Dru, Steinbeck and the Book of Deer

  "Kirk, I thank you. What you have done is..." "What I have done, I had to do." "But at what cost? Your ship, your son." "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul." (Kirk and Sarek. Star Trek III : the Search for Spock ) When I first crossed America in 2010, it did feel a bit like I was stealing the Enterprise for my Helen of Troy... Mind you, I only walked up Sunset Boulevard, not the slopes of Mount Seleya. But as a metaphor, the idea of filching a starship was better than you'd think. In Star Trek III , the cast had given up trying to play young and were being their middle-aged selves. Captain Kirk was having a mid-life crisis and the Enterprise had been shot to pieces in the previous film. There was every chance their illegal mission to resurrect Spock wouldn't work, that they'd make fools of themselves, sacrifice their careers... And they went and did it anyway. Because Spock meant everything to Kirk and that wa...

Stephen King is an underrated artist. His massive commercial success often blinds normally sagacious critics to his genuine ability, but the first time I read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption , I couldn't put it down. Shawshank was also a novella. They're shorter, tauter and therefore harder to write than a fully-fledged novel, in which egotistical auteurs often have too much room ridiculously to ramble. The copy I got came in at a lean and mean 113 pages, not one word was wasted and he wrote lines I'll remember for the rest of my life. And of course, once I'd got there and back again from America in 2010 like an overlarge Hobbit, I saw echoes of that trip in many things. Shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings... All gave me pause to think of my latter-day Alice and ask myself why the sea was boiling hot and whether pigs have wings! I bored a lot of people to death. But that's what Jody's grandfather in Steinbeck's The Red Pony  also did ...

Dear Miss Landau Chapter thirty-eight A date for breakfast   Friday March 12, 2010. I always call it the last day. The day I made the crossing. I didn’t lead a wagon train or drive an overloaded jalopy. But I went the same way, crossing the Mojave to Los Angeles . I woke up on time for the bus, broke my fast with free pancakes and coffee, and was quickly on my way. I remember the clear desert air, thin and cool, and breathing easy, as if it were yesterday, as I walked the 13 blocks back to the glitz and found my way to the Greyhound depot on South Main Street. I’d long forgotten that I didn’t need to go into Central LA. I could take the bus direct to Hollywood . It set out a little later than I’d expected, so I walked back across South Main and found a Starbucks. There was no free Wi-Fi there. Apart from my pancakes and coffee, nothing was free in Las Vegas . A hotel receptionist had explained that to me, too bored even to talk to me as soon as he realised I wasn’t ...

  Apparently, Juliet thinks I hate her. No, I don't. Actually, I thought she hated me . Whatever the case, she'll always be my dear Miss Landau and that's all there is to it. I once said she was the best gal in all the world. She is. That's about it. Not sure about that beret, though...

  You know, I think I'll just say it: I told you so. The new  Buffy  cannot possibly succeed because it's flying in the face of the fates and going the wrong way. It's as simple as that. I am not decrying the class and professionalism of Sarah Michelle Gellar's production team but, to me, it's as if they're trying to find their way through Carlsbad Caverns without a flashlight. ( Buffy the Infantry Officer . 11th November 2025) As also explained in The Glorious 14th , I frankly think Somebody Up There is still stomping hard on you lot because you're still going the wrong way and still seem unable to join the dots together. Unable to work out that that I might just have bought a flashlight, got it right, found Buffy the Vampire Slayer 's true continuation via that lost story arc and (as I myself just realised) continued a certain Xander Harris's own story arc into the bargain. Just to be clear, I know Nicholas Brendon was oft far from perfect and I d...

"We're in a very dangerous slippery slope. ... Where we are is so shocking to so many people they're sitting around saying 'ah, we can't really be there.' You know, we are a group of people that don't like the truth, Andy Ostroy. We don't like the truth so we pretend it doesn't exist, and we live in some realm of denial ... I want to wake you and all your viewers and listeners up to the systemic crisis that we have right now." ( Anthony Scaramucci on The Back Room with Andy Ostroy . 31st January 2026) "Why is there no backbone anywhere ... This is not what the United States stands for, and this is what the person behind you, George Washington, would have said. This is why we have these removal procedures in place to get this insane person out of office. Why are they not doing that, Jim Acosta?" ( Anthony Scaramucci on The Jim Acosta Show . 4th March 2026) Just in case anyone's forgotten, on the 4th of July 1776, the Founding Fathe...