Stories by Tony Deyal

I heard there was a survey by the International Luxury Hotels Association, and one of the questions was, "If you could choose any hotel in the world for an overnight stay, which one would you select?" The almost unanimous choice of most of the male...

Mark Twain is reputedly the first author to use the typewriter. He typed a manuscript for his publisher, who wrote back saying that Twain had left out the punctuation. Twain sent back a sheet filled with periods, commas, semicolons, etc. with the...

After the departure of Quasimodo for Disneyworld to star in the hit movie 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', the bells of the famous cathedral in France were silent and the bishop in charge was very depressed. The silence was deafening and the...

On the first day, God created the sun. In response, the Devil created sunburn. On the second day, God created sex. In response, the Devil created marriage. On the third day, God created an economist. This was a tough one for the Devil, but, in the...

The term 'hard cheese' is a 19th-century British expression that means 'tough luck'. It is not used as much these days since the density, firmness, even resilience of the coagulated, compressed and most times ripened curds of milk...

If you use the terms 'reverse back', 'overexaggerate', 'dilapidated ruins', 'new innovation' and even 'foolish virgins', you need to know these are tautologies, essentially expressing something by repeating or saying it in a different way. This is...

New governments come into town, their guns blazing, not literally like the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday in the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, but more like the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had already won the war but...

When Calypso King of the World, The Mighty Sparrow, introduced Caribbean people to the female character, Melda, in his 1966 song, 'Obeah Wedding', she was no stranger at all. In fact, wherever in the region we lived, we knew many 'Meldas' and, some...

The sign in English in the window of a Mexican restaurant said, 'Don't stand there and be hungry. Come on in and get fed up.' On the other hand, there is a story about a US company that decided to market its 'no-leak' pens in Mexico.The actual...

When I was a little boy growing up in Trinidad, the big-time lawyers were known as 'barristers' and were household names. Their legal exploits were legendary. They were the superstars of the daily newspapers, The Guardian and The Evening News, which...

You've heard about 'good cop, bad cop'. It is when two police officers work on you to get a confession or at least an admission of guilt or accusation of someone else. One is the good cop who offers you the coffee and cigarette and who is the exact...