Then let’s play “Nominate your Fantasy Security Council!” I’m not sure about the speculation about the Irish, though (and they’d probably have to disqualify themselves anyway, at the moment, since they were just on the SC last year. Hands up, everybody who noticed.)
but the excellent AccordionGuy beat me to it. The last line keeps coming back to me:
After endless spleen, spite and bombast from every side, this is so far the only genuinely noble thing to come out of this war. May Fate someday cross my path with this man’s, so I can shake him by the hand.
The goofy card below reminded me of this scene, which I thought I might share with you folks while I’m working on finishing the book. (Yes, I really am finishing it.)
Let’s see if it posts properly this time. (There seemed to be some difficulty with quotes appearing at the beginning of the “description” field in the RSS feed.)
“…Use �em for diagnostic purposes,” McCoy said. “Like the chess cubic. Archetypes.”
“Human archetypes,” Ael said.
“Some,” McCoy said. “Among hominid species, though, there are a lot of similarities in the oldest myths.” He cut the deck, placed the top half face down on the desk, next to the lower one. “Life and death, creation and destruction: we do a lot of the same things, though the motives may change from species to species. These aren�t about motives. You supply those.”
He looked up at her. “Shall I take one?” she said.
“As many as you like.”
“Three, then. A beginning: a middle: an end.”
“Three is one of the ways it�s done,” McCoy said.
She eyed the decks. “Must they be meditated upon, or is there some other requirement?”
McCoy shook his head. “Any way you like. It�s just a game.”
She threw him an amused glance and turned over the top three cards of the left-hand deck, from right to left.
In the first card a man stood at the top of a tower, looking out over mountains and sea, into a clear sunset sky with stars showing in it, and a waxing crescent moon riding high. He was leaning on a tall staff: beside him, from another staff like the first, a banner hung limp. In his free hand, unregarded, he held a small crystalline globe which seemed, in the moonlight, to have the shapes of continents graven on it: but the globe was delicate, almost invisible in the uncertain light, like a bubble.
In the second, a young man in old-fashioned shorts and T-shirt, with a light pack slung over his back, walked toward the edge of a cliff. A small dog was bouncing along beside him, but the young man didn�t seem to notice ether dog or cliff. His gaze was directed upward into the mountain air, and the sun burning down on the mist of the mountains all around him whited out anything else that might have been seen.
In the third, a man sat on a low chair in front of a vista of stormclouds, from which a veil of rain trailed over another landscape mostly obscured by mist. He was dressed in some kind of plain uniform, dark-colored, and in one hand, resting on his knee, he held a sharp straight sword upright. His expression was dark and grave, not revealing much.
McCoy sucked in his breath as he took in the cards at a glance. Ael looked at him, and said, “I have heard that sound before from my Master Engineer, when he tells me that we must have spares that we cannot afford…or make repairs for which we have no time. So the news is bad: but not mortally so.” She peered down at the third card. “And this worthy: who may he be?”
McCoy grinned briefly, though the expression was sardonic. “The original reference says, �A doctor, lawyer, or senator.�”
“Indeed.” She put up an eyebrow. “Well, there are enough of the last of those wandering about the landscape back home on ch�Rihan, and most of them wish me ill. Doctors we have in plenty; and legists as well, though in wartime sometimes they are quieter than normal. But there is little here to tell me which one of these is meant, and which will do me harm — if this card is meant as a harbinger of the future coming.”
“No. This…” He nodded at the first card. “Been musing on the nature of empire, have we, Commander?”
The look she gave him back was as sardonic as his own. “It would hardly take cards to tell you that. Though it is interesting that this comes up.” She sat back, folded her arms. “Doubts and fears enough, I have had,” she said. “And much time for reflection in these months during which Bloodwing and I have lived the silent life. Much time to revolve in my mind, again and again, what might be done next: what is being done at home. But comes a time when such reflection must stop.”
“That�s why this card is where it is,” McCoy said, “in the past. If you believe in this kind of thing.”
That left him with the third card, which he was frankly unwilling to deal with. “And this fearless youth,” Ael said. “But it is something other than fearlessness.”
“The Fool,” McCoy said. “Folly, in the classic sense of the word. Choices badly made. Error…confusion…even madness.”
