The Kremlin has seized the opportunity to advance the plan of tagging the population – “bio objects,” if the gentle reader recalls my post of July 11 last year, is the official term on the government’s websites – to turn its citizens into what we might call “smartserfs,” eventual inmates of a “smartgulag.”
Let us turn to the more lighthearted side of life. While democracy groans and totalitarianism gloats, there is plenty of comedy out there to enjoy.
The Chinese fortune cookie with a Russian message inside, which I strove to decipher in last week’s post, is beginning to crumble.
Comments on last week’s post, fifth in this Sicilian Defense epopee, proved yet again that the reader is astute as he is gentle. “Never let a crisis go to waste!” ironized Andrew G. Van Sant…
What manly China has largely succeeded at, however, is not so much the quelling of the plague as pulling the wool over Western eyes with regard to the quelling of the plague. Last week China claimed that 3,333 people had died of the virus.
The title of the present series of posts, as I’m confident the gentle reader realizes, refers to a popular chess opening whereby Black, who by the rules of the game is a move behind, essentially cedes to White control of the center, using its energies to build up a rival alternative until the timing may be right for a Sicilian Vespers. The Sicilian’s motto, “lie low,” is writ large upon this strategy, and the knack of invisible resistance to domination by central government – whether Arab, Norman, or a myriad others leading up to the present day – is dormant...
The word “weather” (in German, Wetter) is by etymological transmutation the Russian for “wind” (veter), and as it happens a Sicilian scientist has just come out with what to me is a very plausible explanation of why northern Italy is now the global epicenter of the Chinese plague. Hubei, the man suggests – the region where the virus first spread – is geomorphologically analogous to the Pianura Padana, if only in that both are windless enclosed flatlands, now under cloudy winter skies. Let us not laugh before we take aboard a few more suppositions. Wind and light are the reasons,...
Some years ago I used to joke, with reference to my own character, that as a white heterosexual male with formidable conservative credentials I was destined to die of AIDS in Africa while fighting for socialism. It is not that my character is perverse, or that I think one thing and do quite another, it is simply that extreme opposites are strangely congruent and I have always been drawn to their invariant properties.
I was intending to say nothing more of the plague, except to poke fun at it now and again for being such a pathetic contender for the title of the Black Death – much the way a book by somebody like Henry Miller might aspire to the eminence of the Great American Novel – but, as the gentle reader will presently see, I have succumbed. The Great American Novel, by the way, is in my humble opinion You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, written in 1938 by an Englishman named Eric Knight and known to millions of...
Our irreproachably highbrow editor has confessed in a recent post to “have read thousands of mystery novels without a single blush,” and I’ve taken that as a sign, nay, as a command to confess my own flirtations with the lowbrow. Chief among these, given that age and marital status no longer permit me to wake up in haystacks with strangers and hangovers, is a fascination with a particular kind of Russian television series that may be described as a shoot-‘em-up soap opera. The main purveyor of these, since the end of the 1990’s, is a channel called NTV, founded in...
