Every fortnight, the Dark Side of The Dabbler Disappointed Balls As the walrus wallows and flops in its salty seaweed bed, so Mr Balls sploshed in his bath, luxurious rolls of bellyblubber ripening red in the tub. His tummy was a humpy lump island in a bubbly green sea. Gravely he raised ... Read More...
Month: August 2010
Welcome to The Dabbler ‘alpha’! Thank you to all those who joined us in our trial run over on Blogger – we hope you’ll be suitably pleased by the fully-fledged Wordpress version. Don’t forget to update your RSS subscriptions, Google readers etc. We have some new features and guests we’ve been saving ... Read More...
Here is a 'near impossible task' indeed - to identify 'the nation's favourite poem about the countryside'. Hmmm. The National Trust might be a little more honest about it - rather it's an attempt to get National Trust-supporting types to make a choice from a highly contentious shortlist drawn up ... Read More...
For this week's music feature, a bit of jazz/funk/soul... If you’re anything like me there’s a good chance you first encountered King Curtis in the film Withnail and I – that’s his smoky sax version of A Whiter Shade of Pale playing as we pan across the squalid flat in the ... Read More...
I was never much taken with Charlie Chaplin, too cute, I preferred the comparative austerity of Buster Keaton. But a couple of days ago I came across this picture. It is the last shot of Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). At first glance it seems merely generic - hero and heroine ... Read More...
Rumour has it that fashionably retro-progressive gents are investing in the priceless heritage of a bygone era. For those who want to go one better than the blinging new labels of Savile Row, there’s a firm of ‘fashionable tailors’ offering the epitome of understated style. Curiously located on a perilous ... Read More...
Dennis Hopper Hopper, then 39, was arrested by New Mexico police in July 1975 and charged with reckless driving, failure to report an accident, and leaving the scene. Jane Fonda Arrested in November 1970 in Cleveland after she allegedly kicked a local police officer. She had been stopped at the airport by ... Read More...
By Frank Key She has been dead for nearly thirty years, but there's no stopping Ayn Rand. Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged still sell in vast quantities in the United States, appealing as they always will to a certain stripe of libertarian individualist. (I hesitate to use the term "right ... Read More...
In his second volume of autobiography, A Dubious Codicil, Michael Wharton describes the Shaftesbury Avenue studio of cartoonist Michael ffolkes, as “a strange room of narrow triangular shape crammed with an astounding assortment of treasures” and draws particular attention to:...A huge photograph of a painting by the nineteenth-century French Salon ... Read More...
The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is now somewhat undervalued I suspect. He was part of that generation that included Auden and Spender and a load of heroic literary alcoholics. Unlike many of his contemporaries he never fell for Communism, though he did for drink. By the end of his ... Read More...
