About half of these words are in the larger dictionaries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some of them, though one or two—for instance, ‘funkum’ and ‘tosheroon’—are beyond guessing. ‘Deaner’ presumably comes from. ‘denier’. ‘Glimmer’ (with the verb ‘to glim’) may have something to do with the old word ‘glim’, meaning a light, or another old word ‘glim’, meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of the formation of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be older than motor-cars. ‘Gee’ is a curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of ‘gee’, meaning horse, in the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of ‘screever’ is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but there has been no similar word in English for the past hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in France.

Who could have guessed that twelve years of forced education in the near-dead Irish language would ever bear fruit?

Verb
scríobh
to write

It’s pronounced “skree-of”. It’s not often that one knows something that Orwell doesn’t!

This book might be of interest: “How the Irish invented slang“, by Daniel Cassidy:

“The words and phrases of Ireland are as woven into the clamour (glam mor, great howl, shout and roar) and racket (raic ard, loud melee) of American life as the hot jazz (teas, pron j’as, cd’as, heat, passion, excitement) of New Orleans.”

Mr Cassidy hopes to waft the winds of change in studies of English – but reminds readers that academics have long harboured a snobbish attitude to Irish. HL Mencken, author of The American Language, said the Irish had contributed very few words to Americans. “Perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list,” Mencken wrote.

Mr Cassidy points out that West used the word “babe”, meaning a physically attractive woman, in 1926 – and that the Irish word ‘bab’ meant a baby, woman or a term of affection. And baloney, meaning nonsense – a word synonymous with America if ever there was one – is derived from the Irish beal onna, meaning foolish talk.

So the idea that the Irish have contributed zilch (word meaning nothing or zero, origin unknown) to American English could be bealonna (baloney after all.” – Margaret Canning

“To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense – the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; [b]look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer.[/b] Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.”

Were he alive today, what would Orwell make of the state of the culture?

Joe described himself as a redneck socialist, and he was. He was profoundly concerned with the fate of the people he wrote about, those who worked hard all their lives and ended up with nothing. Funny: I’ve never met a socialist who didn’t care about others, or a capitalist who did. The truth is that a great many decent people are on the wrong side of the intelligence curve, don’t come from families that send their young to university,and can’t protect themselves from the corporate lawyers and bought legislatures.

It wasn’t a pose. He really and truly, honestly, demonstrably and implausibly, had no interest in money. He lived for some time in Hopkins Village in Belize, a seaside community of black, downscale Garifuna and, when some money began to come in from Deer Hunting, regularly gave it away to help the locals. He didn’t have a sainthood complex. He just didn’t care. He wanted books, a guitar, friends, internet, wine, and occasional substances not approved of by DEA. No pretenses. Drop acid, not names.

A real hero – like Robert Anton Wilson, another working class American boy made good, who never let success or money go to his head, and treated both with the contempt they deserve. An example to everyone.

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After an initial burst of popularity following this game, new readers and emails stopped flowing in to idleworm as the content became increasingly grim from 2003 onwards. As Jung said, “People can only take so much reality”. What passes for the left in the US prefers their dissent in glib, Jon Stewart-shaped irony. The curse of the “Daily Show” is a subject for another post.

In life, it’s important to be able to take a hint. Spend the remainder of one’s existence screaming into the abyss, or get on with (hopefully) more meaningful things.

Today arrived a peculiar email, which seems to make damning accusations (hard to tell):

So Buddy,

It is wrong when Bush blasts Iraq but it is fine, when Obama blasts Libya, right?

Anyway sweet Buddy, one or another, US military participates to war in order to slam down bloody tyrants, arabic or african, who cares??? Tyrant , they are, anyway.
Right or wrong, I ain’t know, only history ‘s gonna tell us.

Whatever, let’s give us a little animation about your Hero Obama and operation Odyssey Dawn.

Take care Buddy.

