the lights of june

Nearing the two year anniversary of the Kilcullen incident.

So we're all agreed folks.

These were army parachute flares, right?

apologia pro dialogue with cnn mea

Evening at the chateau.
Paddy Pup is flumped beside my armchair. MC Hamster is pounding her wheel in protest at being confined to cage.
I am flicking through the channels on the sexevision.
By accident I land on CNN.
Not much sex there.
But what can you do?
A group of talking heads are discussing the internet.
The panel is chaired by an Irish girl called Fionnuala Sweeney.
The guests are a standard group of television droners.
They could drone for England.
Still it's a blessed relief from all the sex.
I listen.
One of the guests proclaims:
"What are the blogs exactly? They're 65 million people telling you what they had for breakfast."

Ah yes gentle travellers of the internet.
They're really scared of us, aren't they?
Because they haven't yet found a way to own us.

That is why every newspaper, every television programme, every satellite channel, every CNN, on the planet, is trying its damnedest to...
look...
like...
a...
blog...

we are the million million monkeys
clattering away on our computer key boards
reading each other
plagiarising each other
removing fleas from each other
and we know
one of us will be Shakespeare

an open letter to fox news

Dear Sirs and Madams.
Yet another report filed on the Fox News website on 16 June claimed that 1900 people had died in violence in Afghanistan so far this year.
It's not the first time you have published this claim.
In fact only 200 people have died in Afghanistan this year.
Another 1700 terrorists, and their wives and girlfriends, died trying to kill those 200 people.
Your most recent version of this erroneous report had as usual been filed by an Associated Press stringer.
Ah yes.
There's lies, damned lies, and then there's the Associated Press.
Let me this way put it.
It was disingenuous, even mendacious of the Associated Press to attempt to inflate the death toll from Afghanistan in the manner cited above.
It was neglectful, even grossly incompetent, of Fox News to publish the false Associated Press figure.
On the same day as you, who are essentially an insincere anodyne right wing station, on the same day as you sanctioned this piece of Associated Press pro Jihadi propaganda, on the very same day I say, the insincere anodyne left wing station CNN also published the very same Associated Press report.
But someone from CNN appears to have taken the trouble to read the Associated Press report before publishing the untrue death toll figure.
CNN published the same report but edited out the manipulation of the statistics which the Associated Press had been endeavouring to pass off as news.
In fact for the past few months CNN has been removing the fake Afghan death toll from its Associated Press reports whenever the Associated Press tries to slip it in.
So here we see the normally quisling CNN doing a better job than the supposedly pro American Fox News.
You people aren't minding your shop.
James Healy

cafe society

these are no Lisa's Teresa's or Elaine's
these all have impossibly exotic names

Arooga De Ville table number one
nightmare of mothers fantasia of sons

and over by the door near the fuschias
that stealer of souls Foo Foo Sanchez

but worst by far of the whole damn crop
temptress of temptresses Schwing Du Bois

you might make small talk with Arooga
or give Foo Foo a ring
but i really don't advise you
to chance it with Schwing

planet of the black jackets

Three days in Dublin.

On day one I was walking down Grafton Street.
I paused deep in thought.
A Muslim man carrying a sign reading Timberland, took a little jump towards me.
I recognised him as a member of the "Black Jackets" Muslim crime gang, an ethnically mixed group of thugs united by Islam, who have been steadily asserting themselves on the streets of Dublin over the past five years.
The gang colours are black leather jackets, styleless items of clothing which look like something Elvis might have vomited up after a late night party in 1957.
Not in fashion.
Not now.
Not ever.
Probably not even in 1957.
Dublin's favourite Muslim crime gang hiding in plain sight, invariably wore these items of clothing up until very recently. In the past two weeks for some unknown reason, they seem to have discarded them in favour of a range of multi hued anoraks, overcoats and pullovers which look like they might have been in fashion maybe for a few days in the middle of 1961.
Progress of a sort, I suppose.
So here we are.
The Muslim man with the Timberland sign stood toe to toe with me and stared.
I looked back at him indifferently.
He became a bit sheepish.
He had expected me to flinch.
Now there was nowhere to hide.
Still I looked at him.
He leaned forward and said: "Bluh, bluh, bluh, bluh, bluh."
It wasn't Arabic.
He really did say: "Bluh, bluh, bluh, bluh, bluh."
Still I looked at him.
Then ever so slowly I broke the contact and lifted my eyes to the sign he was carrying.
I stared at the sign.
The Muslim man with the Timberland sign took a step backward.
He became intensely interested on something that was going on over his shoulder.
I walked on.

On Day two, I walked down Grafton Street.
The Muslim man with the Timberland sign was at his usual position half way down the street.
I paused a few paces from him.
He was staring fixedly at a point in the middle distance.

On Day three I walked down Grafton Street.
The Muslim man with the Timberland sign was there.
I stood.
He didn't seem himself.
For a start, he was differently attired.
He was wearing an outsize duffle coat with the hood up, fringed in wool, completely obscuring his face on this bright sunny day.
Well, well, well.
The little dim light thug knows at last.
So he's the first.
He's the first member of the Black Jackets to figure it out...

They are no longer the hunters.

facile insolence towards the famous

i was reading wh auden writing about the death of wb yeats
not bad said i with a weary smile
for i was in the mood to disparage the dead greats
it hurts them not but it helps to pass the time
not bad said i with a short laugh
and it seemed a strange and fitting epitaph
for two considered king of the road
when knickerbockers were considered a la mode

perhaps i should temper this vain exultancy
with some dull reference to their immortality
but i don't think that applies
the great poet strives and self promotes and dies
his flesh his verse his bones consign to ground
i'm not a great poet but i'm still around

all the gold in the world