Last laugh

It’s Friday of Saint Patrick’s week—I’ll leave you with a few Irish jokes and resume normal operations on Monday. Whatever "normal" is.

Yes, I realize that only the one in Belfast requires an Irish setting; the others could substitute any ethnicity and still be funny. (Well, maybe the one in Kerry…) But it was hard to find any that were funny at all.

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

Six Irishmen were playing poker when one of them played a bad hand and died.

The rest drew straws to see who would tell his wife. One man drew the shortest straw and went to his friend’s house to tell the wife.

The man says to her, “Your husband lost some money in the poker game and is afraid to come home.”

The wife says, “Tell him to drop dead!”

The man responds, “I’ll go tell him.”

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

A man was walking on a Belfast street late one night when suddenly he was confronted with a masked man who had a gun pointed right at him. 

The gunman said "Are you Protestant or Catholic?"

The man was scared out of his wits but figured that he had to give some kind of an answer.

Praying for guidance he replied, "Neither - I'm Jewish!"

Silence for about 5 seconds, then the gunman's reply - "Is that so?  Well let me tell you, you're talking to the first Arab in Belfast!"

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

An American tourist was driving in County Kerry, when his motor stopped. He got out to see if he could locate the trouble. A voice behind him said, "The trouble is the carburetor." He turned around and only saw an old horse.

The horse said again, "It's the carburetor that's not working."

The American nearly died with fright, and dashed into the nearest pub, had a large whiskey, and told Murphy the bartender what the horse had said to him.

Murphy said, "Well, don't pay any attention to him, he knows nothing about cars anyway."

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

Finally, from a beer company from St. Paul, Minn., I leave you with a visual:

Irish soul

As you know, March is Women’s History Month. And since we’re in Saint Patrick’s week, and I’m on a roll, I’ll just share a couple of my favourite songs from Irish women.

First up, the Corrs, here with The Chieftains:

And then The Commitments. Technically, not a girl group, but the three women take the lead here:

(Look, I didn’t say it would be Irish music, did I?)

I can watch The Commitments over and over—well, it’s hard to go wrong with a movie based on Roddy Doyle. It’s got some great lines, as well as fab music. One of the best is when Jimmy Rabbitte, the would-be impresario, is psyching up his band on why they should be at home in soul music:

“Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud.”

Don’t get much better than that.

Writing (and other things) on the walls

Oh, what the hell—as long as I’m talking about the Irish I’ll share my impressions of Ulster. Overall, let me just say, tough crowd.

I’m not going to go into the 800-year history of Anglo-Irish contention. I’ll just point out that Ireland was Britain’s first colony (courtesy of Henry II), and is her last remaining colony.

My visit occurred in 1994, only a few months after the Downing Street agreement between the governments of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, as well as the cessation of military operations by the Provisional IRA. The Provos didn’t lay down their arms, but it was a step forward. One of their main opposing groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), reacted with the full force of their pent-up testosterone, as I noticed on various walls:

On the other hand, the UVF may have a bit of a planning/estimating problem when it comes to propaganda graffiti. Your message has more impact if you don’t make yourself look like someone who can’t even see the end of your canvas.

Well, knowing the history and walking into it are two different things. Belfast was quite the eye-opener. Basically, it felt to me like Beirut with bangers and colcannon.

I went to an indoor shopping center because I lusted after one of those Filofaxes. (Look, it was the 90s, okay?) I was looking for a stationer’s when I noticed a pair of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) members patrolling the place in Kevlar vests and with automatic rifles at the ready. Not shouldered. At. The. Ready.

This is the only time I’ve ever seen that kind of thing in a First World country. Armed soldiers with the power to stop you for any reason was something I had to get used to in Korea. (Oh, also the nightly curfew, during which they could shoot you for any reason before they stopped you.) But frankly, it freaked me out to see it in Western Europe. And, I was the only person in the mall who even seemed to take notice of their presence.

