A Life in Beta

One of my favorite books is the wonderful ”A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole.  It’s a shame he cornered the market on that wonderful turn of phrase for it could oft be used to describe goings on at Stormont – no more so in the last few weeks.

How dispiriting to see the same old games of tribal/religious (don’t ever mistake what we have in Northern Ireland for genuine politics) brinkmanship played out to the familiar backdrop of Stormont and Hillsborough Castle on the, to be frank, relatively minor issue (in the context of poposed healthare budget cuts, economic fragility and the post primary education shambles) of Policing and Justice devolution.

I was ready to vent my spleen on this topic today, having climbed back on the Blogging saddle as it were but then in catching up on six weeks of Google Reader reading (?!) I came across yet another excellent post from Jeff Peel.
I couldn’t have said it better in any way, so I won’t try. You can just visit here instead and enjoy.

I’ll leave you instead with some wise words offered by JTK via his unique creation Ignatius J. Reilly - a sentiment shared perhaps by all of us watching with interest those on ‘the hill’:

“Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age,” Ignatius said solemnly. “Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books.”

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