Samuel F B Morse has a posse

U-CUNF: Whatever You're On, Can I Have Some

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 02:05:18 GMT

Over on the Conservatives NI, Tory and UUP activists are debating what the U-CUNF shotgun electoral marriage means for their electoral progress. Naturally, those posting there are quite enthusiastic, but none quite matches young Johnny Andrews for sheer, carried-away, madness:

Lets aim big and it may be a few years away but it is not inconceivable that the new force may one day stand for election in the other 3 counties of Ulster which the Ulster Unionist Council for pragmatic reasons abandoned in 1921.

Hey, Johnny, why stop there? Why not start standing candidates in the 23 counties you abandoned in 1905? It sure beats dealing with reality, reality being that the UUP in Tory drag is still the UUP.

Wednesday is another poetry day...

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:16:30 GMT

the little bird
that whistled shrill
from the nib of
its yellow bill:

a note let go
o’er Belfast Lough -
a blackbird from
a yellow whin

A free translation from the 9th Century Irish by Ciarán Carson

Thursday is poetry day...

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:04:08 GMT

Ireland With Emily by Sir John Betjeman

Bells are booming down the bohreens,
White the mist along the grass,
Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens
Move between the fields to Mass.
Twisted trees of small green apple
Guard the decent whitewashed chapel,
Gilded gates and doorway grained,
Pointed windows richly stained
With many-coloured Munich glass.

See the black-shawled congregations
On the broidered vestment gaze
Murmer past the painted stations
As Thy Sacred Heart displays
Lush Kildare of scented meadows,
Roscommon, thin in ash-tree shadows,
And Westmeath the lake-reflected,
Spreading Leix the hill-protected,
Kneeling all in silver haze?

In yews and woodbine, walls and guelder,
Nettle-deep the faithful rest,
Winding leagues of flowering elder,
Sycamore with ivy dressed,
Ruins in demesnes deserted,
Bog-surrounded bramble-skirted -
Townlands rich or townlands mean as
These, oh, counties of them screen us
In the Kingdom of the West.

Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe's stone age race.

Has it held, the warm June weather?
Draining shallow sea-pools dry,
When we bicycled together
Down the bohreens fuchsia-high.
Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,
A ruined abbey, chancel only,
Lichen-crusted, time-befriended,
Soared the arches, splayed and splendid,
Romanesque against the sky.

There in pinnacled protection,
One extinguished family waits
A Church of Ireland resurrection
By the broken, rusty gates.
Sheepswool, straw and droppings cover,
Graves of spinster, rake and lover,
Whose fantastic mausoleum,
Sings its own seablown Te Deum,
In and out the slipping slates.

Great Presidential Elections of Yore - Dan Quayle and the potatoe (sic)

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:50:28 GMT

Remember Dan Quayle's embarrassing 1988 incident in a New Jersey High School where he couldn't spell potato correctly? Ever wonder what happened to the kid who could?

"I raised my hand, he picked me, I went to the board," Mr. Figueroa recalled of the vice president's visit. Young Mr. Figueroa spelled "potato" correctly on the blackboard, only to have Vice President Quayle, holding a flash card with the word spelled incorrectly, encourage him to add an "e" at the end.

With that, Mr. Quayle, Mayor Douglas Palmer of Trenton and the three or four other adults in the room began clapping. Mr. Figueroa returned to his seat, embarrassed and confused.

"I kept thinking, 'How the hell did I spell potato wrong?'" he said.

FDR asks Dewey to suspend campaign...

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:47:47 GMT

John McCain suspends campaign to 'work on the economy', asks Obama to do likewise...

The most desperate election stunt since William Hague's baseball camp this one. I think I now agree with Arnold Schwarzenegger that most American politicians are 'girlie men' these days. After all, during the 1944 election campaign, FDR had tiny little things like the Battle of Normandy, Invasion of Guam and the largest naval battle in history to worry about, but didn't feel the need to ask Thomas Dewey to suspend his campaign.

Let's see a party in government screws up the economy, and in the middle of an election campaign they're likely to lose, their lead candidate asks the opposition to stop campaigning to get them out... er, and this is the bloke who wants to teach the Iraqis about democracy?