They also had stop-and-search zones within the city. That’s where the guys with the Kevlar and assault rifles stop your car and give it a good shake-down, including running a bomb detector under the chassis. In the center of the city. In the center of a capital city.

(That didn’t happen to me while I was in Ulster, but back in the Republic I visited the Waterford factory, because you do, and I was stopped at the gate to the car park on the way in by an amiable old fellow—not armed, as far as I could tell—and he had a good root through the interior and the trunk, both of which by that point in the trip were pretty much tips. He did not have a bomb detector. I went through the factory, didn’t see anything there I couldn’t live without, and on my way out I stopped to ask the guard if he’d been searching for explosives. He weaseled just a bit, but finally allowed as to how he was.)

Then there were the police stations. Gotta say that I’ve not seen the like anywhere, not even South Central Los Angeles. Because what you’ve got here is not only not a place where you drop in to report a lost dog or slashed tires, I wasn’t even sure how the hell you’d get in at all.

Don’t know if you can see in this photo, but the fencing runs horizontally to the building, as well as vertically at the sidewalk, completely enclosing that forecourt area in steel mesh. It was as though the cops were caged. My understanding is that this is to prevent any Molotov cocktails that might be heaved at the station from hitting the ground and closing off the doorway. Or maybe from going into any of the windows.

There was another very literal symbol of the political/religious divide in Ulster: a DMZ between the Falls Road (inhabited by Republicans/Roman Catholics) and the Shankill Road (Unionists/Protestants). Here’s the wall on the Republican side:

But it’s not all spray paint and firebombing in Ulster. There are some real pockets of beauty, and the people—while not quite as sociable as their cousins in the 26 counties—could be congenial.

I spent one night at a pub-hotel near Bangor (close to the Giant’s Causeway). I’d had a substantial lunch so wasn’t interested in eating dinner, but I didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary in my poky little single room. (And here’s something for free: if you take a room above a pub, do not expect to get much sleep. You’re welcome.)

So I plunked myself down in the lounge near the restaurant and spent several hours with a bottle of mineral water, my journal and a turf fire. My one and only turf fire.

Periodically one of the waiters checked on me—not to push drinks but just to see that I was okay and to have a bit of a chat between his table runs. He told me that they’d had an American couple staying with them a few days before.

I asked, “Were they nice Americans? Because if not, I’m Canadian.”

But they apparently were, so I could retain my citizenship.

(I was having dinner the week before in Dublin in a restaurant where there was another American couple, from the Northeast, by the sound of them. They had, ah, expectations beyond their location, if you catch my drift. I recall that the female wanted artificial sweetener for her coffee, which the place did not have. Both the older and younger waiter working the room had time to chat with me throughout the night, but they could not be shut of that pair fast enough.)

I’ll close out today with the only Ulster-specific Irish song I know. Not something to sing your kids to sleep, but I've always kind of liked it. You’ll understand its political orientation from the line about cursing the pope. It’s worth it to stick to the end.

Gaol time

Okay, as I pointed out yesterday, the Irish are worth more than just a day.

Writing the Saint Patrick’s post got me thinking again about that trip to Ireland, and the photo of Kilmainham Gaol transported me back to the day I went there.

It was, as they say in country, a fine soft day.

Meaning it was raining. Not hard; maybe more like falling mist. (As I’ve said before, “The Emerald Isle” does not refer to precious stones. More like moss. Wet moss.)

There is nothing like visiting a prison in the rain. Even a former prison, one that’s now decked out with mostly decent lighting and is swept regularly.

(When I was selling my house in Seattle, my real estate agent made me take this photo down from the wall. She said it was "unsettling".)

The atmosphere is not light, either in terms of brightness or weight. They take you around the place in clumps, but somewhere in the execution courtyard I got unclumped because I was shooting photos and not paying that much attention to what they were doing tour-wise.

I was honing in on the door with the lock on it:

(See what I mean about the green?)

Then I turned around to find myself alone and not sure where everyone had gone, or how I was going to get there to catch them up.

