The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 8

Wee statues with frills in their blouses
Are desperately clinging to houses;
And Gabriel Byrne
Is a point of concern,
With no arse in the back of his trousers.

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 7

On holy shops, cupboards and crumbs
And people with hymns in their hums;
The blackboards, you’ll see ‘em
In Ulster Museum …
One’s finished; the other becomes.

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 6

In Derry, they’re often a pair,
The laughter, pursued by despair;
A deeply emotional,
Any but notional
Podcast, from three who were there.

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 5

The gleam in a shouty man’s eye,
The cake that’s forbidden to fly,
Sectarian tray bake,
And doilies at daybreak …
A whale that’s retired to Skye.

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 4

His doorway besmirched by unnamed,
The Voice of Sinn Fein is reframed;
The story of Jeanie
In France as a tweenie
(Eventually, when she was claimed).

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 3

One’s never, no never, up late,
One’s ironing every date …
The Bishop is brittle
In wee Ballinspittle,
And hark the informer dog’s fate.

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 2

Profane and religious offences,
And thoroughfares nursing pretences;
The standards are failing.
No bums on the railing,
And no filling up of your senses.

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 1

Three Derry insiders transcend
Pulp Fiction and Derry - the blend,
Then showcase Pauline
As a Little Miss Keen,
Though she wasn’t, it seems, in the end.

The Talking Derry Girls Podcast: Episode 0

Jeanie, Marie-Louise and Pauline,
At the dawn of the podcast, convene
For a chat about Derry,
And end with a very
Professional sign-off routine.

Limericks are something I’ve always enjoyed. A well-crafted limerick is completely at home within itself. Short, rhythmic, rhyming, and preferably funny. A standalone giggle.

The most famous limerick is probably this one:

There was a young lady of Riga,
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Edward Lear made limericks popular. But as the example below reveals, he didn’t really understand how they work:

There was an Old Person of Buda,
Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder,
Till at last with a hammer they silenced his clamor,
By smashing that Person of Buda.

A.A. Milne, on the other hand, didn’t write limericks, but he did understand the need for a punchline. I’m quoting The Hums of Pooh below from memory, so bear with me. No pun intended.

It’s a very funny thing that if bears were bees,
They’d build their nests at the bottom of trees.
And that being so (if the bees were bears),
I shouldn’t have to climb up all these stairs.

This hum and the Lady of Riga are two of my favourite poems ever :)

PS: Or did A.A. Milne write any limericks? I must find out.

Dennis’s Wee Shop, from the Derry Girls TV series, has just been demolished in real life. Behold the grim spectacle below. Many thanks to Talking Derry Girls Podcast (Twitter Link) for permission to use their photographs.

 

The Wee Shop in the background

 

The Bogside Inn reduced to a pile of rubble

 

Gutted

Note the sombre skies ...

Test For A Microcast

Upload at 10.43.30

Well this image appeared straight away. I can’t figure out what’s going on with marsEdit and images from my computer.

Chevrolet Vega Johnson at home

10.29 and still no image on the blog.

Uploaded at 10.19.0am

Appeared immediately but without the photo. Instead, a rectangle the right size containing the alt text. The delay is because the photo was inserted from my Photos app, which is only storing low-res versions locally. The original has to be downloaded first, I think, before MarsEdit can upload it.

Deleted and re-inserted the image in MarsEdit. Uploading update at 10.32.50 … Now that worked straight away …

Strictly a test post to see whether it appears straight away on the blog.

Okay. The original displayed on the blog immediately. What about this edit in MarsEdit?

I see. The edit did not display immediately. It took some time. A couple of minutes? I am sending this new edit to the blog at 9.40.30am

And it appeared immediately when I refreshed the page at JohnAN.micro.blog. And this edit?

Also immediate. Adding MarsEdit Category in MarsEdit after refreshing blog to get it.

This is going to start as a draft saved in Mars Edit. Later I’ll upload it to the blog. I need to figure out what to do with DevonThink. Like, how can I use it, apart from its rss feed reading abilities?

And is all this tinkering merely avoidance behaviour?

This didn’t publish by itself on the blog when I uploaded it. I could see it in “Posts” but it had a message saying it wasn’t published yet.

This is a very short post created in MarsEdit 4, the beta version, I think, but I can’t remember what the extra feature was that made me get the beta version.

I have Mars Edit set to plain text.

The mystery is only revealed at the end.

Sometimes an escalator is just really funky.

Everything’s locked down in Sydney but the wind.

The smallest climbing wall ever

Night of the super moon, Collaroy Beach

Early morning at Collaroy Beach

Full image again, I hope, but from Sunlit this time (not from the micro.blog iOS app) …