Subscribe to Thank God It’s Friday

TGIF columns are in order by date from the most recent.

Scroll down to search or read more

The BC Guide to Surviving Christmas

Saturday, 25 December, 2021 Filed in: TGIF

IT’S CHRISTMAS WEEKEND and, at family gatherings everywhere over the next 72 hours, as many quarrels as champagne bottles are likely to pop.

Early.

People who haven’t seen one another for a year – often because they deliberately avoid it – are going to be thrown together for at least several hours and, likely, several days.

Even in the biggest houses, personal space will be limited. Grandmothers sneaking into the spare room to escape grandfathers’ snoring will find it overflowing with relatives from Foreign, already muttering over who has to sleep on the air mattress.

And people aren’t going through the rigours of air travel now to stay for only a week.

O Elon! Omicron!

Saturday, 18 December, 2021 Filed in: TGIF

WHETHER FOR THEIR or his sins, Time magazine – ubiquitously known as “Times” in Trinidad – this week named Elon Musk, the Tesla/SpaceX guy, its Person of the Year. The editors, as is their wont when their choice is hugely unpopular, pointed out Time’s Person of the Year is not a positive award but merely the recognition of the individual who “for better or worse” most influenced the preceding year’s news.

Without either intended irony or seeming to understand it made their choice even more ridiculous and pathetic, Time underlined that Adolf Hitler, perhaps modern history’s most hated man (and certainly the man who would start World War II by invading Poland in 1939) had been the magazine’s 1938 Man of the Year. The USSR leader Josef Stalin (perhaps modern history’s second-most hated man), was Time’s Man of the Year twice, in 1939 and 1942; most historians agree Stalin was deliberately personally responsible for the deaths of 20-22m of his own people.

So you clearly don’t have to be a nice guy to be Time’s Person of the Year.

Rihanna’s & Other Boobs

Saturday, 11 December, 2021 Filed in: TGIF

IT’S BEEN A big week-and-a-half for small island mistakes. On the last day of November, its last Independence/first Republic Day, Barbados’ newly-minted National Hero, the pop music megastar, Rihanna, accepted her award in an outfit that will probably be discussed in fine detail long after Bajans have stopped their general waffling about that trifle, republican status. IT’S BEEN A big week-and-a-half for small island mistakes. On the last day of November, its last Independence/first Republic Day, Barbados’ newly-minted National Hero, the pop music megastar, Rihanna, accepted her award in an outfit that will probably be discussed in fine detail long after Bajans have stopped their general waffling about that trifle, republican status. Read more

Welcome to Bimrock

Saturday, 4 December, 2021 Filed in: TGIF

FOR MOST Barbadians, Barbados’ becoming a republic means practically nothing, in this moment; but, in the future, it might mean everything, not just for Bajans, but for all o’ we who think of ourselves as West Indian.

Barbados could yet become the centre of what could be the second great human civilisation to have arisen out of small islands. West Indians have no technology to impart but we could yet give the world the gift we carry in our hearts: the love that survives everything, including slavery, indenture and hugely unjust treatment at every level from our very start.

Given time, our love can defeat every challenge and solve every problem.

Show more posts

Navigational Links