Friday
Apr092010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Millibandias
Apr 9, 2010 Climate: other Reader Dreadnought has been moved to poetry:
I met a traveller from a distant shire
Who said: A vast and pointless shaft of steel
Stands on a hill top… Near it, in the mire,
Half sunk, a shattered turbine lies, whose wheels
And riven blades and snarls of coloured wire
Tell that its owners well their mission read
Which did not last nor, nowhere to be seen,
The hand that paid them and the empty head.
And scrawled around the base these lines are clear:
‘My name is Millibandias, greenest Green.
Look on my works, ye doubters, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round this display
Of reckless cost and loss, blotless and fair,
The green and pleasant landscape rolls away.
Reader Comments (24)
This very much reminds me of Philip Stott's tale in which Gulliver travels to Milibandia.
http://web.me.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Entries/2009/7/15_Mr_Lemuel_Gulliver_Visits_Milibandia.html
Brilliant! Hmmm ...
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of turbine windy mills
Beside the lake, but far from trees
Towers stilled by lack of breeze
Needs work, I know :-)
Bishop Hill - now with added Culture!
You know it makes sense!
Don't forget about Ed and David's older brother Glen. He was involved in music or something.
And will those mills in future time
Stand upon England's mountains green?
And is the hand of Gov
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divide
Bring forth upon our crowded hills?
And will a kingdom builded there
Among those dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have regained our kingdom
In England's green and pleasant land.
I NEED MORE COFFEE!
I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall mill
And a bomb to scuttle her by.
With apologies to Masefield.
"And will a kingdom builded there
Among those dark satanic mills?"
Look at the pictures in the following link:
http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/
Now that's what I call pollution.
And I thought that that evil poison, CO2 was a colourless, odourless gas, essential as plant food and therefore essential to life.
Silly me.
On either side the river lie
Fields of barley and of rye
But wot's this sight that smacks the eye,
That blots the world to meet the sky;
A many tower'd juggernaut!
[not by Tennyson]
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice
From what I knew of Al Gore’s ire
I held with those who favour fire
Now I know enough of Mike's Nature trick
And the illusion of the hockey stick
And how the temps through long ages tick
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice
(apologies to R. Frost)
Great praise the Millibandias won
And Brown and all his team.
"Why, 'tis a very wicked thing,"
Said little Wilhelmine.
"Nay, nay, my little girl," quoth he,
"It was a famous victory."
[apologies to Robert Southey]
To Noroway, to Noroway,
To Noroway o'er the faem;
This awfu' crup frae Noroway,
'Tis thou must tak' it haem.
.................
Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour,
'Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies Millibandias
Wi' the turrrbine at his feet.
Author unknown [sank dod for dat]
spangled drongo
I think like me you must have gone to school in the days when Global Warming wasn't in the curriculum and we wasted our time learning poems off by heart.
Do you know 'The Faber Popular Reciter'? There all there.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/kingsley-amis/faber-popular-reciter.htm
The windmills spin in stately whirls
Through a sky bereft of birds
Green profiteers wring their hands in glee
As they receive their large royalties
spangled drongo
Oops!
'They're all there.'
I can't decide which Milliband is the bigger whacko, or the more dangerous. They are obviously being groomed for power - a scary prospect.
Dear Bishop
Although I am hardly in a position to point out the error, the title of this marvellous new romantic poem should be 'Milibandias' not 'Millibandias'!
Kind regards
with apologies to WS Gilbert:
I am the very model of a modern climatologist
I’m partly statistian, partly palaeo-phrenologist
I’ve temperature readings from thermometers coniferous
my data are the same (or not, well, maybe) as Keith Briffa has
I bought them from a bloke who brought them hotfoot from Siberia
and mixed them with some algae from the mud in Lake Superior.
When counting different isotopes I’m really in my element
and sucking up to journalists from Guardian Environment
I know what makes the treerings from Siberia to the Rockies tick
And I can make spaghetti and transform it to a hockeystick.
My data’s got dark matter that would shatter a cosmologist
I am the very model of a modern climatologist
One for you Bishop:
''The time has come”, the Bishop said,
To look facts in the eye
And write of Mann and hockey sticks -
And whether Jones was sly -
And why the globe’s not boiling hot -
And whether pigs might fly.”
geoffchambers
Just we need! The Sceptics' Songbook!
Could you do something with 'And now I am the ruler of IPCCee'?
Or maybe we could get up a Concert Party
'The End-of-the-Peer Revue'
Sniff!!!! Poetry is a lost art in America.
Dreadnought,
Thanks for that. I'll just have to get it. [sorry to take so long to reply]
Said a vulture through tight-gritted bill
"Nearly bought it above that brown hill,
But, I'm a survivor,
And I'll savour the liver
Of the bastard who built that damned mill."
<A href="http://anthroblogogy.blogspot.com/2010/04/climate-hootenanny-redux.html">Thank you geoffchambers and dreadnought!!