Author spotlight: Ashleigh Brilliant

Born London, 1933. Mother Canadian. Father a British civil servant. World War II childhood spent mostly in Toronto and Washington, D.C. Berkeley PhD. in American History, 1964. Living in Santa Barbara since 1973. No children. Best-known for his illustrated epigrams, called “Pot-Shots”, now a series of 10,000. Email ashleigh@west.net or visit www.ashleighbrilliant.com

To the Rescue
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   October 25, 2018

One of the most hallowed of all Hollywood clichés is that of being saved at the last moment. This was the basic appeal of such ongoing series of narrow escapes, as The Perils of Pauline, or the weekly serials which many of us fondly remember, in which the hero was left in some precarious position, […]

Standing on Ceremony
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   October 18, 2018

Life seems full of the ritualized events we call “ceremonies.” Some people like them, others try to be elsewhere. I myself generally avoid weddings and funerals. They are so much alike – flowers, prayers, processions – sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. This can be embarrassing if you forget which one you’re at and, […]

Fools, Jewels, and Tools
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   October 11, 2018

I mean “Fools” here in the Shakespearian sense of clowns or jesters – in our day, professional comics, who make a living making us laugh. The most successful of these are highly paid, so much so that they can afford to hire other people to write jokes for them. As for jewels, the best ones […]

All Ears
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   October 4, 2018

As an aesthetic object, the human ear hasn’t yet received its due. Poems and songs celebrating eyes, lips, even chins and noses, abound. Shakespeare, in his Seven Ages of Man, even depicted a lover “with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow.” But nobody writes ballads, woeful or otherwise, to anybody’s ear. Can it […]

Matters of Taste
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   September 27, 2018

No doubt you have heard the wise old saw which pontificates that “There is no accounting for taste.” Yet any number of psychologists and other professional explorers of the human psyche, to say nothing of all the people engaged in advertising, marketing, and other activities involving the purveying of products, are constantly trying to account […]

Insanity Fair
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   September 20, 2018

A crazy old woman of RhydeAte too many green apples, and died.The apples fermentedInside the dementedAnd soon she had cider inside her inside. I learned that poem from my father, who knew many similarly questionable classics. (Another was “It wasn’t the cough that carried him off – But the coffin they carried him off in.”) […]

Heart Murmurs
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   September 13, 2018

One of the most common themes of all songs and poetry is the loss of love. Usually, it is the loser who is speaking or singing. And more often than not, the love he or she thought they had, has been transferred to somebody else. Statistics are lacking, but I would venture to guess that […]

Stolen Moments
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   September 6, 2018

We don’t need the Ten Commandments to tell us that stealing is wrong. We know it inherently, because nobody likes to be a victim of theft. One of the first words most babies learn is “mine!” (and I’m not sure how much later they also learn “yours”). The concept of private property has a long […]

You Wouldn’t Kidney, Would You?
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   August 30, 2018

Growing up in England – as I did for two-thirds of my early life – I was very familiar with “kidney,” as in “steak and kidney pie,” which in that country is almost a staple, and was certainly among my own favorite entrées. But I took no anatomical interest in either the steak or the […]

This is Only a Test
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   August 23, 2018

There are those who believe that “Life is a test” and that, at the end, we all get a grade of H. Everything then depends on whether it’s an H-Plus, for Heaven, or an H-Minus, for Hellswhere. But there are enough hard tests along the way to make life often seem to be a little […]

Waiting
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   August 23, 2018

It has been said (by me, in one of my Pot-Shots epigrams) that “Sometimes it seems all of life is a waiting room.” One of the “Beat” poets of the 1950s wrote a poem which consisted of nothing but the word “wait,” repeated hundreds of times, covering an entire page – except for the very […]

Making Amends
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   August 9, 2018

I have always been in favor of equal rights for women (although I admit that, in my lifetime, it has sometimes been unsettling to see women police, and women doing other work which was hitherto mainly or entirely the preserve of men.) It is sad to think of how many gifted women, in former times, […]

Scope Scam
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   August 2, 2018

There is no statistical proof, but I would hazard a guess that, in most people’s lives, the pleasant surprises are outnumbered by the disappointments. My own life is a case in point. The big happy surprises can be counted on one hand. The disappointments would require all the fingers, and perhaps most of the toes.  […]

