abi @ 66: don't forget the paddywagon. On the other hand, "How the Irish invented Slang" suggests that there may be even more traces of Irish in current language.
WRT to immigration, sometimes it doesn't have to be cross-border to mark you as different. A family may be regarded as "blow-ins" because they've only been in the village for 3 generations. The micro- as opposed to the macro-, I guess.
Thanks, Abi!
A side-effect of the delay: I managed to find that article I mentioned (serendipity now works through RSS - who knew?). It's a Daily Mail one, so adjust the sensationalism to taste.
As an argument against ever engaging in public/private infrastructure agreements, it's hard to beat this one: Ad agency blocks free iPhone app used to tell the user where the nearest municipal bike stand with bikes/spaces is. I guess we can anticipate the nickel'n'diming to start in a few months when the agency releases their own, for-pay, proprietary version (that'll only work on IE, of course).
On a totally unrelated note (which makes it very Open Thready): The Improved Spoofers Guide To the Lisbon Treaty. European law explored/explained in a conversational manner.
Strangely enough, this thread is being played out in the letters pages of (at least one of) the papers here. Dublin introduced a minimal-cost bike rental scheme last week, and one of its sponsors - in an astonishing case of plain-speaking, which is usually bred out of politicians - said “Helmets put people off.†This sparked a sequence of letters involving an ER doctor, a sociologist, a cyclist, and a commuter. I'm sure it won't surprise anyone to note that the flow of conversation and information is much quicker online than in print, although the stances taken and cites used are very similar.
On an anecdotal level, I've been cycling in a city for at least 27 years, and had 4 crashes of any note over that time. Only the one at age 7, when travelling too fast on a Raleigh Chopper induced wheel wobble which resulted in a smash into a gatepost, involved hitting my head. Even the time I cycled over an empty can, which was exactly the right width to effectively Clamp my own wheel, didn't muss my hair. For reference, I'd break down those crashes as 3 cases of rider error, and 1 of driver error.
I don't wear a helmet, because I find, for me, in my experience, YMMV*, that I lose peripheral vision, a substantial amount of audio information, and an irritatingly large amount of comfort when I do. It's a level of risk I feel comfortable with, and I'm aware it's a risk. (This is all for paved road commuting, I guess I should say. Off-road, I'd be the first one to be strapped up with wrist braces and shin-guards as well as a helmet.)
On the broader topic of perceived vs actual risk, I think I agree with Patrick. Activities are perceived as more dangerous than they really are, for all the reasons mentioned upthread. I tried in vain to find a link to a newspaper article from a few years ago, which used a graphic showing the radius of activities of 10(?) year olds in three generations of the same family. Grandad roamed 16 miles, Dad got to 8, and today's kids were <1.
*: and so on, in a spiral of qualifying statements.
@ #58: strangely, he was replaced by an A. Spangler, hitherto unknown, who insisted on running the panel according to Robinson's Rules of Order. When challenged on this, he was able to produce not only said Rules, but also notes from the other panel members' mothers, reminding them be polite, wipe their noses, and abide by the Rules.
Joel @356: to take the good from the bad (season to taste, depending on POV), why not apply the techniques of redefining the debate as seen on Fox News et al? Instead of getting into linguistic fudging, just embrace the premise, and then say "but given these resources, we can do so much more". Maybe something like having upgraded the electrics and sprinklers to cannabis cultivation standards, saffron makes more economic sense, and so marijuana cultivation should be embraced as a gateway herb to hardcore spices?
abi @ 578: I may have the wrong end of the stick, but if you're looking for pre-written adventures/dungeon crawls, you could try the Wizards site here: they have a lot of free ones up.
If the end of the stick I should have taken involves models, walls, and terrain, I'm out of Clue. The semi-low-tech maps on paper seen at Penny Arcade looks good though.
Re the particle of The Naked Taoiseach: in keeping with the grand naming tradition of political scandals, this is now being called Picturegate in Ireland.
In another entry in the Small World, Innit? file, Nasir from Robin of Sherwood (Mark Ryan) was the swordmaster on the King Arthur movie.
Debra Doyle @ 187: I'd go with CHip's explanation @ 200. The attraction of large amounts of farmland in Argentina was huge, and led to a lot of Irish people moving over in the mid-1800s. See here for some interviews with Argentinians of Irish descent - some of whom (like Jimmy Ballesty) speak English with a pronounced Irish accent. I was at a talk recently where the speaker made the point that the first era of globalisation was ended by WW1, but that's probably an open thread digression.
