![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
But give us another pint of beer and we'll all of us go away
So last night I was emotionally miserable and my lower back seized up for no obvious reason and my room was a swamp of heat and humidity and I slept through nightmares for about three hours in the mid-morning and this afternoon I finished my first poem in two months. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony? Have some things I've been meaning to post.
1. Dean sent me this one: archaeologists have uncovered the shipbuilding harbors of the Persian Wars. Now I want to re-read Jill Paton Walsh's Farewell, Great King (1972).
2. I am delighted that a former poet laureate of the UK wants to widen the definition of war poetry to include the anonymous soldiers' song "I Don't Want to Join the Army." I have an unreasonable affection for this jaunty, sweary bit of the folk tradition. I learned it about ten years ago—a side effect of trying to trace a racy jingle from The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), I believe—even before I heard its parent "A Conscientious Objector" and it tends to come into my head while I'm washing dishes.
3. In case you have not yet seen, the full source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer has been published online and it is full of programmers being clever at one another. I had not realized that Margaret Hamilton the software engineer was still alive. I am really happy to know she's still in the world and still doing things with it.
4. Capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been using stone tools for seven hundred years without needing humans to show them how. This is probably the best news I've heard all week.
5. These are the songs that have been in my head for the last forty-eight hours. I suspect them of trying to organize themselves into a mixtape. It's more instrumental than my usual internal soundtrack, at least.
Anna & Elizabeth, "Lovin' Babe"
Sweetest pleasure in all my roaming
Just a kiss from a pretty strange woman, babe
Bellowhead, "A-Begging I Will Go"
There's a bed for me in every town and I've no rent to pay
There's many a right and willing lass I've bedded in the hay
Bellowhead, "New York Girls"
So sailor lads, take warning when you land on New York's shore
You'll have to get up early to be smarter than a whore
Bill Spence with Fennig's All-Star String Band, "Smash the Windows, Coleraine, Haste to the Wedding"
Bill Spence with Fennig's All-Star String Band, "The Three Sea Captains, Old Man Dillon, Charlie the Prayermaster"
Brendan Mulvihill & Donna Long, "Shandon Bells/Boys of the Town/Rakes of Clonmel/Girls of the Town"
Brian Peters, "Gentlemen-Rankers"
If the home we never write to and the oaths we never keep
And all we know most distant and most dear
Dave Swarbrick & Friends, "The Rights of Man/The Shan Van Vocht/Harvest Home"
The Klezmatics, "Mipney Ma"
מפּני מה מפּני מה ירדה הנשׁמה
מאיגרא רמא לבירא עמיקתּא
הירידה צרך עליה היא
Máire Breatnach, "Breatnaigh Abu"
I am now caught up on work for the week. I suppose that explains where it all went.
1. Dean sent me this one: archaeologists have uncovered the shipbuilding harbors of the Persian Wars. Now I want to re-read Jill Paton Walsh's Farewell, Great King (1972).
2. I am delighted that a former poet laureate of the UK wants to widen the definition of war poetry to include the anonymous soldiers' song "I Don't Want to Join the Army." I have an unreasonable affection for this jaunty, sweary bit of the folk tradition. I learned it about ten years ago—a side effect of trying to trace a racy jingle from The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), I believe—even before I heard its parent "A Conscientious Objector" and it tends to come into my head while I'm washing dishes.
3. In case you have not yet seen, the full source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer has been published online and it is full of programmers being clever at one another. I had not realized that Margaret Hamilton the software engineer was still alive. I am really happy to know she's still in the world and still doing things with it.
4. Capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been using stone tools for seven hundred years without needing humans to show them how. This is probably the best news I've heard all week.
5. These are the songs that have been in my head for the last forty-eight hours. I suspect them of trying to organize themselves into a mixtape. It's more instrumental than my usual internal soundtrack, at least.
Anna & Elizabeth, "Lovin' Babe"
Sweetest pleasure in all my roaming
Just a kiss from a pretty strange woman, babe
Bellowhead, "A-Begging I Will Go"
There's a bed for me in every town and I've no rent to pay
There's many a right and willing lass I've bedded in the hay
Bellowhead, "New York Girls"
So sailor lads, take warning when you land on New York's shore
You'll have to get up early to be smarter than a whore
Bill Spence with Fennig's All-Star String Band, "Smash the Windows, Coleraine, Haste to the Wedding"
Bill Spence with Fennig's All-Star String Band, "The Three Sea Captains, Old Man Dillon, Charlie the Prayermaster"
Brendan Mulvihill & Donna Long, "Shandon Bells/Boys of the Town/Rakes of Clonmel/Girls of the Town"
Brian Peters, "Gentlemen-Rankers"
If the home we never write to and the oaths we never keep
And all we know most distant and most dear
Dave Swarbrick & Friends, "The Rights of Man/The Shan Van Vocht/Harvest Home"
The Klezmatics, "Mipney Ma"
מפּני מה מפּני מה ירדה הנשׁמה
מאיגרא רמא לבירא עמיקתּא
הירידה צרך עליה היא
Máire Breatnach, "Breatnaigh Abu"
I am now caught up on work for the week. I suppose that explains where it all went.
no subject
When it comes to expanding War Poetry I think there's a case for including the UK's wierdest Christmas tune, Jona Lewie's 'Stop the Cavalry'
Hey, Mr. Churchill comes over here
to say we're doing splendidly
But it's very cold out here in the snow,
marching to and from the enemy
Oh I say it's tough, I have had enough
Can you stop the cavalry?
I have had to fight, almost every night
down throughout these centuries
That is when I say, oh yes yet again
Can you stop the cavalry?
Mary Bradley waits at home
in the nuclear fall-out zone
Wish I could be dancing now
in the arms of the girl I love
Bang! That's another bomb on another town
While Luzar and Jim have tea
If I get home, live to tell the tale
I'll run for all presidencies
If I get elected I'll stop - I will stop the cavalry
Wish I could be dancing now
in the arms of the girl I love
Mary Bradley waits at home
She has been waiting two years long
Wish I was at home for Christmas
How did I not know about Margaret Hamilton? I mean, never mind she's a pioneer in computing, she's a pioneer in my field of computing!
no subject
Does anybody know how long to World War Three?
I wanna know, I've gotta book me holiday.
They want me in the army, but I just can't go,
I'm far too busy listening to the radio.
The whole thing's daft, I don't know why,
You have to laugh, or else you cry,
You have to live or else you die,
You have to laugh or else you cry.
no subject
I've never heard this, either! Thank you.
My first-resort World War III song is still, I'm afraid, Tom Lehrer's "So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)."
"Now, World War III is almost upon us, as you know—by popular demand, it seems—and it occured to me that if any songs are going to come out of World War III, we'd better start writing them now."
no subject
I envy you that.
have a pic of one of the Victorian building slips at Chatham Dockyard, which looks a lot like the drawing of that Athenian slip (though the floor in the Chatham pic is actually a mezzanine, IIRC)
Oh, that's really nice. Thank you!
the UK's weirdest Christmas tune, Jona Lewie's 'Stop the Cavalry'
You're right; that's gonzo. But also quite good. Sort of like the satire-pop version of Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marching Anymore."
How did I not know about Margaret Hamilton? I mean, never mind she's a pioneer in computing, she's a pioneer in my field of computing!
Women in science have a habit of disappearing—or never being seen properly in the first place. (Marginalization!) I love the photograph of her beside the stacks of printed-out code.