all life all holiness

 

XT comes belting along the lake, not quite in flight, his feet skipping on the surface of the water.

He's spotted one of his three weaned bay-bays entering the water.

It's very late in the season for swans to be weaning. The big tough guy, soft at heart, had waited till the absolute last minute to wean them. It's already laying time for his next family. The bay-bays are weaned now and he won't let them on the water.

Lovely, Dovely and Eric Cartman must find themselves new homes.

Cecilia, the Mama swan watchs from the reeds. The kids would still chance approaching her if she was alone on the lake. She would try to chase them away too but half heartedly and not nearly so decisively as XT. They don't take her seriously.

I think she's heavily with egg.

I like the expression with egg and intend to use it a lot.

The other swan parents Bob and Grace are in exile on the smaller lake across the road since XT now dominates here and is disinclined to share the space with adult swans, never mind with his cadet children, on either of the two larger lakes.

Bob and Grace began weaning their five children one by one last November. They allowed Cutie and Beauty to stay with them until February. Then they weaned those as well. I guess Cutie and Beauty must have gone to the canal.

Grace has made a nest for herself on the island. This time last year she'd already hatched.

Tawny duck on the third lake has a veritable flotilla of ducklings. I think I counted a dozen swimming around  her last week. She's the first to hatch this year.

april showers

 

Afternoon on a bench in the park.

Lovely April sunshine washing over everything.

Cartman swan waddles up and begins tugging at my coat.

Two members of the Hutch gang approach and stand nearby.

They are middle aged, bald, burly, and hardy looking.

The first one says (mar dhea to his friend about the swan but really to me about his friend): "He could break your arm."

The second one says (mar dhea to the first one about the swan but really to me about the first one): "Or he could break your leg."

The first one says (mar dhea to the swan but really to me): "Don't worry we're not going to kidnap you."

The second one says (mar dhea to the swan but really to me): "Not yet."

Both walk away laughing companionably.

"What pleasant fellows,"  I say to no one in particular. "Pity, there's never any Kinahanes around when you want them,"

Cartman gets it.

NEWS ROUND UP APRIL 1ST 2021

 

International pharmaceutical companies styling themselves Pfizer and Astrazeneca are to be disbanded under anti trust legislation after worldwide public uproar about their use of murdered babies as ingredients in vaccines.

"We're finished," said a Pfizer spokesman. "The screwballs have spoken."

The vaccines synthesised or tested using cells from unborn children murdered through abortion, effectively cannibalise anyone who takes them. That is to say a person taking the vaccine becomes a canniabal.

The consequences of the shock decision to disband Pfizer and Astrazeneca, produced immediate mea culpas from small town commentators in the dulcet South Kildare gangster enclave of Kilcullen who had formerly endorsed use of the vaccines.

"Why didn't we listen to James Healy?" oolagoaned broadcaster Brian Byrne through his nose. "He tried to warn us. Now I've just got to take my nasal twang and start again. Next time the UN tries to take over the world using an artificially induced flu virus panic, I'll stick to writing about what I know. Which is basically nothing."

Top science boff Noel Clare was similarly repentent about his role in hoodwinking the proles.

"We all owe James Healy an apology," he said. "I am a whining droning, climate change advocating, conformist left wing eejit parrotting any atheistic bosh that comes along and I guess I just lack an appreciation of the sanctity of life. When the scientists started buying up murdered babies for their experiments, I thought it was all ice cream. In fact if they'd marketed the unborn babies' cells as ice creams instead of vaccines, I'd have bought one just as readily. I'd have said: give me a 23 weeker with vanilla and a flake. Honestly I haven't got a clue. I want to apologise again humbly and from my heart to James Healy not just for this but for everything. Going right back to publishing a picture of Lord Kitchener beside one of his articles in the Bridge magazine thirty years ago. And latterly for giving a People Of The Year Award from my Kilcullen Community Inaction Group to Kinneavey. What a fool I was. An utterable, awful, gawdelpus of a socialist of an eejit of a fool. No really. I'm just a hipster doophus who learnt to say onomattapoiea for a living."

