From her early days with Fairground Attraction till now, I’ve had a massive respect (and crush!) for Ireland’s redheaded songstress, Eddie Reader. This TED performance is stunning, and the emotion in her voice is almost heartbreaking. I think it’s a treasure, so must share it with you. Have a watch today, and spread this one around. They don’t get much better than this. Let me know how you like it.

Be Happy

Here’s a wallpaper that I made on photoshop a while back when I was feeling a little glum. There’s nothing like sitting down to a computer that has a big grin and a good vibe for you. Unless you don’t like that sort of stuff. Anyway, it’s been sitting around on my hard disk for a while, so I thought that I should share it with those of you out there who might feel that they could get something out of it too. It comes in two flavors, so I’m sorry if your screen is too big or too small for either. Just click on the link beneath which matches the screen size of your computer, then right click on the image and save it to your your hard drive. If you don’t know how to do this, let me know what browser you are using in the comments, and I’ll try to help you out with instructions if I can.

Validation is one of my all time favorite Youtube experiences. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Sure it’s sentimental, and it will try to sell you a smile or die philosophy, but I think that sometimes it’s ok to dispense with reality and just plug in to something that’s biased towards optimism, if only for a recharge. Go ahead and watch it, and let me know what you think. Enjoy!

The most potent teaching of silence, by far, was the fallacy of immediacy: how I finally came to appreciate that the pace of our accelerated culture has created the belief that timeliness is of greater worth than quality, and of how this belief, in turn, has led to the ubiquity of mediocrity. Or, more crap and less craft – in half the time. Too often we are sacrificing the beautiful for the immediate; the well-reasoned for the impulsive; the well-felt for the reactive.

In writing many of the entries for The Mute Papers (which were all quite short pieces), I took more time with the editing process than I normally would, and ended up being less satisfied with the outcome. It has clearly been some of my best writing in years – so why the disconnect?

This is quite a spellbinding piece of 2D animation – drawn from real choreography – about love, its blessings, and its curses. Enjoy.

Hello there. I’m back on deck in the land of the talking, having decided late last night that I had learned all that I needed to learn from being silent. I did get a lot of great feedback, and I will be posting the wash-up here in days to come. Thank you for sticking with me while I conducted this little experiment, and I hope that you were entertained by the direction the writing took. It took me a different way than I thought I would go (I was initially going to do some straight journalling about not talking), but I wanted to run with all of the magical realism, so I did!

I’ve only spoken two words to other people all day, and I haven’t muttered anything to myself at all. I did sing in the shower though, and that felt great. I’ve been wanting to do that ever since I embarked on the vow. The things that we miss! Anyway, just this little report, and I’ll be back on deck tomorrow, with some “insights”. Toodles.

The Reaper Of Tongues

If you’ve been following The Mute Papers you’ll be familiar with the Reaper character. You may or may not have pinned the character to a concept so I’ll just say that the propaganda of the establishment is very much alive these days, and the fight to secure the loyalties of your heart and your mind is being conducted in earnest, behind the scenes, every second of your life…

The Company Of Myself

I’m not one for online gaming (much ), but I absolutely love this little game. It’s a little bit darker than most games, and has a somewhat gothic energy running through it, so it might appeal to the utterly disaffected portion of my soul. Either that, or I’ll waste my time on virtually anything. Whatever the case may be, you can play it here: The Company Of Myself

You come to on a cliff’s edge that you recognise only from dreams. Or was it that you remember the edge from life? You’re not certain that you’ve ever been on the edge before. You’re not certain that you’ve ever been far from it, either.

On the other hand, it may not be an edge-type edge. The ground is spongiform. It is of an interesting texture. The cliff is not a cliff. It is a crust…

I went and put a few of my poems through the word clouding machine at Wordle, and thought that I’d publish a few of the better ones here. Unless you’re interested, there’s probably nothing to see here. So move along.

Wordle Cloud – How To Feel Beautiful