Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 32

Rebecca Solnit: ‘Dear Donald Trump, You Should Visit Your Hometown Someday

Dear Donald Trump,

I wonder if you have ever actually explored the New York City you claim to live in. I recommend it, because it has beauties and splendors that undermine so many of the assertions that I have heard you make during your campaign, particularly in the final debate. For starters, its eight million-plus population includes a huge percentage of immigrants, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans, and some lovely people who are black, Muslim, and immigrant all at once. Only a third of its residents are white. You talk as if should lots of undocumented immigrants and Muslims show up here, there’ll be trouble. I have news for you: they’re here, and it seems to be working out rather well.read more

Hyperbole

 

Isn’t that a symmetrical open curve formed by the intersection of a circular cone with a plane at a smaller angle with its axis than the side of the cone?

Wrong.

That can’t be wrong because, after all, I’m a mathematical genius and I ought to know.

Now that’s hyperbole.

Oldest house in city is found on Thomas St, Dublin

Fancy living in a 17th century dwelling? Builder Paul Sinnott bought No 130 Thomas St for a bargain €140,000, two years ago but when Dublin city Civic Trust Officer Graham Hickey took a look at its crumbling interior, he found hidden treasure.

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The End

Photo credit: the last photos of nuclear tests from China, 1996, You Tube Military History series.

I’ve spent three weeks reading an incredible novel call The Hand of Fatima by the Spanish writer, Ildefonso Falcones, an exhaustive account of the persecution  and final expulsion of the last Moors from Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries. Last night I attended the first night of Jimmy Murphy’s play called The Kings of Kilburn High Road in Dublin’s Gaeity Theatre and left there feeling the sad anguish of oppression, oppressor and oppressed.

And for all that time, him writing there

he wondered was he spent?

did words, verse and sense

present themselves

like stakes or briars

in a fence?

did sane anthologies appear

 by dint of Melvil Dewey,

the integrated library system

or the library management system/

Or, perhaps mysteriously

and even more sinisterly,

by a decision to avert the cost?

the cost of what, you wonder?

why the cost of destroying

all that will soon disintegrate

to nothing but a digital memory

of everything that can be preserved,

controlled, manipulated,

distorted.

Don’t look surprised, that’s how it it is.

You’ve created, twitted, facebooked,

snapchatted, whatsapped and vibered

the pinteresting world you live in,

welcome to a world that,

by a bizarre paradoxical twist

of technology, you made.

Or did you? Now there’s a question.

Are we minions of our own realm

in a digital world

of our own design and manipulation,

so we can argue egg or chicken

and so resolve our own

destruction?

Copycat

She loves to lie in the sunshine, stretch her limbs so her nails poke out. Then rubs her ears, first one, then the other and licks her self from shoulder to nail tips, the pads of her paws. She repeats that, head to toe. That mirror molly’s just a copycat.

Eerie, part 2

On the other hand, you might wonder how many countries are being bombed by the United States right now and be shocked by the complete ignorance of  American people when they’re asked? Next week they decide between a racist misogynist and career politician with a closet of skeletons. Now that’s eerie.

eerie

 

Witches, ghouls, vampires, zombies, eerie things that go ‘bump’ in the night, these are the things a person’s likely to encounter on a Halloween night. It’s the time when all the Autumn harvesting is over, Winter approaches and life diminishes for the season’s sleep to renew itself again, before Spring.

The Sellout wins 2016 Man Booker Prize

The Sellout is a searing satire on race relations in contemporary America.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty is named winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The Sellout is published by small independent publisher Oneworld, who had their first win in 2015 with Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings.

The 54-year-old New York resident, born in Los Angeles, is the first American author to win the prize in its 48-year history. US authors became eligible in 2014. The 2016 shortlist included two British, two US, one Canadian and one British-Canadian writer.read more

World’s Oldest Continuously Operating Library Begins a New Chapter

Established in 859 CE, Morocco’s al-Qarawiyyin Library will soon reopen to the public with architectural details for the 21st century.

 

Home to stacks of ancient Islamic manuscripts and intricately decorated reading rooms, the world’s oldest continuously operating library will soon reopen — and, for the first time since its founding in 859 CE, to the public. The al-Qarawiyyin Library, located in the UNESCO World Heritage Medina of Fez in Morocco, has just completed over three years of heavy restoration by Canadian-Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni and her design firm Aziza Chaouni Projects. Established as part of the University of al-Qarawiyyin, the library for centuries was open only to students, but when it reopens — likely sometime next year — anyone will be able to enter the airy rooms with intricate mosaics and latticework and enjoy its fountain-filled courtyards.read more

Amazon nets patent for mini police drones

Science Fiction writers have reached a crisis point: reality may soon outstrip imagination. As the world of astronomy stands poised for its first head on investigation of a Black Hole, the more mundane reality of insect sized, electronic spy devices may soon be a daily reality and not just a special effects device from the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter.

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