A >> fan <<
Right from China

The emailer seems to make a couple of fallacious assumptions: that silence on Obama equals support. A second error: this site has not been silent on Obama; though the old archives are gone, even a quick trawl through recent posts should correct the error that idleworm is a WarLib site.

Nevertheless (and apologies if the email is being misconstrued), a quick comment on Obama and his latest escapade:

It didn’t exactly come as a shock when the Democratic “base” lost their anti-war appetite once it was their guy in office. Hell, idleworm has linked to enough articles in the “Exile”, Dennis Perrin and Joe Bageant for even a casual reader to know where this site stands:

Obama & the Democrats are just the other half of the War Party. “The Business of America is Business”, a creep from the early 20th century once said. Well, “The Business of America is making weapons, and seeing to it that those weapons find ready uses and markets” might be more accurate.

Some might choose to see idleworm as a paid job – whose task it is to create anti-war cartoons (unpaid, of course) attacking whichever lying war criminal scumbag happens to be in office – regardless of which of the “parties” is in office. In reality, this site has consumed thousands of hours of man-time, money, and energy – which will not be recouped. This isn’t a complaint, just a statement of fact. This, clearly, was not a situation that could continue indefinitely.

And things that can’t go on forever generally don’t go on forever. Like Empires, and Growth-based economies on finite land-bases. Like the Romans of 475/6AD, modern people will learn this lesson, again.

The gulf war game – linked to above – was an education in itself. When it went viral, it was seen by millions of people. More visitors came to the site then in one day than visit it now in a year. The log file alone grew to 2 gigabytes in about 13 days, and choked. The game was shown on TV stations around the world, and seen by many more.

Hundreds, sometimes thousands of emails would arrive in a single day. That can make your head spin. The majority were supportive of the game’s anti-war message, though this majority declined to about parity amongst US emailers. There were only a tiny handful of pro-war boosters from outside the US…maybe a half dozen at most…an amazing thing to note.

Here’s the interesting part: in all of those thousands of emails, pro and con (as well as the vile hate mail and threats of violence), not one emailer said the following, or even came close to it:

Watching your cartoon made me reconsider my opinions.

Now don’t choose to misinterpret: only a fool would expect a cartoon to have any meaningful impact, and generations of cartoonists have said the same: that cartoons only reinforce existing opinions. They don’t change minds.

So, hopefully people will understand the decision that was taken: not to spend the next 10, 20 or 30 years pissing into the wind.

If you’re going to piss into the wind, it’d be nice if someone paid you for it, or at least were offered some sort of support/collaboration from fellow minded souls.

Neither of these happened.

And yes, Obama is no different from Bush. His wars of “Liberation” are no different, and the vile cant about freeing Libya from tyranny is particularly shallow. It’s feeling like a replay of the Yugoslavia playbook (dusted off by the reprehensible Clintons, now that they’ve got their greasy hooks back on the levers).

It should be noted that Libya stands on 2% of world oil reserves – and supplies 10% of the EU’s oil. Not only that, but the oil is exceptionally sweet and pure. It only costs ~$1 to refine a barrel, currently trading at ~$100. So the emailer doesn’t need for history to tell him what this is about. Geology and the markets are more than adequate.

In 2004, after seeing this David Goodstein lecture on Peak Oil (on the night of the Bush/Kerry “debate”), it seemed pretty clear that the future wasn’t going to be an extension of the “Happy Motoring Utopia”. After becoming involved in an L.A. Peak Oil group, and seeing the utter futility of trying to convince people by handing out leaflets on the side of the street, a simple (or simplistic) idea sprang to mind: why not make a short animated film about peak oil? Just take a few graphs, and make a 1 minute long primer on this very complex subject.

Well, that was six years ago. “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life”…

So,  now the film is 34 minutes long, and very close to release. Will it change any minds?

Magic 8-ball says: “Unlikely”.

