Got the sad news late last night, while watching the last episode of the far-less-impressive-than-The-Sopranos The Killing, that James Gandolfini, HBO’s Tony Soprano, was dead. Not whacked by New York but by his own heart, according to most reports. He was on holiday in Italy with his 13-year-old son, at least, perhaps his family. Man, how miserable that poor boy must be.

I, myself, not too happy. Last time I felt so gutted

The days remain far too packed for a natural-born idler like myself. I think the mistake was to take the first thing on that I took on, whatever the firetruck it was, however many years ago it was. Hmmm. Could have been parenthood, self. The thing is, doing one thing unavoidably leads to having to do another, no matter how good the thing might be. It could be agreeing to sleep with Madonna and Halle Berry or watching game six of the NBA Finals: you still have to drive to the venue.

And then the car might stall. And your cellphone battery might be dead. All of a sudden, the Swordfish DVD at home seems like a better retrospective choice.

Taking on the one thing, or the next thing (instead of doing the sensible thing and avoiding it) leads

Still busy as a bee - and not one of those idle ones, eh, a real busy-busy one, fetching pollen and dancing honey and thing - but determined to erase at least one more of the back-blog built up over the last week, I turn today to Jack Warner - unlike the majority of the United National Congress, which is rapidly turning away from its former benefactor and party chairman. The Prime Minister seems to be leading the retreat. Just Monday, she called the firetruck affair a fiasco. It is nice, of course, to see her get it right, because spending $6.8M to recover a worthless crashed firetruck is, at best, a fiasco, but one wonders

Though today hasn’t been any less packed than the five or six days preceding it - I’m still to answer a backlog of emails arising out of that firetrucking firetruck column Friday gone - I’m trying to at least tackle the (a)-(f) backlog of blogs mentioned yesterday, starting with (a) my daughter’s birthday difference from me.

It’s more than passing strange.

I don’t recall the day of my 15th birthday itself but I’m thinking I would have asked for one of the many albums I wanted that I didn’t get at Christmas. (Since I was 14, I’ve been easy to buy presents for: I’ve only

The last four days have been so packed, I haven’t had the chance to stay at my desk long enough to post blogs about: (a) my daughter’s birthday differences from me; (b) Jack Warner’s astonishment that anyone should even be faintly interested in his having tried to get $10M out of Cabinet for a job another company would have done for $25K; (c) the amazing Rafa Nadal; (d) the amazing legs of Maria Sharapova; (e) the nail-biting, low-scoring, high-tension West Indies v Pakistan in their opening match at the ICC 50-Over Champions’ Trophy now being played in England & Wales;  and (f) today’s also low-scoring game between New Zeland and Sri Lanka, in which Sri Lanka almost defended 138 runs!

And, when I did get back to my desk, all of the above were beaten back by an email from Denis Solomon to the Humanist Association of Trinidad & Tobago, of which I was a founding member. Denis' two major claims as an educator (according to one of his best columns, which appeared in the journalist-owned Independent in around 2000) were explaining parallax to a Jamaican Rasta and