Seamus Heaney; RIP.

It's a very sad day today.

Today we have heard that the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney has died.

Seamus Heaney was the first Irish poet laureate since WB Yeats and the one thing I know about his poems is that they are – as were Yeats' - very accessible; that's the main thing. 

Some poets are so complicated and dense that they require an education in something else in order to be understood.

Heaney's poems, as well as Yeats' – make the reader look for the meaning of the work elsewhere. 

Work that is usually accomplished part time, evening time and slumber time.

Poems come in a flash to lots of poets and some take time to write – some of the great ones, as with some songs, are written in a moment. Seamus Heaney said Digging came to him as he was driving; here's a bit:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down . . .

Easy peasy isn't it? You can see what it's about – a bit like the miner father to the poet son, the labourer to the lawyer son and so on.

I have known of Seamus Heaney for years and years and I am sorry to say I am not that much of an expert on his actual poetry - but there again I am not much an expert on anything but I can't let that stop me from saying a word about him on this day. 

You have to envy me though as I have that pleasure to come.

But I will never forget that perfect Derry accent and the reading of his own poetry.

I don't know if you need to come from the British Isles to appreciate his sonnet about the shipping forecast but here is a bit of it:

Dogger. Rockall. Malin, Irish Sea:
Green swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice.
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

This is what sends people to sleep in the British Isles; it is preceded by Sailing By which is a piece of music that has been played in the same spot for fifty years. One can imagine Seamus drifting off to sleep at about 12:50 am – as that is when Sailing By, followed by the shipping forecast, comes on to Radio 4. 

If you are in America just listen to it on the Internet; you should be able to work out the time – 5:50 pm on the west coast – and you may be able to hear the inspiration before Radio 4 turns in to the BBC World Service with their new music – Lilly Bolero long gone.

Seamus Heaney was born in Derry; son of a farmer; Derry part of the so called Northern Ireland but he carried an Irish Passport; green it was till the EU came along when you could see your fellow Irish standing in the queues at the airport flashing their 'greeny' but that has gone and Seamus Heaney has gone now too – just 74 in an age when we are all supposed to be living till 100. RIP.

Seamus Heaney - Sailing Away.

The Pitch!

cricket bats - good and solid willow.

The word pitch has loads of meanings: you can pitch an idea, pitch a ball at baseball; it can be the pitch you play on, as in football (soccer), or the cricket pitch which is the piece of ground between the two wickets at cricket, twenty two yards long and ten feet wide – the hallowed piece of real estate that no one will walk upon.

People jump over it in case their foot leaves a mark or moves a piece of the sacred sod.

A pitch at baseball is what they call it when the 'pitcher' throws the ball at the batter, trying to get the ball past him, and into the catcher's hands – or to be more precise – his glove. The glove being worn on one hand – the none throwing hand.

Here is the picture of a pitcher:

not not that one – this one:

in all truth does this look more dynamic?

or this?

or even these 2 images.

Those last two are of Frank (Typhoon) Tyson a bowler – at cricket. 

And this is what it looks like at the other end:

At cricket you have to bowl the ball and keep your bowling arm straight or it will be a foul as you are not allowed to throw the ball which you are at baseball.

You will notice that the pitcher – no not the jug – lifts a knee just before letting the ball go.

Now why is this?

I think it's when you lift the knee you have passed the point of no return and you cannot throw the ball at one of the bases if you see a batter out of his ground which is what you can do before lifting the leg.

It's the same as running someone out at cricket – in cricket two bases, in baseball three bases and the batter's box as in the expression think (or whatever) out of the box.

Yes there are plenty of sayings from baseball but probably more from cricket – a straight bat, a safe pair of hands, a sticky wicket, it's not cricket and many more.

The glove is worn on the one hand, at baseball, so the fielder can throw the ball with the other; however, at cricket, they don't wear a glove at all even though the ball is heavier (between five and a half to five and three quarter ounces as opposed to the baseball which is five and a quarter ounces) apart from the wicket keeper which is the cricket equivalent of baseball's catcher. He wears a pair of gloves.

The difference in weight between the two balls means that the cricket ball can be thrown further than the baseball which makes the long fielding at cricket better than long fielding at baseball but baseball's close fielding is far superior; there is nothing so spectacular as the double (or even triple) play.

The object of both games is to score more runs than the other team; in cricket you can have a drawn game – that is when the time allowed for play runs out before the last batting team are all out – or a tie; that is when both teams score the same amount of runs. 

If this happens in baseball they play till one of the teams has more runs than the other when they have both batted for the same amount of innings; this can sometimes mean playing after midnight.

As a general rule, batsmen at cricket think they can play baseball – but they can't. In baseball when you hit across the ball and you have to run when you hit it.

As a general rule, batters at baseball think they can play cricket – but they can't. In cricket you get behind the ball and hit it with a straight bat but you don't have to run; you can play defensive – unheard of in baseball.

