Keeper of the Clown Bell

Imagine-Nation Under the misrule of The Lord Callaghan of Cardiff a band of miscreants emerged from King's Road to proclaim the death of Rock n' Roll - exhausted and heartbroken by the socialist monotony which gave it birth and against which it had struggled, unsuccessfully, to destroy.  Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols opens with the marching boots of "Holidays in the Sun" and doesn't let up until the lads have blasted Geo-politics, the Monarchy, Abortion, social cohesion, the recording industry and pretty much everything else their Clockwork Orange minds framed as a target. It could have been (should have been) the coup de grâce to the whole musical enterprise, but a few years latter the Thatcher regime captured the nations leadership and like a bad joke Wham! burst upon the emerging decadent and frivolous culture created by those who despised The Iron Lady as an "answer" or, more accurately, a reactionary hissy fit to her shop

“This society of ours is a better society than the United States,” he said. “ It’s more even, it’s more fair . We’ve had a 50 percent increase in real incomes in the last 20 years. Median America has had zero, zero.” He added, “We have universal health protection, from the cradle to the grave.” This from a lost-love letter sent to the United States of America by an Australian Constitutional Monarchist and published (where else) in the New York Times - " Dear America, Why Did You Let Us Down? " Answer: Because you need to be let down and you don't understand "America" enough to even comment on the matter. This woman uses the "semipermeable membrane of celluloid" to learn about our history, follow our politics and understand our institutions - she watches "The West Wing" and thinks it actually reflects White House operations (unfortunately, for the past 8 years she might be right). She learned about speeches by JFK and MLK and knows about

Way back in the summer of 2008 I was having a conversation with a good friend, a poet, a committed liberal about then candidate Barack Obama. She was obsessive on the fact that he was black or African American or whatever and I asked her why she ignored or discounted the white or Caucasian half of the man? She honestly looked at me like I'd just said something she didn't know or, at least, had never thought of before. I didn't say this to discount Obama's blackness , but simply to acknowledge the mans whiteness which, in my opinion, plays as big a role in his political success as anything else and, truth be told, describes his ideological worldview to the consternation of his many black supporters. Case in point is the Ta-Nehisi Coates article " My President Was Black " which tries to make sense of BHO's presidency and how, incredibly (in his view), it lead to the election of Donald J Trump. Obama went on to say that it would be better, and more realisti

Here in the USofA where anyone (and I mean pretty much anyone) can become a citizen and therefore an American it's hard to get a handle on Russia where nobody just shows up and "becomes" a Russian. The Bear doesn't welcome outsiders into it's den and there's a damn good reason for that which is something else the sugar-water drinking, video game playing, slap-happy simpletons living on the fruited plain can never fully understand. America - The United States of America - is bordered by two relatively harmless countries: Canada - a Constitutional Monarchy filled with earnest, kind weepers who look down upon the lower 48 as uncivilized but dangerous first cousins who they have to live with and manage. Mexico - a Socialist basketcase filled with Spanish overlords and their conquered peoples who do everything they can to escape across the boarder. Russia, on the other hand shares a boarder with fourteen (14!!!) different countries, some of them real beaut

Suspension of disbelief is a critical and mysterious quality of human consciousness required to fallow any story be it told around the campfire, in a novel or on the LCD screen. It is demanded in spades by the creators and writers of HBO's West World which portrays a world of the machine in all its post-modern glory and focuses, ironically on the subject of self-awareness. It's heady stuff and the show has a great production budget and very good acting to, like the theme park it documents, bring it all to life. I couldn't help thinking about the show and it's hapless "hosts" when Kanye West dropped by Trumps keep in midtown Manhattan this morning: “We’ve been friends for a long time,” Mr. Trump told reporters. Asked what he and Mr. West talked about, he responded: “Life. We discussed life.” "I'm not one, I can't be." Hmmm... Sounds very suspicious. Especially since Kanye just stood there, motionless, in shut down mode . When Kanye

It's pretty simple really Who's it going to be?  Lamar, Baker, Deshaun, Dede or Jabrill ? The suspense is killing me and it has me forgetting all about  Stavridis, Huntsman, Romney, Bolton and Manchin . Combining the first names of the Heisman front runners with those of Sec of State Apprentice gives America a bad-ass diplomatic name. Check it out: Baker Huntsman (disgruntled psycho chef who hates... everything) Jabrill Manchin  (it just sounds awesome) Looks like the best combination we come up with is Rex Tillerson so let's go with that. This Trump administration is going to be staffed by business execs, generals and Governors - no yes men and middle management types will find a leadership role on this crew. All the losers who use politics and elections to elevate their status, get special treatment and cash in will have to stuff it for the next 4 years. They can all go find work in the private sector where they'll never rise any higher than executive vice p

As readers of the KOTCB blog already know, I have a significant issue with "dark matter" and it's mysterious undetectable quality - especially since it must comprise 90% of the known universe if our current understanding of gravitational pull and relativity are applied to the problem of keeping it all together. You'd think that some "thing" that comprises over 90% of the universe would be observable, if not to the naked eye then, at the very least, to some kind of oscillator magnetron dreamed up in the physics lab. What do we pay these people for anyway? So I was overjoyed to read that Erik Verlinde has found a new, and potentially revolutionary explanation for how things work, why what goes up must come down and how planets revolve around their galaxies a 500,000 MPH - it's all spelled out for a layman like myself in an article titled  Radical New Theory of Gravity --"An Emergent Phenomenon, Not a Fundamental Force of the Universe" . (I&#

I'm an Apple Computer user - MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, AppleTV, iCloud, iEverything and that's just the way things shook out over the years. My first computer was an AppleII and I spent my adolescence coding on green screen terminal hooked up to mainframes creating rudimentary programs in BASIC and COBOL but by the mid 80's I'd moved to the Amiga PC which I loved - unfortunately the Amiga didn't succeed. So back to Apple, then to IBM ThinkPad with a Psion hand held and Nokia smart phone, then to Dell laptop and Apple iPhone and once I had the iPhone I figured I might as well standardize on Apple which I did and that's how I found myself in the Apple walled garden of existence. I'm not a groupie, don't bleed Cupertino silver and white, don't watch the Mac World streaming videos of product announcements - I just want a simple computer that I can explain to my wife and children - all of them have Apple products too so we're talking 6 iPhones, 5 la

I frigg'n hate Twitter . For years the company I worked for begged me to use it to promote products, innovations and success stories to the broader tweeting public but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It just seemed like an endless stream of one liners with incongruous patterns building a formidable wall of confusion . Then the 2016 election happened and I had to start using the cursed platform to follow Trump to figure out what he was doing - now that was fun because Trump actually understands how to use the service and does use it to great effect as his own printing press - like this: ISIS is taking credit for the terrible stabbing attack at Ohio State University by a Somali refugee who should not have been in our country. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2016 Impressive. Complete freak out by all the good people bringing Somali refugees into America and relocating them in the heartland (Ohio) where they get educated and, basically, act like