Diggin’ in the Dirt: I, Patrick. (Puke the Third)
Welcome back for part three of the latest blather.net "Diggin' in the Dirt" epic, "I, Patrick. Puke the Third", coming to you this week from the darkest bowel of a 5th century Irish slave ship. Ender Wiggan, our Graverobber in residence, takes you through the story of how the slave became a general, who became a... no, wait. That's not quite right. The slave who became a call girl, who became a... arse, hang on. I can do this... Havent read "I, Patrick: Puke the First"? Click here. Our Own Mothers There isn't a single Early Irish historian or archaeologist who wouldn't crawl twenty miles over broken glass, before giving you their wallets, rings and the shirt of their backs...in order to have Patrick's account of his journey across Ireland, of several hundred miles, in the fifth century. Most frustratingly, he tells us nothing about it. It wasn't important to...
Diggin’ in the Dirt: I, Patrick. (Puke the Second)
Join us once again as Blather.net's resident graveyard-worrier, Ender Wiggan, regales us with his second part of the epic six-part series "I, Patrick", in which the young Welshman (that would be St. Patrick) gets kidnapped, sold into slavery, generally wishes he was never born and discovers the singular hospitality to be found in early 5th century Ireland. Havent read "I, Patrick: Puke the First"? Click here. Disgorged Imagine travelling by boat to America during the potato famine in the nineteenth century. The cramped conditions, the paltry meals, slop buckets, the smells of huddled humanity, clearing out the dead in the morning. Now imagine doing it while chained up for several days or weeks, being disgorged at various ports and made to stand in a slave market, before returning to the ship (unsold) at the end of the day. Imagine finally being offloaded into daylight, blinking and shivering, into a cross...
Diggin’ in the Dirt: I, Patrick. (Puke the First)
With March 17th fast approaching and Dublin City Council already making preparations for cleaning up the deluge of white foamy piss and green/orangey puke overflowing the gutters in the streets, Blather.Net's Archaeologist of the Damned and Resident Graverobber, Ender Wiggan, unearths the truth behind the blow-in from Britain; in whose honour the annual national stereotype perpetuation festival is held. The first of a six-part series, "I Patrick" is a vast, sprawling epic tale of war, slavery, religious fundamentalism, rape, murder and dying empires. Or, it could just be a load of begorra, begob, musha man divil alive paddywhackery. Prologue: This is the story of a small Island nation, situated on the fringes of Europe during a time of tumultuous change. An underdeveloped country with a predominantly young and highly intelligent population, whose increasing economic ability, disposable income and prospective markets became the focus of international attention. A country targeted by...
Happy Humpback Whale Christmas from the Southern Ocean
Grey-headed albatross - vulnerable species, 2.2m wingspan! © 2007 Dave Walsh I'm writing from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, currently en route to the Antarctic.In the last few weeks we've threaded our way south, around Papua New Guinea, down past New Ireland (we didn't stop in, but I hear the Guinness may be good) and into to the port of Auckland, New Zealand, which is almost becoming a second home for me. I've now sailed out of there five times on Greenpeace ships since May 2004. On Wednesday we left Auckland, and headed down the east cost of New Zealand. After a quick stop off at Bluff (right at the bottom of the South Island), I'm currently writing you from remarkably good weather in the Southern Ocean. Down here, "good" is a relative term - the wind is howling outside, the ship is rolling around a bit, which makes sitting at...
Zeitgeist: The Movie, 9/11, Andrew Keen and the impossible search for ‘the truth’
In February 2007, Blather.net issued a challenge to the 9/11 Truth Movement. We said: "It's time to up the game. Time to get better. Time to write better blogs, make better movies and ask better questions. We're sorry, but Loose Change and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are just not doing that right now." But now, it seems, somebody has upped the game: one Peter Joseph. His film, 'Zeitgeist: The Movie', is an altogether different prospect. The Call to Adventure Peter Joseph's two-hour labour of love 'Zeitgeist: The Movie' is a compelling, engaging and highly effective prayer: a hymn for the Dubyatube generation. Splicing together hundreds of videos, audio files, historical footnotes and citing and quoting sources from an impressively broad spectrum (from Roman Historians to Carl Sagan) 'Zeitgeist: The Movie' is a look at what can only be called 'the greatest conspiracy theory of all' - tracking a clear path from...