Two great games, though, and I am privileged to know both of them so I know what a 'curve ball' and a 'googly' is.

By the way in cricket it's an innings and in baseball it's an inning.

A run at cricket is when you run to the other end of the pitch (you know what pitch means) and the batsman (batter in baseball) at the other end reaches the wicket at the batsman's end who has just hit the ball.

A run at baseball is when the batter (batsman in cricket) has run all the way around the triangle.

Here's the triangle:

 And here's the cricket pitch:

The bowlers at cricket bowl fast or slow. The fast bowlers 'swing' the ball and when it bounces it can go anywhere and when they bowl slow they 'spin' the ball and that can go anywhere too.

Give yourself a treat and look at one of the greatest bowlers ever, the Australian Shane Warne bowling the ball of the century – see how good it is on the replay in this clip which is about one minute long:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waE8Ew5bejM

I hope all this is clear?

Oh! Not to worry – I hope you enjoyed the pictures. Here is a simple explanation of cricket:

The aim of cricket is simple - score more than the opposition.

Two teams, both with 11 players, take it in turns to bat and bowl.
When one team is batting, they try and score as many runs as they can by hitting the ball around an oval field.
The other team must get them out by bowling the ball overarm at the stumps, which are at either end of a 22-yard area called a wicket.

A batsman protects his stumps

The bowling team can get the batsmen out by hitting the stumps or catching the ball. Other ways of getting out
Once the batting team is all out, the teams swap over and they then become the bowling side.
Each time a team bats it is known as their innings. Teams can have one or two innings depending on how long there is to play.
The Ashes Test matches are over five days so England and Australia have two innings each to score as many runs as they can.
Whoever scores the most runs wins. But a cricket match can be drawn too.
That happens when the team bowling last fails to get all the batsmen out..

Here for baseball:

A baseball game is played by two teams who alternate between offence and defence. There are nine players on each side. The goal is to score more runs than the opponent, which is achieved by one circuit of four bases that are placed on the diamond.

When it boils down they are the same game but that's the way the Americans play it; they misread the memo.

Here are the heroes; two in baseball and the other at cricket; these men will never be replaced:

Ted Williams of the Red Sox and Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees.

Ian Botham - a hero for all time (a sporting hero, that is).

The Testament of Mary.

I was laying in bed the other night, the night of the shooting stars – the meteor showers, reading a book by one of my favourite authors, Colm Tóibín, called The Testament of Mary. This is a book about the mother of Christ but it is a fiction – a novel. It's only about one hundred and ten pages or so but I felt I had to read it because of the standard of writing.

It's not a subject I read about much but I am always interested in various religions.

The novel is written in a first person narrative, supposedly from Mary, and she talks of her son; never mentioning him by name – well not yet anyway.

She is speaking some time after the crucifixion from some 'other' place and she is going through her thoughts about what happened in her son's life. I reached the part in the novel where she reminisces about him bringing Lazarus back to life. You will remember Lazarus as the man that Jesus 'revived' from the dead. He is supposed to have said 'Lazarus come forth' and, as the saying goes in Dublin, he came fifth and won an orange.

But I digress.

It seems that Lazarus had been dead for four days and was buried in the ground and when Jesus came upon the scene his two sisters, helped by a few others, cleared the dirt away for the Lazarus miracle. After the miracle people treated Mary – and Lazarus in fact – very suspiciously and as I read this, tucked comfortably in my bed, a big fly buzzed around the room. Now this has happened before and because of the darkness of the room, being lit only by my bed side lamp, I have never bothered to swat the fly, but because the book is only about one hundred and ten pages long, I took a swipe; bingo!

I heard the slight thud of the book to fly impact and saw it careering across the room and landing on the white chest of drawers where he lay motionless; possibly waiting for our spider to take him away.

He has to be 'our' spider as he lives with us.

And so – on with the book.

There were lots of people who didn't believe that Lazarus had died at all and the thought occurred to me that he would find it rather uncomfortable with a mouth full of dirt for four days; the narrative goes on to say his sisters, his beautiful sisters, would put wet cloths into his mouth and I didn't wonder why.

Mary was taken to a wedding and at the wedding people seemed to be interested in her instead of the happy couple and she felt uncomfortable about it. She is warned that a man at the door is a spy and if her son comes she should sneak him out of the house as the Romans did not like the fact that her son was leading some kind of revolution and breaking certain traditions – one of them being death!

As I read this I noticed that the fly, as with Lazarus, was moving on the white chest of drawers; it was that tiny bit too far away from me to swat again without getting out of bed and in any case I wasn't about to run around the room after it, with my wife neatly napping next to me; but I watched.

