Keeper of the Clown Bell

The critical battlefield was outlined by POTUS 44 with the mid-December release of  his annual list of favorites  from the closing year (2025) which includes the top movies he has watched in the hours that remain after reading many books and listening to a lot of music. Because he's a capitol (D) donkey I figure Barack gets to watch all of these pictures for free plus hear the industry chit-chat about what celebritards are paid to promote. As longtime KOTCB readers know, I do NOT usually watch the films critiqued here because, for the most part, I don't need to but unlike Barry I do give commentary regarding the themes in these flicks to explain WHY they make anyones list. The Enigma just lobs his picks skyward like he's shooting hoops with LeBron and hopes the rock falls into the hole.* For me it's one battle after another in the cinephile war and in the spirit of years past I humbly submit my reviews. Through a series of odd circumstances, I have actually watched a mo...

I like the Winter Olympics. I attended the 1976 Insbruck games and saw  Franz Klammer and  Dorthy Hammel win gold.  All a hazy 50 year old memory for me now but I was there, hight of the Cold War , surrounded by spooks fighting for control of Europe and the future of the West. There was some great hockey at the '76 games which I also saw along with Alpine ski jumping and some other sports I can't remember. I was 14 years old and after a few days at the Olympiad I wandered around Austria with my grandparents swooshing the slopes of  Kitzbühel  and  Zürs. A lot has changed in the world over the past 5 decades but the Winter Olympics are mostly the same except for goofy snow board races and big air  loop-de-loops. Thank God we won the Cold War! A year and a half earlier President Nixon had resigned his presidency and I'll always remember the tears I wept watching this man address the nation on a black and white TV my grandfather had gifted me. It was a...

  Longtime readers of the KOTCB blog will know that Rob "Meathead" Reiner has a lifetime pass on Clown Bell ringing due to his 1984 film "This Is Spinal Tap" which remains one of the most based and high-handed spankings ever delivered to Hollywood, celebrity culture and the "liberal" ethos (such as it is) in these United States of America. It matters not a whit that this  evisceration of America's post-1973 corps was performed by comedic thespians possessed by the spirit of the times in an effort to ridicule the Anglo-Saxon, high testosterone, white supremacy of Heavy Metal Rock 'n Roll. This Mockumentary depicts the cultural revolution of "The 60's" and its degenerate 1970's aftermath with more unfiltered authenticity than reality itself. The unintended consequence of creating a work of art that gets interpreted by the audience in ways that the artist couldn't conceive of during production is a recurring source of merriment f...

It's been 10 years since The Elvis From Queens glided down the Golden Escalator at Trump Tower with the beautiful Melania on his arm and promised to Make America Great Again by building a big, beautiful wall, renegotiating trade deals and mercilessly attacking the "all talk, no action" political establishment. I wasn't paying attention to him because, as anyone who knows anything knew at the time, there wasn't a snowballs chance in hell that DJT would get elected as the President of the United States of America. Seriously, I mean, c'mon man, I'm thinking that even Trump can't fight, fight, fight his way through the crowded GOP field of candidates and pull the sword from the stone to claim the throne. I'm especially skeptical that the vulgarian who built a monstrous tower on 5th Ave., converted the Post estate in PB into a club for "black balled" rejects and performed as a thespian on a weekly television show (a show that I, as a cultural...

In the spring of 2021 I had a near death experience when my Chevy Silverado loaded with 30 cases of wine was rear-ended at 50mph  by a young lady who was texting-while-driving at 9:30 AM. Her Mercedes sedan flashed in my driver side mirror a moment before impact and that microsecond of awareness gave me just enough time to pull my foot off the break and jam the gas so when she plowed into my trailer hitch the impact met no resistance and launched my truck across the road and into the woods. I had stopped in the road, left blinker signaling, waiting for an oncoming pickup truck to pass and, by the grace of God, it did pass me just as the distracted driver in the mirror slammed into my flashing taillight. Everyone walked away from the crash with no serious injury but if the impact had transpired 2 seconds earlier it would have been a “Road Warrior” bloodbath of terror and death. When I stepped out of my vehicle and looked through the roadside trees I had miraculously missed hitting i...

 " Why is the Moon exactly the same apparent size from Earth as the Sun? Surely this cannot be just coincidence; the odds against such a perfect match are enormous. " I've often thought the exact same thing and was thinking it very hard three weeks ago on April 8th at 3:17pm ET when I witnessed a 91% solar eclipse while standing bearfoot in the grass caveman style and staring up at the sky. As the disk of la luna moved across the face of the sun I bore witness to what appeared to be random evidence of a grand design drawn up and established by a creator God with infinitely inscrutable motives. And that's just the caveman level observations but when I contemplate the vastness of our solar system (to say nothing of the expanding universe) and the true size and distance of the planetary objects involved in this dance I am truly humbled and in awe of the divine proportions in this phenomenon. What are the odds? For me the odds are infinitesimally tiny to the point of absu...