INDEPENDENCE WEEKEND and Y’Boy footy well know that the onliest thing that will harass Trinidadian like they bounce a jep nest is that the public holiday falling on a Saturday. Trini don’t care if Good Friday fall on Ash Wednesday, as long as a public holiday don’t fall on a Saturday.

Long-time, before the PNM make as eef them care ‘bout Dis’pline, Production and Tolerance, which is the national moe-toe (and not looting the Great House, the real business of government), if a public holiday did fall on a weekend, the gov’ment uses to give the holiday on the next working day following; if the Monday was already a holiday, everybody get the Tuesday off, too. But, since George Chambers play he, “Fete Over, Back to Work” mas in the late Eighties, Trini doesn’t get they extra day of holiday again, and them does get bite up about it, still on to now.

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NOTWITHSTANDING THE often overwhelming keenness of several good friends, many discerning colleagues and every government in the Caribbean for it, I’ve never been a big fan of Carifesta. I’ve always thought of it as a less glamorous Best Village. Carifesta peaks at “ambitious” in practice – and I’m not even sure I support it wholeheartedly as a concept. Read more

NINE YEARS AGO, as a run-up to the sixth Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, I listed my Top Ten Caribbean Films in a snappily titled presentation called, “Men from Africa, Girls from India, Conquistadors from Germany & Some Cosquelle Rebels”. With this year’s festival happening within Carifesta this weekend, I’m revisiting – and substantially changing – that list. Read more

SPARE A THOUGHT for poor Fat Nixon, that low-class, highfalutin, moron in the White House, who must be catching his flabby, fraudulent, corrupt, criminal, treasonous, trailer-sized ass trying to figure out how to continue riling up his base without actually triggering a race war in America – and the only reason he wouldn’t trigger that war is because he can’t be certain the white supremacists would win.

I’m guessing my name has just been scratched off the invitation list to the American ambassador’s Halloween party.

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YOU COULD spot the two Pentecostal preachers at the Gay Pride celebration in Port of Spain’s Mandela Park on Sunday easily: they were the only unhappy people in the place. Scowling, holding their placards filled with Biblically-justified hatred in front of them like shields, their eyebrows were as knotted as their insides, their stomachs turned sick by what they were seeing… which was the happiest people in Port of Spain.

Rainbow-shrouded men and women (and every permutation and/or combination in-between) jumped up behind the music big truck, played themselves on the street, posed for pictures in front of the two-metre high “GREAT” on St Clair Avenue, implying a Britain made Great by equality, that was specially commissioned by the British High Commission for Pride.

And then gathered in the park to celebrate their freedom to do it openly.

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