Earl Best

Forty days and 40 nights. And counting… NCC has had its say. Communications is largely silent. Tourism has been silenced. Community Development, Culture and the Arts has had nothing to say. But the volume of kangkatang in this year’s Carnival, it seems to me, makes a proper post-mortem imperative. And …

“Faith,” the King James version of the Holy Bible tells us in Hebrews 11:1, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” But Communications Minister Maxie Cuffie was careful not to mention that very relevant Bible verse in his Easter message to the troubled citizenry …

POW! POW! POW! Fans of Chinese food could be forgiven for licking their lips on the morning of Tuesday 4 April. Who really could imagine, before seeing the ‘Three shot dead in Port of Spain’ drop head, that the Express’ front page headline referred not to the steamed or fried …

Ivy pack up she clothes to leave/because John was down and out (…) (…) Johnny nearly kill she with blows/Poor Ivy bawl like a cow… (“No money, no love”) Women are taking a beating in Trinidad and Tobago. And if that were merely a metaphor, neither the news nor Sparrow’s …

I doh have no media tabanca.  Some Wired868 readers think I do but I don’t; I swear. I abandoned the conventional media—well, more accurately, the conventional media amputated me—after I had spent four years at the Guardian followed immediately by six at the Express. I have no regrets. There hasn’t been …

The Mighty Chalkdust has no more than one month to make a public announcement that that’s it, he’s calling it a day at last. In February, in his 50th year in the business, the former schoolteacher who celebrated his 76th birthday in early March sang “Learn from Arithmetic” to beat out 16 others …

In the beginning was the word and the word was with Hart and the word was heart. And the Soca Warriors were looking like the 300, capable of beating tremendous odds. But there was a boy called David who, like the fellah in front in Sparrow’s “Ten to One is …

Time was when, if yuh neighbour house on fire, yuh used to throw water on your own. Not anymore, not in politics anyway. Nowadays, if yuh political neighbour house on fire, yuh does throw pitchoil. I thought that was the hidden message in an unpublished letter sent to Wired868 by …

I couldn’t believe my ears. Had the radio just said that the Minister of Education was planning to start instruction in panmanship in the nation’s schools? Had someone finally seen the light after all these years, just as the Lloyd Best Institute of the West Indies was launching a week-long …

Some people will stop at nothing to bring a good man down; many of them are in the media. Ask soon-to-be former NCC chairman Kenny De Silva who decided to resign after reading an editorial in the Express. Or current Pan Trinbago president Keith Diaz who has decided NOT to …

A litany of whoa! But we jamming still! Bacchanal, synonym of and the default rhyme for Carnival, has been part and parcel of the national festival for donkey’s years and controversy and comess have been its consistent companions. But this year was ‘diss’ year; everywhere you looked in 2017, it was disaffection, …

My friend AJ is not a trained calypso judge, the only ones able, according to now nine-time Calypso Monarch Chalkdust, to judge the annual calypso competition fairly. So I really don’t know if AJ’s view that “Chalkdust should be somewhere in the middle of the field”—shared with us on our …