What are future generations gonna say about us? My God, y'know, someday we're gonna be like him [the skeleton]. I mean, y'know, he was probably one of the beautiful people ... and now look, this is what happens to us. Y'know, it's very important to have some kind of personal integrity....I'll be hanging in a classroom one day, and I want to make sure that when I thin out, I'm well thought of.

-- Woody Allen, Manhattan

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Erik Keilholtz, on the Pleistocene gourmet's approach to Megaceros Hibernicus:

The recipe they would have used is simple. Given the era, they would have preferred the cut known as the Filet Magnon, served with a Chausseur and Gathereur sauce.

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While we're quoting movies:

A line from Broadcast News comes to mind at word a film romanticizing Che Guevara has been produced by Robert Redford:

AARON: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing...he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance...Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. (seeing he's not reaching her) And he'll get all the great women.

I've liked Robert Redford quite a bit in movies like The Natural and The Sting, and A River Runs Through It, which he directed, is among my favorite films. That he has devoted his talent, in this case, to the glorification of a brutish cause, is disappointing.

NR's Jay Nordlinger has the first and last word on Che Chic:

The fog of time and the strength of anti-anti-Communism have obscured the real Che. Who was he? He was an Argentinian revolutionary who served as Castro's primary thug. He was especially infamous for presiding over summary executions at La Cabaña, the fortress that was his abattoir. He liked to administer the coup de grâce, the bullet to the back of the neck. And he loved to parade people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which so many innocents were killed. Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless citizens — dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag. A Cuban-American writer, Humberto Fontova, described Guevara as "a combination of Beria and Himmler." Anthony Daniels once quipped, "The difference between [Guevara] and Pol Pot was that [the former] never studied in Paris."

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James Wolcott's politics aren't mine, but I appreciate his defense of diversity of opinion:

It’s absurd the way it is in New York: William Buckley’s phrase, the “averted gaze” — “I notice you, but I’m not going to look at you.” Or, “I’m going to snub you and make it a point that you know I snubbed you.” A lot of people get demonized. Hilton Kramer in person is incredibly agreeable, funny, and knowledgeable about New York intellectual life of the past 50 years, but if you were to mention him in certain circles — it’s not that they don’t want to read Hilton Kramer, it’s [that they believe] people like him should not be allowed to exist. Why can’t he just go away? Oh yeah, let’s just leave it all up to Arthur Danto and the October crowd! I don’t take my disagreements with people personally, I really don’t. If someone disagrees with me about a movie or a writer, I don’t pretend they don’t exist if I’m introduced to them. I thought New Yorkers supposedly thrived on give-and-take. All this stuff you read about the Partisan Review gang, how they would argue into the late hours and get vocal but still keep coming to each other’s parties. Now it’s like, “Oh no, you won’t be invited if you say something that somehow doesn’t fit.”

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Now playing: "Swinging the Elks," by Jelly Roll Morton.