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Golf – small ball, small hole, long club = fun for some
Golf is having a moment with various eyebrow-raising headlines from Saudi’s sportwashing to Rory McIlroy’s divorce and Scottie Sheffler’s Louisville arrest on the way to the PGA. The beginnings of golf are lost several centuries back though in 1457, King James II, in an Act of Parliament banned citizens from playing football and golf … Read more
Ben & Jen – both Leo Sun Scorpio Moon
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez appear to have hit a marital stumbling block according to reports which will upset devoted fans of BenJen and evoke told-you-so nods from cynics. Both are Sun Leos with Scorpio Moons which is a tricky enough combination individually and as a twosome would raise the emotional temperature considerably, both positively … Read more
Francis Ford Coppola – the courage to take risks
Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project Megalopolis has premiered at Cannes film festival with reviews divided between “staggeringly ambitious”, “absolute madness”, and “bafflingly shallow”. The film’s premise is about “political ambition, genius and conflicted love” where “the fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems”. It stars Adam Driver as … Read more
Kevin Spacey – is a redemption on the cards?
Kevin Spacey unceremoniously dumped by Netflix in 2017 over allegations of sexual harassment and shunned since despite being cleared by courts in the UK and the US of allegations is being supported by fellow thespians who insist he has been badly treated. Stephen Fry accepted Spacey had been ‘clumsy’ and ‘inappropriate’ but should not be … Read more
Slovakia – assassination attempt raises tension
Slovakia is in turmoil after an assassination attempt on its pro-Russian prime minister, Robert Fico, by a disturbed, possibly politically-motivated pensioner. Slovakia is a landlocked country in Central Europe, bordered by Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic from which it split in 1993. A developed country with an advanced high-income economy, it is … Read more
Anita Pallenberg – a walk on the dark side
‘Dazzling, beautiful, hypnotic and unsettling’ was how the ‘wicked Anita’ Pallenberg was described by her friend Marianne Faithfull. The epitome of the 1960s sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, she ricocheted amongst the Rolling Stones, from Brian Jones, to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. She did stupendous quantities of heroin, indulged in a fascination for … Read more
Alice Munro – a connoisseur of ordinary life
Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel Literature Prize-winner, renowned as the master of the modern short story and compared to Chekhov, has died at 92. She drew on the lives of her neighbours for stories which became parables about the tests of character faced by people everywhere and managed to invest the humdrum events and parochial … Read more
The Moon – roaming through the astro-houses
The astrological Moon – soft, protective, sensitive, maternal, sentimental, moody, mysterious, evasive, programmed by the past, a seeker of comfort – has as many faces as there are different kinds of mothers. In mythology the renowned mothers: Demeter for one is so possessive of her daughter Persephone she wreaks destruction on earth when separated … Read more
Putin – reshuffle shifts tactics on Ukraine
Putin has seized the start of his fifth term with all-systems-change Uranus in the 10th to shake up his senior security officials and rein in military spending, indicating a major shift in the handling of the Ukraine war. Out goes Defence Chief Sergei Shoigu, rumoured to be involved in corruption as well as criticized for … Read more