Issue 136

..the French. Who else would give this sensationalist and disturbing book two major awards – it would never have made it onto the short list of the anglospheric Man Booker – and have it leap into best seller status? Now while I am an unabashed Francophile, but I must confess that they do take intellectualism…

..about the issues they raise and are careful to get the tone and the clarity of their arguments just right to pass the editors’ stringent scrutiny, real or imagined. Sure, the letters are still not all great, but the standard is generally streets ahead of the ‘anything goes’ FB sewer. And I suspect that a…

Currently we have state and federal government where advertising is seen not only as the most appropriate and almost certainly the only activity to solve a problem. The billboard struck me as the equivalent of Speed Kills advertisements which are seen as a substitute for proper driver training and a way of eliminating the gross…

..from a couple of old geezers venting about how things have deteriorated since ‘our day’. Vaguely apropos of that, I usually have no idea what I’m going to write about when approaching these P&W follies of mine and so I have adopted a standard preparatory procedure. First I have a quick squiz at Christchurch’s The…

S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…

..A Fate Worse Than Death, or simply provocative and silly like Mama, Did Jesus Wear Makeup?, but there’s no discernible trend as far as I know – apart from avoiding the bleeding obvious, of course. Perhaps perversely, (or of course perversely), while I’m quite comfortable playing certain songs for years at a time, I’m not…