April 2024
What I got up to ...
In this part of the world, the weather feels like it has been February for the past six months. This has meant spending a lot of time indoors and online.
Activities
Campus work has dried up this past month. For that reason, I have taken an office gig, and before I started that, I recorded and scheduled numerous online lessons.
These included this Absolute Beginner Chinese lesson, and this intermediate guitar lesson:
Both the Monday Mandarin and Kevin McGeary Guitar YouTube channels have videos ready to premier for many weeks to come.
Output
Of all my activities, the one that probably has the highest ceiling is musical comedy persona The Kev. Since last summer I have been uploading a song or skit every Wednesday and a short joke every Friday.
Building a large enough fanbase to call myself even a minor celebrity is a lightyear away, but this Chinese song got over 3000 views:
and this joke got over 7000 views.
My next headline gig is set for November 16th at The Lion’s Den in Manchester, and my new material is coming along nicely.
I have also been continuing to write for Asian Cha Journal.
Wider World
The leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Jeffrey Donaldson has been charged with rape, assault, and gross indecency. Charging him now poses a huge challenge for the justice system in Northern Ireland, as the case could turn on a knife edge.
Donaldson has already been suspended by his party, pending the outcome of the judicial process. What interests me is how political movements often rise and fall because of the behaviour of the people at the centre.
In 1875, Cambridge-educated Irish protestant aristocrat Charles Stewart Parnell was elected to the British parliament as a member of the Home Rule League (later re-named the Irish Parliamentary Party). For some fifteen years, he was the de facto leader of Ireland’s nationalist movement.
In December 1889, Captain William O'Shea MP, who had been one of Parnell's most loyal supporters, filed for divorce from his wife Kitty on the grounds of her affair with Parnell. Parnell was in fact the father of three of her children. Just two years after this fall from grace, Parnell died of pneumonia at age 45, and the Irish home rule movement suffered beyond recognition.
Another political movement is suffering for reasons other than its own merits.