The brothel creeper is just as good as Belle de Jour ever was, maybe better. (Not to be confused with Robert Crumb’s grammatically correct Belle d’un jour.) But creeper is a one-time shot. Belle was there for us every day of the year. Sad, sad that she’s gone. (The Pentagon must have been reading her. It’s […]

Paul McCartney wants Arnold Schwarzenegger to give geese a chance (second item). Jeannette Walls reports: The former Beatle has written the former action star, asking him to ban foie gras production in California. A bill outlawing the force-feeding of geese to produce the delicacy is on Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk, and Sir Paul McCartney, a member […]

The difference between a lead ballon and making nice at the United Nations may be the distance between the East Coast and the West Coast. Some might even think it’s the difference between smart and stupid. In the opinion of The New York Times, “Bush delivered an inexplicably defiant campaign speech” yesterday at the U.N. His […]

There’s no ignoring the CBS flap, which doesn’t surprise the unflappable Roger Repulski, a loyal Straight Up reader. “The big story,” he says, “is the amazing connection — four hours — between Dan Rather’s report and the blog world’s fact-check pounding. Something vile here. I suspect everyone.” If you’re looking for in-depth commentary on the flap, however, look no […]

We’ve been asking all along: When will American voters get it? When will they realize they were hoodwinked, bamboozled, suckered, tricked, fooled, misled into the war in Iraq? When will they recognize that their thuggish Nincompoop in Chief and his gang conspired with the British high command against their own and the world’s best interests? […]

Have a look at Steve Bell’s “Apes of Wrath,” which skewers Dummy Boy. It sees him as “a pouting simian, his tunnel-vision peepers merged almost into one, his lips forming a red, fleshy proboscis from which absurdities bubble.” The monkeyshines begin with Going to Yurp. (“Is this Yurp?” “Are these people Yurpeans?” “Where am I?”) […]

The reason for the magazine piece was an old, warmed-over subject: Marilyn Monroe. But Arthur Miller, whose new play “Finishing the Picture” begins previews on Tuesday in Chicago, had much more wisdom to impart about other subjects than his former wife. This caught my attention: “History,” he said, “is like some gigantic beast — it […]

 A friend writes: The New York Historical Society, a short walk down Central Park West from the Musem of Natural History, can’t be missed now, even from outer space. It’s a limestone building whose facade takes up an entire block — and the entire facade is covered by a cloth sign proclaiming the Alexander Hamilton […]

Many items were posted over the weekend. See, for example, GRUDGE MATCH. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

He must be snorting something. Dummy Boy insists, “I’m pleased with the progress” in Iraq. That’s what he told a New Hampshire newspaper in an interview published Saturday, the same day a suicide car bomb killed 19 people and wounded 67, when it “plowed into a crowd of men seeking jobs with the Iraqi National Guard” […]

Re: “Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress” and James Joyces’s “Finnegan’s Wake” (see CATCHING UP WITH LEON and scroll to the postscript), a message arrived from Hammond Guthrie, who is a poet, artist, screenwriter, editor (The 3rd Page) and intrepid autobiographer (“AsEverWas: Memoirs of a Beat Survivor”): I wanted to read […]

The 3rd Page commemorates Donald M. Allen, the anthologist, poetry publisher and friend of poets who recently died in San Francisco. Literary polymath Richard Kostelanetz writes that Allen’s ground-breaking “The New American Poetry: 1945-1960,” was “one of the few anthologies that collected disparate materials into a persuasively coherent presentation, making visible what was previously invisible, […]

New verse has arrived about soon-to-be Prisoner of the Year: MARTYR MARTHAMartha Stewart: “There are many, many good people who have gone to prison. Look at Nelson Mandela.”Send me to jail, Martha pleads,Even though I’m a star;Nothing I did was wrong — that’sWhere the good people are.— Leon Freilich It has also not escaped our […]

Secret British government papers leaked to The Telegraph in London reveal that before the invasion of Iraq British officials believed “President George W. Bush merely wanted to complete his father’s ‘unfinished business’ in a ‘grudge match’ against Saddam,” the newspaper reported Saturday. The report said further that British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, […]

The turning point of the presidential campaign? The blockbuster that changes minds? The clincher that tells the truth? It ought to be. Iraq is a disaster — at best unstable for years to come, at worst headed for civil war. As noted yesterday in DARK DAYS AHEAD, that’s what the Nincompoop in Chief was told […]

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, marked the beginning of 5765. But it also marked the end of Belle de Jour. “I’m afraid, darlings, the time has come for me to go,” she writes. The news is crushing. Her Diary of a London Call Girl was a favorite blog of mine. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

My interview with Kitty Kelley in her Georgetown home, an ante-bellum Southern mansion, took place on a sun-baked afternoon back in the Stone Age (to be exact August of 1986). We sipped diet Coca-Cola, not mint juleps. She answered many questions, at one point “swiveling her body on the loveseat in her living room like a petite artillery […]