Category: prose

A bit late for Presidents’ Day

Little Donny: “Father, I cannot tell a truth. I did not chop down the cherry tree.”

Old Fred: “Well done, son. How much did you get for the wood?”

[Yes, I know that the six-year-old George Washington is sometimes said to have damaged the cherry tree with his hatchet, and by other  sources to have actually chopped it down. I also know that the whole story is usually assumed to be a myth, perpetuated because it was included in a biography by Mason Locke Weems and subsequently in McGuffey’s Readers by William Holmes McGuffey, as well as an engraving by John C. Macrae. But the dialogue above is a parable, not historical fact.

What I didn’t know is that Trump’s father was actually named Frederick Christ Trump. I have no further comment to make about that, but Woody Guthrie might have… He wrote at least two songs about Fred Trump, and was definitely not a fan.]

David Harley

Ad Ovum

It was close to midnight when Ralph had the idea. At first, he thought it was just an attractive fancy, a vision of a golden future for mankind that would end all the superstition, the greed, all the lack of empathy and humanity that was driving the human race into the blackest of tunnels. He didn’t think it was actually achievable.

Yet, after several sleepless hours, he had unearthed the barest bones of a way in which it could actually be made to happen.

Over the next few days, he cautiously disclosed his idea to a very close friend. George, a little at a time, and eventually persuaded him that the plan could work. That same day, George took him to the White House. Ralph was astounded: he’d had no idea that George moved in such elevated circles, or could pull such golden strings. Nor would he have believed that it be so easy to get access to the most powerful man in the world. Yet, apart from the pair of marines who accompanied them, all the gatekeepers and barriers seemed to melt away at their approach.

Were they really standing outside the Oval Office? Yet before one of the marines opened the door, his courage deserted him, and a horrible realization began to dawn.

“Look, George, it was just an idea. Perhaps it would… Couldn’t we just pretend I never thought of it?”

With just the barest, saddest shake of the head, George pushed him gently through the door that did not lead to the Oval Office, closing his ears to the muffled suggestion of a scream from the inside.

“If only you really hadn’t had the idea. Or at least kept it to yourself, rather than infect anyone else with it…”

The six-foot-something marines parted to let him past, and George followed Ralph through the door that did not lead to the Oval Office.

David Harley

Index to Words & Music Pages

Verse and music on this page are slowly being transferred to different blogs, imaginatively entitled David Harley’s Songs (which opens to an index of the songs) and in fact there’s already a whole more information there.  And my main blog now is actually the Wheal Alice blog, which is mostly focused on music. However, it might start to find its way back as I try to rationalize my output. :) If you’re only interested in the security-related stuff, you might want to shoot over to my Geek Peninsula page, which has links to most of my security writing.

Contact email: info[at]dharley.com

Here’s a close-to-full list of the other Small Blue-Green blogs:

I suppose you could call this my vanity site (or one of them). It’s maintained as a resource for my music and for writing that isn’t (usually) directly connected to my former work  as an IT security author/consultant. (If you’re actually interested in the security stuff, see the links at the end of this post.) Just to be clear, none of this material is in the public domain, and all rights are reserved. I hope you enjoy listening to/reading it but if you actually want to use it in any commercial context, unlikely as that may sound, you are honour-bound and legally required to ask me first: you can email me at info[at]dharley.com. 

Recording Sessions:

Diverse Brew Sessions:

  1. One Step Away From The Blues
  2. True Confessions
  3. Heatwave

Scriptwrecked Sessions

Sheer Bravado Cassette:

  1. Long Stand
  2. Speak My Heart
  3. The Weekends
  4. Dives and Lazarus
  5. The Butterfly (slip jig)
  6. Paper City
  7. Sheer Bravado
  8. View From The Top
  9. She’s Gone
  10. So Much For Romance
  11. Circle
  12. Blues For Davy

More recent recordings (not commercial quality): as of 12th May 2014, the listings for this are somewhat out of date.

Scriptwrecked Sessions

Additional tracks from sessions in the early ’80s at CentreSound studios from which the ‘Sheer Bravado’ album was assembled. Some of these tracks (plus the three intended for ‘Diverse Brew’) were drawn on for the ‘Scriptwrecked’ album. Not in any particular order, and not all the tracks used are here.

Table of Contents

Songs Without Music:

Demo Recordings

Quick and dirty recordings of songs I hope to revisit and spend more time on a better version. Home-recorded on BOSS digital gear which I hope to have time to learn to use properly Real Soon Now. Just one song – Bootup Blues – there at the moment, though two of the recordings added to the Songs Without Music page also qualify and will probably get moved shortly:

Settings of poems (unaccompanied demo versions)

Folk Resources

At the moment, this page consists of a floor-singer’s tipsheet a number of us compiled in the late 1990s, and a reference to a later version – not sure where that comes from, but it wasn’t me. As I seem to spending a lot of time with old folkies these days, it may be that other things might find their way onto this page in due course.

Security-related publications

Security-related publications aren’t kept on this site now. Most of my recent papers are available or linked from the ESET resources pages including white papers, conference papers, and articles for external publications and sites. Mac and other Apple-related resources are mostly kept at the Mac Virus site.