I am The News
I had no idea I was so important.
I decide to take a day or two's break and what happens? RTE goes off line.
I can only assume that I am the definitive source of all their news?
Or maybe they checked out this this site yesterday and then again today and decided that if Rambles wasn't updated that the Interweb had finally shut down? They looked at their blank screens and said what's the fucking point and they all went home again?
Shower of fucking wankers.
I always said they couldn't manage without me.
Verily,thou art Thoth's reincarnation.
Yeth. I try to do my besht.
Switch on the ofline radio and listen carefully to the gentle static. It's postmodern music. Beethoven & Mozart never came near.
Ger,Simon and Garfunkel got things a bit arseways.Instead of contemplating "the sound of silence",they should have listened to "the sound of st…… ,I"ll get me jacket.
The Sound of Silence was surely a fine song in a great LP album, but radio static is not silence. Static crackles over the empty airwaves when stations cease broadcasting, pending resumption of Normal Service. Static has varying rhythm and 'mood', no melody and occasional loud shockwaves and braingrinding rips caused by flashes of lightning. Stockhausen, Berio, Berg, Hindemith, Webern and Stravinsky seemed during the 20th century to be making attempts to mimic static, but they all failed. The musician John Cage wrote a blank score for classical orchestra with his celebrated composition 4'33", but unless somebody in the audience plays a signed-off radio station during performance there is nary a hint of static. I've an inkling that the Music of the Spheres may be humming somewhere behind radio static, trying to engage our collective ears. Jodrell Bank, GCHQ and military listening posts around the world have probably recorded and deciphered much static over the last seven decades, but are precluded from divulging data because of Official Secrets acts.
Ah yes, the joy of white noise (is that racist? Is there black noise? And if so, what's it like?). Whatever, it's certainly postmodern. One wonders how pre-radio man survived.
Pre-radio man survived by making realtime music. That included dancing at the crossroads – something De Valera never talked about according to historian Prof. Joe Lee.
"One wonders how pre-radio man survived." Just think – life without Joe Duffy? Good God! How did they manage?
They had village gossips, Sunday sermons and the occasional seanachai beside the turf fire in the evening. If they got bored of chitchat there was always pitch and toss, poker, hurling and faction fighting and drinking poitin till they were scuttered. Our ancestors had their survival strategies GD.