GuysBlog

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Yesterday, a poster asked about an obscure poem seen ON A SCREEN IN AN ILLUSTRATION for an article about 3-D graphics in an Amiga computer magazine at least 12 years ago (he was not even sure which Amiga mag).  He recalled the (approximate) name of the author of the article as "Brad W. Schenk or someone similar", and hoped to find the text of the poem.

The first respondent to the posting (in just less than an hour, apparently) reported that she "went down the hallway on a whim to talk to the art director at the company where I work - whose name happens to be Bradley W. Schenck" …

The discussion is continuing, and another poster has turned up a list of what is in each issue of an Amiga magazine that had Brad W. Schenck as its Graphics columnist.

(Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link.)

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Back in the early 1960s, I became a fan of The Clancy Brothers.  Tom and Paddy Clancy from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Eire, had come to the US in the late 40s and rambled through a variety of jobs before going into theatre.  When their younger brother, Liam, and a buddy of his, Tommy Makem joined them, a musical phenomenon was born. Recording first  on their own "Tradition" label, and later for Columbia, they delivered quite a series of albums of (mostly) Irish folk music.  Over the years the act was manned by a variety of Clancy kin, with and without Tommy Makem.  Later, Liam and Tommy did a few albums of their own.

On their "The Makem & Clancy Collection" (Shanachie, #52001, 1990) they included an Eric Bogle song.  He called it "No Man’s Land."  They called it ‘Willie McBride."  The lyrics are available in various versions but this site quotes it pretty much as I hear them singing it. 

Willie McBride    or    No Man’s Land

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the dead heroes in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

[chorus]
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

…
And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

[chorus]

That site includes some other songs of a military vocation, including another of Eric’s: "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," about the survivors of a WWI battle on the coast of Turkey.

. . .
How well I remember that terrible day
When our blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.
Johnny Turk he was ready
Oh he primed himself well.
He rained us with bullets,
And he showered us with shell.
And in five minutes flat,
We were all blown to hell
Nearly blew us back home to Australia.
.  .  .

Today, let us remember all the veterans, of wars declared and merely "authorized."

[reposting with spelling correction]

An entry in Dan Gillmor’s blog brings my attention to this entry in Ed Foster’s Gripelog:

Diluted Documentation

Are
IT product vendors deliberately watering down the amount of information
they provide in their documentation? Not only do a growing number of
readers seem to think so, they have some interesting theories as to why
reading the feeble manual no longer does much good.
. . .
Many readers think the main reason for
shortchanging customers on the documentation is to give the vendor a
lucrative aftermarket.
. . .
Another reader, himself a technical editor, had a
somewhat different theory. "This is a by-product of the outsourcing
trend," he wrote.

[One of the comments in Dan’s blog also points us to an article from 1998: "The Death of Documentation."]

Speaking as a reformed software developer — one who spent some 17 years building software and now has spent over 22 years explaining (other) software — I have some other observations. 

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Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

–Gertrude Stein