Essays in Idleness

“O my God!”

It does not make sense to send me money any more (if you ever did), except from the purest generosity and kindness, for I don’t think I can “perform” any more, as a commentator on various miscellaneous and mostly stupid topics, except rarely while I am not

Still moving, now that I have been slightly jostled by the by-election results, up here in “Canada,” where the Liberals have swept ridings in B.C., Ontario, and Quebec.

Forty trillion dollars — an amount the U.S. national debt now exceeds — would not have struck me as a plausible number in the days when one lousy million would have been enough for an extravagant couple to retire on.

The great pleasure of immobility, while some consciousness remains, and until the tax department catches up with you, is that you may read, more or less without interruption.

I have fallen in love with Sophie Cunningham, even though she is a basketball star (I loathe basketball), and more than six feet tall (which is surely excessive, for a girl).

My mysterious South Australian correspondent, writing from a location precisely north of the absolute South Pole, shares these comments from the esteemed Friedrich Nietzsche: “Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the relig…

Grouse are “adapted” not merely to an environment, but also to being grouse.

It is some time since I tried to read Polybius (c.202–120 B..C.), the ancient historian.

Despite my near-allergy to Hawaiian shirts, and to those children born in the West since the fall of the Soviet Union, and even though I am fanatically opposed to abortions, regardless of birthdates, I have formed something of a male crush on Palmer Lucke…

If I may be boastful for a moment, and I may, it was glorious to remember Roger Smith, although I could not be present at his coffee shop tribute in the dark interior of mountainous British Columbia recently.

Not having “believed” in the crisis of overpopulation, when it was in style back in the ‘seventies, I have little trouble not believing in the crisis of underpopulation now.

As an indigenous Canadian — my father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers were all born here — I am naturally ashamed of how this country is grossly misgoverned.