Agent Palmer

Brad Watson’s short story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives is something of a revelation for a publication released in 2010. The stories contained within could take place from the 1970s through the 2000s, though their relevance and enjoyment seems to be timeless.

That’s the point of stories, particularly short stories – they are supposed to endure with some kind of lesson or sense of purpose either bestowed upon or lost on the reader.

Why Not Me is Al Franken’s 1999 future fiction satire of his run to the White House in the election of 2000. This was years before his actual journey into the realm of public service.

This book may be dated, but not because it was written before the turn of the century or in a different millennium. This book is dated because the line on what works as satire is drawn based around the current events that satire is set against. Why Not Me has moments of clarity that shock, but those are few and far between.

Every week, we get up and live through the same seven days of the week.

Sure, the days themselves are never quite the same, but the names never change.

It’s no wonder, then, that those days of the week are often the basis for popular music.

I was too young to experience the Late Night Wars. They were well over – or at least not as hostile – by the time I was able to stay up late enough to watch any of the Late Night offerings, but I did choose a side. I was a Letterman guy.  At the time, I just preferred Letterman to Leno. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his post-Late Night era Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman.”…