Sean  Penn was once married to Madonna who as everyone knows is a famous pop-star. She has also done a bit of acting in her day, Evita being one of her better movies. Evita was Argentinian which is in South America but so is Venezuela. The president of that country was until very recently Hugo Chavez (described by Vice President Joe Biden as well as others as a “dictator”) who is famous for upsetting the Americans by being friends with Fidel Castro, nationalising the oil industry and being nice to poor people. Chavez is known for many other things; one thing he did was to show support for Iran which, along with Iraq and North Korea, comprised the Axis of Evil propounded by George Bush‘s administration.  In a movie called Team America by the makers of South Park the Film Actors’ Guild (or FAG for short) come out in support of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The movie depicts the do-gooding actors as naive liberals who sympathise with brutal dictators and frustrate the efforts of Team America to rid the world of tyranny. The main offenders are Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, though Matt Damon is quite annoying too since all he says throughout the movie is “Matt Damon”. But one member of FAG in particular speaks out in support for Iraq: “Last year I went to Iraq. Before Team America showed up it was a happy place; they had flowery meadows and rainbow smiles and rivers made of chocolate…” That actor is the puppet version of…Sean Penn.  ...

Go from one thing to another in no less than 15 references. Clint Eastwood was in a movie called Gran Torino. In it he plays a veteran of the Korean War. That same war is the subject of the hit comedy series M.A.S.H which starred Alan Alda, a respected and well-known American actor. He in turn starred in a Woody Allen movie called Crimes and Misdemeanours. Now, Woody Allen started out as a stand-up comic and has said that writing jokes always came easy to him. One of his biggest fans is Larry David who saw Allen’s movie Bananas while he was in the military. He knew then that comedy was for him. He spent a long time as a stand-up, unsuccessfully for the most part, until he hooked up with Jerry Seinfeld. Together they created the hit TV series Seinfeld which ran for about ten seasons. One of the guest stars in that show was Brian Cranton, the guy from Breaking Bad. In Seinfeld he plays a dentist. Jerry is accused of being an anti-Dentite by Kramer. The guy who plays Kramer, Michael Richards, himself a stand-up, was recently in trouble for making racially prejudicial comments. Kramer wrote a book about coffee tables and had the idea to give each edition of the book legs so that it could be used as a coffee table! There were even plans for it to be made into a movie. He’s not the only comedy character who had an idea for a book: Will Smith‘s character in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air had one called Celebrity Houses: At Night! In that episode he filmed Jay Leno pouring oil down a drain; it turned out to be coffee. Jay Leno recently made fun of an ageing...

Guerrilla “Guerrilla,”from the Spanish meaning “little war” comes from the time the Romans were attempting to conquer Spain. It allowed “bandoleros” or smugglers and bandits to legitimise their activities. But these original Spanish guerrillas, from their advent to at least the time of Wellington, needed to work in tandem with a regular army. For instance, Spanish guerrillas worked in a symbiotic relationship with Wellington’s British forces against France. The downside of guerrilla warfare is that the distinction between combatant and non-combatant becomes blurred. This is attested to by the Prussian Prince Frederick Charles who said, “There is for a commander nothing more oppressive than a situation which is not clear”. The Prussians, according to Bismarck, didn’t treat these French guerrillas as combatants but as murderers. Mao and Orwell It’s uncanny how prophetic Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four was, especially considering Orwell died in 1950. Take this account by Jung Chang of what Mao Tse-Tung hoped to achieve and bear in mind it relates to the late 1950s: “What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilisation, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders.” And not only that: Mao used the supposedly veracious diaries of a dead soldier called Lei Fend to try to exhalt the quality of being mindlessly enthralled by a will to obey Mao: “This cult of personality, the necessary obverse of the cult of Mao’s personality, was cloaked in a deceptive appeal to be selfless – for “our” country, or “the people”. Land and Freedom Land and Freedom is a movie by Ken Loach in which Ian Hart plays a Liverpudlian called David who, upon attending a lecture, is inspired to go to Spain and fight for the...

So I’m in Lucano’s, a cafe in Edinburgh – it’s across the street from The Elephant House where JK Rowling began Harry Potter – and I’ve got the paper. I’m reading a piece about a guy called Yapp who was until recently a British ambassador to Belize. He’s been accused of pinching the Belize Prime Minister’s girlfriend’s bottom at a party. Just then a bus stops outside my window. A middle-aged woman under an umbrella wearing a fake fur coat plays with her mobile phone; a younger woman with an enormous tea cosy hat trots by. On the bus, a fat woman looks in, her hands wedged tightly in the pockets of her pink hoodie. She sits still, with a permanent frown that serves to increase her stricken appearance. I turn again to my paper and see an article about a young offender known as “the imp of Satan” called Robert Heneghan. He punched a doctor who then fell and died. He was the youngest child ever to get an ASBO. The “imp” killed Sam Bee too, whose mother died days later, unaware of her son’s demise. Then, in the midst of this misery, an Asian man walks in and sits beside me. He’s upset, that much is clear. He’s talking into a mobile phone, too loudly for the cafe’s patrons not to notice, though nobody really shows it. He threatens to emigrate and declares that he’s devastated. I can’t help earwigging. Turns out he’d just been done for hooliganism at a football game: “Ahm fooking devastated. I tell yoo, ahm fooking ammagrathen. They shooed a clap o’ me at the gayum. Ahm noot allowed entuh the gidoons ahgayun dos yeeurh.” I thought about how much like “Trainspotting” this was – the violence, the...

  Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics by John Mearsheimer (Duckworth Overlook, London, 2011)   In Mearsheimer’s introduction he refers to the WMD that were never found in Iraq and argues that Bush and Blair blamed Saddam for giving the impression that he had them. He did this, goes the argument, to deter any potential invaders.   But there’s no evidence that Saddam ever claimed to possess them. On the contrary: the ousted, now deceased Iraqi dictator claimed he’d none and, as we now know, he was telling the truth. If anything, the Washington administration lied when it said it had proof of WMD: it didn’t. It also lied when it claimed it had proof of a link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden: there wasn’t.   However, Mearsheimer (who’s a professor of Political Science in the University of Chicago), is also sure that neither Bush nor Blair lied for personal gain. So why? Because there is sometimes good reason to lie to the public if you are a politician. It is claims like this one that make this book refreshing and compelling.   It attempts to define lying in Chapter 1: “Lying is when a person makes a statement that he knows or suspects to be false in the hope that others will think it is true.” He continues in subsequent chapters to categorise different kinds of lying. The one I like is “national mythmaking” whose purpose is to “create a powerful sense of group identity among the broader population.”   There are lies told between states, something that’s impossible to quantify and yet we know they exists. But what seems evident is that it happens a lot less frequently than you might assume. Governments are more likely to...

Fate Leah Brown stormed onto Oliver Plunkett Street and glared at a skinhead whose earrings glistened rather threateningly in the Irish evening sun.     “You cow!” Leah screamed, her hair flailing behind her reddened face as she charged towards the man known simply as ‘Spike’. “You piece of doo!”     She advanced closer towards him and, as Leah shouted out: “YOU MURDERER!”, Spike feigned oblivion.     “What the tuck are you smokin’?” he asked and Leah yelled at him; now everyone was staring, watching aghast as this woman claimed Spike had killed her little brother.     “Are you for real?” Spike laughed, revealing his rotten yellow teeth as Leah chased him into the neighbouring pub.     “I WILL KILL YOU!” Leah screeched, attracting the attention of the customers and the rather agitated landlord.     “Now, now,” he said reasonably.     “SHUT IT!!” Leah screamed. “And you,” she looked at Spike. “Tell them what you did. Tell them what you did to an innocent twelve-year-old boy. YOU MURDERER!!”     She picked up a wine bottle, stealing it from a rather shocked banker and stared at Spike. Tightening her grasp over the glass she realised how fun it would be to just throw it at him – exactly what he deserved.     This is not good God thought, pacing around Heaven’s lobby. He scratched his white beard, frowned and grabbed his pencil. Sitting back down, he closed his eyes and added a new paragraph to the book labelled ‘Leah Isabelle Brown’.     “To hell with it,” Leah spat and uncorked the bottle.     To the astonishment of the customers, Leah drained the bottle in one gulp and Spike, overwhelmed by the whole thing, ordered vodka.     Within an hour Leah found herself sitting in Spike’s dampened...

Harry Cotter rang me at 7 p.m. I was dragging a bag of coal from the shed. I had got it to the threshold and was about to lug it down the steps. I might have hauled it over my shoulder but I hadn’t changed after getting back from the party and still had on a pretty good shirt that Shirley had bought for my birthday. My phone vibrated maybe five times before I decided to release the bag and answer it. “Alright?” “Watch you up ta?” Harry’s West London accent always made me think of a joke I liked to tell him about “Eastenders,” that all they ever say in it is “Yor jowking incha?” “Just putting down a fire. It’s the first really cold night so far and I decided to stay in in front of the fire with a beer and the TV.” “Sounds good.” “You gone yet?” Harry hesitated and I waited. “Naw moyt.” “How come?” “Lissun, moyt…you wan’ sam comp’ny then?” I didn’t, but I liked Harry and he never invited himself to anything. “Sure, get a few beers for yourself, I’ve only got a few bottles of Heineken here.” And he was gone. I returned to the bag of coal and started toward the house. Shirley was somewhere on the road now on her way back from the conference in the city. I thought all at once of her and Harry sharing our living space for a night and wondered how they’d ever gotten along. Maybe for my sake. Maybe for their own. Once inside the house I laid the bag of coal at the inner door of the utility room and went inside to get the coal shuttle. Shirley’s magazines were strewn on the sofa and the...

Who deserves a reward? You know, I might have said me aul’ dad. It could have been Mrs Murphy, yer wan who volunteers with St Vincent de Paul. Or I could have insisted that you honour any number of mostly old people who are very nice and have stories to tell of the old days when things were different. People are generally good, it’s true, and most of them deserve recognition for all the unseen and unrewarded things they do. My mother, who I love dearly, cooks and cleans, scrubs and rubs, lifts and drops like Mrs Doyle. Plenty of people I know deserve to be told, “You’re alright!” But I don’t want to ask you to bestow any honours on them if you’ve got only one gong to give away. It’s not fair when they all deserve it. Instead, I want you to honour someone who may not even exist any longer — the man (or woman) who first said in casual conversation, “Yeah, no.” I say it all the time now. Even Colin Firth, when interviewed on the Actor’s Studio, complained about it. But Colin, Colin, take a step back now. Can’t you see that it’s genius? What other phrase or utterance has managed so succinctly to capture the state of confusion that has invaded our lives, our minds, our very souls? We still haven’t sorted out the whole abortion thing and even the divorce debate is ongoing, even though it’s legal to do it. Nobody knows for certain if Simon Cowell is being serious or if Beyonce can really like yer man she’s married to enough to have a baby with him. What about Lady GaGa? Is she the new Madonna? And then there’s Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst and the...