iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I think this may have been the first Dredd story I ever read.

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

See also prime ministers and presidents of the EU commission, elected as they are by pools of MPs and MEPs that are not particularly representative of the general population.

030

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Yeah, I get that. I’ve read plenty of direct quotes and transcripts from him, of course. I’d long realised how poisonous his takes were, I should stress; I just wasn’t ready for how loud and obnoxious he would be. I can’t stand people asking questions and refusing to let people answer.

110

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This is the first time, I think, I’ve ever heard that Tucker person speak; I’ve always managed to avoid him. I wish I’d maintained that record.

100

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There are few books I have with margins more written-in than this. Utter tripe.

000

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Instructive in many ways, and surprising in some, there’s nothing in my September reading I wouldn’t recommend as long as you care about how our homes shape us, friendship, European integration, megalomaniac power, government shenanigans, and how a country can have its reputation blackened at speed.

020

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In the meantime you’ll be stuck as “Otto Recently-English”.

1110

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We’ve cancelled it again recently - we’d got it to watch Stranger Things 5, and hung on for the latest Rian Johnson film, also tracking down - from the Mainland - Lupin and Familiar, but beyond that it seemed to be a morass of stuff that didn’t appeal. I suspect good stuff is there but buried.

110

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Good morning. Looks like Autumn’s finally kicking in. Drogheda looks well in the mist.

050

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Somehow I never posted my August reading, which got bogged down after the profundities of the Pope’s encyclical on living in an AI world, such that it’s only now I’m finishing other books off. The Richter book on cultural continuity in Ireland’s first historical millennium, fwiw, is fascinating.

031

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

People have gaps. I mean, some people are like human sieves, but most of us have at least some gaps that are incredible to others.

010

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Well, it’s a dark day. Having hitherto had not even one book in our 7,000-strong collection written by somebody whose name begins with Q (though we have one edited by a Quinn, and a sketchbook by the supposed Quitely), I’ve bought our first authentic Q text. So far it seems good.

000

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

That was a fun trip to Manchester and Liverpool, where I revisited old haunts, some having changed immensely, others having stayed refreshingly familiar, visited what I hope will be regular spot in the years and decades to come, and spent glorious time in the company of so many wonderful people.

000

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Oh getting the boat was very much the norm back in the day - and Drogheda would have been a significant Camino port taking people to the supposed Irish heartlands of Galicia. It’s a modern affectation to talk about the journey more than the destination.

110

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Always - always - tempting to be back on the Way of St James. Especially when we’ve brand new Camino waymarker here in Drogheda.

170

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I like them. They complement other shelves elegantly.

010

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

You wouldn’t equate them with “the French”, though, would you? I think that definite article is doing work.

101

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Did any French invade? Weren’t the Normans just Vikings who had started speaking French? (Actually, I’m curious now: did they identify as French or get called such at the time? Or as Normans? Or what? The invaders of Ireland, a century after Hastings, were called and called themselves English.)

200

Reposted by Greg Daly

Dr Dean Burnett @drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Having full rights to The Muppets and not just doing The Muppet Show again is like having control over every premiership football team and arguing over whether you should make them play snooker or all compete in some elaborate version of Ready Steady Cook.

36415

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I always think they miss a trick by not having the circle be yellow, as per the circle line, and line across it be red, since the red central line cuts across the centre of London and the historical “circle”.

001

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Good grief. “Testing the waters” as though to see how racist he would be allowed to be…

120

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

(If they were local to me it might be different, of course; meantime we’re doing our best lately with Meath farmers and Louth butchers.)

010

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I sampled it at Gatwick, and despite my laughter about the very idea of it since the spring it was quite good. Not that I bought any: I won’t be rewarding either Brexit or global warming!

120

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

It hasn’t been a bad week, all things considered, with charms of the week including a first encounter with a new neighbour, a delicious Sicilian dinner we missed out on in Sicily, meaningful new paintings up on the wall, and two collections of seventeenth-century Irish poetry got for a song.

