Pica Pica

Happening as I do to know a couple of enthusiastic concertina aficionados here in Sydney, and happening as I do to have known Dick Miles when I lived in West Cork, I have from time to time been asked what he actually plays like when it comes to the jigs and reels and polkas and slides and hornpipes of the dance music. Alas, I was not enough of a concertina lover to appreciate the finer points at the time. I will say that I did rather like the way he would accompany a sad traditional song on the ‘tina, but when it came to the diddley-di we love I didn’t listen closely.

But recently I’ve been importing old material from cassette tapes (remember them?) and mini-disks (a technology that was never quite at the right place at the right time to catch on as much as it might have deserved) into computerised files. And what do you know? An MD of an entire session, recorded at Casey’s in Baltimore on 14 May 2005! What else do you know? I’d almost forgotten about it, since the postioning of the microphone caused the concertina – yes, Dick Miles’ concertina – to dominate the other assortment of tooters, scrapers, bashers and pluckers.

There are 10 short clips. I’m open to correction on the names of any of the tunes, especially the first, which I think is Dan O’Keefes:

 [audio:01_1.mp3]

The Road to Lisdoonvarna:

 [audio:02_2.mp3]

McMahon’s reel:

[audio:03_3.mp3]

Off to California:

[audio:04_4.mp3]

The Ballyvourney Polka:

[audio:05_5.mp3]

The Plains of Boyle:

[audio:06_6.mp3]

The Fairies’ Hornpipe:

[audio:07_7.mp3]

Brosnan’s #1:

[audio:08_8.mp3]

The Frost is All Over (harmonica):

[audio:09_9.mp3]

The Stack of Barley:

[audio:10_10.mp3]

Ten clips in one:

[audio:dick_miles.mp3]

Of two very different kinds. Insectoidal:

To add to the samsaric tragedy of it all, having watched green more or less kill black and taken this picture, I accidentally brushed the table with the camera strap, and black fell to the ground, not to be found again.

Wild mammalian games probably appeal to most of us, as mammals, more:

She has no teeth, but you still need to treat the claws with respect!

Sarah’s father, my father-in-law, died just over two weeks ago.

Rest in peace, or best wishes for a good rebirth? Whichever, we will miss him, awkward as he was quite capable of being.

We’ve been in the audience at Q&A a couple of times lately. Great fun. Here is the question I submitted recently, which wasn’t selected (it was far too wordy, I know):

Given the compensation just awarded to Andrea Turner for her wrongful arrest, and

given the far worse case of the death of Ian Tomlinson in London in April and the attempt to cover it up,

would the panel agree that we are not only free to photograph the police at their work, but that it is our duty as citizens to do so? 

Coal rebranding – worth a look!

Table centrepiece:

I just took part in the “Soapbox” public speaking competition, a little part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House.

Well I didn’t get past the first round, but it was huge fun. The “facilitators” in the red, green and yellow hats (if you were there, you’d know what I mean) did a terrific job of making it go well.

Anyway, in order not to waste my speech, here is the text:

Democracy demands terrorist software

We know that the government’s proposed Internet filters are half-baked and unpopular – but worse than that, they are really the very opposite of what we should be doing.

We know that power looks after power– the law is framed that way. And we know that money looks after money – by and large, the rich stay rich. Those in power can lose huge amounts of other peoples’ money and still grow their own millions. Just think of Telstra or Goldman Sachs.

Those in power now want to get their hands on our information so that they can control us. Elsewhere at this festival David Mutton is putting forward the appalling idea that – I quote – “intrusive, coercive surveillance” is somehow a good thing, and that – again I quote – “issues of privacy, informed consent and free will are irrelevant“. Now that’s what I call a really dangerous idea!

Those in power, in this case represented by the Minister for Broadband, Stephen Conroy*, want to stop us from having free access to information. But at the same time, security organisations now want to intercept and store every electronic message that we send. They want to track the author of every bit of information that is out there.

Those in power want to do this because they think they can. The Gestapo and the KGB also wanted to record the thoughts of ordinary people. And for very much the same reason.

Are we serious about democracy? Then we need genuinely free exchange of information. That means we need privacy and security software that
·        protects the identity of people who publish,
·        that gives us free access to information, and
·        stops spies from snooping on our conversations.

We must do research into privacy software, not into filters! 

*I wanted to quip “… or should that be Minister for Narrowband, or even Minister for Narrowminds”, but I didn’t have spare seconds in the two minutes.

It was just a couple of minutes distraction:

So here is a very similar shot to the one from Wednesday morning taken at a very similar time on a normal day. Different, huh?

6.05 am – I ask myself why the light that filters in is red. I get up and see that the sky is red. I have the presence of mind to take a picture:

6:05 am

By 7.40 there is more light, but very yellow:

7:40

At 8.00 am the back lane still looks like this:

8:00

For comparison, here is the yard in more normal light:

A while ago

According to the paper, “If it were possible to scrape the film of dust coating outdoor surfaces across Sydney together into a heap, it would probably weigh something like 1000 tonnes”. The SMH has some fascinating pictures. 

No other comment – it’s just strange.