A designer has worked up a typography video of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Chicago.” There’s a small promo at the beginning.
Irish stew
St. Patrick’s Day draws to a close, but I shall honor the saint one last time with the highest compliment I can pay—that is, an Irish melody sung by the world’s greatest Norwegian singer, Sissel Kyrkjebø. The song, of course, is You Raise Me Up, but the melody is Danny Boy. Or Londonderry Air, if you prefer. Or Derry Air, if you’re a strong Fenian.
To Norwegians, it’s the day following St. Patrick’s Day that’s the important one. We call that, Angrep Irland Fordi Alle de Irsk Er For Bakrust Å Motstådagen (Raid Ireland Because All the Irish Are Too Hung Over To Resist Day).
A Facebook friend posted an Irish blessing today, and it seemed oddly familiar to me. Then I remembered. I wrote it. I made it up one St. Patrick’s Day years agone, on Baen Books’ discussion board, when I used to hang out there. It goes like this:
“May you ever have bread on your table, and more bacon than bread, and more beer than bacon. And may you have need of none of it, having eaten and drunk your fill at your enemies’ wakes.”
Father Aillil is always at my elbow.
Mark Steyn delivers a bouquet to that much-maligned musical genre, the American Irish song, here.
“I am trying,” Chauncey Olcott once said, “to help the world along with the genius of Ireland. That little island has much to teach, and if people will but listen, they cannot fail to be impressed and improved. The fortunes of war, the mischances of statesmanship, and the awful curse of poverty have combined to keep the world in ignorance of everything Irish, excepting its suffering, hopes, songs and dauntless courage. Yet these are a very small part of the Irish character as an entity. At an early period they realized the vital importance of exercise, sunlight, fresh air, and water as the conditions precedent of all health and happiness. They cultivated the horse and dog; they excelled in the chase; they were proficient in falconry, and they had many Izaak Waltons before that immortal angler was born… For grace and vigor nothing could be better than the old-fashioned game of handball, while in putting the stone and throwing the hammer the Irish still hold the championship. In music and song their genius is well known; nevertheless, it is greater than the public is aware. From the earliest years, the singer has been the honored member of the community, and in ancient days ranked with the great nobles in the courts of the Milesian kings.”
And finally, in a note appropriate for the day’s Catholic associations, Vox Day opens a window and throws some light on real world comparisons between child abuse by Catholic priests and child abuse by government caretakers.
This doesn’t excuse what the pedophile priests did nor does it excuse the diabolical decision of the Vatican to permit homosexuals to join the priesthood in the first place. They eminently deserve whatever punishment they receive, in both this world and the next. But it puts the scale of their evil deeds into the proper statistical perspective. And while one could argue that physical beatings and psychological abuse are not as bad as sexual abuse and should be omitted from the comparison, one also has to keep in mind that none of the crimes committed by the priests rose to the lethal level either.
Tip: Chad at Fraters Libertas.
Ag Criost An Siol
Here’s one Patrick may have enjoyed more than the previous song.
Christ’s is the Seed
Christ’s is the Harvest
Into God’s barn
May we be brought.
That Anthem Which Drowns Out All Other Music
While in choir practice last night, it occurred to me (and I think others have said it before) that Patrick would want us to remember a day in his honor by honoring the Lord God who drove the darkness out of Ireland. So here’s an Irish hymn: ‘Mo Ghrá’sa, Mo Dhia’ (My Love, My God)
The People Of the Mist, by H. Rider Haggard
Michael Palin, formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, pretty much ruined the term “ripping yarn” with a satirical TV series he did, years back. In spite of him, though, there is such a thing as a ripping yarn, and The People Of The Mist
As I read The People of the Mist, the thought that kept recurring to me was, “Why hasn’t this book ever been made into a movie?” The author’s most famous work, King Solomon’s Mines, has been filmed numerous times, but TPOTM contains pretty much all the elements that made KSM so exciting, with the addition of a girl in the original story (movie versions of KSM generally insert one). Not only that, her relationship with the hero is one of those love/hate, “you make me so mad I could kiss you” affairs that filmmakers love. Plus there’s spectacle aplenty. Continue reading The People Of the Mist, by H. Rider Haggard
Never, Oh Never, Oh, Never Again
Prithee, I beg your attention a moment. I did not slur all Irish folk music as being pulled from the sad sack. I believe I said that only of Irish love songs. Give a listen to this drinking song, which for the record is not a love song:
"The Whistling Gypsy Rover"
Faith, and since it’s an Irish mood we’re in, here’s my personal favourite Irish musical group, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, doing “The Whistling Gypsy Rover,” a song which puts the lie entire to the vile slanders of Phil (and Ian in Comments) that all Irish (or all folk, if you prefer) songs are about misery and loss.