Good Cheer
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   July 26, 2018

If you ever see a sundial inscribed with a Latin expression, it will probably say: HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS, which can be translated as “I count only the happy hours.” This is highly appropriate for a sundial, which tells the time only when the sun is shining.  But the idea of always “looking on […]

My Sweet Embarrassable You
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   July 19, 2018

Embarrassment comes in many shapes and sizes – but what we all find particularly interesting are other people’s “most embarrassing moments.” I’m going to tell you mine – but first, some peripheral observations. Such stories usually seem to involve unexpected revelations of things we normally try to keep “private” – particularly if they have to […]

Making the Mohs of It
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   July 12, 2018

Until a fairly recently, there was no Mohs in my life. Now there are two of them. The first Mohs was a gift of Google; the second, of a crossword puzzle. Here’s what happened: My dermatologist, whom I’ll call Dr. O, told me that the hard bump which had developed on the back of my […]

Three Hoovers and Me
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   July 5, 2018

That long-running sitcom All in the Family always began with Archie and Edith singing a sort of pseudo-nostalgic ditty, “Those Were The Days”, which included the line, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.” President Herbert Hoover was indeed emblematic of his time. In his four-year term (1929-33), he had the misfortune […]

On the Movie
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   June 28, 2018

One of the things I’m glad to have learned in high school physics was the explanation of why movies “move.” The fact is that those projected pictures don’t really move at all.  But, if your eye sees a number of still pictures in rapid sequence, and each one is only slightly different from the preceding […]

Yield!
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   June 21, 2018

There are many ways to acknowledge defeat. Besides simply putting your hands in the air, probably the most universally recognized symbol is the white flag – which can also indicate a desire to parlay. You may remember a true episode in the movie Battleground, in which a representative from the Germans comes, under a white […]

Ain’t Nobody Here
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   June 14, 2018

Some of you may know the 1946 hit song, based on the idea of a farmer who, thinking there may be a thief in the hen-house, goes out with his shotgun, and shouts, “Who’s there?” – only to receive this reply – presumably from the culprit: “There ain’t nobody here but us chickens!” Now that […]

Van Cats and Dorothy
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   June 7, 2018

My wife, Dorothy, died peacefully in her sleep on May 24, 2018. She was 86 and had for some time been a victim of Parkinson’s Disease, which progressively robbed her of all normal abilities to function. (Fortunately, she had some truly devoted caregivers.)  We had been together for 51 years, living in Santa Barbara since […]

Another Think Coming
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   May 31, 2018

Probably one of the most famous of all motivational slogans was first thought up in 1911 by Thomas J. Watson, the man who became head of IBM: His brain-wave was the single word: “Think.” But now that we have machines so “smart” that their ability to think is a matter for philosophical debate, we also […]

Heavens on Earth
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   May 24, 2018

One idea that keeps cropping up in literature is the notion that our land – whichever land it happens to be – is at least in some way as holy as those far-off Biblical places we have been taught about since childhood.  Here are two fine examples: First, we have the mystical William Blake, whose […]

Missing the Bus
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   May 17, 2018

On April 4 1940, during an early stage of World War II, which American journalists dubbed “The Phoney War,” because not much actual fighting was going on, prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had led Britain into the war, addressed his Conservative Party with a speech in which he used a common metaphor in a rather […]

Bites In the Night
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   May 10, 2018

I went through much of my life without being aware of this simple fact: One major problem faced by people all over the world is that of getting bitten in the night. And among the chief culprits, besides insects, or even vampires, are ordinary humans. And the humans are ourselves. Biting and grinding our teeth […]

Perils of Kid-Lit
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   May 3, 2018

Here’s a quiz question for you: What one famous piece of literature celebrates (1) a musical feline? (2) an athletic bovine? (3) an amused canine? (4) some amorous tableware? Stumped? Then I’ll have to remind you: Hey diddle diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle,The Cow jumped over the Moon.The little Dog laughed to see such […]

Let There be Peace
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   April 26, 2018

