This is directed at any reader of this blogsite but particularly at those who regularly take the time to comment, sometimes at length.
I am really pleased that we are now getting a range of people as guest bloggers. I think this makes for more interesting reading and for different perspectives. The majority of these blogs elicit comment and developed response from readers. So here’s my invitation/challenge: if these matters interest you, or if some matter that interests you hasn’t featured, why not write a guest blog? I am open to all shades of opinion, with the usual limits at abuse and libel. For those who’ve only commented to date, it would be helpful to put yourself in the shoes of those you respond to and/or criticise. It’d also help you make your future comments more thoughtful. Any takers?
Hi Jude. I would definately be keen to contribute!
What’s the difference between blogging and responding, isn’t it all dialogue?
Well, Dominic, your comment is an example of one difference: it’s a single sentence; most blogs are at least a few paragraphs long. They may be written in response to something but that’s usually something happening out there rather than on the blogsite. It’s (sort of) like a lecture/talk followed by Q and As. (Although I’m seriously considering removing myself, at least temporarily, from the discussions, and confining myself to blogs.It’s a question of time – discussions can sometimes (seem to) go on for ever…)
Dominic
As a blogger you are above mere dialogue.
You can simply light the fuse and then sit back and wait for the fireworks.
I would like to do one if i may?
Fadhb ar bith – no problem, Robert. No abuse, no libel, no punctuation or spelling bloops – oh, and riveting prose, please…
Aw Jude, with conditions like the above you’ve just about ruled out 99.9% of hopeful contributors!
Looks like i will have to pay you to proof read it…: )
Are you saying you can’t spell, punctuate or write clear prose? MMMM
Not up to you obviously high standards!
Great idea. But can you please arrange for 28 hour days so I have enough time to eat, sleep and attend to other necessities of daily living. As it is I’m finding it difficult to squeeze everything in and find myself becoming neurotic over not keeping up with the blogs, comments, discussions etc.
Aye Beachguy..that treadmill of life ….I know the feeling very well.You’ll just have to steel yourself to get by with even less sleep and get up an hour or two earlier…. cut back on that mad socialising and make time and space for all those wonderful thoughts.!! Simple , eh…
How would you go about it?
….technically speaking that is, good start eh
You just sit down and write Dominic…….something we’ve been trying to get MT to do for ages.
ON BEING HOCKEYED IN A REPLAY
Spot the odd one out from these three news items:
1. A United States Air Force AC- 130U gunship strafed a field hospital run by Medicins San Frontiers in Kunzun, in Old Afghanistan, killing 42. Amongst the casualties, including many women, were doctors, nurses and patients. Seven of the dead, including some women, were incinerated beyond recognition. President Barrack Obama is Commander in Chief of the United States Air Force.
2. Mrs. Michelle Obama delivered a passionate oration, throbbing with emotional sobs, in New Hampshire: ‘It has shaken me to my core in a way I could not have imagined………..And I’m sure it has done to you too, especially women. The disrespect of our ambitions and our intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to women’.
3. Moneygall once hockeyed Kilruane McDonagh’s in the Tipperary Senior Hurling Club Championship replay: 3-11 to 0-5.
So, how did you manage, faithful if not fateful reader? Thought so. Pretty obvious, eh?, Indeed a doddle.
The Robinson-Obamas as a putative political dynasty are still in the throes of learning the ropes, ropily, from their never-meant- to- be-mentors, their practiced predecessors in the dark arts: the Rodham-Clintons.
In the mid-1990s When President Clinton the First (the pre-Hill Bill) visited Government Buildings in Upper Merrion Street, Dublin 2 the same Edwardian edifice got a right good going over beforehand.
Courtesy of the SWAT team, armed to the teeth and other parts besides all the way down to their high, laced-up black boots. Eire-Government employees could only on gawk on like flies at these Gods with their 9 mm Heckler and Koch submachine guns and laser-like eyes, in their fire-resistant balaclavas and ballistic vests.
Electronically swept the place, they did, in the manner of the Hoover-founded FBI which organization duly repaid the compliment in the form of a FBI-funded J. Edgar.
(In France, one understands, they order things differently. No SWAT team allowed into Le Palais du Government, s’il vous plait: , les locals have their own securite, who are well capable of doing Le Hoovering, merci beaucoup. All American six -guns must be handed in with Le Sheriff beforehand).
The Taoiseach of the time of the Clinton courtesy call continued to sit idly as this Sweep by SWAT (which might have been sponsored by Schweppes) swashbuckled through, erm, Sovereign Irish Territory (SIT).
But this sweep was nothing in comparison to the clean-out which occurred immediately prior to the regime beguine of a previous incumbent of the Office of Irish Prime Minister .
(As to this versatile PM’s identity, a hint: he had a particular interest in endangered wild life species and once penned a best seller called: Towards a Gnu Ireland).
