Category: Articles

Dear Reader, I am right now somewhere in the island of Björkö, in Sweden. It is located to the northeast of Stockholm, about 2h40 min by bus (actually, one metro and two buses). I came from Germany, where I was before, by train. 16 hours. Except for not sleeping very much, and feeling very tired…

Ending an obsession I am travelling in Sweden and I won’t be posting so much about the “corona” issue these days. Instead, you will find here mostly a travelogue. In the end, my opinion about the whole “corona” thing didn’t change much since February 2020: just stop with the idea of using a pandemic to…

On vaccine passports, Solzhenitsyn and conspiracy theories Argentina has become the latest country in the world to adopt some kind of mandatory “vaccine passport”. I don’t know or care how it’s called, perhaps it has a different official name, but it is a vaccine passport. Some say I am a “conspiracy theorist” to point it…

I have a strange feeling of dejà vu… Happy New Year! But are we already in 2022, or have we gone back to 2020? Canada is now joining the “Lockdown 2022” club, where most European countries already are. At least in Quebec, from 31 December new strict restrictions were announced, with nightly curfews, prohibition of…

This is me playing (very badly) “In the Bleak Midwinter”, a wonderful Christmas song with lyrics (actually a poem) by Christina Rossetti, and music by Gustave Holst. However, I am still learning and I play really badly. Check for other versions for a better experience. Hopefully, one day I will learn to play it… Here…

The “war on viruses” must go on. Some compare corona times to the novel “1984”, but I thought that perhaps Terry Gillian’s “Brazil” could be an even more apt comparison. In that movie, the totalitarian nightmare is coordinated by bumbling and incompetent bureaucrats, who nevertheless never give up in their indefatigable pursuit of more paperwork….

(without burning down the house) I remember reading a story a few years ago about a man who was so afraid of spiders that in order to kill one, he burned down his own house. When I think of the response of most Western governments to the pandemic, that story comes back to my mind….

The following was a text written for “Off-Guardian” almost a year ago as a satirical piece, but since then most of it has come to pass, except (so far) for the brain implants. “Hi, dude!” “Oh. Hi. How are you?” “I’m good. How do you like my shoes?”  “Nice. Are those…”  “Yeah. The original Nike…

A Kafkian Short Story Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. His landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast each day around eight, but this time she didn’t appear. Instead, there were two gentlemen in dark grey clothes standing by the…