a dancing star!

Those spans of Christian-time we call “weekends”, stretching from short, shrift Fridays to long lazy Sundays, seldom warrants thinking about; somehow or rather, you savour it, it savours you. Which leaves the remaining four days. Thursdays are lubricated by a reverse spillage from the anticipated Friday. Best described as en-lulled Thursdays. Wednesdays are threshold days, [...]

I’m not sure what steered me initially away, and brought me to what I hope to be a more permanent return to the site. Things change, I suppose.
I used to subscribe to the Times Literary Supplement; each new issue invariably arrived on a Tuesday, and it would be the focal point until, once religiously devoured, [...]

So we’re back from our honeymoon, and the lessons just keep coming and they keep getting better.

Mexicana - Always Late.
Air pollution is relative - Mexico City is the embodiment of Natural Beauty compared to Havana.
You’ve heard of Eco-Tourism? Well, in Cuba they practice Socialist Tourism. It’s something along the lines of, … how shall [...]

My circle of friends is a narrow one, comprising of less than a dozen individuals. Each was exhaustively selected, processed and acquired during a lifetime of wandering and growth. Nothing esoteric unites them, except some form of association with me; none, as far as I know, are particularly well-known, endowed with special talent, especially unique [...]

The Wrong side of capitalism website highlighted a course sadly indicative of the state (”of disrepute?”) of higher (”than what?”) learning (see also, more recently, University Diaries).
Alas, such content is not uncommon. Warwick University’s Sociology department is now an identity theory-ridden morass of statistical analysis, gender, gender, gender and rational choice study. What follows is [...]

While submitting something for McSweeney’s site, I chanced upon this entry, entitled “Versions of Well-Known Films in Which the Protagonist Has Been Replaced With Leon Trotsky”, by Erick Peterson
The Fast and the Menshevik
From Russia With Acerbic Diatribes
Dirty Trotsky
The Man Who Would Be People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs
The Matrix: Permanent Revolutions
Trotskynator 2: Trotsky Day
Communist [...]

With such a maddening gap between posts, I had better be prepared with a legitimate reason; perhaps a catastrophe of some sort, or a bankruptcy, or the onset of the Saviour’s Season. Or a simple affliction perhaps. Thereby hangs a tale. The annual metamorphosis of digits into its sequential sibling, in an entirely predictable orderly [...]

These Elliott Smith-esque days are coming thick and fast. There are many more reasons to detest the ubiqutous iPod than there are seasons in the sun, the least of which is the overturning of conventional punctuation which results in Steve Jobs iCon (sic) biography. The more glaring one is that, for most, for the recent [...]

Bad things happen to bad people. I was reading Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books (subtitled: how the international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read).
And it came true.
The itinerary for the forthcoming vacation to the West coast would have included a visit to “Midnight Special”, a specialist (read: leftist / critical) [...]

It’s just as well that it is a French word. I remember writing about “race” riots and the disenfranchised in 1980s Britain - the impact of Thatcherite economics, institutionalised racism, antagonistic policing methods, disproportionate unemployment rates etc. Listening to news reports, it seems that explanations are simply regurgitated, albeit with an easily ridiculed French accent. [...]