I am the grit in the gears, the missing bolt, I am the poker of sticks into spokes. I like to know how things work, but sometimes when I take them apart and rebuild them, I have a few pieces left over. I am a man, so I tend to leave reading the instructions until after it goes wrong. And like all men I have a comprehensive mental map of the world and never need to ask directions. I never get lost, only sometimes I'm late, or end up in the wrong place entirely. It's what we do.
Thursday, 29 March 2007
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
Sunday, 25 March 2007
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
Monday, 19 March 2007
Another Fishy Poem
Fragments of 'Pike' by Ted Hughes.
To be precise, the final four verses of eleven.
To me, the first seven verses are in fact a separate, and inferior poem.
If you want to read it, go elsewhere. Me? I'm only posting the final four..
Pike
vs 7-11
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them.
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England.It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what eye might move,
the still splashes on the dark pond
Owls humbling the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
To be precise, the final four verses of eleven.
To me, the first seven verses are in fact a separate, and inferior poem.
If you want to read it, go elsewhere. Me? I'm only posting the final four..
Pike
vs 7-11
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them.
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England.It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what eye might move,
the still splashes on the dark pond
Owls humbling the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
Sunday, 18 March 2007
Oh no! the record industry, that bastion of.........
The recording industry, that bastion of good taste, honesty, and fair distribution of costs and profits thinks file sharing is a crime!
Well, we saw it with the book industry too.
Once, nobody outside a monastery had the skills to make a book. Then along came that damned Gutenberg, inventing printing presses, and any fool could duplicate books.
Even more worrying. Peasants eventually learned to read and write, putting literally dozens of scribes out of work.
What really worries me though, is libraries, and the growing trend of book owners to lend books to others to read, thus depriving the publishing industry of profits and throwing the families of jobless monks into the street.
A further worry to us is the open availability of pencils and pens. Using these, it is possible for criminals to copy whole sentences, and, with that other item, whose posession we'd like to see controlled, or restricted, paper, these people can pin up illegally copied words, sentences, even whole Paragraphs in public places for all to see.
Furthermore, in a recent visit to an academic establishment I was horrified to find students being encouraged to learn and memorise, for instance, whole poems- even formulae, and songs. I saw plays performed where actors and actresses had memorised the lines, not a single one carrying an authorised text.
I tell you, unless the perpetrators are given punitive fines and prison sentences, the book publishing industry is doomed.
Well, we saw it with the book industry too.
Once, nobody outside a monastery had the skills to make a book. Then along came that damned Gutenberg, inventing printing presses, and any fool could duplicate books.
Even more worrying. Peasants eventually learned to read and write, putting literally dozens of scribes out of work.
What really worries me though, is libraries, and the growing trend of book owners to lend books to others to read, thus depriving the publishing industry of profits and throwing the families of jobless monks into the street.
A further worry to us is the open availability of pencils and pens. Using these, it is possible for criminals to copy whole sentences, and, with that other item, whose posession we'd like to see controlled, or restricted, paper, these people can pin up illegally copied words, sentences, even whole Paragraphs in public places for all to see.
Furthermore, in a recent visit to an academic establishment I was horrified to find students being encouraged to learn and memorise, for instance, whole poems- even formulae, and songs. I saw plays performed where actors and actresses had memorised the lines, not a single one carrying an authorised text.
I tell you, unless the perpetrators are given punitive fines and prison sentences, the book publishing industry is doomed.
Saturday, 17 March 2007
Friday, 16 March 2007
Sloth -Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention - Sloth
Chorus)
Just a roll, just a roll
Just a roll on your drum
Just a roll, just a roll
And the war has begun
Now the right thing's the wrong thing
No more excuses to come
Just one step at a time
And the war has begun
(Chorus)
She's run away, she's run away
And she ran so bitterly
Now call to your colours, friend
Don't you call to me
(Chorus)
Don't you cry, don't you cry
Don't you cry upon the sea
Don't you cry, don't you cry
For your lady and me
(Chorus)
(ChorusFrom the 1970 album, Full House.
