The Great Beyond

Al Jaffee, King of the Mad Magazine Fold-In, Dies at 102 [NYT]

Sean Connery: James Bond actor dies aged 90 [BBC]

The hypocrisy of America’s Founding Fathers — let’s go with the traditional gendered version here — is self-evident. All men weren’t created equal. The rights they were born with were totally alienable, especially at birth. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — “property” in the original Lockean — were only conditionally available.

Yet those are the words they wrote, and signed their names below, large enough for the King to see it, in one case.

Those are the ideals of our nation, however much our nation has failed them in the centuries since. And some of us are damnfool enough to take them seriously.

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Wrote The Graduate, and wrote for Get Smart. Not much else to say:

No one could play the straight man when he was in gear …

Loved her in Soap, loved her in Brazil, and what an interesting life.

A fixture of my childhood …