She leaned forward to look at it, shook her head. “I would not be sure how to read that.”
“Neither would I,” McCoy said. “Probably nothing to it, Ael, as I told you. Just a game.”
“But he seems more than just a fool,” Ael said. “See, this card is different from the other two. �Rods�, �swords�: I would guess these cards are each part of a class within the larger deck. But this young man is of another class.”
“A bigger set of symbols,” McCoy said, “yes. The beginning of that other class, in fact. He could mean the beginning of a journey — but one into danger. The disorganized, the unknown…”
“Every day is unknown until it is over,” Ael said. “And sometimes even then. If this means our present is filled with uncertainty, that too would hardly be news. And the uncertainty will get worse: if the warning is against letting its increase unseat our reason, then I take it as good sense.”
She picked up the cards, handed them back to McCoy. He shuffled them back into the deck. “I thank you for showing them to me,” Ael said, getting up. “I take it you do not do so often.”
“No,” McCoy said, “because people might get the wrong ideas. Spock thinks I�m a witch doctor half the time as it is.”
Ael blinked. “A doctor surely,” she said, “but what might a witch be? Surely nothing I have seen on the ship.”
McCoy laughed and got up. “Probably simpler that you didn’t,” he said. Ael gave him an amused look and went out.
McCoy watched her go, then looked down at the deck again and reached out to it to put it away. He paused, and on impulse made a bet with himself — then turned over the top card.
The card showed a robed woman seated on a throne, in profile, very erect and still, and crowned. In one hand, point up, she held a sword. Behind her, in a windy sky, stormclouds blew tattering past. At her feet sat a small black cat with a thoughtful look in its eyes: not in profile, but looking out of the card at the one who read.
Uh oh, McCoy thought, and looked at the Queen of Swords for a moment, as thoughtful as the cat. The card was replete with meaning, as all the cards were, from the superficial to the profound. Sorrow, mourning, separation, long absence — those were the general indications. But McCoy was tempted for the moment, however unusual it might be, to take the card literally at face value. The heart of the problem of the moment was a woman with a sword. The card�s usual meaning, when read in the personal mode, indicated a woman in a position of power — though not a position that would let her use it. More generally, it suggested that trouble was coming, and a bad time.
Didn�t need a piece of plastic to tell me that, McCoy thought, picking up the card to put it away.
But I couldn’t tell you what that would be.
“…You have to be fairly familiar with both tarot cards and Nature’s Ineffable Harmonic Simultaneous 4-Day Time Cube Creation Principle (an unlikely combination) for this to make any sense, and even then I wouldn’t be too sure. But, hey, the Internet was just made for pages like this, so here it is.”
So yesterday was St. Patrick’s day, and we went down to the pub to be with our neighbors for a while, as usual. We went early, as Peter is still suffering from his cold, and didn’t want to have to cope with the late-night smokiness that sometimes ensues at Moore’s on busy nights.
We headed home at about eight-thirty, puttered around the house taking care of a few things, and settled in for the evening. I turned in around eleven, as usual: Peter stayed up to watch some stuff on the Discovery Channel.
Around one-thirty AM I was awakened by a heavy thump and what sounded like a loud scraping noise outside. A moment later, Peter’s voice came from downstairs: “Hon, I think someone’s had an accident outside! I’m going out to check.”
As he went out, I threw some clothes on and came downstairs to follow him. But he was already back in the house. “There’s a car upside down in the road outside the house,” he said. “I’m calling the Guards.” (To non-Irish readers: the police in Ireland are called the Garda Siochona or Gardai [“the Guards”] for short.)
Peter got on the phone and called them, then turned to me. “I went out there, and voices came out of the car: ‘Help us get it off the road!’ I said, ‘With what?'” (When I had a look at the wreck, it was plain that no three people were going to be able to move it, whether or not there was another car to help, which there wasn’t: we don’t have one.) “I said to them, ‘I’m calling the Guards.’ And they started shouting, ‘Don’t call the Guards! Don’t call the Guards!’ I said, ‘Bloody well I am calling the Guards!'”
