George Case's Blog, page 9

An odd subcategory of nonfiction publishing has sprung up in the last couple of decades: books about years. There’s Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970 (2011), What You Want Is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Who […]

In their lives and in their memoirs, rock stars run the occupational hazard of having the most interesting bits clustered at the beginning, while the latter portions tend to feature a lot of belated self-reflection to compensate for the absence of much professional accomplishment.  Such is the case with the 2019 autobiography Face It, by […]

The new technology that allows researchers to trace their personal heritage in great depth – online resources like Ancestry.com and commercial DNA tests like 23 and Me – comes with some unintended consequences. We have long been used to describing ourselves and others with broad characterizations of race, and to categorize people by unchallenged assumptions […]

There’s an interesting development on North American magazine stands right now: two venerable US publications, Harper’s and The Atlantic, are running lead articles with opposing views on the war in Ukraine. The Atlantic piece is titled “The Counteroffensive,” by staff writer Anne Applebaum and editor Jeffrey Goldberg, and has the weighty tag sentence, “The future […]

I’m a big fan of both aviation art and rock ‘n’ roll, and this gallery of original works in a variety of media shows my attempts to combine the two. I like the incongruity of advertising classic rock songs with wartime scenes: they shouldn’t really go together, but for listeners and viewers of a certain […]

As a middle-aged person who reads magazines, watches TV shows, and looks at internet sites broadly aimed at my generation, I can’t help but notice the increasing number of ads for personal incontinence products, i.e. adult diapers. I’m happy to say, and you’ll be happy to hear, that I have no need for such items […]

There is an exclusive list of shocking events which subsequently become fodder for conspiracy theories. The bombing of Pearl Harbour. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The death of Princess Diana. 9/11. The Sandy Hook mass shooting. Each of those is claimed by the theorists to have been […]

Music fans, especially Canadian ones, are mourning Gordon Lightfoot this week. The singer-songwriter, who died on May 1 at the age of eighty-four, occupied a unique place in our culture. He had a better voice than Bob Dylan or Neil Young, a better ear for melody than Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, and a more […]

It is a disconcerting fact that the world’s most infamous “mass murderer” did not physically kill the people for whose deaths he is usually held responsible. Charles Manson, who died in 2017 and the subject of a well-researched 2014 biography by Jeff Guinn, was at worst the orchestrator of the Tate-LaBianca massacres of August 1969, […]

Advocates for electoral reform often denounce systems wherein one party can win fifty-one percent of the popular vote (or less) and still win one hundred percent of the legislative seats.  Rather than award victory to the candidate who merely squeaks by her rivals after all the ballots are counted, the alternative of proportional representation would […]