When cyber money is stolen what disappears from where? And where does it (whatever it is) go?
The 'it' is a series of ones and noughts that their programmers have declared online to 'constitute a currency', though no state backs it. These ones and noughts attract real life currencies that states and banks do back through their reserves thus depleting the supply of real currency to real people and luring ordinary folk away from everyday reality.
But for gamblers the gamble is said to be 'worth it'.
These digital currencies are likely to be stolen by states that are blacklisted, banned from trading, by international decree for deeds they deny doing, where countries across the world are not buying the denial.
So the theft-thru-trade of cyber money that they perform is as near as they can get to any sort of internatinal currency, whilst alarming those for whom their modern day currency is their internet securiy which is said to be so secure that the left hand and mind does not know what key, on the keypad, the right hand is pressing when it types.
Such security is the ultimate in assuredness in a world where the online life creates it's own shadows and ghosts, it's thieves of wealth and peace of mind which was never as secure as the inventors of all these systems claimed in the first place.
'Untitled', watercolour and ink is one of over 1000 paintings and works on paper by Gerard Dillon, probably depicting his beloved Roundstone in Connemara.
'Man with Accordion - Connemara' as painted by Gerard Dillon, for whom Connemara in County Galway was his 'home territory' from which to draw characters from the mid 1940s onward.
'FullMoon over The Bog' by Gerard Dillon is one Dillon's many landscapes that explain his love of place which would make the viewer see that place and past seem still attractive.
'On the Beach' as painted in 1950 shows Dillon with one of his closeest friends at the time in as near a position of near sexual intimacy and trust as he could in the era in which Dillon painted. Alas when his friend married the friendship was rent assunder, never to be restored.
Most people who use public transport nowadays expect wifi, and expect to be able to play with their phones for free. I prefer to read a book. And if the book makes me laugh in a public place where laughter might be embarasing then I will brave that. I read 'Portnoy's Comlaint' by Phillip Roth on the bus, where if I tried to explain to anyone why it was funny I would have to say 'it is funny because it thilthy', which would be accurate. I did not read 'Venus In Furs' by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or 'Crash' by J.G.Ballard in the bus, and there are surely many other books that need to read repeatedly to 'get the trick' of how they test taboos whilst breaking them, whilst hiding how they test taboo. But for the second third time of reading 'Venus In Furs' I think I will take it on the bus with me.
'An Uncommon Reader' made me laugh out loud so often that I lost count of how often I laughed. Whilst it is a compact, a novella, it brought joy to so many of my bus journeys that I wish it was longer.
Bennett had an easy target - The Queen - who needs no further introduction but about whom few have any real clue as to what she thought about what she was so often seen to do when she and Prince Philip were both in robust health - when this was written. Nearly twenty years later we distantly observed their decline in public. On to this full-of-life blank canvas of The Queen, Bennett creates a landscape of modern popular reading habits. He mentions so many authors and books, and drew out more humour inherent from each book and author than I thought was possible. Google tells me that Bennett shoe-horns 55 different and distinguished authors onto The Queen's reading list, and offered to list the alphabetically for me. I declined. Most of jokes I found to be enormously funny, where the slighter the joke the funnier it seemed on the page. This led me to play a sort of authorial bingo as a read, where I could cross the author off if I had read them, could not cross them off when I hadn't.
This led neatly into my memory of first reading of the novella, where what I wanted to rediscover in better detail was what Bennettt gives The Queen to think when she enquires about infamous French author Jean Genet, a spikey non-conformist writer who survived being raised in a series of children's homes and borstals, who survived a criminal underworld that changed him for life. His writings were difficult for English readers, who had to work their way through archaic, some would say tortured, English grammar in the translations of his early books 'Funeral Rites' and 'Our Lady Of The Flowers', which were popular as items on the book shelves in the early 1970s in paperback editions but may have been less fully read as an author. This was where Bennett literary conceit either reached it's peak or collapsed, it is hard to say which, but a new plot kicked in. Marcel Proust is mentioned to The Queen to divert her away from the more subversive and opaque writings in English tranaslation by Jean Genet.
From the start the plot revolved around The Queen and her senior equerries dodging each other and mostly talking indirectly about reading (the queen) or avoiding reading (what the equerries sought of the queen) as her majesty sought to find more books to read and more time to read them, whilst her staff resorted to hiding her books from her when they could do so without being seen to.
The chase around reading eventually wears thin for The Queen, who is consistently funny in a rather Prunella Scales sort of way, when she refers to herself in the third person as 'one', but breaks that habit with a certain bathos as on her own she write to herself 'I have no voice' as she conciders creartive writing to finding her voice after the example of Marcel Proust. Though the country knows more literally that how she actually spoke: in the voice that Gainsborough films studios coached it's actresses to speak in the films it made circa 1946 which became the model for Recieved Pronounciation.
