momentaria

Driving across the Curragh of Kildare through a soft November dusk.

The world is atmospherically sepia grey like an old photograph.

Topping the rise I come upon an unusual sight.

Crows are swirling above the plain on the spokes of a great invisible wheel in the sky.

Yet more crows are perched densely on telephone wires below them.

Still more and far more numerously than in the air or on the wires, several acres of the Curragh plain are carpeted on the ground with myriads of the creatures.

I slow my car and look as closely as I can.

For the most part they are not foraging although I espy a few poking in the earth for worms.

Most of the ones on the ground seem to be in little groups of three, four and five, with those in each group facing in towards each other as though in conference.

They are quite motionless.

Their demeanour reminds me of politicians in coat and tails gathering before a vote and discreetly discussing last minute concerns.

Their folded wings are reminiscent of hands clasped behind a gentleman's back.

So this is a parliament of crows.

Such a gathering has latterly been referred to in the English language as a murder of crows.

Parliament is a much better word.

I wonder what they were talking about.

halloween horror stories

 

"I saw your friends the O'Donoghues last week," said my cousin John with the air of a man beginning a recital. 

He was standing behind the counter in his pharmacy where I had called to purchase elixirs of youth and whatnot.

"O'Donoghues eh? I don't have any friends by that name or indeed any other name," I interjected modestly.

"Gerry O'Donoghue," elaborated the cousin.

"He taught me in third class at Primary School," I admitted, "and many years later starred in one of my plays with Kilcullen Drama Group, albeit unbeknownst to himself or to me, ie he didn't know I wrote it and I didn't the gulpens at the Drama Group were producing it. That hardly makes him a friend. Of course the Drama Group never paid me for the play because it was directed by that great gawdelpus Eilis Philips and she had promised the purported writer of the play she thought she was producing, one Jimmy Kersey, that she would produce his work without any changes, and then went absolutely reliably to the Drama Group archives and accidently and still absolutely reliably retrieved my reworking of the same play which another producer had commissioned me to do months earlier and which had resulted in a completely new play which Jimmy Kersey had expressly refused to allow to be produced under his name, and of course Eilis Philips then went and produced my version word for word, fully convinced she was keeping her promise to Jimmy Kersey not to change a thing in his original drivel. It was exquisite I tells ee. It's the only script of mine that the Drama Group ever even nearly got right. And Jimmy Kersey stood up in the front row after five minutes on opening night and cried: 'This isn't my play,' and stormed out. So I suppose I can claim from the legal point of view it really is my play. I mean we can't leave it an orphan. And Gerry O'Donoghue dancing with the mop and then making out romantically with the mop as a girl comes into the room behind him, with all the vital expressions the actress can do as she drinks in the scene, that was mine of course. And the bit where he does Dirty Harry and Mel Gibson and John Wayne voices in front of the mirror as he tries on a shirt. That was mine. In fact that was me. And the other character introducing himself grandly as Clive Snotley Greene.  Mine. And the bit where another guy says you can't use the word blackmail because it's politically incorrect and nowadays you have to say African American mail. All mine. I sometimes wonder did Dunnywhacks suspect he was reciting my lines while he was making a galoot of himself on stage. My only regret is that my late Uncle Scutch who had asked me to do the re writes, wouldn't allow me to have a sequence where a voracious sensual sexual woman karate chops her way through a table to get at the hero a la the 1970s Hi Karate After Shave ad, and in a later scene the same girl is only barely deterred from advancing on him again when he claims to be a Muslim transvestite and goes into a room to prove it to her and emerges dressed in a full length Burka brandishing a knife and chases her round the room shouting 'Allah u Akbar.' It would have been fun to see what Eilis Drilbits would have made of that one while trying not to change a single word.."

"Let me finish what I was telling you," said the cousin, "Stop interrupting me with your interminable reminiscences. I was saying I saw Gerry O'Donoghue in the street. He had the fishwife with him."

