I, Ron, eek!

Where I, Ron, blog on a variety of different subjects--social theoretical, historical, cultural, political, social ethical, the media, and so on (I got the Max Weber, the Mark Twain, and the Stephen Leacock in me)--in a sometimes Niebuhrian or ironic way all with an attitude. Enjoy. Disagree. Be very afraid particularly if you have a socially and culturally constructed irrational fear of anything over 140 characters.

Wednesday, 13 May 2026

The Books of My Life: Demons/Devils/The Possessed (Dostoyevsky)

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  One of the things I wanted to do in my retirement is read or reread the great “big book” classics of Russian literature. Though the best l...

The American Health Care Kiada: Rolling the Boulder Up that Hill for Infinity, Continued...

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  The United States health care system is the worst I have ever encountered and I lived for awhile in Russia. I was reminded of this empiric...
Sunday, 3 May 2026

The Books of My Life: The Perpetual Dream

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  Gerald Grant and David Reisman explore the variety of attempts to reform the liberal arts in American higher education since the 1920s in ...
Wednesday, 8 April 2026

Theocratic Blues: Life During Wartime

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  Unlike many of you out there in InternetLand I  lived in a theocracy in the United States, yes the United States the country that supposed...
Wednesday, 1 April 2026

The Books of My Life: Hollywood Cinema (Maltby)

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  In Hitchcock’s Films , Robin Wood's seminal study of several of the American films of director Alfred Hitchcock, Wood opens the book b...
Sunday, 29 March 2026

Life as Crisis Management: The Costco Kiada (aka, the Costco Muck-up)

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  I recently decided to join the Costco Club. I did it for several reasons. First, Costco is coming to where I live and I wanted to have a m...
Thursday, 12 March 2026

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Musings on Movies, Evaluating Movies, and Cultural Capital

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  Last night I watched two movies on the over the air Movie channel: Prime Cut (1972) and End of the Game (1976). I had seen both films be...
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About Me

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Ronald Helfrich Jnr.
Who am I? Wow, tough question. I am a hybrid, a blend of "genres". I am a son, a friend, a father, a lover of some art cinema (Rohmer, Rivette, Hawks, Hitchcock...), a devotee of some things Joss Whedon including Buffy and Firefly), a lover of some television (Forbrydelsen, Broen, Lewis, Morse,The Good Life...), an intellectual (or so I would like to think), a culture critic, an author, a romantic smacked in the face by reality, a cynic, a misanthrope, a lover of social theory and cultural theory, a researcher, a continuing student, a lover of knowledge for knowledge's sake, a teacher, someone bored by the banality of life, a lover of music (classical, Beethoven, Mahler, Ravel, Shostakovich, Rush, Midnight Oil, Richard Thompson, Crowded House...), a lover of books, a collector of DVD's, and a secularist among other things. I am, like we all are, to some extent, a work in progress. I see my blog as a kind of electronic journal so it is, like me, a hybrid. I apologise for its infelicities and whatever inaccuracies exist in it.
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