Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 21

Derogatory

Declamatory, they complained , assuming they referred to how I said it, but the substance, I admit, was unrelentingly derogatory.  but no one could prove it. But then, everyone knew the background. So sue me, he said. The girl was raped. She know her victim. Her bloody knickers were in his pocket.

PEN

He needed a pen, not just any pen but one that wrote long flowing graphics in what his old teacher said was the finest penmanship. Bastard, he thought, words, indeed. Fucking Dutch to him. Anatomy, my dear, he thought, embedding the pen, this’ll do, twisting his thrust, you’re dead, motherfucker.

COLLABORATION

She felt a tremor of excitement, a frisson of anticipation. It all came down to this. Everything was arranged, there was no turning back. The other participants in this, what she called ‘a Gothic drama’, may be secured with zip locks and gags but for her, it was a collaboration.

Image source: Wallpaper Abyss

Take a bow, comrade Trump

MAZE

When he gets to the window, after standing in line for 40 minutes, he presents his documents with a smile, reading hope and relief. The person on the other side smiles too, then sends him to Hatch 42. Forty minutes later, 42 sends him to 24. It dawns on him, he’s in a maze.

ANDREW JOHNSON’S IMPEACHMENT: A MODEL AND A WARNING FOR TRUMP

Much has been made of President Donald Trump’s apparent historical gaffe regarding Andrew Jackson and the American Civil War. Jackson, Trump said, was ‘really angry’ about the Civil War, apparently unaware that Jackson was dead 16 years before the beginning of the civil war. But was it just a silly mistake? Did Trump mistakenly name Jackson when he meant Andrew Johnson, the ‘war Democrat’ and former Governor of Tennessee who Lincoln named as his running mate and who succeeded Lincoln following his untimely assassination in April, 1865?

Of course, Jackson or Johnson, both comparisons don’t carry much water but in personality and politics as well as manner, it is the latter, Andrew Johnson, with whom strong comparisons with Trump can be drawn.

In his book, The Case for Impeachment, Allan J. Lichtman, Distinguished Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC, tells how Johnson’s outrageous acts in the aftermath of the civil war almost led to his impeachment and draws a comparison between him and the present incumbent.

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The great climate silence: we are on the edge of the abyss but we ignore it

By Clive Hamilton, The Guardian

We continue to plan for the future as if climate scientists don’t exist. The greatest shame is the absence of a sense of tragedy.

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PANICKED – Daily Post Prompt

 

Harold was in trouble, his comrades’ plan for a masterful victory stroke was in tatters. He was impulsive so when they put him in a room with a Big Red Button that said ‘DO NOT PRESS’ in block capital print and asked him to wait, well, he didn’t, he panicked.

Mapping Ireland’s Mysterious Carvings of Old Women Exposing Their Genitals

Sheela-na-gigs can be found all over the country, but it’s only recently that academics have been brave enough to study them.
by Cara Giaimo
May 01, 2017
Sometime in the 1940s, workers repairing a culvert in Limerick, Ireland, pried a stone out of the ground, flipped it over, and found a surprise waiting for them on the other side. Carved into the rock was a headless figure, with drooping breasts and a round navel. One of her hands had crumbled away, but the other was doing something unmistakable: pulling a thigh aside to better expose her vagina, which had been chiseled deep into the stone.


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LOVING CONSPIRACIES

Image: wikipaedia

A friend and I were having lunch.

He said, ‘Here, you know that Snowden guy?’

I nodded assent.

‘Well, have you heard of Forbes?’

Again, I nodded assent.

He proceeded to tell me a story he’d read in Forbes magazine about how Edward Snowden had released papers relating to two meetings with American Presidents that resulted in an alliance with a group of ‘tall white men/aliens’, resulting in the establishment of a new world order, so to speak, controlled by aliens.

I had to research it and a quick search found a whole list of ‘Forbes and tall white men’ stories. They vary, from the original Forbes magazine story to where my friend linked with it.

Much has been written about this alleged alien conspiracy since but check the second website, godlikeproductions.com and the others referred to in Michael Peck’s  Forbes’ article, asserting the stories began in an Iranian government controlled news agency that weas amplified further by its leaked interpretation by the Russian State secret police, the FSB.

So after, I must  admit, a hugely enjoyable lunch that was, by turns entertaining and illuminating and at all times, happily boozy, I went back to a document, I believe, stands today for prescience and wisdom, that knew what was coming but cautioned for reason. That speech was made by President Dwight. D. Eisenhower in 1961, what has become known as ‘the Military Industrial Complex speech.

Now, apart from wondering whether the ‘tall white men’ were mentioned, in code, a la Eisenhower’s speech, I also began to wonder, if you followed this to a logical conclusion, believe no-one, suspect everyone, then you should be checking out Forbes’ magazine and whoever owns it because, what’s the bet they came to a diabolical agreement with the, so called, tall white aliens.

The atomic age began after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It fired the imagination and a heatwave of commercial expansion for American companies. The US became a global player and the alliance of Power and Industrial Expansion assumed new scales hitherto unfathomed.

In this current age, robotics and artificial intelligence are the catchphrases among the cognoscenti and wily venture capitalists with a billion or two to spare. This is the post atomic age that by the rigorous non-rules established by this post ironic age, looks on schedule to destroy itself with the same mallet set it up. Hello, North Korea.

The thing is, this is also the age of conspiracies and hey, between the velvet sheet helmets, the duelling banjos and the eternally evasive Big Feet, there’s fun to be had, just watching.