Why the Tories are the still the party of entrenched class prejudice

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:06:18 GMT

Things have come to a pretty pass when Harriet Harman, so afraid of the poor that she needs to wear a stab vest when walking around her own constituency, is seen as a class warrior.

Harman was pointing out to the TUC the obvious fact that while race and gender disparities are seen as serious problems, the focus of real public and voluntary efforts, the degree to which class determines life outcomes is significant and growing. Social mobility is getting worse. Too often, family and geography are destiny. And while Tory toffs like Teresa May might claim that focusing equality efforts on class and background is 'outdated and distracts from the real issues'. But even that well known Marxist broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, is happy to say that "working-class children in Britain are less likely to climb the social ladder than in any other developed nation".

Maybe because we dress more alike and speak more alike than ever before, people like Teresa May can kid themselves that class distinction is dead. But family equals destiny far more in our supposedly gleichgestalten new milennium than it did in the supposedly class-ridden 1950s. White working-class boys are the poorest performers in English schools and are in danger of being completely left behind in an economy where skills and knowledge are vital.

Tories like May just don't get it because, try as they might, they have no real experience of poverty or exclusion and more or less believe that poverty and poor education are a product of feckless loungers and too much socialism. They also think that working-class means the well-heeled self-employed building contractor who puts in their extension, because he swears a lot and reads The Sun.

At the end of the day, that's why economically dry as I may be, I could never vote Tory. The Tories are in favour of entrenched privellege, despite all the image makeovers; and although in theory they are in favour as anyone else of kids from poor backgrounds (like me 20 years ago) having equality of opportunity, in practice they shy away from anything that might make that equality of opportunity real.

And if there's a distinctively Tory way of overcoming the impact of social background on outcome, I'm all ears. But first, you're going to have to convince me that Tories even believe this is a problem; people like Teresa May don't seem to get it at all.

All Hail the Coquille Indian Tribe

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:11:35 GMT

All hail the Coquille Indian Tribe of Oregon, the only sovereign Native American national to recognise same-sex marriage!

What's on your iPod?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:52:23 GMT

Since March this year:

10 most played pop songs

Leningrad - WWW
The Cure – The Drowning Man
Goldfrapp – Lovely Head
The Doors – Break on Through
Kraftwerk – The Model
Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam
Die Puhdys – Sturmvogel
Tokyo Police Club – Citizens of Tomorrow
Dead Kennedys – California Über Alles
Vanessa Paradis – Joe Le Taxi

10 most played classical pieces:

John Adams – The Chairman Dances
John Adams – Shaker Loops
John Adams – Nixon in China – “Flesh Rebels” Chorus from Act 2
Sibelius – Symphony No. 5
Bartok – Allegro from Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
John Adams – Nixon in China – “Cheers” Chorus from Act 1
Wagner – Siegfried’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung
Rautavaara – Melankolia from Cantus Arcticus
Richard Strauss – Four Last Songs “Im Abendrot”
Respighi – The Pines of Rome

Sign of the times: Ferry slowing down to save fuel

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:28:15 GMT

Ferry operator Stena Line has announced it is slowing down its high speed ferry between Belfast and Stranraer route (sic) to save money on fuel.

[...]

The crossing will now take 14 minutes longer than its previous 105 minutes.

Thursday is Bartók Day

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:42:50 GMT

Young Italian conductor Carlo Tenan conducts a rip roaring second movement of Bela Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Bartók over-prescribed this score so it can be hard for conductors to stamp their own personality on it. I think Tenan manages to admirably.

Thank you youtube, and thank you Carlo!

The fight against Counterknowledge!

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:23:00 GMT

Now, this is the sort of Facebook group I can really dig!

Are you sick of conspiracy theories and Da Vinci Code-style "history" that are based on twisted evidence? Does it annoy you that a pseudoscience like homeopathy can be taught at degree level in an established university? Are you scared by the spread of anti-Semitic Holocaust denial through the Middle East? Do you want to defend school students against the teaching of bogus "Creation science"?

Then this group is for you. It's not a conservative or liberal group. It's not for or against religion. It's against the systematic misrepresentation of reality that is spreading across the internet and old media like a virus.

