Ah, the blessed Mary... Mary Black, of course, the queen of Ireland. Once saw her live and all my Celtic blood rose to the surface, since I was surrounded by English men who were unaware of her inner strength and wouldn't know how to spell Uileann much less appreciate their haunting beauty. I really mustn't listen to Liam O'Flynn or Christy Moore too much, I can almost smell the peat and the wild west coast's Atlantic spray....
This was, I think, taken during a tour in 2003. She seems to go down well in Holland, also Japan, which seems unusual. I think I must have first run across her when she did a superb cover of the incomparable MCC's 'Moon and St Christopher'
My night for listening to nostalgia, from Billy Ray Cyrus to William Ackerman. Must be getting old, I'll be spinning Bryan Adams next....

Wiggle room. إن شاء الله

Someone sent me a 30 - second clip of the undermentioned in full and mellifluous flow, which I almost allowed to irritate me. This paragraph is from the book.

"The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason."

Also sprach Zarathustra, aka Richard Dawkins, our very own modern-day Nietzche. I wonder what he might possibly mean? High treason is an act of gross disloyalty, presumably in this context, to one's own intellect, which seems to me to have some quite nastily schizophrenic undertones to it. His wrath overtakes his reason, sometimes, exampled with the delightful 'miraclewreaking'. I'd quite like to wreak a miracle, personally. All of the above has only tangential bearing on the title today. The great all-seeing, most gracious, most merciful God of Islam, might be perceived in either of the above ways, although I have some conceptual difficulty with God as a metaphor. Metaphor for what, one asks? A metaphor for his self, perhaps. Muslims use (up to twenty times a day) the invocation of the presence of Allah in human affairs. Insha'Allah, to be precise, is the beautiful cover-all phrase even Westerners use when they are asked when a particular something might happen. Or not. Or they'd rather it didn't and are too polite to say so. Water is leaking all over the bathroom floor and the plumber when asked when he is coming, replies, 'Tomorrow, inshallah', meaning, of course that tomorrow is very probably quite out of the question and were he to bestir himself to think any further into the future, a week Tuesday might just be on the cards. Or not.

Cutting the grass

For those aware, cutting the grass is a painful business. Especially for the hard-to-reach places on the western reaches of the garden. Our souls are easy to mow when the ground is flat, green-perfect, golf-course fresh. When the moles within burrow and turn the ground into a minefield of unexpectedness, one learns to think on one's feet and twirl pas de deux as gracefully as one might. Rencontres du temps perdus is a misnomer. Every twist of the green and every turn of the putter's handle brings remembrance as fresh as if yesterday had barely been. To sunsets over Topkapi and pearl earrings.... A little Yiddische humor to brighten a day or two.. Three brothers just off the boat at Ellis Island are questioned by an Immigration Officer, who asks the first, "What is your name?" "Berl" he replies. The Officer says, "Beryl? You can't have a name like that in America. From now on your name is 'Buck.'" He turns to the second brother and says, "What is your name?" "Cheyl" he replies."Cheyl? You can't have a name like that in America. From now on your name will be 'Chuck!'" He then asks the third brother, "And what's your name?" "Ferl," he replies, "And I'm going back to Poland..."

Fleeting, Smothered Gorgonian Bluntness

It's an addictive little game, isn't it? Blogging is the inept's way of saying to a largely unheeding world that they, as Francis Schaeffer put it, are there and are not silent.
Being alone in a foreign country causes one to seek cybercompanionship more than perhaps the simpler but more responsible pleasures of wife and family. Peeking into the world of cybernet curtains, behind which sit fat naked men claiming to be fourteen year old girls from Ipswich, postings on boards that probably few read and the fertility of overfevered imagination whiles away many a twilight. Also, posts are probably so lacking in interest to anyone but their authors that viruses spread their infection elsewhere. This caught my eye, from the guru of bloggers, Robert Scoble & Shel Israel .. An Excerpt from Naked Conversations: Bloggings's Six Pillars: There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel. You can find any of them elsewhere. These are the Six Pillars of Blogging:
1.Publishable.Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2.Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3.Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4.Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5.Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free "home delivery" of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6.Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
The seventh is a variation on my own theme:
7. We all hate total brain dumps. We're still metaphorically in our high chair, being fed information in small gobbets with entertaining subplots 'here comes the airplane.....' taking more if we wish after we've digested what we've received so far.

