PicoBlog

Welcome to It’s A Shanda, one Northeastern Jew’s quest to find a decent bagel in Seattle (and beyond). If you’re interested in taking this journey with me, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a review. If you want to make sure I review any specific bagels (or want to let me know why I’m wrong), you can email me at seanmatthewkeeley@gmail.com. In my initial review of Ben & Esther’s on Capitol Hill, I had very high hopes for the vegan deli.

We’ve all read it. We’ve all been called out by it. We all seek it out in those moments of uncertainty. You know what I’m talking about - the “Fig Tree” analogy, as mentioned in "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath. The excerpt encompasses the allure one feels when deliberating between distinct possible futures that feel within our reach, along with the nuanced feeling of decision paralysis. Every time I read this passage, I’m compelled to write a letter to myself in another world and ask if she is okay with living with her choices.

In 2019, the Marlins were in a complete rebuild state, as the squad lost 105 games in ‘19. During the deadline of that miserable season, The Marlins dealt youngster Zac Gallen to the D-Backs in exchange for 59th-ranked middle infield prospect Jazz Chisholm. Many Marlins fans were initially upset about this trade even though Jazz was the #3 prospect in the D-Backs system, and Gallen was just the 19th-ranked prospect in Miami’s system.

D. H. Lawrence seems rather out of fashion these days, but let me put my cards on the table at the outset: I have loved Lawrence since I was about 12, and I still think he was a genius who wrote wonderfully about both women and children — and how women feel about children — despite being (shocker!) neither a woman nor a parent. Cancel me now! I came back to Lawrence recently for a couple of reasons.

Pro tip: If you want to subliminally embed a subversive idea into America’s collective unconscious, do it while having Roddy Piper and Keith David beat the ever loving shit out of each other for a full 7 minutes. It does not get much more pulpy than John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live. The movie is based off a 1963 short story by Ray Nelson called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” in which the main character accidentally wakes up “all the way” after a hypnotist’s performance.

(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.)  New York City is a city so heavily represented in media and pop culture that even when other cities, such as Toronto or Vancouver, stand in for it we know it’s supposed to be New York City. If everything you knew about the geography of the United States came from watching television, you’d assume the entire northern part of the country from New Jersey to Maine is “New York City,” a vast and unknowable land mass populated by the nouveau riche and guys who are just trying to walk ovah heah.

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a brief golden period for fantasy filmmaking. It arrived just I was coming of age, playing Dungeons & Dragons and delving into movies, novels and comic books. It was a great time to be a kid with an imagination bent toward orcs and magic chainmail armor. (I mean, wasn't every 8-year-old checking out books on Norse mythology from the adult section of the library?

Well, he didn’t attend the official ceremonies, but Todd Rundgren is finally a Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame inductee, after a couple years of being a nominee. Multi-hit songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and video vanguard, the 73-year-old is still performing shows regularly. In fact, he was onstage the night of the Rock Hall’s induction shindig…just not on THAT stage, the one in Cleveland on October 30, 2021. If it’s any consolation to the Rock Hall, he was in the same state, though.

[Editor’s Note: This is the eighth installment in the JFK Facts series, “Trail of Destruction.” New installments will appear every Wednesday.] On Dec. 22, 1974, CIA Director William Colby fired James Jesus Angleton, longtime chief of the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff. That same day the New York Times ran a triple-decker front-page banner headline announcing Angleton had presided over a massive domestic surveillance program, in violation of the CIA’s own charter.