Q Train

Q Train, by Nigel Van Wieck (1990).

All of You on the Good Earth

50 years ago, on Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 were the first people to leave the Earth’s orbit, and the first to orbit the moon. To what was the largest TV audience in history, they read the opening passages of the book of Genesis. It remains a deeply beautiful moment.

Waiting For The Man

Mother Night

If I’d been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides.

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Introduction to Mother Night (1966)

Pyramid

This Song is an Exercise in Archaeology

Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, 'cos most groups make most of their songs about falling in love or how happy they are to be in love, you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time - it's because these groups think there's something very special about it either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has, you know to burst into song you have to be inspired and nothing inspires quite like love.

These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love - or so they would have you believe, anyway - but these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality. I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.

- Gang of Four, "Anthrax" (1979)

This is an archaeology exercise really, going back in time to figure out what these people were all about in '78 or whenever it was, at the time I was talking about the ubiquitous presence of the love song and why it was that people sang about falling in and out of love and anything else that loosely fell into the love bracket, or as Charles Aznavour may or may not have said, I don't think that what happens in people's romantic lives should be processed in language of mystification.

- Gang of Four, "Anthrax" (2005)

Storm Emma

With spring looking like it's finally arrived in Ireland, I thought it was about time I put up these videos I took of Storm Emma back at the start of March.

Waiting for the Storm

The harbour at Dún Laoghaire, before Storm Emma arrives.

A New Career in a New Town

I Want to Hear Now, the Modern Sound/So I Won't Feel Alone at Night

I got a new stereo for Christmas. The old one is the one I've had since Christmas 1995, and is showing its age: there's no DAB, the CD player doesn't play all CDs, there's no way of attaching an MP3 player, and there's a twin tape deck of the kind no-one uses anymore. But this is the only stereo I've ever owned: I used it to hear most of the music I've ever heard for the first time, and it was with me from secondary school and 6th Form on to Nottingham, London, Liverpool, and then back here. It was, indeed, the radio on to help me from being lonely late at night.

It's wrong, of course, to feel emotions about mass-produced items of consumer electronics, but I don't think I'll be taking the stereo to the tip in the way that I did my old DVD player earlier in the year. It also seems unlikely that I'll ever have any kind of feelings about any other stereos.

Christmas at Song Be

At midnight, celebration was interrupted by the sound of machine gun fire in the distance. The revelers trooped outside to see if they were going to have to fight on Christmas Eve. There were hard words concerning the ancestry of the enemy. Across the wire, across the outpost line, across the valley of no-man’s land were the crests occupied habitually by the “opposition.” From these heights there rose a stream of green, Soviet made “tracer.” The celebrants contemplated this for a minute, and then Suarez suggested a reply. An M-60 machine gun emerged from the house, and while one man fired red tracer into the air, another held the bipod above his head and another fed the gun its belted ammunition. The streams of bullets crossed in the black, star-studded sky. The VC gun fell silent, as did the American. There was a hush as warriors waited for some sign that the hope of common humanity yet lived. The VC fire resumed. Now there were three guns shooting green stars into the blackness. The MI men’s gun chattered merrily, spilling a river of shell casings into the street. Red and green filled the night.

- W. Patrick Lang, The Huron Carol (2007)

An account of a small incident that took place in Vietnam at Christmas 1968. Like most stories of Christmas truces during wars, there's a sad epilogue.

New York Night

New York Night, No. 2 (1921) by George Ault

Keep Off the Grass

Why Cut Me Down?

The Margin For Individual Decision

I really have no idea where Marxist academia gets its reputation for being gloomy from.

From Vicente Lull and Rafael Micó's Archaeology of the Origin of the State (2011).

Tin Legs

The BBC's "Horrible Histories" tells kids about Douglas Bader:

Bad Film Night No.5: Miami Connection (1987)

 Survival: The Ultimate Test...

Dear Nintendo

Dear Nintendo,

I am writing to apply for the position of game designer with your company. We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than any game before them. Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend and that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety. Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she's "damaged goods", a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom "do you still love me?" you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower and your older sister still has casual sex that she confides might bring back a feeling she's certain she didn't imagine. Where the plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says "I hate to fly".

Yours,

Joey Comeau 

- Joey Comeau, Overqualified (2009)

Dawn On The Avenue De Boavista

It's dawn now in Porto, and I'm the only one still awake. I first turned the data back on on my mobile phone just after 22:00 last night. I did it in a "Give it to me straight, doctor" mood, and found some positive news. It's just been announced that there's a hung parliament.

I've no idea what's about to happen, or whether the people I've given my conditional support to over the last two years will gravely let me down or lead to disaster.

What interests me, though, is how wrong all the Smart Boys who went to a grammar school, or an expensive private school , and maybe then Oxbridge were. After all, those educations made their ideas intrinsically More Serious than those of someone who went to the state school down the road, and less elite univesities. That's the natural order of things.

Don't expect to see too much discussion of that over the next few days, though.

Beagle World Record Attempt

About a month ago I went with a friend - and her Beagle - to the Beagle World Record Attempt at Capesthorne Hall in Cheshire. Here are some of my photos and videos.

Mr. Bingley making friends.

Citizen Journalist Beagle is hungry for the truth.



Hurley-Burley in the off-lead paddock.



Waiting for the world record attempt to get underway.



On the walk.