Earlier, I wrote about changing email delivery systems for my blogs and how confusing it gets to be a non-Geek operating in a Geek world. Well, it’s gotten worse. I can’t say I’d rather be starving in Ireland like my ancestors did in Shanty Gold, but I sure think life […]
Month: October 2014
Turn It Over
I sing at funerals. That scares me sometimes because it reminds me of my hometown wakes and funerals when the same old ladies would put on their black dresses and show up. It was kind of a joke in our Irish-American community. My mother called them crepe hangers. It was, we thought, their one social […]
Medical Arrogance and Ignorance in the mid-19th Century
In Shanty Gold’s mid-19th century time period, many women died during or immediately after childbirth from something called “childbed fever.” Since this was years before Louis Pasteur discovered the existence of germs in 1888, the physicians of the day would blithely go from an autopsy to a delivery room without washing their hands or […]
Technology Stinks!!
Okay, some of you have complained that you get a notice of a new post and then, when you click it, it’s not there. To fix this problem, I’m now sending out my email notices about blogs by MailChimp. Every Wednesday afternoon, you’ll get a notice of a new blog by me, but it’ll say […]
Irish Toasts
As you have probably heard, the Irish love a good toot! And what’s a good toot without a good toast? So, here are a few I’ve collected during my travels to the Emerald Isle. Some of them come from a book by Padraic O’Farrell. Whiskey, you’re the divil. You’re leading me astray— Over […]
Triumph and Tragedy of Cobh
In 1849, when 13-year-old Mary Boland sailed off on The Pilgrim’s Dandy for Boston, the Cork Harbor was in the midst of an identity crisis. Because that was the year Queen Victoria visited Ireland and the British wanted to change the name of the port from Cove to Queenstown in her honor.
