The Quiet Road

Head on over to On This Deity for another article by yours truly…

28th December 1937: The Birth of the Irish Republic.

At one minute before midnight on December 28th 1937 the Irish constitution passed into law and the Republic of Ireland (or Éire) was born. Although it has been described as a revolutionary act itself, the passing of the constitution was a strangely muted – almost administrative – conclusion to several hundred years of oppression and bloody rebellions.

read the rest…

I’ve got another piece up on Dorian’s excellent On This Deity…

9th December 1987: The First Intifada.

Today we mark the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987. Various end dates are cited, usually falling between the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Mehola Junction bombing of 1993, but arguably the conditions and enmities created during those first years have characterised Israeli-Palestinian relationships ever since, however one chooses to draw the timeline.

read the rest…

I know, I know.

I swore I’d never use the bloody thing again. And none of my past objections have suddenly become invalid. But a couple of things have arisen lately that forced me to reconsider my participation in the CIA’s big social media experiment.

Firstly… pretty much everyone I know has succumbed. Now, I’ve never been massively affected by peer-pressure, and it’s not the fact of their participation that has changed my mind. Rather it’s that I live in a different country to almost all my friends, and facebook has become the de facto medium of communication for many in my old social circle. Simply by excluding myself from facebook, I’ve ended up severing ties.

Secondly… and this is the straw that broke the camel’s back, not a reason in itself to join… as someone who presently earns a (meagre) living as a freelance web developer (WordPress customisation a speciality), facebook has become too big to ignore. Two clients in the past month have asked me how to integrate their websites with their facebook accounts, and all I’ve been able to do until now is shrug my ignorance. I have very little idea of what goes on behind that blue and white login screen, so can’t really advise anyone on how best to use the site.

So yes, I’ve reactivated my old account. But don’t take that as an endorsement of the sinister system… consider me ‘press ganged’.

I’ve another piece over at Dorian’s place.

28th November 2001: The Collapse of Enron.

The collapse of US energy and trading conglomerate, Enron, played out over several months in 2001 but we choose to note its passing today. For it was on November 28th, 2001 that the scale of the deceit and fraud perpetrated by the Enron management became apparent to the world. On the morning of the 28th, even as Linda Lay – wife of Enron’s Chairman, Kenneth – was offloading over a million dollars in company stock, the last ditch attempt to save one of America’s largest corporations was unravelling. A couple of weeks earlier Dynegy, another Houston-based energy company, had met with Ken Lay and offered the ailing Enron a lifeline in the form of a 9 billion dollar buyout. Over the course of the subsequent two weeks however, Dynegy unearthed some rather startling facts in their examination of the company accounts and withdrew their offer, bringing to an end any hope of hiding the crimes of Enron.

read the rest…

Just a quickie to point you towards my latest contribution to Dorian’s excellent On This Deity…

24th November 1859: Charles Darwin publishes ‘On The Origin of Species’.

Today we’re looking back 151 years to November 24th 1859 and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Although few of you reading this will be unaware of the significance of this remarkable book, it is worth taking a moment to consider the radical cultural shift it produced and the reverberations still being felt.

read the rest…

Just to let you know, Dorian has asked me to be a guest contributor to her excellent site, On This Deity. I’ll hopefully be writing two or three pieces per month. My October articles were:

October 13th: The Execution of Francisco Ferrer.

October 22nd: Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams.

October 27th: Tito’s Partisans liberate Serbia.

I’ll post links to new entries when they get published. And once you’re over there, I urge you to browse the site beyond my entries… there’s some wonderful stuff to be found.

Just a quickie, this. Must be something in the air… or p’raps a case of great minds thinking alike… but just as I return from my traditional summer blogging sabbatical, so Dorian Cope has resurrected the excellent On This Deity.

Billed as “Commemorating culture heroes & excavating world events”, On This Deity aims to present a daily ‘anniversary’ post (for a full year, no less), each one investigating a different historical event or figure from a perspective somewhat outside the mainstream.

Always fascinating and well-written (if last year’s beta version is anything to go by) it’s a worthy addition to any blogroll.

Blogging will be rather light over the next couple of weeks. As you may have noticed, I’ve been trying to post more regularly of late (a combination of having time on my hands and a decision to be more disciplined with my writing… I’m committed to spending a certain amount of time every day writing; depending on my mood it might be working on fiction, the book of essays I’m putting together, or this blog).

However, the lovely Citizen S and myself will be getting married in a week and a half (I know! Who’d have thunk it? And so long as I can keep her from sobering up for the next ten days, it should actually happen). It’s going to be a very small (non-religious) affair and most of the planning and organisation is already done. All the same, I imagine I’ll have less time than usual to sit around in my dressing-gown posting stuff here.

I’ve got articles in the drafts folder that probably only need a few more minutes, so hopefully activity here won’t come to a complete halt. But do expect a lull for a couple of weeks.

Oh, and wish us well!