Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
This week Fat-Fat invites Jack to a nice dinner.
Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner
This week Jack tries to undo some of the damage he has done to himself. Meanwhile, Mu does what she can to bulletproof him against any and all of life’s slings and arrows.
Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner
Last week Jack got some much-needed exercise while negotiating Bangkok traffic en route to a rendezvous with Hippolyte Lafleur, a.k.a. Izzy Scoop.
Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner
Last week Jack found cause to rejoice that he hadn’t yet sold his ancient Royal typewriter after all, never mind he was now a state-of-the-art hack writer fully equipped with a computer.
Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner
Soft drinks giant PepsiCo has consulted with a Russian space startup offering brands the chance to project their logos into the night skies via low-orbit satellites.
“Pepsi considers space billboards to project logo across night sky using satellites”
(The Independent)
No problem, eh? Just part of a global campaign to erode our private spaces and our private choices to vanishing point. More and more, without so much as a by-your-leave, commercial interests invade … Read more
Bangkok currently lies enshrouded in a great cloud of fine particulate matter. Hey, but listen to what an Andromedan named Melrose had to say about pollution back in the 1990s, back in the days of leaded gas and black-belching city buses. Chacun à son gout, eh? The following originally appeared in the Bangkok Post Sunday section, and was later collected in Bangkok Old Hand (Bangkok: Post Books, 1993).
As most of you already know, the … Read more
Always wear clean undergarments with no holes in them. And so mothers everywhere will warn you. A rule to live by. “What if you have an accident and have to go to hospital?” Well, yeah, eh? But my mother, at least, never told me that red-blooded, hairy-chested hombres such as I would come to be risk even greater embarrassments.
Occupational hazards.
The magazine was going through a let’s-economize-on-expenses phase, is why I was headed back to my hotel in … Read more
My ‘cleansing fast’ entailed, among other means of detoxifying body and soul, ten days of no food and twice-daily colonic irrigations. In my own defense, I did this only in the line of duty as a writer. Plus it involved staying in a pleasant seaside resort on Phuket, Thailand.
For a week and a half, voluntarily and allegedly in my right mind, I refrained from inserting as much as a single chewable morsel into my mouth. I was also subjected … Read more
I’ve got a monster cold, the first in years. And the therapeutic effects of last night’s half bottle of wine had clearly worn off by the time I got up this morning.
The fever’s gone, but I remain fluish. So Sara fixed me a mug of hot lime juice with honey, and I chased that with my customary magic potion.
But things remained far from ideal, and the viruses probably reckoned they still had the upper hand. Until I … Read more
Jack Shackaway here.
Not long ago I posted an account of a recent encounter with fine wine and free food. But the starving writer’s life is no incessant five-star carouse with mince tarts and Shiraz on all sides. Far from it.
Here it is some time in the morning, I haven’t even had breakfast, and Mad the Maid has just puked all over my balcony. She went out there to clean it for the first time since this building was … Read more