We gave each other wry looks as we went out to put some gas lamps on either side of the wreck to help keep other motorists from running into it. (Note to self: buy some road flares.) The passengers’ concern most likely meant that (a) the driver was driving drunk and didn’t want to be breathalyzed, (b) the car’s road tax wasn’t paid, (c) the car hadn’t passed its National Car Test (the mandatory emissions / road safety test for cars over ten years old: the car’s plates were 1991 County Kerry plates): (d) the car wasn’t insured: (e) the car was stolen: or (f) some combination of one or more of the above. In any case, the inhabitants of the car were nowhere to be seen…probably, by this time, they were half a mile or more down the road in the direction of Dunlavin.
While waiting for the Guards, we walked up the road a bit to see what had happened. There is a steepish hill just to the east of us, and the road comes down around it in a fairly tight curve. The Kerry car had come down it, possibly on the wrong side of the road (or possibly just driving in the middle of the road, as too many country drivers around here tend to do on narrow country roads when there’s no indication of oncoming traffic), misjudged the curve, either swerved or drove straight onto the grassy verge on the right side of the road, and there hit the hedge just before our house. This hedge is mostly holly, but some other softwoods as well, and grows in and on an old low stone wall which has almost been swallowed up in that spot by the accretion of roadside dirt and growth over the last century or so. The car hit and smashed a cherry laurel tree that occupied that spot; though the laurel absorbed some of the car’s speed, it couldn’t absorb enough of it to keep the fairly sharp angle of the bank and the old stone wall underneath it from flipping the car over on its back as it was deflected back into the road. Looking at the impact spot, it occurred to me that had the cherry laurel not been there, the hollies might not have been able to deflect the car sufficiently so that it would flip. Judging by the direction of its tire tracks in the soft earth in front of the hedge, it would have plunged through them, down into our front yard, and straight into the corner of our house, three feet from where Peter’s head was as he lay on the living-room sofa watching “The Good Life” on UK Gold.
We spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes keeping curious kittens away from the wreck, the lights of which were slowly going out as the acid dripped out of its battery. (The senior cats were inside, exhibiting a general reaction of “Why should I get up for this?“) …The road was full of broken glass and shattered fender-plastic, and the air was full of the smell of oozing crankcase oil, but fortunately, not of gasoline. Shortly the Guards arrived, turned on the blue flashers on their car, and got out to find out what had happened. They were jovial, and rather resigned to the idea that the accident probably involved drink or possibly joyriding: they were as relieved as we were that no one seemed to have been hurt. The two of them started examining the wreck with flashlights as we directed one or two passing motorists around the wreck, which almost entirely blocked the road. The Guards reached in carefully past the shattered glass and started looking through the wreck as best they could. “Took his keys, all right,” one of the Guards said. They pulled out various plastic soft-drink bottles, a lottery scratch-card booklet, a page of the Sunday News of the World, somebody’s fuzzy hat: but there was nothing more revealing than that. The occupants had been careful to remove anything that might have identified them.
The Guards called a towing service, and a flatbed towtruck arrived around 0230. The car’s roof crumpled and groaned with the strain of being winched up onto the towtruck. “There goes his no-claims bonus,” Peter said. (Sardonic laughter from the Guards, who probably were also in doubt about the car’s insurance status at that point.) Around 0245, the truck and the Guards left the scene, and Peter collected the cats and the gas lamps and came back in to finish watching his late-night TV.
…I went back to bed and put on the radio to help me get back to sleep. A mistake, since BBC Five Live was full of the usual: wars and rumors of wars, mysterious plagues, general madness, and bad cricket results. (sigh) Reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes did more to relax me again than any of that.
Shortly I’ll add a picture of the hedge here.
No page anywhere on the Owl Springs website gets the number of hits that this one does, so we’ve added a couple of online video tutorials to keep it company.
The main link —
Peter’s Mum’s Soda Bread Recipe(s)And to supplement the above article, we now offer a two-part video Soda Bread Tutorial:
Last night Blogger dumped an entry after I posted it (no matter, this one replaces it.) But that was just another in a series of weird technical difficulties we had on coming home.
The taxi pulled into the drive by the house yesterday (Sunday), and Peter jumped out to have a look at the fishpond…and saw that the fountain wasn’t running. We both said “Uh, oh…” in unison, since this was the first symptom of the week-long power failure our house had last year when we were in the US.
