Well Written / My Write

Every once in a while I wish this column was daily instead of weekly. Let me stress that this is an occasional wish. The good Lord up in heaven knows there are weeks when interesting ideas are as rare as senators without dropsy and good columns make more style than brownings on the Promenade after they man now get they ten days money.

This week is one of the rare ones, where almost everything that has happened over the last few days is worth writing about. I’m like a fat kid in a candy shop, as “Fiddy” cent said. You have a week that starts off with Dookeran and Persad-Bissessar fighting like two dogs over the marrow-less bone of contention that is the UNC. What a disappointment Kamla has turned out to be, a woman who has had nothing of interest to say since she convinced us of her knowledge of “Mr Bissessar pipe.”

Patrick Manning’s meeting with Vice President Cheney is more than deserving of comment but not enough for an entire column, I think. After all, a 35 minute meeting with a man like Patrick Manning is no time at all. By the time he said his first, “In the year nineteen hundred and ninety nine Mr Vice President, the PNM government systematically and methodically...” well, fifteen minutes up! All it would take to use up the remaining time would be Cheney asking him if he wanted a cup of coffee or tea, one sugar or two. It was a meeting for Patos to swell with self importance like a bake with too much yeast and for Cheney to make sure we don’t play the fool with we gas.

Tuesday dawned with Anita Annamunthodo, the 18-year-old mother of the terribly dead three-year-old Amy, complaining about being beaten in jail. What a sentence to have to write! Two children buggered to death in one year is two too many. Something in me questions this woman’s/girl’s right to complain about abuse, after she allowed and aided the abuse of her own daughter. Part of me exults at the irony, the cowboy justice of it. But another part of me knows that people repeat what they have learnt and I look at the photo of her bloated face, the hard eyes and wonder what lessons did she learn as a daughter, as a mother, as a wife that hate and pain was all that she could pass on.

And it’s only when a child ends up dead with some part of its body ruptured that we start asking the questions that we should be asking all the time. An 18-year-old with a three-year-old baby? Come on people, do the maths. Where were the parents? Where were the neighbours? Where was social services? Anita may be the one receiving it, but plenty of us are deserving of a good cut arse.

The column for Wednesday would have been about the call by the Bicentennial Committee for the 200th Anniversary of Chinese Arrival in Trinidad and Tobago (phew, what a name) calling for a public holiday. I wrote about this since last year. Great idea. I only have one problem. The date. Why October 12th? Everybody knows the unofficial Chinese holiday in Trinidad is October 10th - double ten. It’s the day we get discounts on chinee mango and chinee sausage also known as first communion because of the way it’s shared in primary schools.

The sharer then puts the brown almost tasteless yet forever popular sweet on the sharee’s tongue and moves on to the next sinner). I say give them the holiday. And all who are insulted by my saying that a Chinese national holiday should be celebrated by discounts on preserves might want to hang themselves over the way it’s being celebrated this year. A fashion show?! A film festival?! The irony is if a national holiday is declared the only businesses you will get open on that day will be the Chinese restaurants and the groceries anyway. The whole of Trinbago will be celebrating Chinese arrival day except Charlotte Street.

Now it’s time to round up ‘cause I’m almost at my word limit and I must include that butt by Zidane on Sunday. Sparrow really said French men give the best head! And what a head to get butt by! What a way for a man whose name was synonymous with elegant dribbling and spectacular scoring way to end a career. Not that I’m complaining; I wanted Italy to win – right after our own boys. I was hoping to squeeze in a paragraph or two on the OWTU and their “eye on ALCOA” nonsense. Errol Mc Leod’s promise to make ALCOA “contribute tremendously to the well-being of the peoples of Trinidad and Tobago” would be laughable, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a crying shame.

So, what he means essentially, is that we could destroy the environment immediately to construct the US$I.5billion monstrosity that will destroy the environment for posterity but he, Errol Mc Leod, and his band of merry men will personally ensure that ALCOA gives back to the poor enough jobs/handouts/steelpan, football sponsorships to keep their mind off of the wealth they’ve really lost. Sounds to me like Patrick and Cheney spoke about the wrong thing at the White House. We need to start deporting some of their bandits, even those that wear three piece Armani suits and are friends with Bush.

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