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.
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.
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.’
Them Derry wans obviously have more fun than I gave them credit for!
A GROUP of women who were spotted carrying a six foot inflatable penis along the Strand Road in Derry have been accused of "behaving like harlots" by a local pastor.
Pastor Stan Cullen of the Baptist Church, who is also a taxi driver, said he was appalled when he saw the women carrying the item after teatime on Saturday evening when children were standing outside the cinema.
And he said his wife and kids were left stunned by a separate incident when they saw a woman on a party vehicle flash her bare breasts at a passing male in Clooney Terrace on Friday night.
Giant inflatable dicks on the West Bank, female flashers on the Waterside. Whoda thunk it? Obviously, it's a sign of the end times. Read more in the Derry Journal.
Robert Boyd, aka Buho the Elf has got two years for robbery at Belfast Crown Court. Enthusiastic readers of Sammy Morse will remember that Boyd was arrested for stealing lingerie and suspender belts at oh-so-feminine-not-a-sex-shop-honestly Orchid on Belfast's Lisburn Road. Boyd's defence was that he got confused between real life and his character in theShadowrun cyber-fantasy role playing game, Buho the Elf.
Two years seems a bit stiff for a first offence, even if a knife was involved, as the guy obviously has 'issues'. I suspect the beak noted the public notoriety of the case, especially among roleplayers and sundry geeks, and decided to make himself look a bit hard.
I don't envy this bloke when he gets to Maghaberry. He will be the laughing stock of the jail.
Has anyone actually been sacked over this corruption? For corruption is what it is. And if not, why not?
I mean, at one level I really don't care what C-list TV shows do; but at another it's an example of literally getting away with theft that erodes, in a very public way, some of society's most important values.
And they say Germans have no sense of humour... a bunch of Germans make a bizarre spoof rap video about... er... cooking vegetable stew. Absolute genius! And, judging from my housemate's reaction, you don't need to speak German to enjoy it either.
Sir Ian Richardson has died at the age of 72. Richardson, perhaps best known for his spellbinding role as evil Chief Whip turned Prime Minister Francis Urquhardt in the House of Cards trilogy was, as far as anyone knew, in good health and about to start recording for a new series of Midsomer Murders. He was a wonderful actor and extremely dishy in his own way.
I had the chance to see him on stage when he appeared in a play called The Creeper last year in London, never quite got around to it, and now I never shall. Which gives me a second reason to be sad about the matter.
"You might very well say that Matty. I couldn't possibly comment.
Now, admittedly the survey covered a massive sample of 45 notes, so if I was in my usual form I would be highlighting this as an example of really dodgy statistics. But this is just too funny to nitpick.
The geniuses who carried out the study at Dublin City University also made the shocking discovery that:
The study also found that higher value banknotes, such as 20 and 50 euros, were more likely to contain greater traces of the drug.
No shit sherlocks. I could have told you that without spending the time and money doing a chemical analysis of the things.
Restoration Village the property pr0n programme you love to hate is coming to Northern Ireland.
Maybe a more appropriate programme given the number of racist attacks in South Belfast might be Restoration: The Village.
We move three immigrant families into recently renovated houses off the Donegall Road. The Jaruselskis from Poland move into Eureka Drive, the Nkosis from Zimbabwe move into Kitchener Street and the Shuklas from the Punjab move into Coolfin Street. Who will be the last to get burned out by the UDA? (And it should all fit into a forty minute slot before the ten o’clock news.)
Even in America, you don't quite believe things like this can really happen... is your family traumatised because Mommy or Daddy is off fighting Mr. Bush's war in Afghanistan? Well, replace them with a nice cardboard cutout 'Flat Daddy'.
The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.
``I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket," said Kay Judkins of Caribou, whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. ``The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I've tricked several people by that. They think he's home again."
Also in HMV last night, I picked up John Thaw’s portrayal of Bomber Harris recorded for the BBC in, I was astonished to find, 1989. I remember watching it first time round, and with hindsight, I could have been twelve at the time but am amazed it was so long ago. Although that might explain why I remembered so little about it.
The film is essentially sympathetic to Harris, presenting him as devoted to his own men and simply doing the dirty work that he felt was necessary to win the war against Germany. It doesn’t gloss over the fact that it involved butchering a couple of thousand people but it doesn’t exactly dwell on the matter either. The Bomber Command Parson who tackled Harris directly about the ethics of area bombardment and who later invited Sir Stafford Cripps to lecture the men on how they shouldn’t silence their consciences even while, say, 20,000 feet over Berlin, comes across as cold, sanctimonious and generally unsympathetic. The film also makes its view clear that Harris was made a scapegoat for others who approved entirely of his strategy and then dumped him, friendless and honourless, when the war was over.