Heading into the house, we found that there had indeed been some massive power surge that had flipped the circuit breaker on the main house “board”, about four o’clock on Friday. We flipped the circuit-breaker, and things came back on…mostly. The food in the freezer was OK: only a little ice in the topmost shelf had melted…that thing has good insulation. But the freezer’s sensor chip seems to have been fried, in that it doesn’t know what temperature it is inside any more, and every now and then triggers its “power loss” alarm, screaming in ill-founded frustration. Additionally, when Peter went upstairs to reset the clocks and so forth, he discovered that his computer’s power source had also been fried. (At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. Push the button, no power. The cord’s not at fault, and neither is the plug [note to non-UK and Irish users: plugs here have fuses in them]. Seems to me that if the power source was OK and the motherboard was fried, we would at least get the power source’s fan coming on, but nothing further, or a screwy POST, or whatever.) What joy.
Talking to our neighbor Mary (who kennels the cats for us when we’re on extended trips) we find that the area suffered extensive and unusual lightning storms for a couple of the days we were away; so that might have been responsible for Peter’s blowout…and if it was, we should be lucky that nothing else got blown up. But now we have to call the Bosch people in to replace the freezer’s sensor chip, and I have to find out whether I can get P. a new power source locally that’ll suit his present motherboard, or whether I have to send back to Scan in the UK for it. Either way, his machine’s going to be down for days. He’s got his old laptop hooked up to his monitor and his various other peripherals, so that’s OK…for the moment.
But there’s one cheerful thing about this, in our “household mythology”. It probably means there’s money on the way in, because that’s always when the electronics around here start to die…
I’ve put back the comment system, and everything still seems to be running fine. What joy! RSS users, are you seeing the new feed OK? (This one’s at http://outofambit.blogspot.com/rss/outofambit.xml.) For those of you using Syndic8 and/or UserLand, I’ve added the feed’s address to both of those. Any thoughts on where else I should submit?…
A slight oddity: on my own browser, I have to hit the “refresh” button twice to see the new feed after I publish. No idea what this means. Never mind: now I can dump the geekery for a while and get on with this novel…
And about time, too. Europe sends out an ion-driven probe around July 15…
While we’re cleaning off DV tapes so that we have plenty of them available for Fasnacht, I came across this clip in Windows MovieMaker (.wmv) format, which should satisfy the curiosity of those of you who have been wondering about the recurrence of the “Sheep are eating my rosemary” theme. Non-broadband users, beware: this clip is 6 megs of pastoral sunshine, birdsong, and baaaaa-ing. Not to mention little lambies running around in the green spring pastures behind our house. (I hope to later catch some video of that most dreaded of rural manifestations, the “Lamb Gang”, i.e. about twenty lambs running around like crazy together.)
So I’m sitting here working on this book, and all of a sudden it’s getting to be time to go away to Basel, in Switzerland, for Fasnacht.
Fasnacht is a regional Swiss version of the Lenten carnival tradition, related (somewhat) to Mardi Gras and its cousins. But about Basler Fasnacht, more can be said than just that, and I’ve said some of it elsewhere, so I’ll quote:
…Fasnacht takes some explaining. It�s more than just the carnival tradition which runs through other parts of Europe. It can start the week before Shrove Tuesday, and may run through until the week after, depending on local preferences. And Fasnacht has very much its own character in each of the cities which celebrate it.
Some cities do it twice�once for the Catholic population, once for the Protestants, on different weeks (so that each group can go to the other�s party?). In Basel it�s an intensely adult preoccupation: razory verbal wit overlies the outrageous costumes, and underlies the rest of the celebration, in the form of the zeedel,the long skinny printed handbills of rude and loony dialect doggerel handed out by costumed marchers to passersby; and also as schnitzelbaengg, the sudden satirical theatre which breaks out without warning in bars and restaurants, and on the street. There are adult dangers, as well. In Basel, at Fasnacht, as long as you�re masked (meaning complete-body disguise), you can go up to anyone you know, put on a squeaky high voice, and tell them exactly what you think of them. They�ll have no comeback: traditionally, retaliation against someone who gave you a piece of their mind at Fasnacht just isn�t done.
