Picture by Kevin Taylor
Don’t you just love the Red Arrows? The way they fly so close to each other without actually touching, the way they belch out those different colours and then do a nice smooth angle away from each other. So it must have been very disappointing for the good people of Newcastle Co Down when word came through that those magnificent men in their flying machines wouldn’t be putting in a visit after all.
Mind you, it’d be different if you were in Syria, say, and saw a British fighter plane not unlike a Red Arrow come whizzing overhead. For many Syrians, that was the last thing they’d have seen before dying. Nobody would claim that the 11,000 women and 7,700 children who have died in Syria were all killed by British fighter planes.But you can feel confident that they blew their fair share of them to bits.
And of course a lot of Libyans went to their deaths with the roar of British fighter planes in their ears. Certainly recently- released figures show that Britain spent thirteen times as much in bombing Libya than it did in rebuilding it.
So maybe it’s not totally bad news that the Red Arrows won’t be doing their fly-over at Newcastle. When you think about it, there’s something a bit sick-making when crowds of people gaze skyward to ooh and aahh at flying death machinery swooping overhead.
OMG. I actually agree with one opinion expressed by Jude. I hope he can extend that logic to all entities which promoted their power through killing
Professor, in the English language what word describes a descriptive piece which is several magnitudes of shortsighted? A respectful student.
If it’s my piece on the Red Arrows, Virginia, the answer is “truthful”
The appliance of science
If the incineration of a child and his father is not sickening enough, Moshe Ya’alon, a former Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Minister, is not happy about a nuclear agreement between Iran and a number of western nations. He also opposed Gaza disengagement proposals. In an interview with Der Spiegel, he stated that one way or another Iran’s nuclear programme must be stopped.
It is strange that to date, five Iranian scientists have died in car bombings.
The Red Arrows are used as salesmen for the British arms trade.
Of course these are the same machines that the British sold to the Indonesians and that they used to bomb the people of East Timor.
That you should be so lucky, Esteemed Blogmeister.
While you were missing out on the aero-batmen and their flying machines, The Red Arrows we down here were up to our proconsul tonsils in The Red Devils and will be for the next interminable season or so.
Yes, indeed, Denis O’Brien (DOB – may his tribe increase ! lest one forget) has already seen to that. And specifically through his own personal, erm, hang-glider equipped with his very own personalised Biggles goggles.
Thus was Dec ‘The Neck’ Lynch ( for it was he!) on the DOBle as it were: last week in his ‘Game for a Scaff’ column in the Sindo he gloatingly announced the end of a hellish sports- free summer and the start of yet another extraterrestrial extravaganza of the Creme de la Cremiership.
Opined the Premlin supreme from Le Left Bank de Athlone amidst multiple chortles :
-I’ve been studying the GAA mindset for a long time now.
Thoughtful pause, to allow the sheer puniness of it all to sink in.
– And it really is about time they faced reality. We spend a lot a time fooling ourselves in this country.
Observed The Great Realist.
– Time to end it now, chaps. English football IS our national game.
This of course is a week in the Free Southern Stateen during which DOB has shown his delightful sense of historical irony by making the first decisive move to impose a Section 31 of sorts on Dail Eireann, oops, The Irish Parliament. (As it is increasingly preferring to be called).
You have to hand it to DOB all the same (and we do ! we do !) whereas most of us outgrow our favourite board games of childhood, from snakes and ladders to ludo to draughts, DOB has never done that.
Rather has he stayed true to his inner self and so remains essentially a child at heart (and in the best meaning of that phrase, one hastens to add !).Once a monopoly player, always a monopoly player, would seem to be his most admirable motto.
And of course, as befits a big man with unfathomable pockets, and as a big fan of soccer, oops, footy he is able to bankroll not only the Banister and his Assistant Banister, O’Neill and Keane, of the profoundly fogbound and runaground FSS team but also to underwrite the rigmarole role of Dec ‘The Neck’ Lynch.
Banister is Dec’s take on Bainisteoir and he never fails to find it Hillarious 16.
All of this would be mildly soporiific if it wasn’t for the institutionalisation of this bigoted Biggles mindset. Take a quick look at the Railway End of the only unfinished National Stadium in…….(Michel Buffer, wherefore art thou, oh, Las Vegas Big Fight Announcer in our time of need?) ….in……..da……Woooorld !
The Unfinished End looks as if the Red Arrows had turned Kamikasi and got ready to crumble there.
Speaking of Banisters and Bainisteoiri,
Whereas the latter look as if they have a life outside of sport (cf Commandant Jim Gavin, sir, Bainisteoir Atha Cliath, who has combined his role as Chief Flying Instructor of the Irish Air Corps with specialising in the concept of flying wing backs and forwards, such a hapless monseirur as A. Wenger, sur l’autre main, looks as he might have problems climbing the stairs even with the aid of a banister, without falling on his, erm, munitions dump.
Four hundred years ago, The Great Shakes had terrific fun with a French character called Clapper de Claw and his reasonably inept efforts at learning the Q’s English.
Four hundred years on, the joke has word a little thin.
Try telling that though to Denis O Brien’s front of house man.
P S Love your double breasted suit, Mr. O !
(The last bit is tagged on, le bheith ar an dtaobh shabhailte / to be on the safe side. One just never knows when one might be dive bombed by some jivetalking solicitor’s runner).
So your against the Red Arrows because of their background fair enough but you don’t seem to have a problem consorting With Gerry Kelly and hosting an electoral event for him in North Belfast and for SF at the last elections who actually killed people here but that of course is different in your world view!
First of all. Ouch! Is tú atá géartheangacha a Jude! My view on the Red Arrows, rally car drivers, formula one (actually any form of race car driving) is that they are a waste of valuable fuel. Isn’t it ironic that the invaders involved in a war driven by greed for fuel have managed to waste so much oil.