It's time to send out a clear message to fundamentalist Christians, postmodern pseuds who think science is a "narrative", Islamic conspiracy theorists, 9/11 fruitcakes, New Age quacks, greedy publishers: if you can't support your theories with solid data, then stop bothering us with your bullshit.

Fuck yeah!

Let's all laugh at John Terry!

Thu, 29 May 2008 16:15:44 GMT

From Spiked!:

"Frank Lampard described John Terry as ‘Mr Chelsea’. I’d go further. To me he is Mr England. He embodies the soul of English football. Not the bulldog spirit, the three lions or any of that nonsense. I mean the missed penalty and the tears. It’s so quintessentially English."

More available here.

Dmitri Shostakovich ate my pet hamster

Tue, 27 May 2008 10:02:04 GMT

A very young Sayaka Shoji plays the explosive finale of Dmitri Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto live in Tokyo with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in 2002.

Look for the beaming smile at the end!

Follow the Mars Phoenix fun!

Mon, 26 May 2008 10:12:05 GMT

Mars Phoenix official news site is worth keeping an eye on for more info on the fun at Mars' North pole.

Now that's what I call music! Sunday night edition

Mon, 26 May 2008 01:04:09 GMT

The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain under Andrew Davis play the 5th movement *(the famous one) of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony. Complete with whooping ondes Martenot!

Lefty toffs are martyrs to tradition?

Thu, 22 May 2008 11:28:49 GMT

From The Dutchess vs 'white trash' Britain in spiked:

The Duchess in Hull is one big advert to show how jolly nice Fergie is. So it’s not surprising that it avoids asking one very obvious question: why does she have an apartment in New York and staff while the Sargersons - who seem like thoroughly decent people in a rut - have to feed themselves on 80 quid a week?

[...]

Poor people being patronised by the upper classes is nothing new, of course. In The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, George Orwell recounts the anger of one communist activist: ‘In London, he said, parties of Society dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping lessons to the wives of the unemployed. He gave this as an instance of the mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money.’

Quote of the Day: Property and Common Sense

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:15:34 GMT

From the Property Pin forums on the nasty hangover after the long property party:

Sometimes I wonder if someone threw all of Irelands common sense into the back of a Hi-Ace and headed off to Italy to the World Cup in 1990, and all the common sense got stolen somewhere outside Genoa.

Archbisop Peter Jensen is an eejit - official

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:45:15 GMT

An Australian satirical "Colbert Report"-style programme doorsteps Peter Jensen on why it makes sense to keep obeying the bits of Leviticus which are anti-gay, but not the bits which are anti-dwarf, cheeky teenager or indeed speccy people like Jensen himsef.

He doesn't answer the question very well.

Creepy Olympics...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:17:11 GMT

Brilliant post from the Adam Smith Institute blog on why there's always something of the Leni Riefenstahl propaganda film about the Olympics...

Lack of immigration leads to rotting fruit harvest

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:55:24 GMT

Edinbugh soft-fruit farmer John Sinclair is worried. "I could have tons upon tons of rotten fruit lying unpicked", the BBC reports him saying.

Why? Changes in immigration rules, brought in at the behest of hysterical newspaper editors and panicky culture-warriors, have banned non-EU nationals from taking part in Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme, meaning that the Ukrainians who have provided the backbone of seasonal agricultural work in Scotland are no longer legally entitled to enter the UK to take up these jobs. The BBC says:

Across Scotland fruit farmers are reporting a worrying low-level of interest from Eastern European migrant workers, the backbone of the Scottish fruit picking industry.

And the Romanians and Bulgarians who are eligible to take part in the scheme largely aren't interested; better paid and easier work like bar work is readily available. Fruit-picking is is so badly paid that the only people interested in it are people who can repatriate their earnings to a low-wage economy and live most of the year there. And the pounds weakness against the Euro means that equation stacks up only for those living in non-Eurozone countries and, more importantly, countries with non-Euro pegged currencies.

So, it looks like those evil immigrants are stealing all our jobs again... Remember that when the price of your jar of raspberry jam goes through the roof.