"That's not fair," said I. "I haven't called her a fishwife in 37 years, since 1988 to be exact. And back then I was sorely provoked. If I remember rightly I had greeted her in the street at Logstown with: 'Good afternoon Mrs O'Donoghue,' and she had replied without any preamble: 'I didn't like that article you wrote about the Philippines. And I know what you are. You are a lonely, single man, about 32 years old. You never go anywhere. You have no friends. You don't go to discos. And you think you know something about the Philippines.' Apparently she wasn't joking about not liking my article on the Philippines. I ask you. Defending the Marcos regime against Amnesty International, the Soviet Union and the O'Donoghues. What's not to like? But ah, the O'Donoghues always had a weakness for ad homonem attacks. And her greeting was uncanny. It was like a gypsy curse. It all came true. She was right on every point except that I was 22 not 32."

"You're reminiscing again," said the cousin.

"Sorry. Continue your fascinating discourse about Hare Baithers in their natural habitat. I can't wait to see how it turns out. What were the great left wing power couple doing in the public thoroughfare?"

"Well that's just it," said the cousin. "It was very strange. They seemed to be walking up to lamp posts and pulling at them. Then I realised they were tearing down Irish flags which someone has been sticking up around the town."

"Strange," said I, "I always took the O'Donoghues for closet Rahmen. I'd expect them to be waving Irish flags rather than taking them down."

"It is strange," said John. "I wonder what's at the back of it."

Later that week I drove through South Kildare on my rambles. It was an idyllic sun splashed evening.

My feminist cousin Pauline's house is in the neighbourhood.

On impulse I stopped for a visit.

I met her at the door.

"I can't stay," she said. "I'm going to a bake sale."

"In aid of your writer's group?"

"In aid of the Palestinians."

I bid her adieu and drove on.

All around the hinterland of Narraghmore as I drove away, I encountered little groups of rosy cheeked country people scurrying along bearing cakes wrapped in tin foil.

With some measure of spiritual mastery I resisted the urge to wind down the window and roar: 'Let those hostages go you evil Palestinian ****s.'

The last time I engaged in such public polemic was at a picket line of police employees outside Naas Garda Station during their strike action. I had roared: 'Go back to work you lazy ****s. You're bankrupting the country.' Before that it was picket lines of teachers on two separate strike actions with more or less the same appeal to their better natures as I used with the cops, and prefixed by the same honorific. Before that it was Muslims demonstrating in the streets of Dublin. Each time I seem to have favoured the cee word in my discourse. Mrs O'Donoghue doesn't know how lucky she was back in 1988. I was less vulgar then. But I'm reminiscing again.

And I have grown mellow in my middle years.

Not a word of contention did I raise to Pauline. Not a word did I say to the good hearted burghers of South Kildare scurrying like rats to their bake sale.

Back at Aunty Mary's house I fished out a computer and began a typically intense chess game with Mohamed in Teheran.

I was quite engrossed when my cousin Frances who is a retired Secondary School teacher entered the room stage left, chatting with the aforementioned Aunty Mary.

They sat at the table.

I looked up from my international outreach to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Frances had a black eye.

She was in the middle of telling the aunt how it happened.

"There are Irish flags all around the town," she recounted. "It's an anti immigrant thing. Those right wing bastards are hijacking the flag. I went up to a lamp post to pull down a flag and somehow I fell and broke my glasses and gave myself this black eye."

She actually said 'right wing bastards,' with me sitting right there right handedly, mightily rightily righteously playing chess.

Truly I have mellowed gentle readers.

Silent though I remained, my face did betray the ghost of a smile.

So Frances wasn't beaned by the yobs who put up the flags.

She was beaned by a lamp post.

And if the lamp posts are turning on humanity, where will it all end?

With a little luck, maybe they'll get the O'Donoghues next.

John Carpenter could direct the film version.

how to cheat at chess

The internet website styled Chess Dot Com is purportedly the world's leading online platform for chess players.

Statistics for the site claim over two hundred million regular users. Occasionally there are higher claims of up to 400 million users.

It is a phenomenally successful site.

I would recommend it for anyone looking to learn chess, improve at chess, or test themselves against chess players of all abilities.