Many regard this as John Thaw’s tour de force, and I’m inclined to agree. Thaw acts Harris wonderfully, with some wonderful support (e.g. John Nettleton as Harry Weldon). Only Robert Hardy’s Churchill feels weak, and that may be simply the price of playing too familiar a figure.
Try as it might, however, this film can’t entirely absolve Harris from his responsibility for the horrors of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. Harris was an enthusiast for aerial bombardment from an early stage, having been an experiementer with it in the early 1920s in Iraq and India (no-one worried too much about a few ‘natives’ getting the chop, of course). When Harris became frustrated with the limitations of targeted bombing, he turned to the idea, concocted all those years before, that blowing the smithereens out of cities was the way to shorten the war. It didn’t shorten the war – German industrial production in 1945 was as great as it was in 1938 – and it’s difficult to make the case that it had a militarily significant effect on German morale, either.
As ThEconomist notes in an interesting article this week (subs required), Harris was the first, but hardly the last, in a line of fantasists who deluded themselves that air power made the infantry soldier obsolete. In the past few years, we’ve seen two classic examples of that delusion – the Anglo-American débâcle in Iraq, and more recently Israel’s war gone wrong against Hezbollah in South Labanon. Luckily for the human race, the Allies did have massive ground forces to hand in 1944 and ’45.
Air power is great for blowing things up, but it doesn’t actually do much if you’re trying to create something.
I'm still amazed at what the chaplain got away with though. This is a sign either of the liberality of Britain in the 1940s or the exalted position the Church of England used to have in English society. Either way, it's hard to imagine anything vaguely like it happening today.
(Pointless aside: the review of the Harris DVD on the amazon.co.uk page linked to above is clearly written about a completely different production.)
D'ya wanna know the creeda Jacques Derrida? Dere ain't no reada Dere ain't no wreida Eida
I was in HMV last night and found there was a documentary about Derrida on DVD for sale. Imagine paying money to watch a documentary about that old pseud.
OK, yes I did consider it, but no, I didn't buy it.
This just has to be the basis for a manga film! How about this:
Scientists at Sapporo Technical University create a micro-universe in which, unbeknownst to them, magical powers actually work and evolution is speeded up to zillions of times its rate on Earth. Within a few months they surpass human technology levels and become aware of us, and are insanely jealous of the fact that they are our 'children'.
Coincidentally, Taka Yoshimatsu, a troubled hikikomori teen from Fukuoka begins to have disturbing dreams of demonic possession, at the same time as his latent psychic powers, the result of secret CIA experiments on Japanese children in the last years of the Cold War, wake up. Taka has an argument with his best friend in school and, inadvertenly, kills him with a psychic blast. Taka withdraws from the world even more and considers taking his own life.
However, energy beings, which most humans perceive as demons, cross the threshold from the pocket universe into ours and rampage across Japan. In an agony of rage/ecstacy, Taka discovers the truth about his powers and the state of the universe and realises that only he can save the human race from total destruction. Leaping on the bullet train to Tokyo, Taka confronts the leader of the evil techno demons inside the Budokan, but confronted by the raw power of the demon/aliens, he loses his ID and joins them in rampaging over Earth in an orgy of destruction.
Pretty cool, eh? I think it would be a good opera plot, as well as a manga film plot. Maybe I could get the real Takashi Yoshimatsu to write the score?
The BBC is running a poll on the UK's favourite unsung landmarks, and of the eight entries, Belfast's Samson and Goliath ship cranes are languishing in fifth place.
I come out of the house this morning and dump some rubbish in the recycle bins at the bottom of our flats, pull off on to the road, drop down into a slightly lower gear and - ouch - my chain pops off (again).
This one is a real doozer though - the chain has somehow managed to get loops in it and come right off the back sprocket. As I'm trying to work out how the bejasus I manage to fix this, some bloke in a Pimlico Plumbers sweatshirt comes up to me and asks am I alright?
He goes and gets a pair of gloves from his van, which he's been having his breakfast in about 10 metres away, and starts to fix the chain on for me, while his mate comes along with a lemony sort of cloth for me to wash my hands on. It takes about 20 seconds for him to fix the bike.
Who says Londoners are all rude and civility is dead? And as recompense, here's some free advertising for Pimlico Plumbers. Pimlico Plumbers are the biggest and best plumbing firm in Central London, and I can only recommend all Londoners to use Pimlico Plumbers for all your plumbing needs.
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