Frank Sanello's Blog
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Feb.28.2012
Thanks for not smoking
Advocates of legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana ignore research that undercuts their arguments.
According to a documentary in 2011 on the National Geographic channel, 50 percent of Americans have used marijuana at least once, and yet the drug remains illegal...
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Jan.20.2012
Critics and scholars have ranked 1939's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), the third greatest film of all time.
Everyone has two jobs, Roger Ebert told me years ago – film critic and what they do for a living. I don't fit Ebert's arrogant claim because I was the second-string film...
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Jan.17.2012
The following account has been condensed from two biographies I wrote, Naked Instinct: The Unauthorized Biography of Sharon Stone and Eddie Murphy: The Life and Times of a Comic on the Edge, both published in 1997.
Names and identifying traits of some people mentioned here...
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Jan.16.2012
Alec Baldwin, email/voicemail terrorist
For almost as long as grapes have been fermented or liquor distilled, many people subscribe to the ancient proverb, In vino veritas (Latin for "In wine there is truth").
That abstraction assumes human form when applied to the drunken acting out of Mel...
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Jan.09.2012
Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) Arthur Zimmerman (1864-1940)
The Ems Telegram sparked the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, which led to the unification of Germany’s many independent states into...
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Jan.08.2012
Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-)
Until the launch of the gay civil rights movement in the late 1960s, the entertainment industry and the media that cover it colluded in a conspiracy that kept gay issues in the closet and out of newspapers and films.
Before my reincarnation as a biographer and...
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Dec.14.2011
Why does this man call himself "black"?
Biracial Americans seem to have internalized the racist belief that having only one drop of African blood makes them black despite their Caucasian heritage.
President Obama and Halle Berry embody the lingering belief in the one-drop rule. Both Obama and...
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Dec.12.2011
From ancient times to the present, there’s a lengthy, ugly record of men who paid for sex with their lives rather than their pocketbook.
Commodus, 2nd century Roman emperor; Johann Joachim von Winckelmann, the great 18th century art historian; silent screen star Ramón Novarro; Italian film...
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Nov.29.2011
Portrait of Dr. Gachet by van Gogh
La Belle Époque (The Beautiful Age) was a period of great artistic innovation and controversy that began approximately in 1890 and ended exactly on July 28, 1914.
That’s the date World War I began when Austria invaded Serbia in retaliation for the assassination...
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Nov.24.2011
My computer consultants, Cesare and Pellegrino
Thanksgiving has put me in a reflective mood, so I thought I'd use the cheap excuse of Red Room's photo contest to wax nostalgic.
During a nightmarish period in the 1990s when my partner of 20 years and many of my friends were...
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Oct.31.2011
Sawai Bhawani Singh, the Maharajah of Jaipur, aka "Bubbles"
Recent events and experiences have put me in a nostalgic mood.
The ongoing takeover of Wall Street by unemployed college students and other young people reminds me of my own radicalism in college when I was a Trotskyite, which put me...
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Oct.13.2011
The author with neighbor, Halloween, 1993
As an adult survivor of incest that combined sex with corporal punishment, I am in no way an apologist for pedophiles.
Even with the qualifier “some pedophiles” in the article's headline, some may interpret my defense of pedophilia as approval....
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Oct.13.2011
Don Benito Mussolini, the Ultimate Crime Boss
In the early 20th century, German economist Max Weber said that a sovereign nation is defined by its ability to maintain a monopoly on violence. Benito Mussolini’s suppression of the Sicilian Mafia during the 1920s put Weber’s theory into practice....
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Oct.10.2011
The Roman historians Suetonius, Plutarch, and Tacitus wrote accounts of prominent people in the ancient world that were more often propaganda than objective reporting.
A present-day historian compared ancient historians to tabloid reporters and imagined historians in the distant future writing...
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Oct.07.2011
King Alexander and Queen Draga
Previously on Red Room: Uncrowned Heads: Whatever Happened to the 20th Century’s Ousted Monarchs?
With the possible exception of the Romanovs, King Alexander I and Queen Draga, right, suffered the most ghastly end of any of Europe’s crowned heads....
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I saw a sign in a restaurant that said, 'Breakfast served any time.' I said, 'OK, I'll have French toast during the Renaissance."”
—Steven Wright
About Frank
"The Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler" available in paperback ($19.95) at http://www.amazon.com/The-Autobiography-Frau-Adolf-Hitler/dp/1477581723/....
KINDLE ($9.99) available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008E78B9S
Some readers found the chapters of the...
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Causes Frank Sanello Supports
ACLU, ASPCA, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders
Frank’s Favorite Books
Emma, Madame Bovary, Cousine Bette, War and Peace, Day of the Locust, 1876, Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, Daisy Miller, The March of Folly, Dr. Faustus
Frank is a fan of
