I arrived in Wicker Park in the dead of winter. Chitown was under several feet of snow when my taxi pulled up in front of my Chicago Connection’s place. Many a Chicago resident wanted to claim to live in Wicker Park at the time (it was so hip, Hollywood made a film starring Josh Harnett […]
Archives for September 2014
William S Burroughs: a role model for how to be a cool pensioner
My two year old daughter has become obsessed with a terrible book she found in amongst the volumes we put upon her shelves; it is from the 1970’s and is filled with “cute quotes” from small children, many of which are crushingly outdated, such as “You tell me to use my imagination – then you […]
Banning e-cigarettes indoors would be the nanny state at its worst
Just in case you were wondering, I am not a smoker. Nor have I ever been. I do have a rather annoying habit of pretending to smoke random, phallic symbol objects like pens and pencil, which I won’t go into the Freudian implications of here and now, but I have never really had any desire […]
David Cameron has precisely five weeks to save the Conservative Party
The Tories thus far seem a little lackadaisical in terms of their approach to the Clacton by-election. Perhaps this is just for show; play down expectations and then come up the home stretch strong. However, I’m starting to think this may be an overestimation of their game plan. October 9th has been chosen as the […]
Why does the West struggle with the idea of multiple threats?
Another US journalist, Steven Sotloff, has been killed in the Middle East. His murderer appears to be another Brit, possibly “Jihadi John” again. By attacking members of the press, ISIS, ISIL, IS, whatever they are calling themselves today, know what they are doing. They are demonstrating that the sword is mightier than the pen and […]
The suicide of Budd Dwyer and the B.I.N. Bait Bucket
When I was nine years old, I had two best friends. One was Berthold. He was really short and funny looking, sort of like a slightly mutated version of Opie Griffith from the Andy Griffith Show. A bad bowl cut and an unfortunate in the context of where we lived German accent added to the […]