Agent Palmer

My first real job was at a little place called Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips.

This is one of the many brands from the previous century that didn’t venture too far into this one before calling it a day. While there are still a few Arthur Treacher’s around, they are usually in split locations sharing a building space with A&W, another brand that is a shadow of its former self.

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.”…

I enjoy baseball, and I enjoy spy and espionage books, films and series. It would seem, then, that The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg was bound to not only interest me, but intrigue and entertain me as well. I would argue that sociologists and psychologists would also enjoy this book, as the curious case of Moe Berg is more than what it seems.

Despite the research completed here by author Nicholas Dawidoff and other books written about him, the constant in this book is what we don’t know.