End of day

It’s Friday, so here’s a Dublin sunset.

I shot it on my walk back to my hotel from my first “fine dining” experience. That was the day it was chucking it down rain, but the skies started clearing in the early evening, and by 2100, it was looking just beautiful.

That’s the thing: if you want a spectacular sunset, you need clouds to refract the light.

Silver spike

For more than 150 years, a gigantic phallic monument to Lord Nelson was plopped in the middle of one of the main drags in Dublin. It was erected (sorry) by the Dublin Corporation (city government) to pay homage to the victor at Trafalgar, not so different, actually, from the one in Trafalgar Square in London.

Then, in March 1966, the top of the pillar—Nelson’s statue—was blown up, presumably by members of the IRA kitted out with explosives from their pals in ETA. The remainder of the phallus was subsequently removed as a hazard.

For more than 20 years, Dubliners mulled over what to do with the space, and in 1997 The Corpo opened a design competition to replace the Pillar. The winning design was a 120-meter metallic spike, signifying nothing, really, except that you could build it.

Seriously—it has no meaning.

(Okay, the winning architectural firm called it the Spire of Dublin, and described it as an “elegant and dynamic simplicity bridging art and technology.” Whatever. They alternatively called it the Monument of Light, which makes me think of Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, so, no.)

Well, at least it's not a British admiral. Or a Starbucks.

But naturally, as I was walking back to my hotel from 14 Henrietta Street, I noticed it, and I had to shoot some photos.

However—and this comes under the category of “don’t try this at home, kids”—I got a little carried away with trying to capture the entire 120 meters in the shot. As I was concentrating on it—and fighting with the bloody LED screen on my digital P&S camera—I became aware of a quiet, repetitive sound somewhere in the area. Eventually I looked up and realized what the repetitive noise was. (When I got back to my hotel I saw that I’d caught it on camera, but because you can’t see anything in the sunlight on an LED screen, I didn’t realize it at the time.)

And I scooted.

Sorry, LUAS driver. I am a total idiot.

Off and on the rails

I do love repeating patterns, and  railings make good subjects. So here's some ironmongery from Dublin:

On Henrietta Street:

  

At the Taoiseach’s palace near Merrion Square:

The Bank of Ireland:

Because it actually wasn’t the way in that day.

At the Guinness Storehouse:

And just somewhere:

But here’s what I also got a kick out of—the way people perched objets trouvés on nearby railings:

Here’s a close-up of the last one:

Transportation modes

I’m always interested in approaches to transportation when I travel. So here are some things that are going on in Dublin.

For one thing, the sharing economy is alive and well.

I saw one in action, too, but didn’t get a pick

But there were a lot of bikeshare installations, although this is the only one I saw that was actually approaching full availability:

In fact, I saw several that were completely empty:

But lest you think no one actually owns a bicycle, here’s a shop:

I’m guessing that you’re not allowed to take your bicycle on LUAS (the light rail system), as here’s one of the stops:

Now, clearly it’s not paradise for cyclists, or for bikes. I was walking along Merrion Street and saw this example:

The tag is a threat:

But since I shot the photo nearly a month after the date on it, I’m thinking they may not be big on enforcement.

Here’s another, which was just sad:

And its tag:

By the time they get round to actually impounding the thing, there’ll be nothing left.

These pedicabs were at the St. Stephen’s Green end of Grafton street (along with horse-drawn carriages, which I did not shoot); only at the weekend, though:

And here’s something I had not come across before this trip.

I would have been clueless had I not seen and heard two of them at a distance in Belfast. (The first time, in the street by my hotel, I was so stupefied that I didn't think to pull out my camera. The second I heard three blocks away while I was at the top of my hotel, and it was too far to shoot.) You get a bunch of people on the bicycle seats (probably pretty well inebriated from what I saw), and they provide the power to move around. They’re also their own cheering section.

I have to say that the notion of doing this as a team-building exercise does not appeal to me in the least. And I think it would only work in a relatively flat city. San Francisco, for example, would not be a good target market. But evidently it’s a Thing in Ireland, north and south.

Gratitude Monday: On duty

Last Thursday afternoon in the District They Call Columbia, we had a tornado warning. Our COO sent round an email telling everyone to get away from outside windows, which is probably good advice, because I’d have been the one glued to a window, shooting photos. As it happens, I was WFH in the People’s Republic, where it got so dark around 1530 that my solar-powered garden butterfly lights came on. Sometime after that, the skies opened up and all the water in the world came right down on us.

(A few weeks ago a tornado actually touched down about a mile from me, although thankfully there was no loss of life.)

Well, during a staged event that afternoon for yet another farm bailout to offset the fallout from his tariff wars, as the Chaos Monkey was peddling porkies about him being calm—the calmest ever, dammit—when throwing a wobbly at Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer the day before, and was calling on his toady aides to—one by one—swear to the assembled media that his account of the encounter was true, and calm…soldiers of The Old Guard were carrying out their duty at the Tomb of the Unknowns across the river at Arlington National Cemetery. Including placing flags at the Tomb in honor of Memorial Day.

And on Friday morning, as Cadet Bonespurs (proud descendant of a long line of military service dodgers) hauled off for a state visit to Japan and golfing with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, The Old Guard tweeted photos of what real devotion to duty looks like. Viz:

Today I am grateful for the generations of men and women of our armed services who have made great sacrifices for the survival of our nation and our democracy. And I’m grateful for The Old Guard for their dedication to honoring those sacrifices. And I’m grateful for social media, which enabled America’s Regiment to disseminate these photos that silently remind us of what duty looks like.