Let me just say that if the lighted parts of the Gaol did not fill me with a sense of hilarity, the corridors I stumbled down made me just the teeniest bit—no, a whole lot—ill. Where I was obviously wasn’t a public area, so it wasn’t dressed up for tourist consumption. There wasn’t blood on the walls, or anything (at least that I could see), but it was monstrously dark and cramped and not a place I wanted to linger.

After some time (probably only a couple of minutes, but you begin to understand the relativity of time when you’re lost in a prison) I came across another tour clump. The guide was pissed off that I suddenly appeared from where I wasn’t supposed to have gone, but I just let him think I was an American blonde. With, you know, red hair.

I meekly allowed myself to be herded back to the central area and then walked a few blocks to catch the bus back to my hotel. As I got on and handed in my bus fare, I told the driver, “I just got out of jail.”

He paused for a couple of seconds and then replied, “Welcome back.”

Another reason why I really love the Irish.

Gratitude Monday: Sláinte bha!

Hmm? What’s that you say? Oh, right—Saint Patrick’s Day? Why, so it is.

It’s my take that “celebrating” the day is primarily a function of the Irish in America, who had huge chips on their shoulders what with being second-class citizens here. (They were not seen as particularly good for property values, particularly after the mass immigration following the Great Famine of the 1840s.) So they were putting on a swagger to flip the WASPS the bird.

Back in Ireland—eh, not so much. Yes, it was made a public holiday in 1903 as part of the whole idea of public (“bank”) holidays in the UK. But shortly afterward, another law was enacted that closed all drinking establishments for the day. (That stayed in effect until the 1970s.) So—not really so jolly.

(In the 1990s the Irish kind of woke up to the notion that Americans of all backgrounds used 17^th March as a jumping-off point for huge drink fests—including green beer in copious quantities. So in 1996 the government started “Saint Patrick’s Festival” to showcase the country and its industries. The next year it was a three-day event, kind of like your average Polish wedding.)

Okay, now that I’ve got that background out of the way, on to the Gratitude part of this Monday. I’ve always loved those right-brained, sweet-talking, ballad-singing, beauty-loving, cynically-inclined Irish, both here and in the old country. Especially now that I’ve been working in various areas of the tech industry for 20 years, where my right-brained, clear-talking, synapse-skipping cynical inclination sticks out like a lighthouse in a sea of tee-shirted and flip-flopped network engineers and software developers.

The Irish give me comfort and hope, reminding me that being this different is only a problem if you let the surprisingly cookie-cutter narrow-mindedness of the people here in the Valley they call Silicon (who consider themselves the very vortex of innovative thinking and yet seem to have been implanted with virtual blinkers the instant they set up their first incubator) impose their values on you.

Yeah—Irish history is not a placid sail through drifts of rose petals. Hard, bloody, vicious even, with a lot of beat downs. And the fat lady has not yet appeared on the stage; so there’s a ways to go. But still they rise. Ya gotta love that.

In the past I’ve given you some music from Ireland, and Yeats; of course, Yeats. Feel free to reprise the pleasure; no charge. Even a small treatise on whiskey in Ireland.

So this time around I’ll just share a couple of my favorite photos from my trip there.

Kilmainham Gaol was built in 1796. It was intended to be a model of new prison management philosophies; but two years later there was a rebellion, and the building had to take on a slew of political prisoners, so that whole enlightenment thing pretty much went out the window.

It’s perhaps best known for holding 15 leaders of the Irish Uprising after the British suppressed it in April 1916. They were all executed in the courtyard by firing squad. One, Joseph Connolly, had been so badly wounded in the fighting that the Brits had to sit him in a chair for his execution; he couldn’t stand. It’s an ugly place, that courtyard, and the Irish pretty much keep it that way as a reminder.

I was taken by one of the doors—long since bolted shut—in that courtyard, and this is what I shot.

But then, we’ll return to the whole drinking aspect mentioned earlier. Here’s a pub in Dublin, early afternoon. 

This is how you should drink, not crammed up against 1673 people you don’t know, all wearing green and yelling “begorrah” while slurping down green beer.