Month: July 2006
Waking the Dead: the Return of the Funeral Pyre
Although illegal since the 1930s a giant, beautiful funeral pyre for a British Sikh man was built and burnt this week, bringing an ancient and almost forgotten burial rite back to a country that once, like much of the rest of Europe, burnt its dead. An intriguing story has emerged in Northumberland, England this week with the extensive media coverage of an open-air funeral pyre for a Sikh man which was carried out an a secret location. That said it can't have been that secret as a BBC camera crew managed to film the whole thing. Jobsworths Of course, this being England we're speaking of, it didn't take long for a bureaucrat to come screaming out of the woodwork about violation of protocols and laws. The row began in earnest when the Department for Constitutional Affairs (who the hell are they?) went into jobsworth mode and stated that the ceremony...
Diggin’ in the Dirt: Niall (sausage the third)
Continuing with Blather.net's in-depth investigation of the infamous fifth-century thug and womaniser, our grave-robber in residence Ender digs deeper into the history of Niall of the Nine Hostages and discovers some good old-fashioned Irish skullduggery. For historical accuracy we must be very careful in giving any credence, to anything, written before the seventh century. This is when native Irish chroniclers started to write things in the margins of Easter Tables contemporarily, as was the fashion in Europe. Before this, they had to introduce and teach a foreign language like Latin, to a native ecclesial population who had no previous written form of their own spoken language, and not much experience of speaking the new written one. (Think TEFL courses, with lots of half bald men in robes, sitting around calfskin tomes. “Conail…I’ve had enough of your messin’, get to the back of the beehive hut. Ah ah…no buts.â€) Only then...