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her shelves; it is from the 1970’s and is filled with “cute quotes” from small children, many of which are crushingly outdated, such as “You tell me to use my imagination – then you […]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 […]
Shaggs Own Thing: celebrating New Hampshire’s best/worst musical combo
There are two things that are either generally known about the Shaggs, or can at least be easily ascertained by doing a google search of them and avoiding the ones that deal with misspellings of a common British term for having sexual intercourse: one, that Tom Cruise is rumoured to have bought the rights to […]
My vision of what the Clacton by-election will be like
Douglas Carswell, MP for Clacton, resigned from the Conservative Party yesterday to join UKIP. He also said he will be resigning his seat, thus forcing a by-election. I’ve had a vision for how I think the whole thing will play out, so here goes. A date is set for November 6th. First item of business […]
All the rumours are true: the Better Together PPB that is horrifically crap
I’m not a rabid Scottish nationalist by any means. In fact, on balance I’d rather Scotland stayed in the Union, mostly because I fear for the chaos that might ensue, in all parts of what was the United Kingdom, in independence’s wake. So I do not offer the following critique for political reasons, but […]
I’m just going to say it: I really like John Bercow
The Speaker of the House of Commons seems to fill lots of people in Westminster with outright bile these days; they call him arrogant and in extremis say that the Rt Hon Bercow is trying to start some sort of revolution from the inside. His list of enemies is growing all the time, particularly with […]
Angels and Demons at play: Saturn’s best pianist, Sun Ra
Jazz musicians have a reputation for being weird, outré, strange. Thelonious Monk’s middle name was Sphere; Miles Davis was so infamously difficult to interview because of his tendency to ramble that journos dubbed him the Prince of Darkness. But in the deviation from the norm sweepstakes, the grand prize must go to Sun Ra. Born […]