I am accused of cheating by other players about once every two months.

Some players would make such an accusation during a game merely to distract you.

Others may be a little neurotic.

Or maybe I'm just good.

I always take such accusations as compliments and often reply via the messaging service to wit: "Sorry it's against my religion."

A fellow from Spain accused me thusly during an intense blood and thunder game last night: "What the hell Bro! You're moving instantly and every move's a good one."

I made a special effort in replying to him as follows: "I'm flattered but I have learned not to praise the morning until I see what the evening brings."

This is a one liner lifted from the German general Heinrici who is reputed to have said it while playing war against the Russian army on the outskirts of Berlin.

I have never been accused of cheating by the administrators at Chess Dot Com.

About once a month the administrators send me an email to award a game to me in which they have adjudged my opponent was cheating.

I'm not sure if this is simply to reassure me that there is oversight from the website's owners or if a genuine cheat has been identified and excluded.

Chess Dot Game claims to have closed the accounts of tens of thousands of users caught cheating in recent years.

There is no point in cheating.

It is a meaningless act.

And in the words of Mr Mackey from the opprobrious television cartoon Southpark: "Cheating is wrong, mkay."

The method of cheating which is said to be most favoured on Chess Dot Com is for a player to have a chess computer programme running while he plays you so that effectively you are playing Big Blue or some such thing.

The meaninglessness of cheating is summed up for me by the analogy of me racing against champion athlete Mo Farah over the 5000 metres and claiming to win because I drove a car while Mo was on foot, or of me fighting Mike Tyson in the boxing ring and claiming to win because I used a machine gun.

The use of machines to cheat is without merit in terms of genuine achievement in any human endeavour.

Chess is only of interest because human beings compete honestly against each other.

It seems to me that the vast majority of players on Chess Dot Com do not cheat and have no willingness to do so.

But those that do cheat, have methodologies beyond machines.

Each chess player is given an Elo points rating, so named for Arpad Elo the Hungarian American chess master who originally devised the system.

Elo points ratings are used by Chess Dot Com and other websites as well as by the international Chess Federation FIDE (Federation International d'Echecs.)

You are awarded Elo points for each game you win.

You lose some for each game you lose.

It is a continual rating.

The central computer at Chess Dot Com selects competitors for you as close to your Elo points rating as possible.

The chess master Anna Cramling says that a 2000 point Elo rating on Chess Dot Com implies you are what she calls a chess expert.

Positions in league tables on Chess Dot Com are decided by a separate points award for each game you win. These are called Trophy points. Unlike with Elo points, you do not have trophy points deducted when you lose a game.

So a high volume of  winning games can put you high up in the league regardless of a high volume of losses.

In the scenario I am citing, cheating involves artificially depressing your Elo points by deliberate losses so that you are matched against players much weaker than your real ability.

These novice opponents will be easy to defeat rapidly.

Trophy points will thereby mount up quickly while you keep your Elo points low by ensuring you have as many deliberate losses as wins.

Another method of cheating is for two or more players to get together and play in relays on one account, allowing them to log up incredible numbers of trophy points.

The most prestigious league on Chess Dot Com is the Legends League which this week has nearly two million participants.

My assessment is that the top five positions in the world on Chess Dot Com's Legends League this evening are held by people or groups of people systematically gaming the system.

I would say the same about most of their top fifty.

The player at the very top of the Legends League whose user profile features a picture of President Trump in a chicken outfit and who calls himself "Oops Wrong Piece," has an Elo points rating right this moment a little above 100.

Not a thousand, a hundred.

This would be considered a beginners' level Elo points rating and theoretically could not arise for someone in the Legends League let alone someone who is topping the Legends League worldwide.

The next four players also have very low Elo points ratings between 400 and 1100 still guaranteeing them opponents well below the level of an average player in the Legends League.

I am suggesting that all of these players or more probably groups of players using the cover of each of the top five accounts to play in relays, are cheating.

I would expect the cheating cabals to register new accounts next week when the League resets and on into the future.

