Aries (20 March – 19 April) New year, new you. Excommunicate your family and set aside old friends, because isn’t it about time you had some fun? * * * Taurus (19 April – 20 May) What the devil is up with your pallid complexion? Can a vitamin deficiency owe anything to the pattern of the stars? *** Gemini (20…
Saying, ‘Shishi, shishi,’ My wife encourages the baby To pass water, and I hear The noise of a morning shower. Circa 1675. Hokku from the haikai no renga (comic linked verse) of Nishiyama Sōin, Ihara Saikaku, and followers of the Danrin school. Translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa.
More than a year in the making, Ronda Rousey’s return to the Octagon was hotly anticipated, and not just in the loins when she emerged from her long hibernation looking lithe and lean and in all-round great shape. Alas it proved shockingly short-lived. Bruised and benumbed by the blistering hands of Brazilian Bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes, within just 48 seconds…
When David Bowie’s death was announced one morning last January, the sudden news – yes we see you little starman – proved the cause for almost universal lament. But as everyone began to piece together the details of his final days – the release of Blackstar, his twenty-fifth studio album, and the eighteen-month struggle with liver cancer hidden from all…
It is Christmas, and against all the odds, you find yourself alone in your apartment with the object of the most ardent desire of your only heart. As they mill about the living room in a dressing gown or pop off to the bathroom in order to freshen up, you incorporate the kitchen, and sing opera with gusto while preparing…
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) At the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, you’ll sit there blinking with tears in your eyes, and your breast all aflutter with far-flung hopes and distant dreams, just like the young boy who – in the years following the First World War, making the best of things with only one ear – fixed ice…
Citing a paid survey probably filled in by parents which – if taken at face value – indicates that one in ten children can conceive a scenario where they might possibly be damaged by online sex, the scourge of internet pornography has been blamed in the sorry case of a defiled Elf on the Shelf. The surreptitious love child of a…
When the morning star was extinguished the moon remained still. The sun waved a veil of clouds towards it over the mountain which forgot to doff its nightcap. A fine tapestry of roses woven on the windowpane by the frost. 1971. Translation by Bernard Scudder.
Squeezed awkwardly between the dainty lace of a ‘bralette’ and the dirt and grime which is conjured by the colloquial north-easterly term ‘brook’, this month ‘Brexit’ made its belated entrance into the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The dictionary is updated four times a year, and its editors could only wait so long in the vain hope that the…
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On The Life of Pablo Kanye West doesn’t just engage in sexual relations with bleach-bottomed models as he transcends the Yeezus persona to become something more than a son, his exploits showing a strange synergy with – alongside assorted other ‘P’ plosives – the painter Picasso and the apostle Paul. He is artist and patron, seer and saint, a missionary…
