Prizes All Around
Good friends sent this news clipping from Norway recently (see main image). We can’t read Norwegian, but think we get the message… We infer the obvious reference to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu writing to the Nobel Peace Committee, nominating Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Our friends regard that as risible. So do we, perhaps for different reasons. What we don’t get is that the Norwegians fear the Nobel Peace Prize might be trashed. Surely, it’s been a joke for ages. It wasn’t always that way: evidenced by the awards to Nelson Mandela and Elie Wiesel, for example. But…
Continue Reading →The Handmaid’s Tale
By Margaret Atwood (1986) You’ve seen the headlines, “The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s coming true! It’s real!” It is? Women in the United States are being forcibly abducted and repeatedly raped in the name of population growth? That’s quite a surprise. I would have expected that to be on the news. American women of child-bearing age have to wear outlandish costumes, act as a devout mob and are not educated? Oh, no, I’ve got that wrong. That’s only the howling, rainbow-clad sufferers of TDS. The Handmaid’s Tale, apart from its apparent prescience, is vaunted as a feminist tale of great power…
Continue Reading →The Bad and the Beautiful
ASO at Adelaide Town Hall, 4 July 2025 A mixed night at the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s programme entitled “Mythic”, featuring a piece of that name by someone from Tashkent named Elena Kats-Chernin. Described as conjuring “the atmosphere of a mystical cave…where shadowy strings and twinkling winds reflect the faint glimmer of light in a cavernous realm“, it is a mess, frankly, like some cacophonous tune from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon meeting the score from “Out of Africa.” But it had pleasant things within what we might loosely call its structure, which is more than we can say for the drivel that…
Continue Reading →The Windmills of His Mind
In the northern Summer of 2025, we learned that former President Joe Biden is writing a memoir of his Presidency. He also mentioned that a number of European leaders have kept in contact with him, seeking his advice and continuing participation in affairs of the World. We have commented (almost) enough on the Biden Imbroglio, and don’t want (too much) to kick a man when he’s on the ground, so instead let’s hum a little tune, with apologies to Michel Legrand, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and Noel Harrison: “Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a…
Continue Reading →Bidengate
“The cover-up is usually worse than the crime.” Richard Nixon was neither involved nor apprised-of the break-in at the Watergate, but in participating in the cover-up, he strayed over the political line into an area of illegality, leading to a threat of impeachment and his resignation. If he had shopped his staff at, for example, the tense and heated press conference on the evening of 26 October 1973 (see main image), he probably would have survived. Now let us consider what may rival the Watergate scandal: what looks more and more like a massive gaslighting operation to convince America, and…
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