What is peace? Two millennia ago, the Roman historian Tacitus quoted an enemy leader as saying of the Romans, “They make a desert and call it peace.” But total destruction is not the preferred method of peacemaking, and various alternatives continue to be tried – one of which is mediation, whose success depends in part […]

What’s So Funny?
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   April 19, 2018

Maybe you have heard the story of the man who went to see an eminent Viennese psychiatrist complaining that for some reason he felt sad all the time. After some discussion, the doctor said, “Let me suggest, as a first step, that you go to the theater tonight. The great clown Grimaldi is performing here […]

I Hope So
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   April 12, 2018

Here is a question for you: What is the southernmost point of Africa? If you answered “The Cape of Good Hope,” I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. The correct answer is Cape Agulhas, which is 150 km farther south. The “Good Hope” Cape was not even given that name originally. Its first European discoverer, Bartolomeu Dias, […]

Astronomy and Angels
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   April 5, 2018

Do you ever long for the good old days, when the sun went around the Earth, and we were really the center of everything? Science keeps discovering new ways in which we are less and less significant, and the world more and more strange. Not many eras ago, if I were to quip, “They told […]

No Thought for the Morrow
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   March 29, 2018

Sometimes, staying alive seems too high a price to pay for the privilege of not being dead. Nevertheless, people find ways to cope, including comforting mantras such as “This too shall pass.” One ubiquitous expression advises us to “Take one day at a time.” I satirized this earnest injunction with an epigram which became the […]

Singular Symbols
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   March 22, 2018

Here is a little quiz for you: What country is represented by (a) a part of a tree? (b) a whole tree?  The part of a tree is a leaf, and the maple leaf has been the symbol of Canada for centuries, though it did not get onto the national flag until 1965. A key […]

Bad Names
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   March 15, 2018

No doubt you’ve heard of the usher who said, “May I sew you to your sheets?” And you probably know that such slips of the tongue are called Spoonerisms. William Archibald Spooner, the honoree of this eponym, lived much of his long life (1844-1930) at Oxford University, where he was for many years a loved […]

Close Calls
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   March 8, 2018

My mother had a favorite joke on the subject of superstition: “Well, I’m not superstitious,” she‘d say. “But I’ll tell you one thing: I would never sleep thirteen in a bed.” Nevertheless, it’s a fact that for several people to share a bed was once much more common in our culture than it has since […]

Who Scares?
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   March 1, 2018

Despite FDR’s famous dictum, that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” we do have plenty of other things to be afraid of. But what matters is how we deal with them. The ones really worth fearing are those we can’t prevent and can’t adequately insure against.  Crossing a street is a […]

Dreaming Australian
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   February 22, 2018

In 1972 – about half our lifetimes ago – Dorothy and I traveled to Australia, our first of many visits, but the only one by sea. The Australian Aborigines call their distant past the “Dream-Time.” On this journey, I carried my own enduring dream. Since school-days, I’d retained in my mind a map showing the […]

Fair Warning
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   February 15, 2018

I don’t want to alarm you, but this is going to be about alarms, and ways of giving them. Let’s start with our culture’s most famous false alarm: The Boy Who Cried “Wolf!” The moral is clear: If you make false alarms, people may not believe it when you have a real one.  But notice […]

Getting It Wrong
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   February 8, 2018

Maybe you’ve heard about the child who came home from Sunday School reporting he’d been learning a song about a cross-eyed bear named Gladly. The song turned out to be one called “Gladly the Cross I’d Bear.” Now, let me tell you some similar misunderstandings of which I myself have been guilty. One of them […]

Wise Guise
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   February 1, 2018

On December 9, 2013, I celebrated my 80th birthday at a hilltop park overlooking Santa Barbara. Inviting everybody, on a pot-luck basis, I announced, somewhat facetiously, that this would enable me to assume the role of a “Wise Old Man of the Mountain.”  To my surprise, the City took this seriously, to the extent of […]

Some Lines about Some Lines
By Ashleigh Brilliant   |   January 25, 2018

One of the best gifts I ever received was a “Rapidograph” pen, from a friend who knew I was starting to illustrate my epigrams. This pen was extremely useful, because it could draw very fine lines of a single steady width. But, like the many others which I have bought since then, it also proved […]