James Healy was not available for comment as he has been kidnapped in a joint operation by the Maloneys, the Hutch gang, Kinneavey and the clan gang operating out of the Alke Babish chipper.

A spokesman for the hoods said: "We're sorry too."

FILM REVIEW

Boeing Boeing.  A new release of the 1960s sex comedy which started as a stage play by Camoletti and Cross. I wonder who they were. The plot features the adventures of two wide boy atheistic scientists Richard Dawkins and Fred Hoyle amidst the backdrop of swinging London. There are various charming misunderstandings as the young men while away the time, Richard popping in to junkyards in the hope that a 747 Jumbo Jet may be about to appear spontaneously after a windstorm and Fred peering through telescopes in the expectation that aliens are about to land to check up on the human race which they had earlier seeded on earth. A frisson of dramatic tension is added by the two atheists fundamental disagreement on the origin of life. Richard thinks it just happened. Fred thinks the aliens dunnit. I kid you not. There's an intriguing side plot when Richard starts dating that cracking Lalla Ward bird from Doctor Who (She played the warrior woman Leela.) while conspiring with script writers at the BBC to atheise the British populace through the manipulation of scripts for this and other science fiction programmes of the period. Boeing Boeing ends on an upbeat note with Leela marrying Richard and with Fred marrying a Jumbo Jet. From what I remember of Doctor Who, Richard got the better part of that deal. Of interest to cultural historians is the fact that in an Irish production of the original stage play I myself filled the role of one of the wide boy scientists sharing the stage with well known real life Irish criminal defence lawyer Conal Boyce as the other. Although to be fair, he didn't really share. By the way, Conal Boyce is a criminal defence lawyer in the sense that he defends criminals (They all did it.) not in the sense that he is defending them by criminal means. Although. But no. Leave it.

KILCULLEN EASTER

the lambing time

evanescent leaves

provincial poets stitching worn out rhymes

into patchwork quilted semaphores of praise

all of these

mist like matting on muddy fields

old men rejoicing in campaniles

all of these

everything that breathes is on its knees

for the coming of the lord

peace 

my favourite conspiracy theory

 

A few years ago I published an article floating a speculative notion about the existence of practitioners of occult activities working   in British children's television productions during the 1970s.

The two programmes I cited as evidence for this hooey were Children Of The Stones  (scarey shite which only falls down in its final episode when the plot chickens out and becomes science fiction rather than the supernatural) and The Moon Stallion (great music and whap bam thud drama which only falls down in its final episode by trying too hard to surpass itself with silly special effects.)

Children Of The Stones was broadcast simultaneously on RTE in Ireland and on the ITV network in Britain in January 1977.

It was a six episode series, an effortlessly unfathomably eerie story, very appealing actors, superb atmospherics, fine acting from adults and kids, and all a bit too close to the bone for me. By which I mean the evocation of the supernatural seemed uncomfortably real.

I thought then and think now that someone involved in that thing knew something about something.

I cannot be more clear.

Music perfectly tailored to the action too, let it be said.

The whole thing a work of art really.

Such an assemblage of talent, narrative, filmic skills, and (I suppose we might say) vision.

Nothing else like it has ever come out of children's television in Ireland or Britain (Or Wales to be more precise. It was HTV the Welsh branch of the ITV network who concocted the thing.)

And it was never shown again in any of our countries.

There you go.

Thoroughly excellent, too close to the bone and never shown again on British or Irish televion: That's enough for me to start suggesting occult conspiracy theories in connection with it.

Okay.

I also posited in the same article from a few years ago what I considered a more remote possibility, that there was something similarly dodgily occultish going on in the woodshed at the BBC in 1978 when The Moon Stallion was filmed and broadcast.

It too is a little bit close to the bone (in its suggestion of the supernatural) but the story is pleasant, life affirming, action filled, not scary really, and full of characterful acting and pure hokum.

I unreservedly loved the music to it and found myself willing to look the other way with regard to what in some lights might have seemed a thinly disguised endorsement of, er, esoteric doctrines.

The Beeb has rebroadcast The Moon Stallion any number of times and it has been freely available on the internet.

So as stated above, a few years ago, I published my article.

