Monthly Archives: March 2018

I Am For An English Libertie

Leave a reply

I am for
An English libertie
Wherein,
When I close my door,
I am free
To sin
(Whatever sin may be).

I am for
An English libertie
Where the law
Protects person and propertie
And the weak
Who can not for themselves speak.

I am for
An English libertie
Where people who’s views I dislike
Can sleep easy at night
And they extend the same courtesie
To me.

I am for
An English libertie
Where students can not ban those with whom they disagree
From campus under “no platform”, for that is not free
Speech, and I still
Cling to Mill.

“There is no uniquely English libertie”,
Some will say,
But I shall continue, in my contrarian way
To maintain that we
English are still
More or less free
(Though beware the authoritarian chill
That may our libertie kill).

Silence

Leave a reply

Silence enfolds,
Holds
Me.
In her soothing arms.
How well I know her charms.

I abhore
The crowd’s inane roar
Where those who shout loudest are too often heard
And the liar’s honeyed word
Is sweet
In the ears of those who long to eat.

The crowd will crucify
Those who are found to lie.
But tis a truth most drear
That tis the lie they long to hear.

The multitude hate
The silence for it makes them think,
So turn to drink
And prate
Of matters they only half comprehend.

I shall defend
The freedom of silence
Against the violence
Of the crowd who sway
First this way
Then that.
I shall stand aloof
From the man in the bowler hat
(and he who wears the cloth cap),
And hap
I shall find truth
For the crowd’s roar
Can not penetrate my front door.

The Tape

1 Reply

I can not escape
This constant tape
Running in my head.

When I am dead
The words said
Will go
I know
Not where,
Other than those
That from paper stare
At my readers from the printed page.

I shall be beyond rage
Or any other emotion,
Lost in a great ocean
Of what?
Shall I know it not?
Methinks
The tape will, finally, stop

Here’s how to check which apps have access to your Facebook account—and delete them…

Leave a reply

For anyone concerned about privacy, this is helpful

Chris The Story Reading Ape's avatarChris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

Further to my blog linking post on 15th March

Facebook doesn’t make it easy to delete your account – Here’s How to do it

Please also read the following  from Mike Murphy  on Quartz Media LLC:

If you’ve been on Facebook for a while, you’ve probably installed games or given sites permission to log into your Facebook account. You may even use Facebook to log into services like Spotify, Netflix, or Tinder.

But if you’ve been following the news around Cambridge Analytica, the data consultancy firm hired by the Donald Trump campaign for the 2016 US election that harvested the data of up to 50 million Facebook users without their permission through data collected from third-party apps, you may want to know how to make sure that something similar isn’t happening to you.

Here’s what you need to do

View original post

Was Squeers Misrepresented By Dickens In Nicholas Nickleby

Leave a reply

In his novel, Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens portrays Wackford Squeers (the headmaster) as a sadist with no redeeming features. Squeers was based on the (actual) headmaster of a Yorkshire school named William Shaw who was prosecuted for child cruelty. However, according to a descendant of William Shaw he was, in fact a humane man who was liked by his students and by the community in which his school operated. Dickens therefore does Shaw a great injustice in his portrayal of him in Nicholas Nickleby.
To read the article please visit https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1316931/The-real-Squeers-was-no-Dickens-brute-claims-descendant.html

“Doctor Foster” Reinterpreted

Leave a reply

I have played around, (purely for my own amusement), with the English nursery rhyme “Doctor Foster”. The first rendering is the traditional rendering, followed by my reinterpretations:

Doctor Foster went to
Gloucester,
In a shower of rain;
He stepped in a puddle,
Right up to his middle,
And never went there again.

—

Doctor Foster went to
Gloucester,
In a shower of rain;
He got in a muddle,
When he fell in a puddle,
And never went there again.

—

Doctor Foster went to
Gloucester,
In a shower of rain;
He indulged in a cuddle,
In the midst of a puddle,
With a lady whose name was Jane.

—

Doctor Foster went to
Gloucester,
In a shower of rain;
He stepped in a puddle,
Which did befuddle
His poor overtaxed brain.