In person to person chess games, cheating is also a part of the landscape.

In 2022 the world champion Magnus Carlsen accused 19 year old American Hans Niemann of cheating against him in a tournament that Carlsen withdrew from in a huff.

Chess Dot Com has said their investigations into Mr Niemann indicate cheating in online games.

Mr Niemann admits to twice cheating in such games.

Fide's investigation declared that there was no evidence of cheating in his person to person clash with Carlsen.

Various methods have been postulated as to how Mr Niemann might have cheated against Carlsen. The billionaire Elon Musk suggested, perhaps mischievously, that Mr Nieman may have had a sensor device in his anus through which an external agent could signal moves to him using vibrations.

The external agent in this scenario would be using a chess computer to come up with his moves.

The conventional more prosaic methods for cheating in person to person games are thought to involve a player going for a toilet break and contacting an external agent for advice through his mobile phone (as opposed to through his anus) while in the toilet cubicle.

Classic chess tournament games are usually set at ninety minutes.

Football players are not routinely allowed toilet breaks or the use of mobile phones during 90 minute international soccer championships.

It is probably past time for Fide and other chess authorities to forbid mobile phone use or possession for players during tournaments. It would also seem sensible for world championship events to stop facilitating unsupervised toilet breaks for participants while a game is in progress.

synchronicities

Early morning flumped in front of the television.
I am watching a Catholic satellite channel called EWTN.
Occasionally I flick up and down to the Protestant channels which have buckets more oomph for your dollar.
The worst Protestant broadcaster is about a hundred times more televisual than the best Catholic one.
I return a wiser, weaker man, rather chastened in fact, to the channel God watches.

And lo!
EWTN is showing a most curious film from the 1960s.
It's part of some lost series called Father Peyton's Family Theatre.

Each episode features a poetic visual interpretation accompanied by a reading from the Book of Psalms.
In my cynicism nay defeatism, I can't help thinking that no other television station on the planet earth would dream of broadcasting this stuff now.
Nonetheless I am rather stunned by the symbolism of this week's episode.

The captions tells us we're about to hear Psalm 139 which the makers of the programme have entitled Once Upon A Morning.

There is darkness.

And then there is a campfire on the beach flickering in the darkness.

Then we see a boy and girl sitting at the campfire.

The filming is quite beautiful.

The boy breaks off a piece of fish which they have been roasting at the campfire and gives it to the girl.

Over all this a splendidly resonant narrator's voice begins declaiming Psalm 139.

Whoever he is, he's good.

The sun comes up over the crashing waves.
The children, now revealed as a cropped haired boy and a blonde girl are wandering through sand dunes searching for meaning.
No really.
They are luminously beautiful children.
The sea is rolling white topped in a glorious sun.
Everything is very Californian.

That anonymous unseen somebody with splendid intonation is still reading Psalm 139 from off camera.

And lo!
The kids have come upon two rocking horses on the beach.

It happens.
They are sitting on them now.
Their faces suffused with joy.
Their hair streaming.
The sea is a magnificent mythic backdrop.
Presently the kids get off the horses and stroll back among the sand dunes.
No words at all from them.
We are left contemplating the wild mystic ocean.
The ocean of truth?
The credits roll.
Most extraordinary.
I watched this thing with my jaw dropped. I couldn't make up my mind what the hell I'd just seen.
So the credits rolled.

And lo again!
It had been a young undiscovered William Shatner at the dawn of his career, reading the psalm,

I didn't recognise the other names in the credit list. But I could imagine that for each of them working on this film might have been a thrill, possibly the thrill of a lifetime.

A final credit appeared.
Typical of the Catholics.
They give a credit to everybody.
The final credit began: Assistant to the Cameraman...
Now this guy hadn't been Assistant Cameraman.
This guy was Assistant to the Cameraman.
An important distinction.
He didn't get to work the apparatus when the main man was chatting to Father Peyton.
What he did get to do was fetch the cameraman's sandwiches.
The Assistant to the Cameraman was George Lucas.

