the heebie jeebies

 

"What do you think is the scariest horror movie of all time?" wondered my cousin Yankee Joe apropos the scariest horror movie of all time.

"I don't really approve of horror movies," I mused cautiously.

"Why not?"

"The hack and slash ones may generate the behaviours they depict. The more subtle evocations of evil may give evil power over people. Generally speaking, as my dear old Dad put it many aeons ago when I was scaring myself witless with the Friday Night Horror on the BBC, I don't think those things help anyone's faith."

"How about Poltergeist?" insisted the unquiet American.

"I would have said that's more an effects movie than a horror. I think it was directed by Tobe Hooper who made the 1970s exploitation flick The Hills Have Eyes. But Steven Spielberg was involved as producer and some say he directed most of Poltergeist and merely had Tobe Hooper there as a sort of affectation. I have a hunch that the little girl who played one of the main roles met an early death in real life as did the girl who played her older sister."

"Well," said Joe, "I read a survey this week that said The Shining was the scariest film of all time."

"It's an eerie thing, I'll give you that," I said. "It's hasn't got a conventional narrative. But there's something about it. A little bit too close to the bone. I think it's one of those ones where I'd be wondering how the director Stanley Kubrick and the writer Stephen King knew so much about evil. I saw it when I was younger and was tremendously disappointed because I had been enthusiastic about Stephen King's writing and had hoped for a good old fashioned entertainment hunkered down in my seat rooting for the forces of good. Nowadays I wouldn't touch it with a forty foot barge pole."

"So you really think a horror movie can have a negative affect on people?" said Joe.

"I do," said I. " You know the horror actor Christopher Lee, star of The Devil Rides Out and sundry others that I wouldn't touch with a forty foot barge pole, was asked at a press conference in Dublin whether he had engaged in occult practices. Word of mouth was that he had. This was shortly before his death. The journalists and the audience were fawning on him and made a great laugh out of the question. But Christopher Lee answered it very seriously. He said that anyone who gets involved in black magic not only risks losing their sanity but their immortal soul."

"Would you watch any horror movie?"

"I choose not to feed my fears. But if John Carpenter's Halloween came on television I'd be saying to God: I'd really love to watch this, it would be a complete nostalgia trip enjoying Carpenter's story telling, his music, the actors' playing, and memories of my younger self being fascinated by the whole thing but I wouldn't watch it for a million pounds. Partly because of the sexualisation of murder as entertainment which is the moral flaw in all hack and slash films. But with Carpenter's the film is more than just graphic exploitation fare. It's not really scary. But there's enough faintly suggested evocations of something supernatural in it to make it more genuinely scary than the more recent gore fests which have been inspired by it."

"How about the Exorcist?"

"Wouldn't watch it if you paid me. I read the book when I was a kid and slept with the light on for twenty years."

"So you've no personal nominee for the scariest movie of all time?"

"On principle no.. But the first of the Omen films was an eerie piece of work. That''s worth an honorable mention. No hang on. I know what I'd nominate as the most scary film of all time. It's another Stephen King one. Salem's Lot. The two part version they made in 1979. Directed by ye aforementioned Tobe Hooper. It's a horror but it's entertainment driven and has some heart. David Soul was in it and Bonnie Bedelia  and the whole cast are excellent. James Mason and the kid particularly. I'd challenge anyone to watch that and not look over their shoulder once or twice. On the other hand I saw David Soul giving a presentation on it recently, and I couldn't escape the feeling that he had been somehow damaged by taking part in the production."

apologia pro vignettes mea

 

Doctor Fortescue looked up from a folder as I came through the door.

He answered my bright, optimistic, quizzical expression with a brief shake of his head.

I thought to myself: Well this is well nigh useless; I won't even get a good dramatic moment for my website out of it; I know some medical professionals personally and not one of them will believe a fellow doctor would pass on news like this in the way he had just done.

There followed some stage business about medications.

"I'll email the prescription to the pharmacy," said the good doctor.

"How long will that take Doc?" quoth me.

"I'll do it straight away," he said.

We shook hands on it and I turned to go.

At the door I found myself unable to resist posing a question apropos nothing at all.

"Do you remember a conversation with me during the supposed pandemic a few years ago?" I asked.

"I do," he said.

"Do you remember I asserted that face masks don't work and that social distancing doesn't work, and that forcing people to stay in their homes under lockdown would damage mental health, and that the vaccines were not properly tested and should not be compulsory and that in any case no one should use the vaccines as they were made out of aborted babies?"

"I remember," said the doctor.

"Have you had any reason since then to revise your opinions?" I ventured.