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After moving to Canada to work, back in 2007, there were a few rough weeks where things seemed pretty pointless – to the point that the option of moving back to Ireland was seriously considered. A couple of strokes of good luck helped to lift spirits. One was a friend calling out of the blue to suggest a move to Portland Oregon, (done, and thanks for that). The other was a friend who emailed with the information that Joe Bageant had included idleworm.com in a list of websites that he had found useful in his book, “Deer Hunting with Jesus”.

For years, I’ve been meaning to email Joe about that, and how/why he saw fit to do include this site – it was a great lift. Now, we’ll never know.

Seize the day, eh?

Oh, do yourselves a favour and buy “Deer Hunting with Jesus”. Time to put his final work “Rainbow Pie” on the to-read list as well. Unlike political cartoons, those books will make you reconsider your opinions.

From “Three Days of the Condor”, (1975):

James Howard Kunstler has called Suburbia “the greatest mis-allocation of wealth in the history of the human race”.

Well, second greatest, at any rate.

Reagan … managed to destroy everything that was best about the state: the park system, the libraries, the protected shorelines, forests and rivers. He was just in time; when he took power, coastal California was reaching critical mass. There was a moment, as Hunter Thompson says in Fear and Loathing, when it seemed that whole littoral would just lift up, a reversal of the earthquake the inlanders were praying to sink it, and float away from the dead mass of the continent. Reagan came to fix that.

His method was simple: Reagan was the first to talk straight-out hate. Strange as it seems now, nobody was talking hate then, in public. In the living rooms, over dinner, oh yeah! Every house on our street. But not on the air, not yet. Reagan showed the way. This was Reagan 1.0, the California-only issue. This version had not yet learned his second great innovation: the smile. This early Reagan was angry, as Mark Ames discovered in a search of archived stories from the 1960s. The headlines of those stories would shock fans of the later “amiable” Reagan: “Angry Reagan Shouts Back at Heckling Students”; “Reagan Prepared to Attack Militant Student Leaders”; “Reagan Explains Angry Words.”

In contrast to the walking abortion “Reagan” – a black hole in space and time where there should have been a human being, contrast with … an actual human being, one Robert Anton Wilson, here in an interview, where he talks about fears that change is impossible:

As Mong-Tse said, “A man must destroy himself before others can destroy him.” Perhaps you put too much energy into resentment, anger, denunciation, and similar negative energy states, and don’t have enough positive energy surplus to achieve your goals. Perhaps you are too impatient and expect “freedom to drop into your lap as a fairy’s gift,” as Nietzsche said. Perhaps you are looking on too small a time scale to see the grand evolutionary pattern of higher consciousness and higher intelligence ever emerging. Perhaps you are too attached to the superficial and temporary, and regard each setback as a total defeat, without seeing that intelligence always wins in the long run. Copernicus couldn’t publish in his lifetime, Bruno was burned at the stake, Galileo was condemned and placed under house arrest, etc., but the new astronomy finally triumphed over Catholic orthodoxy. Dr. Reich died in prison of a broken heart, because he believed that those who jailed him really were in control and, hence, saw himself as a victim of injustice. Dr. Leary stayed high (through a sentence nine times as high as Reich’s) because he knew that, even in prison, even in the solitary-confinement cell at the bottom of the maximum building at Folsom, he was more in control than his persecutors. He knew that because his ideas were creating the future; whereas the gang who locked him up can’t even control the present, which is, in fact, falling apart all around them.

As I said earlier, the path of intelligence is all hard work, low pay, and a high probability that the fanatics of all ideologies will gang up on you. If a person can’t accept that cheerfully, he or she should give up such a dangerous occupation, and join one of the coalitions of true believers or Establishmentarians. If any of the conspiracies really are as all-powerful as you think, it certainly would be a wise choice to join them, if comfort or status are your main concerns. We in the SMI2LE organization accept that we are living on the Planet of the Apes and that, as Charles Fort said, it doesn’t steam-engine until it comes steam-engine time. The stupidity, brutality and banditry around us are what one should expect on a primitive planet with low technology and only a few hundred years of science. (As Gurdjieff said, “Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?”)