Granted, 99% of folk songs are about misery and loss. Because, to be sure, when a fellow’s happy he generally has better things to do than write songs, while when he’s feeling low writing songs is about all he does feel up to.
She Moved Through the Fair
It’s St. Patrick’s Day this week. This version is not the version I’m most familiar with. Apparently, the small Irish band which came to town some years ago and encouraged me to buy their CD sang an ancient version of this very old song. The gist is the same. A young man last sees his bride-to-be walking through the fair. Sometime afterwards, she dies, and in the last verse, her ghost visits him at night to say her final words to him again.
That’s the way Irish love songs go. One lover dies; another one is rejected; or another couple is opposed by their family or society or circumstances from living happily ever after. Moral: Don’t love an Irish person.
What If Christ Had Not Come?
Mike D’Virgilio talks about the first season of “Spartacus” and what the world would be like if Christianity had never existed. As we’ve touched on many times on this blog, one thing that would been different is the idea of forgiveness. Forgive others as Christ has forgiven you? Crazy. I wonder if Islam, which spun off of Muhammad’s exposure to Christianity, would have come about either. Even Buddhism and parts of Hinduism have changed in response to the teachings of Christ Jesus. The Way, the Truth, and the Life has really turned people upside down over the years.
In America, the "U" is pronounced short
Poster for the “The Birds,” a film starring Tippi Hedren, a native of New Ulm, Minnesota.
Before you ask, yes, I did go to New Ulm on Saturday for the reenactors’ event. It wasn’t our period, being mostly fur trade wares on sale in a local hall, but we were going to meet a guy who had some stuff to sell us that he wanted to get off his hands. We did that deal, and now my friend is pretty sure we got skinned. But skinning is what fur trapping is all about, after all.
I’ve come to think of New Ulm as a kind of mythical place, like Brigadoon, which you can only visit by accident. Although it’s a not least among the tribes of Minnesota, no one has ever built a direct route to it from the Twin Cities. It’s tucked away in a valley out of sight, so that you’re never sure you’re getting there until you’re right on top of the place.
It was even tougher than usual to get there on Saturday, because for a good stretch of the route we experienced white-out conditions. It wasn’t actually snowing, but it had snowed the night before, and now we had a strong wind that blew that new snow off the fields and across the highway, in a reasonable facsimile of a blizzard. We were actually stopped by emergency trucks and told to go back, which wasn’t the greatest idea as the highway behind us had also been effectively instruments-only for twenty miles or so. We turned onto a parallel gravel road, and a nice old couple who passed us told us that if we followed that road and “turned at Five,” it would take us directly into New Ulm. They, needless to say, were actually Underground Folk (see my novels) trying to lead us astray and put our souls in peril. Fortunately they weren’t very good at it, because the road we ended up on, though not the one they promised, did get us where we were going.
We had lunch in a local Rathskeller, where we waited about an hour for a couple hamburgers. (Anti-Norwegian prejudice lives on.) The most interesting conversation I had was with a gunsmith in a beaded top hat who insisted on telling me all about his work (which was wonderful), though I warned him at the outset I wasn’t in the market for his fine wares. Did you know that the best way to make a brass rifle barrel is to dig a very deep, thin hole in the ground, and pour the brass in straight down?
OK, you knew that. But I didn’t.