Wood's Stacked

I was just surfing around and I ran into this, from David Seaton:

Before we get started, it would be useful to remember that the founding "parents" of the "conservative revolution" or "neo-liberalism" as it is known in Europe, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both died of Alzheimer´s disease... This might not be the cause of the ongoing disaster, but it sure is a nifty metaphor for the situation we are in.

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my favorite hobby horses is criticizing the blockheadedness of post Cold War politicians who seem to have totally lost their fear of popular wrath.

Those who are cheerfully going about the work of dismantling the welfare state seem blissfully unaware that the welfare state was created by men as, or even more conservative than themselves, (Bismark, for example) in order to avoid revolutionary social movements which would destabilize and jeopardize the entire economic system and society itself. This was a strategy that was so eminently successful that it practically has destroyed revolutionary praxis.

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-european-red-spring.html

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I was also thinking this week of Seamus Innis's wonderful extemporaneous remarks on the playing of the Ulllean pipes, made many years ago when recordings had two sides and came in what seem now to be gigantic packages, sometimes even boxes, with whole booklets inside, explaining all the music or whatever. See e.g., the Library of Congress's amazing "The Hammons Family of West Virginia," something I've been conversing about with a nice feller from Staunton, VA. And it being the birthday recently of James Joyce, and as well the anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, the Innis remarks seem even more appropriate.

There is always an awful lot to be said about this Irish traditional
folk music and folklore, because first of all you have to learn it, and
first you must learn the talk, and then you must learn the grip, and
after that you must learn the trucklyhowl, and then you have the
whole lot only just to keep on practicing it. Because Seamus Innis
knows far more about this than even the old folk lord-di-lordies thems-
elves, because Seamus Innis once met a little Lepprechaunie trucklyhowl
at the bottom of the garden gluth, and up and up the garden path, which came
up from that in the Limoreti-Limoreti hillhockers, before the Earthian
Throll, before the Lepprechaun era, and long before the Argy-Fargy.
And that was in the Depondoom, before the Emerald Isle was ever
dropped . . . plop plop . . . in the water.

You can hear this spoken on this site: http://joefago.com/The_Truckley_Howl.html

I take "truckley howl" to be the perfect description of what the Ulllean pipes sound like, by the way.

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Here's a photo of Major Franklin, who in the mid-1960s played the perfect version of Tom and Jerry.

I've been working on learning his version for a while. It's not easy, for all it seems so. It might be that I'm getting too old to learn a damn tune any more, for all the ones I know already seem to continue to improve in the playing, if only slightly. I agree with Franklin's way of doing things:

http://www.nationalfiddlerhalloffame.org/HallOfFame/majorfranklinbio.html