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Welcome.

Most websites are niche sites. This one ranges a bit. Apologies.

It’s mostly movies, and mostly movie reviews, but I also write about baseball and politics and literature and hiking. I write about myself from time to time.

I grew up in Minneapolis and live in Seattle, so I’m a fan of the Minnesota Twins and Seattle Mariners. I hate the New York Yankees. My writers are Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Milan Kundera, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy. I back Barack Obama. I bark for him. I bike to work. I studied French for a while but my Mandarin Chinese, learned more than two decades ago in Taipei, Taiwan, is still better. C’est dommage.

I’m tired of the bullshit. That’s what this site is more and more about. I think the world is the opposite of the way it’s portrayed. The mainstream media is condemned as liberal when it’s often conservative, sensationalistic, or both. The product of Hollywood is condemned as liberal when it promotes an absolutist, good-vs.-evil vision of the world that suits conservatives. Hollywood’s main storyline—a lone man using violence to achieve justice—describes neoconservative foreign policy exactly. We just suffered a decade of it.

Since readers ask for this kind of thing, here’s a list of my 10 favorite movies in chronological order:

• The Third Man (1949)
• Seven Samurai (1954)
• The Godfather (1972)
• All the President’s Men (1976)
• Annie Hall (1977)
• Breaking Away (1979)
• The Thin Red Line (1998)
• The Insider (1999)
• L’heure d’ete (2008)
• Un Prophete (2009)

Here’s a few favorite articles and posts:

• Shitty But Not Illegal: Two Tales of Microsoft
• Dark Knight My Ass: Why Batman descends into camp
• Where Have You Gone, Fred Wenz? Reflections on the 1971 baseball card you never wanted but always got
• Movie Critics and Moviegoers: Agreeing more than not
• Three Stories with J.D. Salinger

On the site, you’ll also find my freelance work with MSNBC, MSN, Slate, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Believer, and others.

Feel free to friend me on Facebook.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter.

Feel free to range.

Best,

P.S. Yankees suck.