The ongoing saga of David Hogg’s Good Pillow company has ended with the petulant youngster pulling out of the infant company. In a twelve-part Twitter thread Hogg explained that he would be quitting the company to focus on school and activism, and that he has “resigned and released all shares, any ownership[,] and any control of Good Pillow LLC.”
It seems that Mike Lindell will continue to sleep easy tonight.
The Hulu-based deep dive into cinematic obscurity continues this Monday with 2014’s Suburban Gothic, a film broadly in the “comedy horror” genre. It’s roughly in the same vein as 2020’s Love and Monsters, but it’s much quirkier, a la John Dies at the End (2012). The presence of Kat Dennings as the sidekick/love-interest—a latter day, gloomier Zooey Deschanel, and a prefiguration of Aubrey Plaza—further drives home the hipster credentials of this oddball little flick.
Needless to say, I loved it.
Well, it was fun while it lasted—another Spring Break is in the books. I enjoyed this brief respite, the eye in the middle of the storm that is the Spring Semester. The next couple of weeks will be a flurry of activity for yours portly, followed by the long, graceful descent into summer vacation.
Like last year, I’ll be recapping the short stories I recommended this past week, and offer up a short ranking of them. The list will be shorter by two this year, as I dedicated last Monday to a movie review and did not reblog an earlier short story review Thursday.
Oh, well. Here’s what I did read:
So, how do they fall this year? You’ve probably figured it out, but it was an easy call: Michael Noonan‘s “The Personality Cult” won the day for me. Here is my ranking:
1.) “The Personality Cult”
2.) “Black Tancrède”
3.) “Out of the Deep”
There you have it! Happy Reading—and haunting! Mwahahahahahaha!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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This Spring Break Week I’ve been reviewing and recommending short stories, something I began doing back in 2020. To wrap up the week, I thought I’d offer up my review of Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs. The film is a masterpiece, and quite a faithful adaptation of the book.
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Rounding out this week’s Spring Break Short Story Recommendations is Walter de la Mare‘s 1923 psychological ghost story “Out of the Deep.” This story is the second in Chilling Ghost Stories, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz.
“Recommendation” is perhaps a strong word for this story, which is, at times, excessively wordy and confusing—and that’s coming from me!
“Ghost story” is also, perhaps, a bit of a misnomer, though there does appear to be at least one—and possibly three—apparitions in the story, although that’s never made entirely clear.
It’s the wordiness and lack of clarity, though, that paradoxically make the story interesting. Walter de la Mare was a poet, and brings something of poetry’s attention to the consonance of words. At least, I’d like to think that’s what he is going for here; he clearly enjoys playing with language, almost the way a punster does. It makes for tedious reading at times, but does have the effect of keeping the reader guessing as to what is really happening.
But I digress. The real “ghosts” are the ones haunting the protagonist, Jimmy, a listless young man who has taken possession of his late uncle’s rambling London townhouse. Jimmy apparently has no occupation, and lives by selling off the sumptuous possessions his aunt and uncle left behind. Jimmy is also something of an eccentric insomniac, who finds it difficult to sleep unless bathed in candlelight (at least once in the story he sells some household items so he can purchase candles).Read More »
It’s another glorious Spring Break for yours portly, which means it’s time to whip out some classic tales of ghostly spookiness. This week I’m working my way through Chilling Ghost Stories, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, published in March 2020. It’s a collection that was clearly compiled for the bargain section at Barnes & Nobles, with a list price of just $10 for 471 pages of medium-sized print chills (I picked it up for $8 plus tax thanks to my handy Educator’s Discount card). The stories were written from 1893 to 1929, with today’s selection, Henry S. Whitehead‘s “Black Tancrède,” being the latest.
Here it is—the long-awaited first day of Spring Break! I’ll be reviewing some short stories throughout this week, continuing the tradition I began last year, but I’m kicking off the week with another Monday Morning Movie Review.
I’ve been watching a lot of flicks lately, and there was one excellent movie I wanted to review—but I’ve forgotten what it was called! I suppose it wasn’t that memorable after all.
Instead, this post will review 2018’s Still, a movie that is difficult to review without giving away the “twist” ending. That might explain why there aren’t many reviews of it online. Like many obscure films with limited audiences, Still is on Hulu, which is proving itself a depository of hidden gems.
It’s no secret—I do not like meetings. It’s somewhat humorous, then, that I ran for an office that pretty much requires me to attend at least one meeting a month. But at least in a Town Council meeting we cover relevant information necessary to the functioning of the town, and occasionally discuss or debate useful topics pertaining to the interests of our residents.
But in professional settings, I typically find anything longer than an occasional half-hour meeting to be a tedious waste of time. I can never shake the sensation that most meetings are opportunities for Karens and busybodies to peacock, fanning their feathers to signal their virtue.
This piece, which is actually one of my favorites I’ve ever written, details that we waste 11.8 hours a week in meetings—over 25% of our workweek. I wonder if remote working has increased or decreased the amount of time spent in meetings; my hope is that it is the latter. At least with Zoom meetings, you can always switch off your camera and do something productive while the social justice commissars in your human resources department drone on about their latest fad.
Well, let’s hope your week is wrapping up without any more tedious meetings on the horizon. Here is 25 January 2019’s “Meetings are (Usually) a Waste of Time“:
Well, it looks like self-righteous twerp David Hogg’s proposed progressive pillow company is, so far, a colossal flop. Hogg announced a pillow company to rival Mike Lindell’s popular MyPillow, and immediately the mainstream press went to bonkers: Washington Post published a fluffy feature before the company even had a name, and Newsweek thinks that Twitter followers are a substitute for actual clients.
Hogg is so clueless that he failed to register the trademark “Good Pillow,” the ultimate name of the company; a clever individual from North Carolina snagged it the day after the Newsweek piece was published on 10 February 2021.