Frankly, I’d find life a bore if I wasn’t playing for very high stakes in a very high-risk situation. We do have the chance, now, for Utopia and even for immortality. If we who see this opportunity aren’t smart enough, adroit enough, and fast enough to seize the chance, then we don’t deserve to initiate the next stage of evolution. In that case, the age of the mammalian predators isn’t ending, and we are deluded visionaries seeing a future that can’t happen yet. The order of nature is nothing to be angry about. Meanwhile, until they shovel me under, I still think our side is winning, and that the power brokers you worry about are a bunch of dying dinosaurs.

Dmitri’s blog:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/

The Kepler spacecraft has found a strange solar system, packed with 6 planets, very close together. Five of these objects orbit their sun in a space equivalent to that between Mercury and the Sun:

A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their coauthors analyzed the orbital dynamics of the system, determined the sizes and masses of the planets, and figured out their likely compositions — all based on Kepler’s measurements of the changing brightness of the host star (called Kepler-11) as the planets passed in front of it…

…The five inner planets in the Kepler-11 system range in size from 2.3 to 13.5 times the mass of the Earth. Their orbital periods are all less than 50 days, so they orbit within a region that would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our solar system. The sixth planet is larger and farther out, with an orbital period of 118 days and an undetermined mass.

An exquisite re-use of an existing spacecraft, and a second chance to see the results of the first man-made deep space collision:

NASA’s Deep Impact mission pounded a comet in 2005, but failed to see the resulting crater. Now, scientists will get a second chance to glimpse the damage when a second spacecraft flies by the comet on 15 February.

In an unprecedented experiment, NASA smashed a 372-kilogram impactor into Comet Tempel 1 on 4 July 2005 as part of its Deep Impact mission.

A flyby spacecraft recorded images of the impact from a safe distance, but the cloud of impact debris and a flawed camera made it impossible to see the crater itself. Studying the crater could have revealed more about the interior composition and structure of comets.

Now, another spacecraft is about to make its own fly-by of the comet, offering a second chance to image the structure.

Called Stardust, the spacecraft collected material from Comet Wild 2 in 2004 and sent it in a capsule back to Earth, where scientists have been studying it ever since.

It would be nice to live to see this: should Betelgeuse, one of the stars in much loved constellation of Orion explode (as astronomers expect it to do, soon), it’ll be very bright. As bright as the full moon, maybe brighter. Probably visible during daytime! In spite of much online noise, it’s unlikely to kill life on Earth – that Honour shall belong to the Mucoid Invader Fleet of #21343314390-K. They’re not due to arrive for another 23 years. The ensuing horror will make you curse the day of your conception. Until then:

We will see a bright light, a flash, which will last for years. But even at its strongest, it will be about as bright as the Moon – not anywhere near as bright as the Sun. There are several types of supernovas, and we know that this one will be a type two.

We also know what its maximum luminosity will be; we have seen similar ones in other galaxies. It will be bright enough to light up the night sky as much as the Moon does.

As for gamma rays or high-energy particles, there’s no reason to worry about them. We have nothing to be concerned about before the shock wave reaches the Earth, and this won’t happen for a very long time. It will expand at a speed well below the speed of light. If it takes the speed of light 640 year to reach the Earth, something travelling a hundred times slower will take a very long time to reach us.

Lovely, and just a little creepy: Greenland’s Moulins

A moulin is a hole in a glacier that funnels meltwater from the surface to the bedrock beneath. This flow of water has importance consequences for the speed at which the glacier moves.

Warmer summers may paradoxically slow down the speed of glaciers flowing towards the sea, suggests new research. This investigation, using data from ESA’s oldest environmental satellite, has important implications for future estimates of sea-level rise.