So the Catholic Church, way ahead of the posse, had in 1962 brought together William Shatner and George Lucas while Star Trek and Star Wars were still just a glint of unsuspected possibility in the yet 

to unfold future of both men.

Boy we're good.

Or more subtly stated... It all just goes to show, the Catholic Church can really pick em

By the way Raymond Burr was in another Psalm in the same series, long before he became world famous as the TV cop Ironside.

But ah.

That's another story.

(First published 2007)

how many candles does it take to light a secret lair

 

Flicking through the channels on the sexevision.

The news channels are all full of war and rumours of war.

It's bleak enough.

And lo!

What light through yonder window breaks!

Why it is a music channel showing a song from the 1980s version of The Phantom Of The Opera.

The video features Michael Crawford as the Phantom sweeping Sarah Brightman as the ingenue back to his evil lair.

The scene is quite quaint.

Michael Crawford became world famous for playing the Phantom of the Opera with menace and panache but he was famous in Britain and Ireland long before that in the 1970s, for playing in utterly non menacing non panachey style, a lovable bumbling cockney husband called Frank Spencer in a TV sitcom with the catchphrase: "Ummm Betty."

Betty his wife was played by Michele Dotrice.

Tonight I keep expecting the Phantom while manhandling Sarah Brightman down labyrinthine passageways to pause every now and then, and say: "Ummm Betty."

I think Andrew Lloyd Webber should have found a way to insert the line.

It would have crowned it.

For me anyway.

As for the ingenue Sarah Brightman, a one time pop star who, as her pop career faded, leapt sylph like from the chorus line of West End musicals to starring roles in Andrew Lloyd Webber productions through the simple process of marrying Andrew Lloyd Webber, I mean I don't want to cast no aspoyshuns, but she is no more an ingenue than I am.

She can play sensual sexy sylphs alright, in fact with gusto, but she cannot portray innocence no matter how much white diaphanous tulle they swathe her in.

In fact the Oxford English dictionary under its definition of 'pathos,' actually has a picture of Sarah Brightman in her white tulle chiffon ensemble, heroically trying to look like an unspoilt mountain flower as the Phantom spirits her away no doubt to his doom.

When the Phantom thunders maniacally: "Sing for me my angel," I would have loved if Sarah Brightman had stripped off the white diaphanous thing to reveal the famous spandex catsuit from her pop singing days and launched into a medley of her greatest hit, "I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper," which by the way is a good deal better song than any of the infernal tootling Andrew Lloyd Webber ever came up with for her to sing.

In spite of the glaring absence of spandex catsuits, it is still monumentally fascinating to watch the Phantom of the  Opera attempting to strike a fearful posture as he draws his favourite dim but sexy bim down his favourite dim but beautifully lit secret passage.

She is quite luminous, and a fine figure of a woman, all gotch eyed sensuality and pouty lips, but as I've said before not in this universe by any stretch of the imagination, capable of playing a vulnerable innocent.

She looks like she's just come from seducing Andrew Lloyd Webber, found it fine good sport, and is ready to seduce whoever else happens along, possibly for a bet with the other members of her ex pop group Hot Gossip.

In fact my concerns in the matter of the Phantom of the Opera kidnapping Sarah Brightman and taking her to his evil lair, would be entirely for the safety of the Phantom.

Any Phantoms of the Opera reading this would be well advised not to take strange girls back to their evil lairs unless they know precisely who they are.

The secret lair when Sarah and Michael get to it, tootling infernally all the way, is like the aforementioned secret passage, beautifully lit and indeed positively chock a block with candles.

Some high up. Some low down. Some in little alcoves. Some rising mysteriously out of the partially flooded  depths.

Marvellously atmospheric of course but I wonder how the phantom lit them all.

There is no mention anywhere in the production of the phantom having a servant to handle candle lighting duties while he's out stalking sylphs.

So he must have lit them himself.

He would have been risking doing a right number on himself scrambling over slippery boulders to get to the really high up ones.

And then where would we be!

And so I amuse myself on the night Indian army chiefs threatened to nuke Pakistan.

an open letter to doctor john campbell

Good morrow John.