I'll be at Fairport's Cropredy Festival in Oxfordshire, in August....
Poetry......
Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea-Garden
by Keith Douglas
As a white stone draws down the fish
she on the seafloor of the afternoon
draws down men's glances and their cruel wish
for love. Her red lip on the spoon
slips in a morsel of ice-cream. Her hands
white as a shell, are submarine
fronds sinking with spread fingers, lean
along the table, carmined at the ends.
A cotton magnate, an important fish
with great eyepouches and a golden mouth
through the frail reefs of furniture swims out
and idling, suspended, stays to watch.
A crustacean old man, clamped to his chair
sits near her and might coldly see
her charms through fissures where the eyes should be;
or else his teeth are parted in a stare.
Captain on leave, a lean dark mackerel
lies in the offing, turns himself and looks
through currents of sound.
The flat-eyed flatfish
sucks on a straw, staring from its repose, laxly.
And gallants in shoals swim up and lag
circling and passing near the white attraction;
sometimes pausing, opening a conversation:
fish pause so to nibble or tug.
But now the ice-cream is finished, is
paid for. The fish swim off on business
and she sits alone at the table, a white stone
useless except to a collector, a rich man.
by Keith Douglas
As a white stone draws down the fish
she on the seafloor of the afternoon
draws down men's glances and their cruel wish
for love. Her red lip on the spoon
slips in a morsel of ice-cream. Her hands
white as a shell, are submarine
fronds sinking with spread fingers, lean
along the table, carmined at the ends.
A cotton magnate, an important fish
with great eyepouches and a golden mouth
through the frail reefs of furniture swims out
and idling, suspended, stays to watch.
A crustacean old man, clamped to his chair
sits near her and might coldly see
her charms through fissures where the eyes should be;
or else his teeth are parted in a stare.
Captain on leave, a lean dark mackerel
lies in the offing, turns himself and looks
through currents of sound.
The flat-eyed flatfish
sucks on a straw, staring from its repose, laxly.
And gallants in shoals swim up and lag
circling and passing near the white attraction;
sometimes pausing, opening a conversation:
fish pause so to nibble or tug.
But now the ice-cream is finished, is
paid for. The fish swim off on business
and she sits alone at the table, a white stone
useless except to a collector, a rich man.
Monday, 12 March 2007
Thursday, 8 March 2007
Tuesday, 6 March 2007
"Here, Mate! are you shearing that sheep?" "Nah!, Get Yer own!"
Oh, By the way Blogger, This is via Googlevideo, your sibling.... Whence also came the embed code...
Monday, 5 March 2007
Sunday, 4 March 2007
Richard Hammond, BBC Top Gear.
BBC Top Gear co-presenter Richard Hammond said he thought he was going to die after he lost control of the Vampire jet powered car, at 288mph, when the car flipped over while he was filming a feature for the show, on an RAF airfield near York, last September.
Hammond, known as "Hamster", suffered brain damage and was in a coma but is expected to make a full recovery.
Last month Hammond told Jonathan Ross in his first TV interview that he had no memory of two weeks of his life after the incident.
"I was driving and then it was two weeks later and I was in Leeds (hospital)," he said.
"Apparently I was awake on the way to the helicopter and I got a bit fighty, I wanted to do a piece to camera, but my eyes were pointing in different directions," he said of his trip by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary.
Hammond, known as "Hamster", suffered brain damage and was in a coma but is expected to make a full recovery.
Last month Hammond told Jonathan Ross in his first TV interview that he had no memory of two weeks of his life after the incident.
"I was driving and then it was two weeks later and I was in Leeds (hospital)," he said.
"Apparently I was awake on the way to the helicopter and I got a bit fighty, I wanted to do a piece to camera, but my eyes were pointing in different directions," he said of his trip by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary.