“I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard.” That’s Bruce Springsteen describing Born to Run — which seems to have fulfilled this hope, as it’s still going strong for its 50th anniversary. Released Aug. 25, 1975, the Boss’s third album became his breakout — a perfect suite of eight magnificently engineered
When Webb readers receive this issue on Aug. 26 or 27, I’ll be in the throes of my first-ever week teaching college. And yet I also officially retired more than six years ago. Here’s what happened: Regular followers of my movie pieces will recall that on July 31, I gave a talk at Brown Library
Last week, Webb’s “Weird Words” celebrated a major milestone with our 100th vocabulary column. That somewhat self-indulgent piece comprised a description of my weekly writing process; but it also mentioned another recent milestone: Sometime in the past month or so, the running master-doc—the one from which I draw my lists each week—managed to cross 3,000
Though not exactly a household name, the comedy team of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker — colloquially shortened to ZAZ — seems to have perfected the spoof movie genre with their uproarious Airplane! (1980) and three successful Naked Gun movies (1988-94). Wikipedia points out that spoofs had been around since the days of silent film, generated
As of this week, Webb’s Weird Words has wended its way to 100 articles. In celebration, your overworked columnist is taking a break from actual lists of oddball terms. Instead, this word-Smith figured faithful readers might enjoy an inside look at how the pieces get written — my process, as it were. And … as
