cloudsoup

I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.

Denis Leary via Samizdata via Stephen Pollard

Post-Cocteau, singing this time with Massive Attack in a live version of 2003′s Teardrop

Cocteau Twins – Pink Orange Red

Another trip down memory lane: London, sharing the flat with Maureen, who’s now living in the States. This was one of her favourites.

Your chance to compare Tim Buckley’s version of his song with This Mortal Coil’s cover.

This Mortal Coil

Tim Buckley

Mack The Knife, Ute Lemper

Song for today courtesy of YouTube.

Today – at this moment actually – I’m installing KDEvelop and various support add-ons . An IDE for KDE with support for C/C++, Ruby, scripting and so on.

It’s a few years since I’ve done any serious low-level programming. In fact, I think the last such project I worked on was the development of a COM object to suck in foreign exchange information in real time, C++ on an MS platform. My development experience on Linux is limited although I used to support a job scheduling system written on a Unix platform and used by BT but from today I’m rolling up my sleeves and getting down with KDEvelop.

Don’t know if I should report on my progress, it might be so painfully slow.

Kennedy wasn’t so good at transparency either. And, if anything, he was more reckless in foreign policy than his rich-kid, daddy’s boy successor, George W. Bush

Andrew Sullivan, JFK to GWB?

Rich-kid? Daddy’s boy? Bush? Ok, but let’s not forget Kennedy either. Kennedy’s grandfather was a three-term member of Congress and a mayor of Boston. His father went to Havard, had been estimated by Fortune magazine as being somewhere between the 9^th and the 16^th richest person in the US and had been the US Ambassador to the UK. JFK himself went to the LSE, Princeton and Havard. As for being a daddy’s boy, his brother Joe was killed in World War II, making John next in line to fulfill his father’s political ambitions.

Just so we don’t forget.

Over at normblog, Gene Zitver, a contributer to Harry’s Place, reveals that his favourite poem is Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright. I’d never heard of it so I looked it up.

It’s in free verse and from a quick Googling I suspect it’s a popular subject for English assignments in US high schools. It’s a very short musing on the lives of working people in a steel town in Ohio. It goes like this

Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

I am quite sure I have had a stroke (the final medical diagnosis is still pending), a small one I suppose, since I still drive a few weeks after my 93rd birthday. At this age, I must say that I do delight in people’s amazement when I tell them how old I am. But under all this is the knowledge that I am the oldest male on either side of my family, maternal or paternal, and I know I must go fairly soon. I just don’t like the idea.

from Don To Earth, Donald Crowdis’s blog

Go read his blog. He survived the 1917 Halifax Explosion (largest artificial explosion until the first atomic bomb test explosion), he was the first host of CBC Television’s The Nature of Things, he’s 93, he blogs, and he’s contemplating his own death. It strikes me forcefully, reading Don To Earth, how very lucky I am – we are – now to be slipping into an age when lives will be permanently recorded on blogs, on video, on audio.

I remember a pair of my great-grandparents and a great-grand-aunt from my childhood. The great grand-parents were from my mother’s side of the family but I’ve no idea which of my maternal grandparents was their child. Mine isn’t the sort of family to have kept those records and my parents were vague – suspiciously vague even – about their families. How fantastic it would be to go back to blogger, or the the Internet Archive, or something similar, to look them up and read their own words.

The traces people leave are often are so slight. Sometimes a parish record of a birth and a death, sometimes not even that, and often nothing at all left between of a lived life. Now that’s changing and Don’s an example of how valuable, individual and first-hand experences will be preserved – … and to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is blogs.

So, to get the Larkin correctI looked up Arundel Tomb, found the lines, then made the mistake of looking up the Top 100 on Poem Hunter. Good grief.

Maya Angelou? Pablo Neruda? ee cummings? I assume this list is really telling me about the literary preferences of 16 year-old American students. Or, better, the literary tastes of female American high school teachers of a certain age.

Mine? Ah that would be telling. I am partial to a spot of Donne (When my grave is broke up again / Some second guest to entertain … ) and his irony would slice through the cloying nonsense of this Top 100 list. But I’m not telling.