Surreal live action Ms. Pacman hits New York

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:06:43 GMT

Although they've missed out the orange ghost (who was the woman, I thought), this is an A-cool video.

Things you find on the internet: Ian Fleming and Aleister Crowley

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:38:06 GMT

According to this website:

During the interrogation Rudolf Hess spoke in strange ramblings which some viewed as occult. Ian Fleming, who was involved with those interrogations, decided that help was needed. But who could he get who might understand these occult ramblings? Fleming thought about it and then suggested to his boss, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, "that Crowley should be allowed to interview Hess about the role of the occult in Nazism." Fleming thought Crowley would be able to obtain further details on the influence of astrology with the Nazi leaders. It seemed like a good idea at the time. However it was his friend, Maxwell Knight, who spoke strongly against Crowley's involvement with Hess. It is said that Knight had no intention of allowing Crowley near Rudolf Hess, even though some historians have indicated that Crowley actually was a MI6 agent who spied on the Nazis and Communists in pre-war Berlin for the British government.

[...]

"For many years he had been fascinated by the legend of wickedness which had attached itself to the name of Aleister Crowley, necromancer, black magician and the Great Beast 666. This immensely ugly old diabolist and self-advertiser had thrown himself into certain more unsavory areas of the occult with a gusto that must have appealed to Fleming, and when the interrogators from British Intelligence began trying to make sense of the neurotic and highly superstitious Hess he got the idea that Crowley might be able to help and tracked him down to a place near Torquay, where he was living harmlessly on his own and writing patriotic poetry to encourage the war effort. He seems to have had no difficulty in persuading the old gentleman to put his gifts at the disposal of the nation."

Aleister Crowley wrote a brief letter to Ian Fleming, now the Director of Naval Intelligence, offering his help.

Sir:
If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology
and Magick, my services might be of use to the Department in
case he should not be willing to do what you wish. I have the
honour to be, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
Aleister Crowley

With the letter Crowley included a copy of his latest patriotic poem entitled "England Stand Fast". To quote further from Fleming's biography, "It is a pity that this had to be one of Fleming's bright ideas which never came off: understandably, there was hilarity in the department at the idea of the Great Beast 666 doing his bit for Britain." So in the end "Fleming's suggestion was vetoed, and Crowley and Hess never did meet, to the chagrin of the unorthodox historian."

Kohl-Brandt catfight!

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:40:03 GMT

For those who speak German, a legendary catfight between Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt, I would guess from the middle 1980s.

IRTS 80m contest results

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:26:11 GMT

Record book rewritten!

Objective achieved!

The title comes north!

When do they ban The Simpsons in Derry?

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:03:59 GMT

In order to bring about the great Socialist future, Venezuelan President and leader of the Bolivarian revolution, Hugo Chavez, has banned The Simpsons from daytime TV. Apparently, the programme about the family of yellow graven images from Springfield contains “messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents”. Ironically, it has been replaced by Baywatch which is obviously much more suitable for the whole family, especially pre-teen boys.

Now, we in the Northern Ireland political class are deeply concerned at the tendency of our youth to indulge in wanton violence in the streets, which seems to be a particular problem in Derry, especially when assisted by child-unfriendly technology like the internet. While the left and right each have their pet theories for the outbreak of child indiscipline in the Maiden City, perhaps it has nothing to do with the breakdown of the family or the legacy of Thatcherism, but instead is a result of The Simpsons' undoubted popularity with Derry Wans.

Which is convenient, because Derry already has a local representative in Martina Anderson MLA who has strong ties with the Bolivarian Revolution. Martina has already told us that Venezuela has "the kinds of policies which advance equality and economic and social justice ... which we could all support". Indeed, she tells us that, "The policies of the Venezuelan Government seem primarily to be one of equality, improving people’s lives through social changes, ensuring the right to health, education and to live free of outside interference" (although that presumably doesn't extend to interference in one's choice of TV programme). So, I'm waiting for Martina to propose that the The Simpsons be banned in Derry and replaced by non-riot inducing programming like Baywatch. Although, speaking personally, I might find the sight of David Hasselhof's naked hairy chest too overwhelming and start a disturbance on the street.