Here, more than elsewhere, the �pressure valve� quality of carnival tradition makes itself plain�and the continuity of medieval tradition, too, when at four in the morning all the lights in the city suddenly go out, and the massed “cliques,” the formally-constituted parade groups, stand all over the city in their hundreds and thousands, drumming and fifing the Morgestraich: the slow, stately Basler call to arms. On a freezing February night, in the pitch darkness, with the drumbeats and the shrill fluting of the fifes rattling off the old buildings around you, you find it unnervingly easy to believe that you�ve fallen into the fourteenth century, and that the enemy is outside the city walls yet again, waiting to sack the place. When something of the kind might happen any year, you take your Carnival pleasures seriously. You might not taste them again…
This year, Fasnacht starts on March 10th: at 4 AM, as always. Besides my book work, I’ll try to do some blogging from there. I’ll also try to post some video. Here, as a foretaste, linked to the photo, is a little video from last year: the first couple of minutes of Basler Fasnacht. (This is Windows MovieMaker format, by the way. I’m still working out how to make the software excrete MPEGs.)
…They started a little early, last year. Normally the city’s streetlights don’t go out till the first four-o’-clock stroke of the great bell in the Muenster, but last year somebody at the power company got too excited (I think) and turned the lights off a bit early. (This is why, in the beginning of the clip, the camera bobs and swoops all over: I wasn’t ready.) You can hear the crowd go “Yeah!” — and then the fifing and drumming breaks out in a huge fugal racket as, for just these few minutes, every clique in the city plays the same piece of music, the “Morgestraich” proper: “reveille”. One small clique walks by the camera with their laderne, a painted lantern covered with satirical art by one of the city’s graphic artists.
Their costumes (hard to see in the lighting of this clip: sorry) are themed to match the lantern, and on their heads they wear lanterns with related designs, some of them lit from inside by electric bulbs, some by candles. Some also carry staffs with lighted lanterns on them. There will be at least a hundred cliques, possibly more, doing this kind of thing between 4 AM and dawn on the 10th. They will march with their laderne in a big parade, the cortege, on Monday afternoon, and again on Wednesday. Tuesday is children’s day, when parents parade informally with their children: that day the laderne are displayed in the plaza outside the Muenster, so that everybody can closely examine the astonishing artwork on them. But between Monday morning at 0400, and Thursday morning at 0400, the fifes and the drums will never stop by night or day. There’ll be food and drink in the streets, parties, balls, the huge concert of guggemusik, which is music played badly (on purpose) on massed band instruments, and general carrying on. The streets will be knee-deep in confetti every night, and it’ll all be gone again every morning. (One way you know it’s time to go back to Fasnacht is that you no longer find confetti in your clothes when you’re doing the laundry.)
Some Baslers, bored with it all, leave town.
But thousands of people come to Basel from all over the place for the Morgestraich — the largest number in recent years, on a weekend when the weather forecast was good, was 250,000 — and among them, among relatively few English-speakers, we’ll be there.
Watch this space for further developments. More details can be found at http://www.fasnacht.ch/?pm_1=21&mid=21 (check the sidebar for more English-language info). They also have a page with links to the various sources for live streaming video and audio, here.
It’s a fair question. Keeping it simple (because that way I can understand it):
RSS is short for either “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”, depending on who’s telling you about it. It’s a way to “syndicate” your blog, making it available to many more readers than would normally see it because it was merely linked to in someone’s blog or web page. Producing an RSS version of your blog makes it possible to send it as “news headlines” (or in longer formats if desired) to one of the various news aggregator sites where blogophiles and others can quickly gather information from websites and blogs that interest them. If your blog interests a person, he or she can have his or her news aggregator software pick up your blog immediately when it’s freshly published. (This whole thing is an oversimplification of many more complex issues, and I beg the indulgence of bloggers far more educated in RSS than I am.)
Publishing a blog in an RSS version involves taking a normal HTML-formatted blog and turning it into one formatted in XML instead (see here for what an XML page can look like). There are various formats or “flavors” of RSS: 2.0 is the newest one: Blog*Spot uses 0.91. There are a lot of issues about RSS publication which I don’t yet understand, having other things to think about all day, like books and cats and husbands, and sheep not eating my rosemary bush again this year (it’s spring…the lambs get in through the fence, and their moms follow them, and eat my garden…). But I’m working on it.
More general data can be found here and here and here and here and here.
Now excuse me, because I swear I can hear sheep in the front yard again —