020

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Picked this up today. It’s impressive to see how clear-eyed Ireland was back in 1970 in its considerations of what joining the EEC would have meant. It’s striking how people nowadays act as though various developments since then were not on the cards from day one.

010

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

It’s not really correct to say that EEA membership gives the benefits of EU membership anyway - it gives significant benefits, but not the right to be in any of the rooms (councils, parliament, commissions, negotiations between said) where the rules and arrangements are worked out.

010

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

My aunt and cousins were away at the time. My aunt was up early and saw the news before the others. “Princess Diana is dead,” she told her son-in-law when he got up. “Get off,” he said. “She is! Her car crashed,” she cried, “when she was chased in a tunnel by lots of Pavarottis on mopeds!”

1130

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

This is maddening. GKC has hugely influenced me; I’m confident he is with God and is not antisemitic now, but it’s quite an assumption that he bypassed Purgatory. There’s never been an organic cult of him either, such that the older model of classing people as saints by acclamation doesn’t work.

010

Reposted by Greg Daly

Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

"He was perhaps less a political radical than a bohemian individualist, resentful of authority and restive with institutional restraints." Terry Eagleton on the politics of James Joyce: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... #SpéirGhorm

lrb.co.uk

Terry Eagleton · Starveling Rabblement: Joyce’s Politics

Joyce stands out among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress and the...

053

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

It’s genuinely bizarre to think that I lived right next door to this for five years and never knew about it.

000

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Good stuff today, but disappointing news too. My desktop sidekicks are of course advising that I should just plod on, and I will. In a bit.

040

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

There was a time when pretty much every mention of Thucydides online was a reference to a pseudo-quote from him that Colin Powell had framed on his wall or desk. It was a good line, and in truth we’d do better if people applied it now.

110

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

It probably says a lot about me that my immediate thought was “Kermit? Or someone else? I hope it was on civil war in Corcyra - that bit’s brilliant.” Not my second thought, I should stress.

110

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Just to show you: one distinct accent in Gilsland circled in the east and a very distinctly different one at Birdoswald circled in the west. Scarcely a mile and a half and rge shallow river Irthing between the two.

020

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Have I told you of the day walking Hadrian’s Wall when I went from breakfast with people of one accent (basically a Northumbrian variant) to people of another (a Cumbrian variant, like reinforced Lancashire)? All that divided the two was a couple of miles and a shallow river.

120

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

That’s wild. I mean, I know non-English people regularly talk of “the English accent”just as English people often speak of “the Irish accent” etc, but they sound very different to me.

110

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Surely this can’t be right. Manc and Scouse accents are very different, and there’s a fair gap between the varying Lancashires and Yorkshires. Maybe it blurs on county borders, but otherwise.

120

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

It was excellent. And my description of it in advance proved more apt that I had expected.

020

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Folks, I’m about to watch a film about Sisyphus suing his boulder. It looks great. I hope others come to see it.

130

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

My old blog is a neglected attic nowadays, but still, it seems as good a place as any share my thoughts on Nolan’s Odyssey, why I love how bland his Greek armour is, the wisdom of Xenia, and the lessons we should have learned from Andromeda and Memnon: thethirstygargoyle.blogspot.com/2026/08/an-o...

thethirstygargoyle.blogspot.com

An Odyssey: Reflections on an Adaptation

'It was outstanding,' wrote one of my classicist friends in a WhatsApp group after seeing Christopher Nolan's film of The Odyssey a couple...

021

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Verification in these matters is important, as I recently learned in England.

020

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Well, yes: there are innumerable “unqualified man lies and spoofs his way into job beyond his capacities” stories that could be told in modern Britain so it’s telling which ones people choose to care about.

0130

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

(I’ve sent it to - perhaps your now very old and obsolete - email address just now.)

000

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Have I shown you my review of Ellen Coyne’s book? I think it’s worth a go.

100

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Thanks Mary. Derek’s book is excellent, and I think quite important in ways. I enjoyed interviewing him a few years back.

100