"I'd probably agree with you on the first three things you said and not on the vaccines," he answered.

"Have you noticed Doc," said I gently, "an awful lot of people are getting heart attacks?"

He flinched.

It was the darndest thing.

He didn't flinch when he read my doom laden chart but he flinched at those simple words.

Instantly I felt strangely sorry for him.

"I know you haven't time to be talking to me all day about current events," I said. "I'll let you get back to your other patients."

As I clumped out the door I was struck, not for the first time, by the strange mystic pathos that gilds the vicissitudinous peregrinations of my effulgent existence.

johanaan

 

(poem for a new baby)

The years mount up

But do not gallop off

Not yet

Though soon they'll run amok

Tonight we are between time

Between destiny, darkness, fortune, and luck

I want to give you a gift

Something that rhymes

But the only theme I can think of

Is an old gag along familiar lines

About the world being at war the day you were born

It is you know

It always was

It will be so in the morn

History itself is a storm

Of souls against the infinite

But the thought rings too violent

For the poem I want

And I am left

With something more prose than poem

Inspiration flees

Now no more words will come

The jungle chirrup of fledgelings in the hedgerow

Draws my eyes to the window

The darkness pulses

As a billion times before

Into something old

Something new

Something murky pure

Grey light becoming white light

The firstlings of the dawn drink the night

the mask of the daft hayporths

 

Shopping in a small town pharmacy for some product a fellow citizen wants me to get her.

A fetching young woman with a nose ring goes to fetch the product.

I do not endorse nose rings generally but she could kind of carry it off in a subtle, sylph like, sensual, sexual sort of way.

While she is gone a fetching, I espy a public health campaign poster on the wall.

The poster features an image of the deceased musician styled Freddie Mercury performing on stage with a  health board parody of his most famous song emblazoned in large letters beside him.

The song as written on the poster has been rejigged to urge people to wear face masks presumably during the international and interminable flu virus shenanigans of recent years.

The health board's parody reads:

"No mask on your face

Big disgrace

Spreading your germs all over the place."

It is not clear to me how Freddie Mercury could have given his consent from beyond the grave for the use of his image and his song to promote such nonsense.

It is by no means a safe assumption that he would have gone along with it if he had lived.

Some other equally famous though still living musicians, to wit Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, risked their standing and good names, to defy the conformist hysteria which health boards and governments at the behest of shadowy figures manipulating the World Health Organisation, attempted to impose on the public via face masks, social distancing and vaccines made out of aborted babies, during what has now been revealed as a thoroughly artificially induced Covid 19 panic lasting several years.

By the way, I mean both the panic and the flu itself were artificially induced, since the panic was entirely unnecessary and the virus had been manufactured in a laboratory using non lethal viruses taken from bats by Chinese communist party scientists at Wuhan which had been deliberately turned into more dangerous viruses that human beings could catch, a criminally adventurous process known as gain of function research, intended to make yet another fortune for pharmaceutical companies in vaccine development and carried out using funding from Anthony Fauci then head of the American National Institute of Health.

That's some dark cabal right there: The Chinese Communist Party, Pharmaceutical Companies, the World Health Organisation and Anthony Fauci.

I kid you not.

And the information I've given above is precisely what billionaire social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg this week admitted the FBI had compelled him to censor from Facebook at the height of the government mandated Covid 19 hysteria.

Incidentally it shows a peculiar though not surprising lack of taste for Irish health boards to hijack the late Freddie Mercury without his consent for their supposed hygiene campaign since the man died of Aids, a disease he contracted by engaging in markedly unhygienic sexual activities with multiple partners of the same gender as himself, and I might add, a disease to which the international response from the 1980s to almost the present, was led by no less a personage than Doctor Anthony Fauci of the American National Institute of Health whose sole response to the Aids crisis, aside from developing vaccines that could never work as their aim was to make inherently unsafe behaviour safe, his catchall solution to Aids I say, was to urge people to use condoms when engaging in the sexual debaucheries which were killing them.

But I digress.

Back in small town Ireland, the nose ring girl had returned to the counter.

"I see you're still going on with that face mask rubbish," I commented politely.

"Oh that poster has been there for years," she smiled.

"You know the face masks don't work?" I said.

"I do," said she.

"You're humouring me, aren't you?" said I.

"I am," said she.

Her nose ring seemed to glimmer most wooingly.

In the half light of that poky little small town pharmacy, I saw no shadow of another parting.

our television listings

 

RTE 1

9am. JUDGE JUDY: Belicose New York harridan berates vulnerable people who really want to be on TV.

