I never heard of them or the song until a few weeks ago, when I saw an episode of Stargate Universe which had it as a theme. Brilliant. Even made the TV show seem deeper and more mordant.

I'm not sure about it being Irish, or even Irish-American. The hyphenates are usually dreamers who think dear old granpa MacGillycuddy emigrated from the Urheimat of Oppression. But the place was never *that* bad. An occasional massacre or famine, sure, but everyone has those.

Maybe it *uses* mutant Irishness. Like Flann O'Brien and, to a minor extend, me. Heh.

"It's been the worst century since the Dark Ages
When all the sages
Hadda eat their pages.

So we'll light Lady Lucifer's lamp
And we'll sing out a hymn
To the dark and the dim
And the damp
And we'll all die of cramp."

Exquis, man, but you forgot *strong*. Strong, bitter, and who cares about the cost, nicht wahr?

There are alternatives. "I like women like ... nettle soup. Sweet, natural, and wholesome, with the sting removed."

I can't imagine *why* anyone would say this. I just know they would.

Personally, I just like women. They can do their own damn adjectives.

After the washing-up, of course.

Not an autobiography, alas, but the 'plot' of a story - or half a story accidentally separated at birth - that Samuel Beckett wrote in 1946. But it will stand until I get some guy ropes in place.

Guy ropes. What do the guys *do* with them, apart from the obvious games like 'burglary' and 'I'm Miss Piggy and you're the Marquis de Sade'. And abseiling, I think it's called.

Hmm. I saw 40 mins from the middle of a late sequence Kharri Potter movie. I'm persuaded it's not *all* tosh. I even enjoyed it, just not quite enough to watch the beginning or the end.

I should add I'm almost allergic to movies. My years as a film critic did that. I can't watch anything now.

I could still write a review *sans voir*, of course. Like blindfold chess, but much easier.

Anyhow -- as it happens to be lodged in my cut'n'paste system following an incident elsewhere -- I'll continue the ongoing inauguration of <Toadspawn> with a reprise of my alphabet poem, *BC*.

I should point out that I won a magazine competition circa 1979 with a 52-word alphabetic piece. Guess I'm the ultimate in alpha maleness after all, despite what they say.

On that occasion, the brief was "Write about Christmas in 52 words that start with A, then B, C, D, up to Z and back again".

I can't remember mine, but I recall some fragments:

<the start>

"Ah begorrah. Christmas doesn't even fool *God*", he intoned, Jesus kissing.

<the turn>

- You Zombie!
Zombie? - "You xerox!" - Wilbur vaulted up the stairs.

<the end>

Christ. Booze. Alcohol.

Sorta Joycean/Mylesian, innit? I was young, your honours. It's funny, there are chess games from the same era where I can recall the opening, a bit of middlegame, and an ending -- but can't reconstruct the whole thing.

So, much much later in the 1990s there was another competition, for an updated version of the 1820s doggerel that began "An Austrian army awfully arrayed/ Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade" ...

Look it up sometime. Writ by some reverend. Shockingly inept drivel. But it pointed me at the Balkans, and I wrote the following version. Which for some reason that now eludes me I never entered for the competition, but posted here instead, in the present century.

BC...

An American airforce, ah'm awfully afraid
Backed by Blair's Britain, bombed Belgrade.
Clinton commanded. Cruelly, children cried.
Dissent disappeared. Democracy died.

Every evil empire exports ethnic engineers
For foolish foreigners. Forget faint fears.

Go google Goebbels. Gods, generate
History's horror, here harboring hate.
Ironsides is inside. Invisible inks
Join jackal, joker, jocoserious jinx.
Ku-Klux Klan killers, kindly Krauts
Let loose like lions. Learning late lessons, louts.

Milo married Mira. Milo's Mum
Needed no narcotics, naturally numb:
'One of our offspring opted out of our
Preternaturally patented parenting power.'

Queerly, quaintly, quintessentially quiet,
Ruling Ruritania's rancorous riot,
Slobo screwed Serbia. Some suicides survive.
Thanks to TV, the torturers thrive.

Under useless umbrellas, using uniforms unclear
Vagrants vanish, vermin volunteer.
Who would want wisdom? Wish what wiser way?
Xeroxed xenophobia, XL, X-ray?

You yearn, young yearlings. You yearn, yet you'll yap.

Zigzag, zestful zealots. Zeroes. Zap. Zap. Zap.

<ends>

Hmm. About time I wrote a return trip through the aplabet, just like *Wilbur vaulted up the stairs*.

