Thank you for all your questions. If you missed the live broadcast, the action replay can be heard in full here.
UPPERDATE! We're live now, so let's have at it!
UPDATE! We'll be going live in about fifteen minutes, so do get ready to fire off your questions via the comment form below. See you at the top of the hour. And to listen simply click the livestream feed.
Today marks the fourth birthday of The Mark Steyn Club, and, in lieu of gun salutes, I'll be conducting an anniversary edition of our Clubland Q&A, live across the planet but at a special hour: 10am Eastern time in North America - that's 2pm GMT/3pm British Summer Time, and midnight in Sydney, but we hope our Aussie listeners will want to stay up for it. We'll try to pin down the rest of the time zones below, but do, as they say, check local listings.
On today's rundown, I'm happy to take questions on pretty much anything that's on your mind, but, if you've any birthday observations on what's good about the Club and what sucks, feel free to have at it.
Whether or not you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, you can listen to our Clubland Q&A live as it happens wherever you chance to be on this turbulent earth: Club membership is required only to ask a question. We love to hear from brand new members, so if you've joined this birthday week do fire off a question on any topic that appeals. Indeed, if you've been toying with signing up, either for a full year or a see-how-it-goes experimental quarter, there's still time to do so and shoot me a head-scratcher for today's show. But, if you're not interested in joining, no worries, as they say in Oz: We seek no unwilling members - and as always the show is free, so we hope you'll want to tune in.
~This fourth birthday of The Mark Steyn Club is a joyful celebration somewhat muted by the wretched state of the world, which has put a definite crimp in our ability to host live events with guests from many lands accessible to all our members. I'm twenty minutes from the US/Canadian border, but it's like Checkpoint Charlie, except with East Berlin on both sides. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the ever changing and ever more capricious rules on freedom of movement, the third Mark Steyn Cruise will definitely be sailing the Med this autumn with my longtime Rush comrade Mr Snerdley, Conrad Black, Michele Bachmann, Douglas Murray, John O'Sullivan, and many other special guests. If you're kinda sorta semi-curious about coming along, don't leave it too late: accommodations are going fast - and the ship itself will only be at 60 per cent capacity.
~If you've been with us since Day One, thanks for signing on for our fifth year. If you've just stumbled upon us in recent days, we've built up quite an archive:
There are now four dozen of our monthly audio adventures - my serializations of H G Wells, Jack London, Conan Doyle, Baroness Orczy, Kafka, Conrad and many more - conveniently gathered in Netflix-like tile format over at our Tales for Our Time home page.
We've done the same for Keats, Shelley, Browning, Kipling and our other video poems - because, as I always say, video poetry is where the big bucks are. And for Tal and Randy Bachman, Liza Minnelli, Paul Sorvino, Peter Noone and Herman's Hermits, the Klezmer Conservatory Band and other highlights from our live music performances.
Likewise, check out the full selection of our late chum Kathy Shaidle's glorious film features, or our monthly news update from a century ago, The Hundred Years Ago Show.
~Even after a year of lockdown and looting, this website still provides more free content than at any time in our eighteen-year history. That would not be possible without The Mark Steyn Club. So on this fourth anniversary I'm especially grateful to all our first-day Founding Members, beginning with a gentleman from small-town Idaho who signed up shortly after midday Pacific Time on May 6th 2017 and kicked off an avalanche of subscribers. I was stunned by your enthusiasm, and even more surprised as it grew in the ensuing weeks and months. My only regret is that we didn't do this eighteen years ago, and I hope to thank many of you personally on this autumn's cruise. We're thrilled by all the renewals from all over the map - from Centerville to Surbiton, Toronto to Tres Cantos, the Netherlands to New South Wales, almost every corner of the globe. If you've waited a while to join us to see whether we're in it for the long haul, yes, we are. To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, or to sign up a friend, please click here. Thank you for a terrific and spectacular four years. There will be many more anniversaries to come.
~As soon as we go live, members should log-in and submit their queries via our comment form below - and I'll answer them as-it-happens on the audio livestream that should magically appear above (or possibly below - I forget which). And, if you disagree with my response, then let rip in the comments, and I'll endeavor to address a couple of the objections as we go along.
So see you back here live this morning at 7am North American Pacific Time, 10am Eastern Time. That's 11am in the Canadian Maritimes, 11.30am in Newfoundland - and, beyond the Americas, 3pm in London and Dublin; 4pm in Paris and Berlin; 5pm in Istanbul and Jerusalem; 6pm in the Trucial States, as I still think of them; 6.30pm in Tehran, for all you Newfoundlanders who move to Iran for the half-hour time zone; 7.45pm in Kathmandu, for all you Iranians who move to Nepal to check out the quarter-hour time zone; 10pm for night owls in Singapore and Honkers; midnight in Melbourne; and the dead of night for those of you in New Zealand and beyond.
But, whatever hour it is where you are, we do hope you'll be able to join us. To listen to the livestream, simply click the "play" icon on the audio player (in certain browsers, the audio will start auto-playing). And to pose a question simply use the comment form below.
