Columnist Earl Best surveys the many tributes to dearly departed cricket icon Tony Cozier and seeks to make a river of the tributaries: “Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” (African proverb quoted by Chinua Achebe) In a 21st Century colonised by the …
Read More »The Great Training Robbery: TTOC sent wrong message to young athletes
Columnist Earl Best says Trinidad and Tobago Olympic Committee (TTOC) boss Brian Lewis made a ‘white-collar’ decision in selecting Marisa Dick for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games: Dear Brian, I don’t know what your experience has been but I know from my own experience that there are times when you have to cut off …
Read More »The Colm after the storm; and Imbert’s about-turn on the gas subsidy
Minister of Finance Colm Imbert was interviewed by Khamal Georges on CNC3 last week and it was difficult not to be genuinely impressed by his calm demeanour. It contrasted sharply with the agitation and irritation he displayed during his mid-year review in Parliament a week prior, when he announced to the …
Read More »Is just a PNM movie: Best look at what politicians are saying but NOT doing
“Life is a stage and we are the actors,” calypsonian Lord Valentino sang in the 1970’s. Three or four decades later, endorsement came from the novelist Earl Lovelace, who declared that (Politics in T&T) “…is just a movie.” “Everybody have a part to play,” Valentino also sings. Including Faris Al-Rawi. …
Read More »The ghosts of November past: Best and Walcott review the T&T/USA WCQ
Wired868 columnist Earl Best and journalist Roneil Walcott evoke the ghosts of November past in five tableaux: (Tableau One) “Dem eh really understand, yuh know,” he said to me, his voice thick with emotion, “deh eh understand hommuch dat hurt.” I expected him to wipe away a tear but he …
Read More »Wham Rasta?! Best gets brutally frank about frankly brutal viral bar video
“Ay, rasta, wham?” What laudable restraint! What admirable self-control! Having waited, according to the Trinidad Express’ Alexander Bruzual, all day to see Ricardo Jerome, the 36-year-old man accused of assaulting Ruth Marchan (not the former LifeSport director) in a bar, a woman grabbed him—presumably not by the scruff of the …
Read More »Is the Lotto part of Scam-lamafia? Best looks at $30m jackpot
The Lotto, an economics teacher friend of mine has long insisted to me, is nothing but “a regressive tax on black people.” That’s probably also true of Play Whe, Pick Two, Pick Four and Scratch and, indeed, the National Lotteries Control Board’s whole range of online games. And not being …
Read More »Barry, barra and other crap: Best on un-Parliamentary language
Say “Employer” to someone and (s)he expects soon to hear “Employee.” And ditto if you reverse the order. So I wasn’t really surprised when Wired868 stopped talking about “Barra” and started talking about “Barry.” But I stopped reading Monday’s Express story about the MP for Princes Town with the first …
Read More »Jason Holder’s West Indies plan; Best comments on new regional captain
Earl Best comments on the dumping of the relatively recently appointed captain Denesh Ramdin and the very recent selection of his young successor: If there were an election to determine the position of West Indies cricket captain, we might all have been getting e-mails and text messages from the newly …
Read More »Is T&T 400m sprinter Machel Cedenio too young to soca at the Rio Olympics?
Columnist Earl Best shares a suggestion which, he feels, might bring the T&T men’s 4x400m relay team closer to gold in Rio next year: I run my mouth often and I sometimes jump to conclusions. And although, under a PP government, that might well be deemed qualification enough for a …
Read More »Windies continue slide into cricket abyss with Champions Trophy failure
“Running a board with only management skills,” declared former West Indies team manager Rudi Webster in yesterday’s Express, “is like trying to cut a piece of paper with half a pair of scissors.” “We must remember that in general,” he also noted, “when we are dealing with human beings, we …
Read More »Plea to Jack Warner-critic-cum-biographer: Come back home, Tino
Columnist Earl Best pens an open letter to current Guardian Sports Editor Valentino Singh, who initially led the campaign to have Austin Jack Warner brought to book for his November 19,1989 misdeeds and then turned around and tried to make Warner look good by authoring his two self-serving books: My …
Read More »