Anarchy on the High Seas
© Dave Walsh Dave and Mir tell of pirate hideaways from on board the Esperanza: The other day our ship, the Esperanza passed near the island of Sonsorol, one of the sixteen states of the Republic of Palau. But when we say "near" it's very relative - the ocean is a very very big place, and we didn't actually see it. Still, Sonsorol was there, just a tiny dot in the chart, so small. It could have been just a rock. But it is also the place of an utopian anarchist dream. Some years ago, an article called Visit Port Watson!, a sort of tourist guide about the perfect lawless society on Sonsorol, was published in a book called Semiotext(e) SF. The article would have you believe that Sonsorol was a sizeable place, a pirate enclave with towns and farms where anyone could go and live, with all sorts of...
Blather meets Out There Radio
'Out There Radio' is the brainchild of Messrs. Joe McFall and Raymond Wiley. Broadcasting from Athens, Georgia and touching on every form of conspiracy theory and fortean phenomena imaginable, 'Out There' is an excellent podcast, covering ground that should be quite familiar to readers of Blather.net. We recently caught up with Joe McFall and invited him to introduce himself and 'Out There' to Blatherskites. Blather: Who is responsible for 'Out There Radio' and how did you all get together? Joe: Raymond's really the captain of the ship here... Blather: Who would you cite as your most prominent influences? Joe: Like many who have read Robert Anton Wilson, I would say that his books, especially /Prometheus Rising/ and /Cosmic Trigger/, had a profound effect on me, moreso than the works of any other author or artist. Timothy Leary, too. Many people who trash Leary for exposing entheogens to the public (and,...
Conspiracy of Silence; UFOs in Ireland
I wrote this review of Conspiracy of Silence; UFOs in Ireland by Dermot Butler and Carl Nally about a year ago for Fortean Times - and completely forgot to publish in Blather! Of course, that's all because blather.net is part of an Irish government conspiracy to suppress the proof that extra-terrestrials are visiting this very parish, I'll have you know. The authors of Conspiracy of Silence set their stall out early, the cover showing a sinister black triangle - with conspicuous red lights on each corner - hovering above Newgrange, the 5,000 year old passage grave in County Meath. Inside, the thesis continues, with ufologist Timothy Good's foreword stating "in this ground-breaking book, Dermot Butler and Carl Nally have shown us that, in company with many other governments, the Irish authorities have made strenuous efforts to keep its populace in the dark". The authors, Butler and Nally - both of...
Waking the Dead: The Mummies of Saint Michan’s Church, Dublin
Once again the Blather team lead their readers into a dark corner to show them disturbing things. This time, Dave descends below Dublin's oldest church, St. Michan's, to see the famous "mummies" - ancient cadavers that have dried out rather than rotted, and to pull the Crusader's finger. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust - you've been warned, potentially unsavoury photographs to follow... I was an impressionable youth. Well, a wide-eyed seven-year-old country kid anyway - easily wowed by the city slicker ways of his urban cousins. I've recounted elsewhere my early experiences with the Dublin Hellfire Club. The same aunt, uncle and cousin who took me on that adventure were also responsible for introducing me to the Mummies of St. Michan's. Down the steps they led, me, down into the bowels of St. Michan's Church, some grey place in the middle of a grey city. Down a tunnel, into...
Blather.net: 10 Years Old! Happy Birthday to Us!
Dear reader (excuse the familiarity - we don't know you from Adam) - please sit down, as you may find this hard to swallow. Blather.net is ten years old. Yes, ten years or if you like, 3653 days. This means that this website is racing towards puberty, and will no longer stand for the wearing of shorts pants, at least not in the depths of the Hibernian winter. As the legal drinking age in this country is eight-years-old, we've already been hard at it, building up a fierce resistance to the hard stuff, so the website won't (or shouldn't crash) during the celebrations. Do you get the smell of porter? It was a Monday, May 1997. I was at my desk in a trendy loftspace, just off Westland Row, Dublin. Gerry McGovern, one of my bosses at the upstart Internet startup Nua, approached me, somewhat tentatively. "You were in London...