Walter Abish -- who lived in Shanghai in the 1930s and fought in the 6-day War in the 1960s and was definitely *not* Walter the Softy -- wrote a book, Alphabetical Africa, with a similar device.

Good writer. <How German is it?> and <In the Future Perfect> are worth reading a few hundred times.

Did I just say *aplabet* .... ?? *Fou, Aplabet Spou*.

It got its own back centuries later, when Edward Fitzgerald produced a 'translation' of the verses - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - "The moving finger writes, and having writ/ Moves on; nor all thy piety and wit/ can call it back to cancel half a line/ nor all thy tears wash out one word of it" -- which owed much to the feverish Romantic Orientalism of Victorian Britain. And less to Omar's originals.

That was 150 years ago, when Europeans thought of Islam as exotic, Romantic, quaint, and fatalistic. A few centuries earlier, it was wealth beyond imagination, wealth worth aiming your nuclear arsenal or papal crusade at ...

What comes around.

Oh, right, the Zimmerman fragment. The line after "The Persian drunkard, he follows me" *should* read "I'd take him to your house but I can't unlock it/ you see you forgot to leave me with the key".

Incredibly, Ayers was the nearest of them to a bona fide pop star. Cale was a Welsh weirdo who'd been in some cult New York band, and Nico was their ex-Eurotrash singer. Eno had been in Roxy Music, but nobody knew why. So it was Ayers' gig, and he takes up half the record.

"This song is called *Shouting in a Bucket Blues*", he says. "You should try it sometime. Put your head in a bucket and shout. I sound like Nico."

Sigh. I thought this stuff was witty and profound when I was younger.

Anyhow. Ayers did his alpha male routine by rogering Cale's wife the night before the gig. This is where Cale's song *Guts* comes from.

I once put a link direct to a lyrics site here and it got zapped by the Powers. So I'll paraphrase.

<"Bugger in the short sleeves rogered my wife

Did it quick and split
Went home, fresh as a daisy, to Maisie
Ah, Maisie.

And the twelve-bore that stood in the corner
Quite operatic in its self-disgust
Blew him all over the living room floor
Like parrot droppings.

And suppose it was someone familiar?
Someone we both would know?
A familiar denoument, n'est-ce pas?
A familiar hyperbole ...

Like that ancient teenage dream
Of soul to poison soul to poison soul.

Guts, guts, got no guts
And stitches don't mean a thing
Holes in the body
Holes in the head
There should never be holes at all.">

Just listened to it again. A few good versions on U-choob. Has a better song ever been written about pain? Vanity? Revenge, wounded macho pride, guys competing over chick-laying, as I think they useta call it?

Has a better song ever been written, period? About the Romantic history of rock'n'roll, operatic disgust and teen dreams. And as immediately autobiographical as any chunk of self ever dripped into a blog.

I don't wanna know what people are thinking unless they have brains to think with, and I don't care what people are feeling unless they can transmute feeling into art.

I'm just a gimlet
Those I meet seem easily bored
A Hamlet, a half-scrambled hommelette
An eagle like Dedalus
Nothing to peddle us
Ran out of air when he soared.
Still, he soared.

So bring me a Gidget
A girl or a midget
We'll cook up a story
An old jackanory
Pretend that we scored.
Still, we soared.

So if you grow tired
of the friends you make
never ever turn your back on them
say they were the best of times
we ever had
the very best of times
with the thoughtless kind

- john cale

<Hmm. I saw 40 mins from the middle of a late sequence Kharri Potter movie. I'm persuaded it's not *all* tosh. I even enjoyed it, just not quite enough to watch the beginning or the end.>

Good start - just keep in mind that the movie conveys only a very small percentage of the actual quality of the stories, in book form. ;)

<I should add I'm almost allergic to movies. My years as a film critic did that. I can't watch anything now.>

Me no has TV. Me no wants TV. And I believe the last movie I bothered to watch in a cinema may have been HP 4, when it was released. I useta watch TV and movies, so I have a general idea there, but that was, as with many other things, "a long time ago".

Corollary: I have no clue whatsoever who the latest "celebrities" are supposed to be. :s

<I could still write a review *sans voir*, of course. Like blindfold chess, but much easier.>

Even I know that, although I only use a mouse. In fact I'm typing this message from an "alphabet board" with my mouse.

Or I would be, if I were.

Well that just refers to a brace of posts he made in the Kibbutz Kafe giving many unwanted details about his illness and medication regime.

To tell you the truth I don't believe a word he types- on his best day.

However, when confronted with such an artifact of public self-loathing on the internet, what does one do?