And boom.

The Moon Stallion disappeared.

Children Of The Stones is still there. (And it's still scary shite.)

The Moon Stallion is gone.

There are what look like home made amateur videos all over the internet captioned The Moon Stallion featuring private citizens film of their horses. These have nothing to do with the television series.

The Moon Stallion has vanished overnight from the internet as though it never existed.

On a voodoo wind.

No longer on the Youtube website.

No longer available to buy on the BBC Player website.

No longer possible to find the theme music anywhere.

Who wudda thunk it.

All this time I thought I'd gotten close with the Children Of The Stones.

But The Moon Stallion was the one.

apologia pro 747 gambits mea

 

The odds against life beginning spontaneously by chance are likenable to the odds of the Boeing Corporation visiting a junk yard and from the debris field available being able to construct a Jumbo Jet capable of asexually reproducing itself in male and female forms which in turn go on to propagate a whole species of sexually reproductive self perpetuating Jumbo Jets.

this just in

 

The controversy over whether US President Joe Biden's wife Jill should be called Doctor Jill Biden or Toots came to an unlikely conclusion this week when Mrs Biden intervened to save the life of an airline passenger who had been suddenly taken ill on a transatlantic flight.

Back at the White House waiting for his wife's return, President Biden himself saw a surge in his opinion poll ratings following the incident.

The airline passenger had suffered an apparent heart attack.

Jill Biden's timely intervention seems to have put an end to carping from Republican Party nay sayers who have consistently refused to accord her the title Doctor on the grounds that her university qualification is in Musicology.

The drama unfolded on Monday evening on Lufthansa Flight 832 from Munich to Milwaukee after a passenger lost consciousness and the captain appealed for any doctors on board to step forward.

Jill Biden was returning from an ex officio diplomatic visit to Germany without her husband, and was the only one to answer the captain's call.

Witnesses recall that Mrs Biden didn't hesitate but that there was one awkward moment as she searched for the patients heart and inadevertently palpated his testicles.

The patient did revive while Mrs Biden was massaging his testicles but clearly was a Republican nay sayer and had doubts about her bona fides.

"Madam," he said, "do you know the first thing about medicine?"

"No," replied Doctor Jill Biden, "but you sing it and I'll hum along."

A modest Mrs Biden told reporters on landing that she had simply gone with her instincts in rushing to offer her help.

"I didn't think twice about it," she said. "I just tried to remember everything we learned in Music School. You know, leg bone connected to the back bone, neck bone connected to the head bone, testicle bone connected to the heart bone. That sort of thing."

Mrs Biden recalled for reporters how she had first decided to become a doctor.

"When I was a little girl," she gushed, "I watched The Fugitive on television and I loved the way the narrator said Doctor Richard Kimble. I think the narrator was actually the detective Frank Cannon. He had a great voice. Anyway, from that moment on, I knew I had to be a doctor."

CNN and other Democratic Party leaning media groups are now routinely intoning Doctor Jill Biden in all their news reports (even ones that have nothing to do with the Bidens) with precisely the same gravumen and portentousness as Frank Cannon used for his voiceovers on The Fugitive.

Having gotten a taste for saving lives, Mrs Biden intends to augment her qualification with a second Masters Degree.

"I'm writing a thesis for a new Phd," she commented. "It's on Mozart and the Respiratory Tract."

The Nobel Prize committe has announced that Mrs Biden will receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her heroic action saving the passenger's life.

She joins several previous US winners of the Nobel Prize from the Democratic Party including former Vice President Al Gore who was honoured in 2007 for his role in creating the Climate Change shake down, and former President Barack Obama who got one in 2009 for being black.

Nobel Prize Committee Chairman Sven Organdonor attempted to allay concerns in some quarters that his Committee was giving out prizes to anyone and everyone.

"That does not happen," he said. "Vee only give zem to accredited socialists with long service to George Soros and his Freemasonic cabals undermining ze sovereignty of parliaments in the interests of propagating worldwide dictatorship. Es lebe unsere geheimnis Deutschlund. Ein reich, ein volk, ein World Health Organisation. Nyah, ha, ha Gee Force."