Up he rose and started to fly around the room – not making the same buzzing noise as before but, nonetheless, being a nuisance. I know all creatures have their place on this earth and if we take one species away we will be plagued by whatever they eat, but I was reading and didn't want his company.

After a few minutes he settled on to the ceiling; the ceiling in my bedroom is very high so I would have had to jump up and smack him with something so I lay there and watched him walk to the corner where I know there is a spider's web made, some time ago, by our spider. After a few seconds I could see he was tangled up.

So back to the book and back to where Jesus enters to the wedding party. His mother said he had a glow about him, was wearing rich clothes; he seemed to have grown and that his followers, the people he had come with, didn't dress the way he did and didn't have a glow about them, and that he was the centre of attention as soon as he came in. 

Well he would be wouldn't he? He had just brought a man back to life but . . . . . when people looked at Lazarus he looked dead; he was being watered by his beautiful sisters with a wet cloth and he looked as if he was about to collapse.

It gave Mary the chance to go to her son and tell him that he must get out of there that he is in danger and that they must leave right away but he looked at her as is she were not his own, that he didn't know her and went and spoke to others.

His mother thought she heard him say that he was the son of God and this disturbed her so she went to him and tried to reason with him again and as she did this - the fly escaped from the spider's web.

The captivity must have frustrated him so much that he was flying around, buzzing, bumping and nearly hitting me so I had to take the decision and get out of bed.

As he flew across the width of the bed I took the book and, using it like a table tennis bat, I backed handed it into the wall by the window where it perished.

I made sure of this by gently tapping him with the spine of the book and moving him, with the book, to the skirting board.

Usually I read heavier books which cannot be used as a swatter so this book has more uses than it was meant to have and I recommend it in any case as a good read.

The next morning I looked to see if the fly was still where I had left him but he was gone; taken away by our spider I suppose.

Internet Bullying - Trolls.

I wrote in a blog some time ago about the film director Alan Smithee – who doesn't exist.

It's a name film directors use when they don't want their name attached to the film they have directed mostly because someone has messed with the film and, in the opinion of the director, ruined it; but let's face it sometimes they improve it.

The directors are really saying they don't want their name associated with the film and by doing so they create publicity and they don't achieve the anonymous state they profess to desire.

They are not and never will be anonymous.

Now my pal Jim, who writes a blog that you can click on to at the top of this page, has trouble with an anonymous troll who writes comments on his blog all the time.

This must be a bit worrying but I know Jim and I know he can handle it; the fact that he edits his comments and doesn't publish any more of the comments from the anonymous troll tells you more about the anonymous troll than it does about Jim.

In Britain, lately, trolls have been threatening female members of parliament; one in particular because she was campaigning for Jane Austin to appear on the ten pound (£) note.

She has been threatened with rape, bombs and other kinds of violence but, as in the case of Jim, she can handle it.

Last week a young girl committed suicide because she suffered the same kind of abuse and it's obvious that she couldn't handle it; she's not the first and she won't be the last.

I heard of it happening in America before we came back here.

There is no answer to it really; I have noticed that YouTube have been asking for real names lately but that will never work.

These people are usually weedy little pieces of garbage who live in a little room at their parent house.

I saw a documentary on TV once where a man was being threatened over the phone in his apartment; the guy on the other end of the phone was say 'I'll be up to kill you, soon. I got a gun.'

When the police found the man they knocked his door down and he was in his apartment, surrounded by old pizza boxes and he was about five feet four and weighed about 90 pounds wringing wet - ' don't hit me, don't hit me' he cried. If only that girl knew the type of person that was threatening her.

On the IMDb, which is the Internet Movie Data Base, there are loads of trolls. If you go on to the Star Wars page and leave a comment saying 'Star Wars is crap' you will be spotted straight away as a troll.

Now where did this word troll come from; we all know the song I’m a Troll fol-de-rol, I’m a Troll fol-de-rol, I’m a Troll fol-de-rol and I’ll eat you up for supper from Billy Goats Gruff, but this word troll comes from the fishing term and the activity of trolling; it's when you have your rod in the water trying to pick something up.

It's strange that the other bad Internet activity has a fishing connotation – phishing; that's when people send you an email asking for your password.

Another con trick these days is when someone gets that password from you, signs in to your email and sends an email to everybody in your address book saying that they (pretending to be you) are in Venice and they have lost their wallet – can you send money etc.

If I run out of money in some far away place with a strange sounding name I will not send any of my pals an email; if I'm in trouble I'll call you.

Baseball and Cricket - the difference; or Memorial Day in the Valley.

Memorial Day in America is a national holiday; what you would call in Britain a bank holiday, and when I first moved there I would go to a big house in the San Fernando Valley (The Valley) to celebrate with a friend of a friend.

The friend was a guy called Hank; everybody called him Hank but his real name was Chaim – pronounced Hime, with that guttural sound on the aitch – but people called him Hank. It wasn't that he wasn't proud to be Jewish but Hank was easier for goys to remember and pronounce. 