As for concidences, Ireland is so small that eveyone here experiences them all the time. My favourite one is when I was best man for my friend. When our fathers saw each other, across a car park, their eyes narrowed and they both hunched down a little. It turned out grown up in adjacent parishes, and had played football against each other as teenagers. They both moved away from home for jobs, and hadn't met in 30 years or so. My friend and I'd met at college, and had no idea.
Terry @ 182: according to Delete Expletives from the BBC back in 2000, it was the most severe insult in the land. WRT to insults and genitalia, it's strange that "prick" has no positive connotations, but "bollocks" can have. I guess the relatve acceptance/lack of severity of prick is because it has many non-insulting uses.
Earl @ 19: there's nothing to apologise for, it's a good action movie, and the "what colour is the boathouse" scene deserves to be a classic. It's just that hearing movie-Irish accents is a bit like hearing sounds in space: it might be dramatically excusable, but it plucks at the thread I'm suspending my disbelief by as if it were a banjo string.
What's in a voice? that which exposits
In any accent would sound as clunky;
So infodumps would, were they not infodumps call'd,
Retain that dread redundancy they owe
Without that title. For Bob, as you know,
There is no thread which on topic stays,
yet with strange postings, even drift's a phase.
Speak, if you can.
Never was an Irish accent mangled more horribly than by Jonathan Pryce in Ronin. Except maybe by Natascha McElhone in the same movie. Or Tom Cruise in Far and Away. Or Richard Gere in The Jackal. Or...this list could get out of hand.
Night walking, travel, nature:
We were inter-railing, trying to get the most value out of our ticket by ensuring we took as many night trains as possible. This economising left us with some time in Luxembourg - from 2am to 5am, in fact. It was a warm, clear summer's night, and even if we'd wanted to get a bed, everywhere was shut. So, we left our rucksacks in the station, and went for a walk.
It was eerie, wandering totally deserted streets in the middle of Europe (well, compared to Ireland). We met nobody: no street cleaners, no bakers, no early shift workers or late night revellers. After a while, we took a break in a park, that seemed to be at the bottom of a cliff. Everything was still, and so quiet we could hear the trains shunting into position the other side of town. At that point, we noticed we were surrounded by lots of little lights. Lots and lots of them. They seemed to be pretty static: they'd blink out for a moment, then reappear.
It felt like forever before we realised we were surrounded by cats.
Katherine @ 87: wrt the census operation, it's not so much that people in rented accommodation were ignored, as that apartment living in Ireland isn't done well (on so many levels). The census forms were hand-delivered, they weren't just dropped in mailboxes. Unfortunately, getting access to apartment buildings can be hard: they don't have supers, the alternative of ringing buzzers until someone lets you in isn't foolproof, and most people won't answer a knock on their door anyway. That could explain why you got no form.
If you weren't listening to radio, you mightn't have heard the adverts explaining what to do if you didn't have a form. See the 19th April entry here for what I mean.
For voter registration, libraries, police stations and council offices will have the lists and the forms. Or there's the Check The Register website, which also has downloadable forms.
Oh, and midweek voting vs weekend? Doesn't make as much difference as you'd think. The government that introduced free third level education held the general election on a Friday, with the (not unreasonable) expectation that gratitude would secure them some votes. They lost.
Caroline @ 31: Don't pick Ireland on that account. You know that phrase about university politics being so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small? The stakes aren't much bigger here.
But back to the US, which seems to demonstrate that the converse of the quip isn't true...
Dave @ 32: I don't know about anything as completely final as On The Beach, but I've certainly read lots where civilisation was destroyed. This Is The Way The World Ends, Down To A Sunless Sea, and does anyone else remember the Firebrats series? For a more complete list, there's Paul Brians' Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction.
I found Chimay to be a very efficient gateway drink, which set me off down the path of geographical tasting. It's possible to leave Belgium while doing that, it just takes a while.
A good book is Man Walks into a Pub, which talks about things like the local brew/consolidation/micro brew/local brew cycle, and the earliest use of nudity to advertise beer. Can't vouch for the accuracy, though, as it also mentions the use of leather trousers in measuring beer quality.
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| 2009 | 11 |
| 2008 | 9 |
| 2007 | 3 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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