We are getting back to work after a long and protracted holiday (even if we did not take one, everyone else seems to have done so). Streets are busier. Shops are crowding up slowly again. Supermarkets may even begin to stock the shelves once more. The fall season - in a way very different from the burgeoning of spring - is all about new beginnings. Schemes
Just to be clear: it is called a "pact" because it is an agreement. It is called the Warsaw Pact because it was signed in Warsaw.
In the past week, much like the dehydrated man fresh from the desert, I have been showered with politeness from people whom I do not know. There are altogether too many people smiling. As a traveler in this not-so-strange land, I feel a growing sense of paranoia. There is just something wrong about all this courtesy.
Chances are that the world will have ended by the time I finish this sentence. No? Ok, I can probably get a few more paragraphs in before the cataclysm and what St. Matthew calls the time of "great tribulation" (clearly a biblical Star Trek reference, indicating how well he could see the future).
The big question must be HOW the world is going to be ended.
The juggling act is about to begin...
When the decision was finally made to cough up USD 700 billion to bailout the Greatest Financial Show on Earth, the American taxpayer's elected representatives decided to give the poor silly bankers another chance, thus ushering in the thing that no one wants to talk about:
"The Great Depression II: The Revenge"
Opening REALLY soon in theatres REALLY near you
Thusly do I follow in rather oddly assorted footsteps by my Tube-imposed sequestration here in Kew during the thirty-six hour long 24 hour strike of the London Underground. I do not complain; there are worse places to be sequestered (and let us not reopen the file on Slavonski Brod...).
The US election will get underway in several hours as I write this and will surely be done and put to bed by the time you are reading this, but I feel that I have legitimate gripe to make NOW before even I know the outcome of the elections (and before I go around paying out on my bets for John McCain).
I have been, as most of the US and a big chunk of the televisually linked world, keeping up with the presidential campaign through the most readily accessible means available to me: CNN. And each day I switch it on, I have been getting progressively more angry at them.
The expression, "it's like riding a bike" generally means it is something easy and something you do not forget. Whoever said this probably forgot.
The following started out as a letter to a good friend who gave me his mountain bike before absconding to the jungles of South America, but in the meantime has taken on wider significance for me.