Bring Me My Chariot of Fire

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Seven Angels on a Bicycle,
Carrie Rodriguez, with Chip Taylor.

Go get what you want my love
Go get what you need my love
I am with you
I am with you
Go get what you want my love
Go get what you need my love
I am with you
I am with you
This will not turn me away
This will not turn me away
I am with you
I am with you
Go get what you want my love
Go get what you need my love
I am with you

Brooklyn Bridge on a bicycle
Brooklyn Bridge on a bicycle
Don’t he look good
Don’t he look good
Follow him right into town
Follow him right into town
Don’t this feel good
Don’t he look good

Taking pictures on a subway
Enchiladas on a Sunday
Lets get drunk
We’ll all play
Your fancy guitar
Don’t this feel good
Don’t he look good

Seven angels on a bicycle
Seven angels on a bicycle
I am with you
I am with you
Seven angels on a bicycle
Seven angels on a bicycle
I am with you
I am with you

Go get what you want my love
Go get what you need my love
I am with you
I am with you

Go get what you want my love
Go get what you need my love

I am with you

Deep Cleansing. Ed Reiss

Found in the hospital, -a poem.

The Horses - Edwin Muir

I remember reading this poem many years ago. -I grew up in the shadow of the cold war.
I remember the great V-Bombers, Vulcans thundering down the valley, practising, always practising that low level flight, infiltration under the radar, a suicide mission to drop their bombs on Russian landscapes, where at the same time, Russian crews were practising the same thing.
Five-minute-warning.
The Distant Early Warning Line. Global war was real. Expected, even.
Nobody knew what the aftermath would be. Who might survive. What sort of life might there be.
I read science fiction.
Then at college, I read Muir.
This poem, which says so much.

A few days ago, I read a poem called 'Warpath', which I liked, on a blog called Scribblings & Sketches.
Do go over there, and read, if you like poetry.
After reading, I wondered for some days what old memory that poem was tugging at.
Here it is,

The Horses, By Edwin Muir.

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Edwin Muir

Tankchair:- An Engineer's token of Love.

Awesome! Tankchair
Built by a very talented man, after his wife was injured in an accident, he sought to make a chair that would enable her to enjoy the woods, hiking, the places she had loved when she was able to walk. It can cope with mud, streams, snow, gravel, soft ground, all those things that are impossible for an ordinary wheelchair.
It can even climb stairs!
(though I bet that's scary for the pilot)

Their website says "For every 10 chairs sold, TankChair is going to donate one to a fire department in a rural area so that they can give it away to someone who would not normally be able to afford one. The first is going to go to Parker Fire Department in Arizona. This is our hometown and they were the ones who rescued my wife, my kids, and myself when we got in the accident that put her in the chair."

When I read their website I was so impressed at how he has striven to give his wife back the freedom of the outdoors.
If ever I need a wheelchair, I'll beg for one of these.

I Was driving to Work When......

Warning:-Technobabble and boys toys follow.

I was driving to work, a bit mentally vacant and stuck in slow traffic when I spotted a man in a yellow jacket fiddling with a radio control box. How strange, thought I. A group of business suited onlookers watched.
Up the embankment slope above the road a bizarre yellow thing was pirouetting, weaving between trees.... and cutting the deep grass. WOW! I WANT ONE! was the first thought..... Then an angry beep from behind forced me to notice the hundred yards of clear road ahead... That was a couple of years ago, The city bought, I think, four of these supertoys, to cut steep bankings by roads and in parkland. Ride-on mowing machines can be very hazardous on steep slopes, and fatalities are not unknown. Hand held brushcutters, (strimmers, weed whackers) are very labour intensive, and again, operator injuries are common.
The machine in question is a Ransomes Spider, an awesome machine, powered by a seventeen horse-power kawasaki engine, four wheel drive, four wheel steer..... Hydrostatic drive.
As far as I can tell it was designed by a Czech inventor, Mr Lubomir Dvorak, who founded a company to build them, and is the holder of the patents.
However, they're being made by Ransomes in England, under licence I assume.
What makes me think of this just now? Well I was sent a link to Dave Mows Grass, his most recent post, in which he is running short of blog materials, so loads up his pick-up with what might be well rotted horse-sh*t, and promptly gets it bogged on a perfectly innocent flat patch of grass.

A-ha, I thought... Dave NEEDS a Spider...

(The Spider would not do the pick up's job, I know, but a man with a stuck truck needs something else to do.)



Elsewhere, Warwick University has been experimenting with robotic self control of these, and the use of artificial intelligence to allow a group, or 'swarm' of spider-bots to co-operate.
Not slow to see that they need not be confined to mowing, another team, in Denmark, calling its Spider-based device 'Hortibot' has worked on building an autonomous machine to carry out tilling, seed planting, spraying, and much more.



At the moment they seem fearsomely expensive. Like about the same price as a BMW 1Series,
And I only have a tiny patch of flat grass.

Somewhat cheaper, and not quite as fun-looking is the Goat Hybrid Mower.


Now I look, I see all manner of geeks designing radio controlled lawnmowers... Anyway.... The growing season is over. I'll forget it all until next year....

A Picture of Me...

Being a Knight of the Order of the Besmirched Countenance, one has to maintain certain standards....

Harry's Troublesome Buzz.