The Doctor is in podcast
Bulldog Drummond VS. Indiana Jones!? Rex takes issue with Dr Fleming’s critique.
Category: Access
Wednesday’s Child: Not Bread Alone
“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”
Wednesday’s Child: The Blackmail Angle
We’re now in what British journos call the Silly Season, and what could be sillier than the silly invitation for silly President Zelensky of Ukraine from silly U.S. President Biden to come and see him in Washington at the end of August, when Congress is in recess and there’s nobody to say they’re being silly?
Make My Day
If you are unwise enough to be on one or another social medium, you will have read something like this: “If you want to disagree with my futile ill-thought out and clumsily expressed opinion on X Y or Z, go ahead and make my day. I can’t wait to unfriend you”? Do you ever wonder what is going on in someone’s mind, when he issues such a taunt? I automatically unfriend such people, even if I agree with their position. I no longer have to teach low-achieving American adolescents with exaggerated opinions of themselves. I am speaking of the early...
Wednesday’s Child: Second Life
Though now back in my own bed, thoughts of the fancy hotel where we stayed in Apulia keep me awake at night. What is it about such places? The first answer that comes to mind is that it has something to do with the success of “virtual worlds,”
Book of the Week: Bite of the Bulldog
And now for something completely different! Since Polish novelists and ancient historians have proved to be too daunting or time-consuming for most readers, I am taking a different tack and devoting a few days to Bite of the Bulldog (initially titled simply Bulldog Drummond), a short thriller in which the reader meets one of the great pop fiction heroes of the last century, Bulldog Drummond.
Twilight of the Neocons
Out of power, though trying to claw their way back in, the Neocons have become an unintentionally humorous sect. Their howlings could form the dialogue of a woke sitcom.
Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Apulia
It was like something out of a movie, one of those Eastern European flicks of vaguely subversive import in fading color from directors with names like Tomasz or Janos which in my childhood the dissidents of the day so cravenly admired.
Wednesday’s Child: A Dance Too Far
The gentle reader, I’m sure, will not be surprised to discover that my understanding of professional football – or soccer, as he probably knows it – is limited to the encyclopedic fact that the game is played, predominantly with the players’ feet, using a ball once made of pigskin and since the Orwell year 1984 manufactured in synthetic material.