Just a brief fan note.

I became aware of your broadcasts a few years ago, early on in what I regarded as a fake pandemic.

There was a flu outbreak alright even if it was one featuring a virus concocted in a Chinese Communist Party laboratory with funding from Doctor Anthony Fauci of the American National Institute of Health.

I kid you not.

We have never been able to control a respiratory virus.

This thing was always going to go through the herd.

But it wasn't at any point a pandemic.

It just didn't kill enough to be called a pandemic and such death tolls as we have were crassly and artificially inflated by those compiling the statistics.

My view on this is no longer controversial.

It is, in the truest sense, settled science.

My initial and ongoing assessment of the government and Health Board led response to a fake pandemic, was that the panic inducing hysteria of face masks, lock downs, social distancing and compulsory vaccinations would damage public health and actually spread the virus.

At first I took little notice of your work because I viewed it as accomodating the aforementioned shenanigans of lock downs, face masks, social distancing and the dreadful infringement of bodily autonomy which was compulsory ingestion of untested vaccines made out of aborted babies,

But I've kept an eye on your public statements and I must now profess profound respect for your mature view, that is to say your insight, wisdom and courage in seeking to spread conscience based intellectual awareness of the grotesque wrong turn the medical profession and governments took during what was essentially a staged pandemic in service to a medicalised dictatorship emanating from pharmaceutical companies and who knows what other malign puppet masters.

I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.

I note that the immortal Wikipedia website, having earlier lauded you, now tries to damn you for your present stance.

They're going down with the ship.

Best wishes.

James Healy

from the heelers emails

Augustinian mornings.

-

Hey there Marie.

Another all nighter with the computer.

Jess the miracle dog is at my feet. The other one is curled up in a basket. Strangely she's not snoring for once.

Normally Mollie asleep emits a stream of sounds like nothing so much as the tennis player Monica Seles who was famous for grunting her way through games.

So August is dawning around  me. I've been asking the creator for miracles and news came this week that a woman I was praying for has had some relief from cancer. I'm just waiting to see if we get the real whap, bam, thud miracle.

I love those.

On the internet I've been listening to broadcasts by Allie Beth Stukie. at the moment she's talking about Catholic doctrine re the Blessed Mother's perpetual virginity. Allie Beth describes herself as Evangelical but she's certainly not hostile to Catholics or the church.

The question is did Joseph and Mary have sex or not.

A certain rarified delicatesse among some believers may dispose them to the notion that the Blessed Mother remained eternally a virgin.

But the overall tradition of the church has been likewise and this cannot in my view be simply dismissed as delicatesse.

The New Testament says that Joseph and Mary did not have any such intimate contact before the birth of Jesus but does not say anything about afterwards.

The gospel witnesses do mention Jesus having brothers and sisters but the Hebrew word for brothers and sisters is the same word used for cousins and kinsmen so the scriptures don't settle the matter definitively.

I could imagine Mary and Joseph adopting kids. Maybe half the town was living in their kitchen and perhaps those adopted ones were known as Jesus' brothers and sisters.

I knew an Irish woman of the present era who adopted and fostered 17 children and in her family circle they were considered brothers and sisters to the four she gave birth to from her own womb.

The early church held to a tradition that Mary remained a virgin always and this notion is shared by the Eastern Orthodox and also in their formal doctrines by Lutherans and Anglicans. Among the great men of Protestantism, Zwingli, John Wesley and Calvin also held irrevocably to the idea.

It's never been important to me Marie. Although the church has a dogma on the matter, it is not the core of the good news of the Gospel which we have been commissioned to preach until the end of time. I am open to it as true. I would have no problem if at the end of time I was told, no it wasn't true and that those modern Protestants and others who seem to have gotten bored with the idea were actually correct in walking away from it.

Mary is still the highest saint of heaven and has obtained miracles for me from God regardless of whether this dogma is correctly defined or not.

And the heart of Catholic doctrine is still Christ the liberator today, yesterday and forever.

Peace.

Saint James of Kilcullen