Reid Collins

“I scream, you scream. We all scream for ice cream.” Before calling somebody, I asked Uncle Pundit what that was all about. “The ‘Scream.’ They stole it again! Eddie Monk’s picture.” I believe they call it a painting, Uncle. By…

“What do Boston, Massachusetts, and Athens, Greece, and Las Vegas, Nevada have in common?” I give up. (I always give up to Uncle Pundit’s delphic queries.) “What happens here, stays here.” Now, I know that is the Vegas advertising slogan,…

“I just came across some of Grant’s plans for Vicksburg. Think we should call ’em?” Uncle Pundit’s ironic sense sometimes gets more mordant than needed, and I told him just because the al Qaeda e-mails were a little old there’s…

Uncle Pundit looked at me and poured his third cup of coffee. “Group think? What’s so bad about group think? Those 9/11 gurus have group thought all their lives. We call it a ‘consensus’ and that’s what politicians reach for,…

Forget the disaster movies of earth warming, ice melting, world awash. And stow the political arguments attending all that. We are on the way to finding out what is true about what is happening to Mother Earth, what’s doing it,…

“It’s a documentary like Deep Throat is a love story.” Uncle Pundit, just back from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit movie, was mincing words again. “You mean, it doesn’t explore its premises fairly and with equanimity?” (I always play the innocent.) “No,…

When the Graves Registration boys searched the bodies of GI’s on the D-Day beaches, and later in the European forests, they often found photographs to be put in the collected effects. Not of Betty Grable or Chili Williams, but of…

“I got it figured.” Uncle Pundit is not given to snap proclamations of this type, so you listen. “That Chalabi guy. Six weeks ago the neo-cons loved him enough to marry and now they all wanna mess in his mess…

“Kotex? My God, man, we can’t say that on the air. Go back and tell ’em.” And so, the part-time salesman, part-time announcer, part-time copywriter went back to the local drugstore in Missoula, Montana, to explain that one of the…