Author ArchivesJohn

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“I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.” Three years ago, almost to the hour, legendary comedian Mitch Hedberg was found dead of “multiple drug toxicity” including heroin and cocaine, in his New Jersey hotel room. Now, this may seem like a strange thing for ...

“I’ve only been on this website about a day and a half but I bloody love it.” This quote today from Joe, a reader who’s been dominating the comments sections over the past day or so. Welcome, Joe. Our traffic is twice what it was this time last year; thank ...

I was called these things in this exchange at Will & Testament after giving my opinion about a subject with which I’m intimately familiar: the British addiction to pomp and ceremonialism. My friend William Crawley did a fantastic job of hosting for the BBC a live 90-minute program covering the ...

Wired asked their readers to submit self-portraits and published the top ten as decided by readers. This is one of them. (I wonder what we’d see if we asked our own readers to do the same?) 

The events leading up to this case include a resident of Washington D.C. who challenged the city’s law banning handguns in the home for self-defence on the basis that the law is unconstitutional. Now the US Supreme Court has heard arguments for the first time on what the 2nd Amendment ...

Back in October, I wrote a brief post on a piece of music that Stephen and myself have been getting into again this week. For this reason I’ve bumped it up again, the original post below (slightly edited) and then some links you can use if you like it as ...

Spitzer’s Sin has been of great interest to me, for a host of reasons. One of those reasons is obvious to our regular readers: we’ve always argued that prostitution should be protected in law as a legitimate right (and I recently wondered if banning it may be unconstitutional, a case ...

Steve Chapman summarises my position exactly on Spitzer’s Sin: “I understand why Spitzer’s alleged hiring of a call girl was stupid, selfish, reckless, immoral and a betrayal of his family. What I don’t understand is why it was illegal. …. Some brilliant lawyer ought to ask the courts why the ...

It’s been tough to find the time to blog recently, but so much is happening that I’ve been dying to talk about. Take Spitzer’s Sin, for example. An LA Times editorial argues that the New York Governor – who is a customer of Kristen the sex worker – is actually ...

This is one of the most entertaining performances I’ve seen recently, by Liam Finn, making creative use of a looping effects pedal (reminiscent of K.D. Tunstall’s live performance of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree).

Davy Sims reports on a great story: the Dallas County District Attorney finding an old vault in his office stuffed full of previously undisclosed documents and files on the JFK assassination. An even greater part of the story is what he did next: digitise them and turn them over, unarchived ...

This certainly ranks among the strangest stories I’ve heard lately; a woman who went into the toilet of an Indian train, passed out and woke up to find that she’d somehow given birth to a baby who had fallen from her body through the toilet from the moving train onto ...

Aside from the Pullman interview, I’ve been interested in the following stories today. 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama is either neurotic on the issue of gun control and the 2nd Amendment or he’s a pathological liar who’s trying to conceal his utter contempt for the concept of individual gun rights ...

I’ve been reading an article intended for the March 2008 print edition of Reason magazine, in which Cathy Young examines Philip Pullman’s ideology in His Dark Materials, the trilogy from which the first installment, The Golden Compass, was adapted for film last year (to some controversy). Pullman is an interesting ...

It’s interesting to observe the political Left at this period in time. It isn’t just the state of fluctuating and redefining of leftist positions as they relate to 21st-century challenges, it’s also the fact that more and more liberal goals seem to be coming into conflict with each other. This ...

The 80th Academy Awards ceremony yielded its highest honours to my favourite film of 2007, the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men: Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, considered the frontrunner going into the ceremony, lived up to expectations, racking up a leading four Oscars: Best ...