Published:Saturday | September 22, 2018 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
The guntalk, boasting, jibes, name-calling, praying for DJ Bravo not to bowl and then the elation when his team won, the highs, lows, and mediocrity made me think of the dumbest wars that were ever fought, threatened or contemplated. For example, a...
Published:Thursday | January 25, 2018 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
I heard there was a survey by the International Luxury Hotels Association, and one of the questions was, "If you could choose any hotel in the world for an overnight stay, which one would you select?" The almost unanimous choice of most of the male...
Published:Friday | December 1, 2017 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
Trinidad and Tobago always wanted a model prime minister, and now it has one. This was one of the comments after the prime minister of the country, Dr Keith Rowley, hit the runway like Air Force One in an event held in Trinidad last Saturday that supposedly showcased Caribbean fashion talent and was hyped as “designed to rock the fashion world”...
Published:Friday | July 21, 2017 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
Mark Twain is reputedly the first author to use the typewriter. He typed a manuscript for his publisher, who wrote back saying that Twain had left out the punctuation. Twain sent back a sheet filled with periods, commas, semicolons, etc. with the...
Politicians use statistics the same way that a drunk uses lamp posts for support rather than illumination. Mark Twain, who first said this, is also credited with this observation, "Statistics are like ladies of the nightonce you get them down, you...
Published:Thursday | March 23, 2017 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
After the departure of Quasimodo for Disneyworld to star in the hit movie 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', the bells of the famous cathedral in France were silent and the bishop in charge was very depressed. The silence was deafening and the...
Published:Thursday | November 3, 2016 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
Once upon a time, there lived in the Caribbean the Taino people. They gave us words like barbacoa (barbecue), hamaca (hammock), kanoa (canoe), tabaco (tobacco), yuca, batata (sweet potato), and juracan (hurricane).It was always thought that they...
Published:Friday | October 21, 2016 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
On the first day, God created the sun. In response, the Devil created sunburn. On the second day, God created sex. In response, the Devil created marriage. On the third day, God created an economist. This was a tough one for the Devil, but, in the...
Published:Friday | February 26, 2016 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
I thought my daughter asked me, "Dad, have you seen Monsters Ink?" But even if this was not exactly what she wanted to know, I behaved as though it was. "Yes, of course," I replied."It is invisible but ... it is green." "How can it be green and...
Published:Thursday | February 4, 2016 | 12:00 AMTony Deyal
The term 'hard cheese' is a 19th-century British expression that means 'tough luck'. It is not used as much these days since the density, firmness, even resilience of the coagulated, compressed and most times ripened curds of milk...
Apart from some mundane meanderings in meaning, like the identity of Twirly and Twisty, the possibility of a pig dancing a jig for a fig, the wanderings of Goosey Goosey Gander and the gustatory delight of 'monkey liver soup', the West Indian Reader...
If you use the terms 'reverse back', 'overexaggerate', 'dilapidated ruins', 'new innovation' and even 'foolish virgins', you need to know these are tautologies, essentially expressing something by repeating or saying it in a different way. This is...
Some of us older folk in Trinidad still refer to bananas as 'figs', even though we know the two fruits are different. My cousin Savi took the easy way out and used the term 'banana figs'. Banana is a fruit all of us in the Caribbean have grown up...
New governments come into town, their guns blazing, not literally like the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday in the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, but more like the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had already won the war but...
American journalist Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) coined the expression, "Politics makes strange bedfellows." Helen Thomas, a columnist, disagreed and insisted, "War makes strangebedfellows."The German general and strategist, Carl von Clauzewitz...
When Calypso King of the World, The Mighty Sparrow, introduced Caribbean people to the female character, Melda, in his 1966 song, 'Obeah Wedding', she was no stranger at all. In fact, wherever in the region we lived, we knew many 'Meldas' and, some...
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door." 'Tis some...
The sign in English in the window of a Mexican restaurant said, 'Don't stand there and be hungry. Come on in and get fed up.' On the other hand, there is a story about a US company that decided to market its 'no-leak' pens in Mexico.The actual...
One day a drunk walked into a bar and ordered a gin and tonic. He drank half of it and, without any warning, poured the rest on the bartender. The bartender got very angry, grabbed the drunk by the collar and demanded, "Why did you do that?"The...
One of the most famous movie taglines came from the film Jaws 2. The first movie in the series, the one that contributed considerably to the reputation of Stephen Spielberg, Jaws, was released in 1975 and immediately became the biggest summer...
When I was small, I was fascinated by cranes, trains, dump trucks and tractors. The first time I heard the term 'bulldozer', I had no idea what it meant, and since these were the days long before the Internet and there were no reference books in the...
When I was a little boy growing up in Trinidad, the big-time lawyers were known as 'barristers' and were household names. Their legal exploits were legendary. They were the superstars of the daily newspapers, The Guardian and The Evening News, which...
When we refer to people as being part of, or even constituting, the 'elect', it generally means that they have been chosen or singled out. One can say that "President Obama is one of this century's elect". He contested the election for president and...
You've heard about 'good cop, bad cop'. It is when two police officers work on you to get a confession or at least an admission of guilt or accusation of someone else. One is the good cop who offers you the coffee and cigarette and who is the exact...
A peer without peer could be deemed peerless but a peer without care is not just careless but seemingly couldn't care less. This is the case of Lord John Sewell, 69, a peer beyond compare, deputy speaker and chairman of committees at the House of...
