I probably didn’t buy my car from the most reputable salesman. He wore silver dice cufflinks, had a shirt that was so crisp with starch that the collar tips could be used to gouge someone’s eyes out, and had enough mousse in his hair to keep Vidal Sassoon in profit for a year. But beyond […]

There is a difference between anarchy and chaos. Anarchy implies people being in charge of themselves and willfully going in individual directions; in contrast, chaos is apparently defined by no one being in control of anything and everyone running around in circles. Britain got a large dose of chaos yesterday. On Monday afternoon, the Speaker […]

The Parliamentary expenses scandal has soaked up British airtime like a sponge. Admittedly, it’s not entirely the fault of the media: some of the tidbits are simply too juicy to ignore. It has everything: vanity, flamboyance, greed and silliness. It makes a Monty Python farce look tame. However, this has obscured an even more important […]

The May Bank Holiday has to be one of the cleverest innovations that the British government has produced. Winters here can be long and depressing: they’re dark, soggy with rain, and their chill is worsened by the omnipresent moisture in the air. It’s very rare that we get a covering of snow to enliven the […]

Perhaps one of the funniest yet most obscure Monty Python sketches portrayed a meeting of senior British Civil Servants. John Cleese entered and spouted off a great deal of bureaucratic gibberish, which was then translated by his colleagues into a simple problem: the government needed something new to tax. Terry Jones then said, “…most things […]

It must have been a nice 100-day anniversary present for President Obama to have Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania defect to the Democratic Party. Provided that the Franken / Coleman court case in Minnesota is resolved in favour of the former Air America host, the Democrats will have gained an absolute majority in the Senate. […]

I haven’t been paying much attention to what’s been going on in America this past week: theoretically, I’m on vacation. It’s been pleasant to have time to read, listen to music and to go out and experience Spring in England, even if that means getting rained on a few times. However, I got a phone […]

Nostalgia for days gone by is nothing new. The statue of Richard the Lionheart in front of the Houses of Parliament is a testament to Victorian aspirations of medieval nobility. I remember back in the early 1990’s that my younger sister developed a penchant for tie dye clothing and Janis Joplin records. “The good old […]

OK, so I’m disappointed. We’re 77 days into the Obama Administration, and not everything is perfect. The economy hasn’t recovered. Carbon emissions haven’t stopped. My mortgage isn’t paid off. I still have to get up at 5:30 AM to get ready to go to work. I want a bailout but there wasn’t a cheque in […]

Two days ago, I was walking home from the train station when I heard a loud noise explode from behind me. The dreadful cacophony sounded like a goose was being strangled in 3-D surround sound. I turned, and saw that a group of teenagers had appropriated a traffic cone: one of them was using it […]