I think the majority of members simply pretended it never happened, which is surely the most sensible strategy.

I recoiled in horror when I read it.

He does it in cycles- they even have stages

1. Everything American is evil
2. Everything New Zealand does is evil
3. All white people are evil
4. All men are evil

5. "Hey I'm a white man from New Zealand"

6. Therefore, I must be evil

7. It would be a good idea to tell everyone- in great detail- how evil I am, make an excuse for this evil based on mental illness, and then beg for public mercy from a public who has no interest in a single one of these points.

You can find these "episodes" archived in Kibbutzer Kafe if you want to look at them.

Although I have no idea why anyone would- "not edifying" would be my review if it were a play.

And this is perhaps my point.

It *is* a play, and a very poor one at that.

I hope this has helped some.

I'm sure my own actions at this website are equally embarrassing and/or horrifying to many others, in turn.

I love John Cale and Nico as you know.

Are you ok? There seems to be a pattern in the lyrics you are posting.

What that pattern is, I couldn't say.

At least you have good taste in music.

In fact you should say that anytime anyone criticizes you.

<Dom's boss at work>: "Mr. Dom, we don't want the aisles cluttered with your empty guinness bottles any more."

<Dom>: "At least *I* have good taste in music."

Thanks for calling me over, this is a rather good issue of <Toadspawn>.

No worries. I'm not about to do an RT and spill my turgid soul into an already sordid internet. Is there a chance, you think, that he does it in the hope of making poetry? Like that Yeats line: we make rhetoric out of the struggle with others but poetry from the struggle with ourselves.

I could be very wrong. It's a classic mistake to assume that other people have plans or agendas, even unconscious ones. Sometimes they're just a pile of accidents.

I am very well. But I have set myself the task of mutating -- do toads *moult*? -- no, a toad is meant to be the product of a transformation. But I want another go at turning into somebody else. I need to understand the future, like I did before it stopped being the future.

Hence a certain, ah, instability. But change is good. I may even write stuff, new stuff. Been inert way too long.

Your music-taste idea is superb and would usually work. My current editor, however, has prayed with U2. What he said is between him and their god.

I still wonder what went down. "Dear god, make everyone here a zillionaire apart from the journalist, that'll be a larf, amen" -- "OK chaps, will do, over and out".

New writing could only be good for everyone. I was just thinking I have some of your old writing on my computer still.

"To journalist":

walk away walk away walk away We won't follow

He should have seen that one coming.

Toads don't moult, but they do shed.

You see, you need feathers to moult. The Mexican Feathered Frog of Southern Sri Lanka can do both, of course.

Punk hit. Cale morphed into the bomb-crazy Sabotage Man and created Music For a New Society, while Ayers wittered on about 'green cigarettes' as if anyone cared.

But in 1974 Ayers was the one with popstar chic. He'd been in the band Soft Machine in the 60s -- they ruled the scene along with Barrett-era Pink Floyd. If anyone invents a time machine, that's where I'll go: Soft Machine and Floyd at the UFO club, 1966/67.

OK, I was alive at the time. But instead of telling me about what was really happening my teachers insisted on droning on about some nonsense called Irish History.

And the wheel turns, and now I drone on (to a fellow teacher, yet) about 'rock' history, when I wasn't even there. Oh, well.

Ayers' best song, IMO, goes:

<This is a song from the bottom of a well I didn't move here
I just fell.>

But it's not as good as Devoto/Magazine and 'Song from under the Floorboards':

<This is a song from under the floorboards This is a song from where the walls are cracked
By force of habit
I am an insect
Must admit I'm proud as hell of that fact>

I'm trying to figure out a conundrum: I'm sure you could solve it in a flash.

Is "It's been the worst day since yesterday" equivalent to "It's getting better all the time" ...? Or not.

Maybe the amount of rainfall has something to do with it. Flogging Molly are an 'Irish' band from California -- which is impossible, because it never rains.

Tanks are for besieging Stalingrad or containing your central heating oil, if your planet still has oil.

Hmmm. Bet you could manufacture a lot of celebrities with one tank of oil. Unless the procedure somehow got out of control ... picture self-made celebs rising like elastic vampires from the world's tar sands. All reciting plasticity's catechism in German -- "Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weisse". And yes, the original makers of both celebs and plastics thought 'strength, stability and whiteness' were good things. One shudders.

But yes, poor old Bob Wade *was* turned into merchandise in his final days. That tournament, all those zeroes. Although he claimed to enjoy the experience, it can't be fun at that age.

As if I'd know.