According to a flyer I picked up in a local convenience store, “a new California law makes it illegal to sell most flavored tobacco products, including vapes and menthol cigarettes — protecting our kids from a lifetime of deadly addiction.” If a kid wants to smoke and vapes are not available, won’t the kid just smoke regular cigarettes like we did as kids? Vapes are probably not good for your health but I have heard that they’re not as unhealthy as cigarettes. I’d rather see kids smoke cigarettes than vape anyway. Not my kid, but your kids and other people’s kids. Smoking is cool. Think Steve McQueen, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, etc. Vaping is, pardon the expression, gay. Still I’m appalled at the idea that individual rights can be violated by the state using its coercive apparatus in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood at the RNC
That was hard to watch but he did point out one important fact: We own the country. That’s often overlooked, especially by elected officials themselves. Politicians are employees. We hire them, we pay them, we give them unimaginable sums of money to spend as they see fit, and we hold them to such ridiculously low standards . . . Read more →
EppsNet at the Movies: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
There are two kinds of people in the world — those with loaded guns and those who dig. Let others spend the weekend catching up on Oscar nominees. We (re-)watched Sergio Leone fill the screen with boots, eyes and fingers in this classic Western. Although Netflix listed it as the 161-min version, the DVD they sent was actually the full-length (175-min) Italian version, so that makes 14 minutes of action I was seeing for the first time! By the way, did you know that Eli Wallach is still alive at age 94?! Read more →
EppsNet Movie Reviews: Gran Torino
It’s sad to see Clint Eastwood get old but somebody’s got to do it. It seemed to me as far back as Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire that while other actors were trying to stay artificially young forever, no one else was putting on screen an honest portrayal of what it’s like to be an old man, what it’s like to feel yourself diminished. And that was 15 years ago, when Eastwood was in his early 60s. He’s now 78 and looks it. I was trying to think of another leading actor who’s doing roles where the central fact about the character is that he’s gotten old and tired and scared . . . Robert De Niro? No, he’s still doing the same cops and mobsters roles he’s been doing for decades. Al Pacino? Dustin Hoffman? No. Same roles, plus they’re both around 70 years old with absurd… Read more →