“L’enfers c’est l’autre.” Whatever Sartre meant by “Hell is other people,” he was certainly right about the people he liked to refer to as “salaud”—the scum who think only of their own interests and reduce the universe to their own dimensions, in other words, people like Sartre and his friends.
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,”
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.
The empire of the Babylonians was not fated to last, and Cyrus the Persian, after entering the city in triumph in 539, promulgated an edict authorizing the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. It has been conjectured that the Persians were rewarding Babylonian Jews for their covert assistance in the defeat of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, but, there is no need to posit such a special relationship.
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.
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.
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.
Free For All–the first episode directed by Patrick McGoohan.
In the fall of 1963, first-year Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, who already had national ambitions, was facing an image problem.
