Frank Sullivan, the now forgotten New Yorker magazine humorist, invented a character he called the Cliché Expert, known as Mr. Arbuthnot, whom I ran into the other day after many decades. I feared he had passed on. “You’re looking well…
(To help rescue the postal service and keep neighborhood post offices alive, I’ve devised a system to teach those who grew up on the Internet the basic methodology of corresponding with others through a revolutionary hand-delivered process.) Welcome to the…
You may not have heard yet but I just got out of rehab. My problem was that I had never been in rehab for anything and desperately needed something to jump-start my stalled career. I tried performing, but lacked any…
The finicky pasha of the New York cabaret scene, Donald Smith, died last week at 79, only a month after it was announced that the posh Oak Room that Smith helped reopen 30 years ago was closing — the handiwork…
While Downton Abbey is on hiatus until the third season begins on PBS this fall, bereft fans of the series will need something to sustain them Sunday nights during the interim, so I have taken the liberty of devising my…
If Pauline Kael had ever reviewed her life, she might have labeled it “a mess,” her favorite rebuke for a film that had failed to measure up. Yet Kael often reveled in movies she thought were a mess, just as…
When Steve Jobs died, his last words were, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” Jobs, a famed perfectionist and detail guy who figured he had a pretty good shot at immortality but wanted to seal the deal, clearly had thought…
A current fad tickling the nation’s palate-comfort — or “mommy” food — has taken American childhood staples once taken for granted, reconfigured them at fancy prices, and fed them back to diners who gobble them down with glee. There are…
ABC television has just announced that it will unveil a new survivor reality series, “Occupy Whatever!” based on the popular Occupy movement that has popped up in scores of cities across America and is proving to have universal appeal —…
The media got an early Christmas gift from Jerry Sandusky, who fills the hideous monster vacuum that had developed after Osama Bin Laden was slain. How the media does love its monsters. After Bin Laden, the monster niche was neatly…