Essays

Northern Lights and Low Expectations

Northern Lights and Low Expectations

A humorous reflection on life’s lowered expectations, fine dining dreams gone cold, and existential musings from an Arctic kitchen. There comes a point in every man’s life when he realizes that all the years of carefully curated knowledge, refined tastes, and grand...

read more
Rules and Unwritten Rules

Rules and Unwritten Rules

Indifference is not a response in unsettled times   Love, not indifference, protects. Here is a Downy woodpecker by Maria Corcacas. This morning, as the ‘dim temple of the Dawn1’ paled the sky, our red-headed male downy woodpecker announced his return with his...

read more
Choices

Choices

Be skeptical, and think afresh... Flying Fish Services Ltd. The Editor of The Ironist has long asked me for my views on the war in Ukraine. For me it is a long way to Europe – let alone across the Atlantic – as I haven’t left the Black Sea. But sturgeons live longer...

read more
AI Hasn’t Won Yet!

AI Hasn’t Won Yet!

I have been reading so much nonsense about the American election. The so-called ‘experts’ don’t get it. It is not so much about who is in power, or who is out of power, or what the consequences were, or are, or will be. It isn’t about who was or will be good or bad....

read more
Listen to the Song

Listen to the Song

 The blind need a helping hand, but a disability can be a gift                                                                                                                            A maidenhair tree, or ginkgo biloba   A recent article in the Spectator[1]...

read more
Smile!

Smile!

We need more humor. It is hard keeping paper money dry when you live in the water.  That is why I always kept my lari¹ in coins. Coins don’t get soggy. I think that is why American sturgeons switched to credit cards and then many got themselves into so problems with...

read more
Take Back Control

Take Back Control

Sometimes we feel as though “they” (companies, lobbyists, governments,) are trying to frighten us, to make us feel as though we are in danger, implying that the world is about to end. The purpose of this would be to make us feel as though we need them, which would...

read more
We Need More Insouciance

We Need More Insouciance

Flt. Lieut. Peter Guy Scotchmer next to his damaged Typhoon after returning from an attack on an E-boat. Today, we read and hear not only about wars in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and of impending wars, but of riots and the threats of riots in many countries....

read more
Gordon of Khartoum

Gordon of Khartoum

An overdue retrospective Major General Charles George Gordon, CB, 1833-1885 The Victorian Age was an idealistic age, beginning with the might of the Royal Navy breaking the thralldom of slavery outside the British Empire. There was a dawning acceptance of Darwin’s...

read more