The day before the took office his oval, oops, oblong office was visited, in her top of the range wheelchair, by Madame Taoiseach, his everloving wife. To say there was a close inspection of the female staff in situ of the Office of Taoiseach doesn’t even commence to come close.
Microscopic, might be nearer the mark. Anyways/ Ar aon nos, one result of this thorough inspection,in which no cheekbone nor gemstone or let alone was left unturned, two female staff were re-assigned to other duties in the farthest reaches of the vast Government Buildings, one blonde (?), the other brunette (real).
One mentions this because neither of these two clean-outs will be in the nickel and dime place when the Mother and Father of all clean outs occurs by the time that the anything but fickle President Pillory Rodham takes the Office in the oval-shaped office, come early 2017..
For she will be accompanied by, erm, baggage. There will be Bubba Bill (for it is he !), former President but now Resident, sitting all alone in the White House with time and other things, perhaps on his hands while the first of Lez Prez in away from the Land of Aunt Samantha on biz visiting the rest of the World, in any one of 112 countries.
Bizzy as a bee, she’ll be.
Already the houndogs in the highways are baying that the ultimate irony of the The Dworkin Class taking power, by fair sex means or fairer, in the Land of Aunt Samantha is that (gulp) no female will be allowed within the Cordon Sanitaire which will be thrown within bronco-roping distance of the Choc Bawn.
Hark to the bark of the houndogs of Washington’s avenoos and alleyways.
-Well they said you was high class
Well, that’s just a lie
Well, they said you never caught a Cabot
And you ain’t no friend of mine.
But of course, that Mother and Father of all Clean-outs will pale in comparison to the Mother and Mother of all Clean outs when the post-President Pillory regime begins and President Michelle Robinson takes over in 2020.
(One knows this because Foresight has Twenty Twenty vision)
For the real Presidential Election currently being orchestrated by monominded minnies in the media, Stateside is the one after this.
-When they go low, we go high.
(For some reason, this sacred mantra of the moment never fails to evoke the image of Good Ole Boy Bill swinging from the crystal chandeliers in the egg-shaped office in The Perkin’s inner Presidential watcher).
The first thing which President Michelle Robinson-Obama will do Assumption into Oval Office will be to high-heel the encumbrance of the galling Monegall appendage O’Bama, having served its purpose, out of the way. And revert to her original handle.
Speaking of handles the sound of Handel’s ’’Silent Worship’ l comes to ear: already the houndogs of DC alleyways and other media outlets are barking it will be the Inauguration Song of Choice, though not as we know it:
-Do you not hear My Lady
Go down the garden singing
Blackbird and thrush were silent
To hear the alleys ringing.
Now, Baroque is a kinda musak which Prez to be Michelle has long since passed, not to mention Barack and Roll: dis lady is inta Rap Musak, yeah. Not least Sean John Combs aka Puff Daddy (soon to be Baroque Obama?)
-Sometimes I rhyme slow, something I rhyme quick
I was on 1-2-5 and South Nich
Chilling with this chick so swell
Call this chick, my man, Michelle
(Chorus)
It’s the D, the I, the D, the D, the Y
The D the I the D
It’s Diddy (Hold up ! the Diddy (That’s cool).
So, perhaps : the Broom that Sweepeth Clean.
She’ll be one bizzy bee:
First item, on the agender-drive agenda, after the mandatory dropping of the O encumbance, will be:
-The Mother and Mother of all Clean Outs.
Context, led thoil / please.
A month or two ago her everloving husband, Barack, -aka the Man from Monegall who had to barrack the Moneybags !- cut the ceremonial tape to the open the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Pride of place goes to (gasp) the block-long candy-red 1973 Cadillac Eldorado of (gulp) Chuck Berry (89). In 1962 Charles Edward Anderson Berry (for it was also he !) was charged with offences under the Mann Act: to wit, that he had transported a 14-year old Apache waitress, Janice Escalente , across state lines.
The accused did not duck-walk free from the dock: Chuck spent a year of a three year sentence in chokey. In 1979 Berry spent 120 days behind bars for (gulp) tax evasion.
In 1990 Charles Edward Anderson Berry was sued by several women for having installed a video camera in the ladies’ restroom in his restaurant. He settled for a class action with (gasp) 59 women. This cost the cool dude a cool 1.2 million squids, plus legal fees.
One can already see a certain candy-red Caddy being unceremoniously towed, if not high-heeled itself, out of the Smithsonian Museum in q. (see above).
-Can you imagine the way I felt?
I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt !
And that’s just for starters, sisters.
What next?
Ah, yes, and also in Washington, that , erm, gigantic memorial to a son of a preacher man who once explained (away) his ‘extraordinary number of extra-marital affairs’ as a (gulp) ‘form of anxiety reduction’.
Early barkings from the houndogs of Washington DC – as yet to be verified – indicate that President Robinson to be (!) is already working on her Inaugural Speech in 2020 to be tentatively titled:
-I have a (wet) dream.