Posted by: BCPires
on Feb 02, 2012
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Another case of opening my mouth being speaking too soon, on different fronts. First, my Internet, after my public praising of it, promptly reverted to my InterNot – a LIME technician was in our house for so long we thought we should give him his own room, but couldn’t do anything about it. And, to make filing copy and getting online generally more difficult, my computer battery chose yesterday morning to commit hara-kiri. It swelled to a state you could properly call, “tumescent”; certainly I was firetrucked. No walking around, computer open, looking for an un-password-protected network; not without a firetrucking long extension cord, anyway.
And, then,
Posted by: BCPires
on Feb 01, 2012
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Luckily, the country seat we’ve just occupied is the definition of serenity; we need every iota of peace we can find to deal with the lack of a land phone line and the Internet. The phone still isn’t working but, miraculously, our LAN is back up. In the olden days, the only thing I could attribute a working Net but inert phone to was our need to press those little silver buttons the receiver used to sit on repeatedly; in the modern age, we
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 26, 2012
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The Dog Whisperer of Atlantic Shores is a tall Canadian guy who, when you walk by his house with your dogs, will leave off his newspaper-reading, leave his front porch and, without your leave, volunteer a stern lecture about the very damaging effect leashes have on dogs. He ends each unsolicited harangue with the kind-but-firm reminder that, “The leash is for you, not your dog!”
Well, this morning, rumours swept through Atlantic Shores that a pack of marauding wild dogs were
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 25, 2012
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Former PM of TT, Patrick Manning, is in a hospital bed in Sando after a mild stroke and this week’s Thank God It’s Friday began writing itself the moment I read the media release issued by his “protocol officer” last night. In it, amongst other equally mystifying things, the lady concerned “claims immaculate healing”. Smoke that. And I will. In a chillum. With a safi. (And, if you catch all that, you’ve smoked something with an old sadhu some time – or at least
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 24, 2012
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For the literalists and the magical alike, there could hardly be a better way to start the new Chinese Year of the Dragon by going to see the English language Girl with a Dragon Tattoo; unless, of course, it is by NOT going to see etc etc. The English version is, as
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 19, 2012
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Went to see a couple of films last night @ Olympus, the English language Girl with a Dragon Tattoo – far better than the Swedish version, still not as good a movie as the book – and then the quite amazing The Iron Lady, a film I will have to see several times to take its full measure. If you’re in doubt whether you should see it or baptize you child, Heaven can wait. There is a great deal to be said about it – it puts The King’s Speech in proper, sentimental perspective, for
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 18, 2012
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Sometimes I don’t know how to handle myself, I’m such a literary snob. Like the driver who puts on his indicator on an otherwise empty country road where no one could possibly even see him turn, I’m even a literary snob in only my own company. We’re moving house again, on Saturday week, and I’ve begun packing my books. I’ve packed all of Fiction and some of Short Stories & Anthologies into 19 cardboard boxes so far. You have to name and number each box, for ease of unpacking at the destination house. So, e.g., box 3 has, on the outside (top and side, for easy reference), “Banks – Chatwin”. Box 5 is marked, “Dostoevsky – Fitzgerald”. Box 7 is “Heller – Kipling”. Right, all good.
But hear this.
Box 8 is marked, “Kundera – McCabe”, box 12 is
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 17, 2012
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Though it’s difficult – and, with most American movies that get noticed at all, like Inception, all but impossible – I try to watch a film knowing as little as I can about it. It increases enjoyment and/or impact. It’s not something popular with my Trini businessman friends, who want to know everything about anything they’re getting into ahead of time, and what’s in it for them. Of course, they are usually taken in by
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 14, 2012
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Two things about the three-part story, New Year’s Daydream that concluded in Thank God It’s Friday yesterday. First, I went back-and-forth wondering whether the whole thing should have been called Old Year’s Nightmare – but decided on the more hopeful title. And, second, it wasn’t about my father, as I said in the Facebook intro yesterday. I have written directly about my old man before – with the same honesty I try
Posted by: BCPires
on Jan 11, 2012
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One of the four cats in the house, Bubba (real name Guinness), has been “displaying behaviours” that, in the USA, would have him in a padded cell at the pet psychiatric hospital and, in a normal West Indian home, in a bag filled with rocks flung off the end of a jetty. For more than a year, he’s been peeing indiscriminately on the furny-chairs. The living-room sofa that cost six months’ wages has, now, a faint whiff about it, and the fabric of the seats is four shades lighter than the backrests, because they’ve been washed (with a host of smell-killers) so often.
Last August, not satisfied with indiscriminate micturition, he added specific defecation to the mix: he began crapping in the same spot