 

Now 'goy' is a Yiddish word and if there was one thing I liked about Hank it was his use of Yiddish; I learned what a schnorrer was, a schlemiel, a schlepper and all the other uses of words not so complimentary but colourful and interesting. 

 

I also got used to hearing those words from his other friends and when I went to the world première of the movie Showgirls (don't ask) with him I met all the guys in the producer's office and learned their humour too.

When they heard my accent they'd say 'Where you fram – Joysey??'

In fact if there's one thing I miss about LA it's the Jewish humour – not Jewish jokes but Jewish humour – you know: Woody Allen, Seinfeld etc. 

 

The Jews here in Britain, seem to play gentiles ever since David Kossoff died. The closest thing Britain ever got to a Jewish series, since Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width was a series made by Indians called Goodness Gracious Me which had that fish out of water, matriarchal, Italian/Jewish/Irish feel to it, even though it was from a country so far away.

Back to memorial day and my pal Hank.

I went to the house twice in the valley and it was the same story each time; when we arrived we met Hank's pal and he would be sitting in the big house by himself. He would take us in to the rear of the house where there would be loads of food and drinks all set out on a garden table next to the pool.

'The others will be here soon' he would say 'Hey Chris – when we have time maybe you can explain to me the rules of cricket.'

And I would say 'They're quite simple it's . . . '

'When we got time' he'd say; then we would sit around and take a drink.

A little while later his daughter would arrive, by herself, and sit at the table. She had the same conversation each time and that was to do with the 'valley' seceding from Los Angeles.

That's all she was interested in and, in fact, one of the years they had an election and the people of the valley decided to stay in Los Angeles.

After that the fella's ex-wife would show up. She would sit with the daughter and the fella would say 'how about some food' and as we were helping ourselves the son would arrive. 

 

He wouldn't say hello to anybody but would get in to some argument with dad and the arguments would usually spring from the fact that mom and dad were no longer a couple, mom no longer lived in the big house and neither did the kids.

So each Memorial Day this fella would get ready for a big garden party that no one went to; the son was embarrassing, the daughter was a typical 'valley girl' and the poor mother would try and hold on to the remnants that once were her family.

Each time we went there we ended up playing darts and leaving most of the food.

One year, Hank brought along his wife – that was a new one on me and I think he married her so she could get a green card.

She was a make up assistant in the film industry and Hank and his pal were assistant film directors; they were always setting up one big film after another none of which ever happened and if there's one thing to know about the Los Angeles film industry it's that most people have a script in their pocket, a project they are working on and, as an actor, I have been offered stardom more times than I can remember.

It was usually 'I want your voice in my movie' – my voice? Maybe I can get in to it too aye?

Hank asked me to join him when Memorial Weekend came about again – some time in May, as a rule, before the weather got really hot and the sun reflecting on the pool would blind you with its glare and when I would go indoors to get away from it the image of the last thing I was looking at would stay with me – but I passed as it was just too embarrassing.

I never completely lost contact with Hank; he would call me every Saint Patrick's Day and offer his services as a nominated driver. He drove a 1963 Chevy Nova convertible with red seats and white body work and in the winter, even though it was LA, it was cold, as he couldn't get the hood to work – or the top or whatever it's called - so we were forever in the open.

When I started to do my one man Irish Show on St Patrick's Day in the year 2000 he came to see it and one year he brought along the guy from the valley.

'Nice show, Chris; listen when we get time maybe you can tell me the rules of cricket.'

'Yeh – when we get time' I'd say.

I did the show each year up to about 2010 and each year I'd send Hank a flyer and he would call to say he was available as a nominated driver.

As well as the Yiddish, Hank had a very rough voice with a thick Brooklyn accent; he would talk about his 'dawdter' and his 'mudder an' farder' and one day when his daughter showed up she turned out to be quite a beauty. It was strange to see something so beautiful with such a rough looking man – let's face it he looked like a gangster.

One year one of the flyers came back – not at this address, so I feared the worst.

Hank had called me one day, when I got back from New York; I saw his name on my 'caller I.D.' thing on the phone and meant to call him back but I was rushing out so I didn't. He probably wanted to know how his home town was.

I felt guilty not calling him that day as I knew what the returned envelope meant, which I kept in the car; one day when I was travelling through Culver City, I called at his address and what I had suspected was true.

The manager of the building told me he had died; he had a heart attack one day and that was all he knew.

All the stuff I knew died with him: his daughter, his mother in New York, his money worries, the very cheap places to eat he had found all over Los Angeles and his Chevy Nova convertible, which he called Betsy – all gone.

Took me a long time to get over the guilt of not calling him that day – but I did think of him just as I think of all my friends, like you, that I will call one day.

Just as one day I'll tell you the difference between baseball and cricket.