ORLANDO—A neutron bomb hit this place just as I got off the airplane, killing all humans but leaving the buildings intact. It was a horrid, unpardonable crime, and I blame the scientists. They should have done it the other way around: Kill the buildings and save the humans, however brain-dead they are in Orlando. I knew we were in trouble the moment I deplaned. There were five of us: two competitors and three coaches. We were ...
Why would a German playboy-billionaire industrialist with a large family and lots of old and good friends have dinner in Gstaad with one of his closest buddies, then go up to his chalet and put a bullet in his ...
Some thirty years or so ago, my friend P. J. O"Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with what was then his new bride. She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner she called me a male-chauvinist anti-Semitic racist before leaving the house in a fury. P. J. apologized and followed his bride out. To this day I haven"t figured it out, nor has P. J. They didn"t stay married long enough for a serious ...
Mme. Nhu, who died five days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. When she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie, yet the Western press named her the Dragon Lady, a nickname she didn’t deserve but one that stuck. She was a nationalist par excellence, but in the Vietnam War’s gathering storm, the press needed ...
Gone are the days when I used to wear a tux to go see a Broadway show. These days I feel overdressed wearing a sport coat and necktie. I used to go to Broadway a lot when I was young. My girlfriend at the time, Linda Christian, was an actress known for her romances more than her screen credits. She was once married to Tyrone Power. She loved the theater and more often than not was asked to visit the dressing rooms afterwards. ...
How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient Greeks had gone a step further. They did not require a Godlike sustenance or perfection from their kings, only greatness. Agamemnon, ...
Tuesday last, April 12, one hundred and fifty years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 34 hours, and Fort Sumter occasionally replied with fire of its own. Then the white flag went up and the Union troops within the fort surrendered. Not a single man had a scratch on either side. It looked as if neither gang ...
Let's play the "What If?" game for a minute. What if I had written this column in October 2002 and some eagle-eyed aide to George W. Bush had noticed it and shown it to his moron boss? Had the moron read it and taken what I"m about to write into consideration, Uncle Sam might be one trillion dollars richer, thousands of our dead and maimed might still be alive and kicking, and ditto for hundreds of thousands of ...
NEW YORK—I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of his other gems come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and Marine Major Chris Meyers (Ret) and their girls. Both officers saw action in Iraq, both are extremely well educated and well read, ...
This is the most outrageous proposal since Nero named his horse a senator. The suggestion that two of Gaddafi’s sons may inherit his mantle and a deal struck with the coalition is not even material for broken down comedians plying their trade in whore houses. Saif and his brothers have more blood on their hands than even the drugged out paranoid Muammar has. It was they who actually ran the system of murdering ...
NEW YORK—They say when sexual attraction sets in, all other brain functions shut down. It’s nature’s way of ensuring procreation. My brain shut down last week, and for a Hollywood actress to boot. Of German extraction, Sandra Bullock is not the classic Aryan goddess, but she’s most attractive in the flesh, more so than on the screen. I ran into her at Michael Mailer’s birthday party. He threw the bash in his famous ...
NEW YORK—Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for The New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter. He had come up the hard way and made his fortune in Wall Street but retained his loathing for those who had made it the old-fashioned way, mainly by inheriting and the old-boy WASP network. Graydon Carter (no relation), a good friend of mine who went on to become the big poobah at Vanity Fair, ...
GSTAAD—I’ve got the end-of-season blues. I know I say this every year, but this has been a particularly fun winter, with friends throwing goodbye parties, dinners, and lunches since the beginning of March. My liver has done a Gaddafi and taken a brutal revenge on my body. The right ankle is doing a Saif as I write. If I stand on it—or, worse, try to walk—it feels what it’s going to feel like when the ghastly Gaddafis ...
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Up to London to collect my Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. My name is Dr. Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he might one day get a Ph.D. like Dr. Gaddafi and Dr. Taki. Actually, my thesis was on the environmentally friendly method of converting Gaddafis into waste. The ceremony did not last long. It took me less time to write my thesis ...
GSTAAD—From my study’s wide-open, icicle-covered windows, one feels cocooned from the elements, as if in a prison cell but with the doors unlocked. The snows have finally come. The horizons are totally white. Clouds and snowy peaks intermingle in a rhapsody of snow-white, pine-green, and sky-blue. Thirty-five or so years ago, I took a ski-plane up the Jungfrau, landed on an upward slope, and skied down to Kleine Scheidegg, ...
Remember the old cliché about someone who is perpetually vacillating between a necktie and an open shirt? Or the one about the man who is noticeable for being completely unnoticeable? Step forward Ban Ki-moon, the useless UN's useless Secretary General. Despite persistent allegations that he is a habitual body-waxer, I have always insisted that Moon does not wax because he's Korean. No body hair. Then there were rumors that ...