10am. MURDER SHE WROTE: Jessica discovers that the Covid 19 flu virus was engineered in a Chinese Communist Party laboratory at Wuhan with funding from Doctor Anthony Fauci of the American National Institute of Health. There's an unrealistic side plot about the World Health Organisation forcing people to wear face masks, engage in social distancing (ie standing at least two metres from each other) while ingesting vaccines made out of aborted babies.

11am. MOST HAUNTED: A frighteningly bad television programme.

12 midday. HOW RTE GOT ITS GROOVE BACK: In house documentary about RTE's renewal of its slander war against the Catholic Church. After being caught in 2011 paying an African to frame Father Kevin Reynolds for fathering a child, RTE might have been forgiven for easing off a bit or even for being a tad embarassed about its crass Marxian bigotries. But no. A decade later those lovable IRA proxies in the documentary deparment are back with all new programmes intended to stampede our drugged up debauched peasantry away from the ancient church. This programme looks at RTE's revitalised strategy against the Christian faith part of which inolves slandering dead priests such as Bishop Eamon Casey as they are less likely to sue and, more importantly for the crypto fascists at RTE, lesss able to defend themselve. There will also be a preview of another forthcoming RTE documentary series entitled Stolen, recycling the Magdalen launderies libel, in which the channel tries to persuade the abortion generation of Irish people that they are superior morally to those who came before us. The programme's peculiarly manipulative inuendo laden vilification focusses on past generations provision of adoption procedures for children of single mothers along with their provision of respite care homes for those mothers while ignoring the present generation's solution to all such matters, to wit the industrial scale systematic killing through chemical and surgical abortions of supposedly unwanted children in the womb. RTE are such humanitarians you guys.

1pm. NEWS: (That's enough RTE - Ed note) (Too right it is - James note)

the clash of civilisations

 A phone call from Yankee Joe.

Our talk ranges.

"Do you know Graham Linehan?" the Yank enquires at some stage.

"You mean the Cork man to whom the BBC gave mllions so that he might present an unwatchable chat show just because they thought he was attracted to people of the same gender as himself only to discover that everyone in Cork talks that way and that Graham is actually by Corkonian standards the ultimate macho man, in effect the Arnold Schwarzeneggar of Cork?"

"No I mean the guy who writes comedies. I presume you're talking about Graham Norton. I'm talking about Graham Linehan."

"Who he?"

"He's only the man responsible for some of the best TV comedies of the past thirty years."

"Such as?" I venture, fascinated that Graham Linehan could be off my radar having created Seinfeld, Friends and the Larry David Show.

"Black Books, Father Ted, and The IT Crowd," clarified the cousin. "All of them sheer comic gold."

"Ah Cousin," I remonstrated, more in sorrow than in astonishment at his lack of taste. "A great gulf opens up between us. It's like when I'n talking to the Brigadier about Israel. It's not just that we disagree. It's that we're on entirely different planets. Sheer comic gold? No, no, surely not. Sad post modern cyncial joyless drivel more like. But why do you bring up the immortal Linehan? You'r not just sticking it to me, are you?"

"He's been cancelled," explained the Yank. "He wrote something critical of transgenderism on a website and, boom, he lost everything: his marriage broke up; his friends don't want to know him; he can't get work in television. He'd been concerned about transgenderism because he feared the cultural promotiion of it might affect his own daughter. Can you believe he could lose everything at a stroke?"

"All for stating the truth about mutilating sex change operations which don't work, eh?" I mused, "But isn't there an irony here? I mean he played a not insignificant role in creating the present collapse in common sense societal moral values which has led to sex change operations and cancel culture. And he did it through the very comedies you love. I'm suggesting that the anodyne conformist sleazoid trash with which he cluttered up the airwaves on behalf of the amoral BBC and deparaved Channel Four, has led in a linear fashion to cancel culture itself. Now he's hoist on the monstrousness of the anti life anti Christian bigotries he himself fostered, Petard I mean."

"Jean Luc Petard?"

"No. Hoist on his own petard."

"Aw Heelers. You gotta have some sympathy for the guy."

"Actually Joe," I said ruminatively, "for the first time I think I'm starting to see a bright side to cancel culture."

a long overdue tribute to author broadcaster journalist photographer poet blogger and all round humanitarian brian byrne

 

One of my dogs went missing earlier this week.

Unbeknownst to me a delivery man at Supervalu shopping centre noticed the dog wandering on Main Street and brought her to the Guards, the Irish police force.

The Guards notified Brian Byrne that they had a lost dog in their possession.

Brian Byrne put a photo of the dog on his Kilcullen Diary website.

Kindly neighbours recognised her and phoned me.

The police had the dog back at my house two and a half hours after she first went missing.