The book ends at curious point. It more stops than ends, leaving the reader wondering what might have come next - apart from the disguised decline of old age which comes to all who live long enough to adapt their embrace of such decline.
It is a decade since I first seriously stopped watching television at the press of a remote, and I remain pleased with the results.
Life is slower and quieter than it was before. I listen with more inent to the many broadcasters on the speech based radio that I enjoy, and I turn them off sooner when I notice I am more inattentive of what is on - something I did much less with television.
And the stillness of the paintings in my walls, most of which I have painted myself, amuse me.
As the stillness of life engages more with me it helps me find the self I wish I had found, as a key part of myself, much earlier than I did.
I went to see the Irish premier of this 2025 documentary last month knowing the bare minimum about Big Mama Thornton. Knowing little beyond that she had a strong role in the birth of Rock and Roll. I did not even know what her role with that birth was.
But the documentary soon informed me of the outline of the role in the music she gave birth to. Big Mama Thornton was originally called Willy Mae Thornton and was born in 1926 to lead the hard life those who were black and poor did, early on. She was physically strong, she had to be to survive the harsh life that she, and millions of others, were raised to live out, enduring a poverty they did not ask for amidst the great depression and other financial pressures. As a young adult she was 6 foot 1 inches tall and weighted up to 270 lbs, sometimes less than that. Her first public introduction to music was in the Baptist Church in her native Montogmery, Alabama. There her father was a minister and her mother sang from the front of the stage. Willy Mae went to church and sometimes sang, mostly she attended but did not sing. When Willy Mae was 13 her mother contracted tuberculosis and had to be nursed in the Montgomery Tuberculosis Sanitorium by Willy Mae until her death soon after. Willy Mae missed that much school for nursing her mother that she could not return to her education. She took her first job as a washer up in one of the roughter local taverns.
Many owners of record labels and managers of musical acts were innately untrustworthy characters who when anyone trusted them, then they did so either for them not knowing who they were trusting, having nobody else to trust, or desperation. Willy Mae Thornton's first break as a singer came when she was 14, from the older sister of the then recently died Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. To see the footage of Bessie Smith, what litttle of it there is and even as it is unrepresentative of Smith as how she deserved to be seen, was one of the early treats in the documentary. Ma Rainey also died soon after, in 1939. With her strong vocal style Thornton became an early natural heir to those women who stamped their characters onto the blues, and onto 'race records' as they were known. Thornton would tour but not record for the next 11 years, the first 8 of them as a comedienne, singer, and dancer in a revue style show before she left the show. She felt sure she was being underpaid and cheated out of money she was owed. She had to wait until she was 25 before she cut her first sides 78 rpm sides as part of a version of the troupe she had left earlier. The sides were cut for E&W records of Houston. There she got her first song writing credits. Through a series of coincidences she was signed as part of her troupe to Peacock records in 1952. There, as a solo artist, she met the young Lieber and Stoller who wrote the song 'Hound Dog' around discussion they had with her. It was the first song they had written. She was awkward as she was coached into giving them the vocal performance they wanted as producers, but they got what they wanted when she could feel like she owned it as a self taught musician. She provided the backing band, and one of the stand out performances on the record is the drums which were played by her drummer Johnny Otis, The record sold locally and then sold across America, and gave her a name that in years to come would make her a headline act in gigs acrfoss America, and in Europe, Whilst her record label at the time denied her the co-credit for the song and denied her the earnings she should have got for co-writing and co-arranging the song.
From then on, in spite of her lack of secure grounding with a very male record industry, an uneasy relationship with being managed, a certain defensiveness about how to play and record a song, and never quite being on the top side of her economic situation as she should be (a standard complaint with blues artists), she was on her way.
For the next three decades she was touring, recording and sometimes resting to write more songs including 'Ball and Chain' as recorded to spectacular effect Janis Joplin who asked Big Mama Thornton if she may. The film fills lots of the holes in her story where there is no footage, or reports of events in her life, with shots of car lights on the road representing her life. The car headlights footage is intersperced with the recollections of those who knew her and have documented her life, some of them documenting it long after she died.
The film ends with footage filmed recorded by British television a Channel 4, who filmed her live on her last concerts where she is in full comand of the stage, both as a blues singer and as a fine example of a drag king. A woman who dresses stylishly in male clothing. Not that her sexuality was ever the couse of comment, she seemed to be above any such comment. I just thought her dress sense was just fabulous.
I understand how Trump and the Tech Bros work: 'run fast and break things' is their motto.
What I don't understand, because it is so hard to ask about how they run so fast and break so many things is which is the cause? Which is the symptom? Because where the cause leads, the symptom follows...
From the distance I am from the USA it would be easiest for me to believe that both are symptoms of another cause: being incapable of long term fore-thought before acting as ministers grab at the nearest solution that presents itself.