So far, so good. I rather think I'm going to put together a blog of an entirely different water next time. Perhaps something educational, with all sorts of weird overtones to trap the unwary....
The title? Oh, that's an anagram of "Blogging: hours of endless entertainment." Tee hee

Penguins

I am speechless with quite unjustifiable self-admiration. My tiny, frail laptop with an Internet connection no more secure than a line of wet string, has managed to download a fully functional CD bootable version of Linux, which is rather like learning about computing from scratch all over again. It's amazing how one's thinking becomes a resonant image of Windows and you behave as that nice Mr Gates has taught you, it's only when you get out into the fresh air of open source that you realise what you've been missing. There are some quirky litle glitches but at least with a modicum of UNIX nous, most problems are transparent and not difficult to solve. It's faster, cleverer and more intuitive than I could have imagined, and, best of all it is, like advice, free of charge

Desert, mostly

Kuwait. A long, thin drinkawater of a country, approximately one-third the size of Wales. Most of the inhabitants are coastal, and Kuwait City to the Saudi border is one long suburban sprawl. A car seems to be essential, preferably huge, 4WD with a highly efficient air conditioner, but in the interim, taxis will have to do. The bus service is cheaper, but less regular. The 120kph freeway limit is, remarkably, adhered to with some rigour, most cars and all the taxis having audible speed limiters. This of course is the Holy Month of Ramadan, let joy be unconfined. I though a colleague was joking when she told me that the police will arrest anyone caught smoking in public, apparently not. Spending the rest of Ramadan in a Kuwaiti jail isn't tempting, thus I have to be more self-controlled than usual, which is hard for me.
The Month of Ramadan is also when it is believed the Holy Quran "was sent down from heaven, a guidance unto men, a declaration of direction, and a means of Salvation". Excellent.
Ramadan is a time when Muslims are supposed to concentrate on their faith and spend less time on the concerns of their everyday lives. It is a time of worship and contemplation, or so I am told...
One is not allowed to eat or drink during the daylight hours. Smoking and sexual relations are also forbidden during fasting. At the end of the day the fast is broken with prayer and a meal called the iftar. In the evening following the iftar it is customary for Muslims to go out visiting family and friends, which is why you can never get a parking space in the mall. According to the Quran:
One may eat and drink at any time during the night "until you can plainly distinguish a white thread from a black thread by the daylight: then keep the fast until night"
The good that is acquired through the fast can be destroyed by five things -
the telling of a lie
slander
denouncing someone behind his back
a false oath
greed or covetousness
All very fine. Doesn't help that everyone's blood sugar is lowered thus bad temper is commonplace., so roll on 24th October, and Eid. The towers in the image are quite spectacular when seen close up..

Komboloi

The next few days are likely to be interesting. Work, like Bunyan's puddles, has dried up, thus I am once again casting what little bread I have upon rapidly shrinking wetland.
Philippians 4:19 notwithstanding, one is sometimes tempted to ask the question 'how?' And yet, so many times, usually at the last moment (please someone buy the guy a watch) the remarkable fact remains that as a believer, I am able to wait in confidence simply because God is committed to providing.
It has been said that worry is a form of atheism, saying, "It all depends on me." Worry is a warning light that we doubt the love of God. Put more properly, we doubt the unconditional love of God. H'm. The image is of Greek worry beads (Komboloi) but the idea originated thousands of years ago in the prayer beads of many cultures and traditions...Hindu, Christian and Moslem. Today they are used for their comforting effect....helping smokers to quit, the anxious to breathe more deeply, the very pregnant to be patient...and people like me, I suppose.
Perhaps I should get some, counting being soothing, whether hours, days or beads.