Do you remember Shari Lewis? I try and avoid describing women in sexualized terms, however sometimes it suits, as she was an astoundingly beautiful ventriloquist on American television when I was a child thus becoming my first and fondest celebrity crush. She had several puppets, however the best known was...
So the latest since our last check-in is that the President has been having imaginary conversations with the head of the Boy Scouts of America and the President of Mexico. These were either bald-faced lies (most likely), possible signs of creeping dementia (not unlikely), or one of those flashbacks we...
It's a thin and shaky cable that stretches between bemused interest and hysteric obsession and sometimes you just stand there in the middle, wondering which way to walk. Casual glances at a news subject's headlines with only an occasional long read is in the long run probably safer for mental...
When Hunter S. Thompson was writing the article series for Rolling Stone that became the book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, for my money still the best book ever written on US politics, he combined factual reporting, interviews and out-and-out hallucinatory fantasies to give both the facts...
Frankly I blame beer for it, this whole obsession over sporting records. If it wasn't for beer's foaming head giving the men who drink it equally foaming heads would we really care who scored how many goals or runs in however many games in the year of one's father's birth?...
There are in truth only a handful of magazines, newspapers and websites that are actually worth one's time on a consistent basis. Naturally I consider The London Economic to be one of them (Flattery will get you everywhere – Ed.) for its over-all consistency of writing, broad range of subjects...
A year and a half ago a book written by M.E. McMillan titled From the First World War to the Arab Spring: What's Really Going on in the Middle East? landed on my desk for review. The title neatly summarizes the content, so no further description is needed other than...
As much as I truly enjoy reading a good mystery novel – within the broad term of genre fiction mysteries are by far my favourite – they do present a positively infernal problem in writing about them. Most of the major touchstones used by a thoughtful reviewer in assessing a...
If you have not heard of the Irish writer Karl Parkinson before, well let me tell you two things. One, you really need to move in better and more alternative circles; and two, you're missing out on something special. Parkinson's first novel, The Blocks, like a great thoroughbred on its...