Once claiming to be 'the seafood capital of the world', Crisfield is now virtually a ghost town. Rita reflects on time, place and crab sandwiches... It was a dark and starry night, a peaceful rural silence blanketing the sleeping fields … that is until the shots rang out. We were just ... Read More...
America
When I stumbled across this Wikipedia article I though this sounds like a brilliant idea! Who wants to join? The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction in order to bring about the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. VHEMT was founded in ... Read More...
As America debates race yet again, Rita recalls an incident in racial profiling that occured close to home... America is going through another one of its periodic Rorschach tests on race. The O. J. trial, Rodney King, now Trayvon Martin. Not to mention the long litany of names going back through ... Read More...
He was the bard of Chicago and he tried to steal Simone de Beauvoir from Satre... Mr Slang introduces the man behind The Man with the Golden Arm... As Hamlet put it, look here upon this picture. And see before you, dare I attest, a proper writer: specs, work-shirt, hair a little ... Read More...
Rita finds that her traditional English cynicism cannot survive a remarkable Independence Day performance... Parades, picnics, fireworks, and flags. Tomorrow is the great American national holiday celebrating a bunch of traitors to the Crown. Or as they are known over here, Patriots. During my early years in America I maintained a ... Read More...
Glorying in the brief Washington spring, Rita proves she really is English by feeling nostalgic for something she never had... As I write the demented robin who inhabits the dogwood tree in our garden is repeatedly flinging himself against the window in a kind of avian kamikaze assault. The thump, thump, thump ... Read More...
News and internet coverage of the Boston bombings had all the ingredients of a TV thriller boxset. Rita is transfixed, but also disturbed... 24, Homeland, and now The Boston Bombing, TV shows that kept Americans on the edge of their seats with suspenseful plots, unexpected twists, false leads, explosions, car chases, ... Read More...
Rita explains the tradition of the weather-predicting Groundhog - and how it became yet another pawn in the Culture Wars... Americans have endured the War on Christmas, the War on the Easter Bunny, and the War on North Korea – oh wait, that one hasn’t happened yet and it isn’t funny. ... Read More...
This week Mr Slang takes us back to 19th Century America and a remarkable 'Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature, and the Stage’... ‘I’m a Salt River Roarer! I’m a ring-tailed squealer! I'm a reg'lar screamer from the ol’ Massassip’! WHOOP! I’m the very infant that refused his milk ... Read More...
Bizarre Flemish coincidences and worshipping at the Temple of Apple in this dispatch, as Rita visits New York... I first suspected something was amiss with my New York Subway app when it advised us to travel from Midtown Manhattan to the Lower East Side via Brooklyn, on the other side of ... Read More...
