The Ironist

We need more humor. It is hard keeping paper money dry when you live in the water.  That is why I always kept my lari¹ in coins. Coins don’t get soggy. I think that is why American sturgeons switched to credit cards and then many got themselves into so problems with...

 William Morris, Eleanor Marx, George Bernard Shaw et al. gave speeches nearby  I am sitting on a wooden bench by the Limehouse Cut, the oldest canal in London, built in 1770. It is a Sunday morning, and there are only a few passers-by on Commercial Road that crosses...

Flt. Lieut. Peter Guy Scotchmer next to his damaged Typhoon after returning from an attack on an E-boat. Today, we read and hear not only about wars in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and of impending wars, but of riots and the threats of riots in many countries....

An overdue retrospective Major General Charles George Gordon, CB, 1833-1885 The Victorian Age was an idealistic age, beginning with the might of the Royal Navy breaking the thralldom of slavery outside the British Empire. There was a dawning acceptance of Darwin’s...

The past is another country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between   (A mosaic from Hadrumetum, in Tunisia, an important pre-Carthage Phoenician city, which depicts Aeneas surrounded by Clio, (history), and Melpomene (tragedy). This...

A Bookseller’s stall in Kutaisi, Georgia Now the ‘Luring of Children’ is a provocative title for an article in a non-political periodical like The Ironist. It comes from a picture, (above), that I took in Georgia (the country), recently, at a bookseller’s stall in the...

The Need For Critical Thinking   Children, quite rightly, expect adults to look out for them. Maybe, when we grow up, we continue to expect others in authority to look after us. Or we WANT to believe they care. The more fools we are. Last night my bank called and...

It is a supreme irony that the Ontario public school system, at least in its Peel District school board, should fall victim to wokeist activists of the ‘cancel culture’ persuasion, militants unrepresentative of Canadian majority opinion. Recent news reports of a...

If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, it makes Jill pretty boring, too. If truth be told, those workaholics Mr. and Mrs. Jack are tedious company, as well. So obsessed has our society become with work, usually paid work, that its antithesis, play, has become...