411 Years Later, a Debt Collected

Before we continue with the "Erin go Thud" story, I thought that regular readers of SherWords might like to know that some of our best photos from this year's trip to Ireland are popping up on Flickr. They have very little in the way of narrative (that's what will be showing up on this blog as the year progresses), but some of them are pretty:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherwoodh/sets/72157624912483438/

Erin go Thud, Part One

180-degree Panorama at the Giant's Causeway, County Antrim. Please click on any image -- but especially this one -- to see it in a larger size.

No matter how pleasant a town is otherwise, the sight of razor wire with six-inch blades atop a six-foot high stone wall around your hotel's parking lot will tend to put a damper on your enthusiasm. So will shuttered storefronts and grim, gray faces, but that was Armagh, and that was two days in the past and forgotten when we woke up on Thursday, August 12th. We were to spend most of this day among happy people and inspiring natural grandeur.

We had arrived at the Seaview bed and breakfast near the Giant's Causeway on the north coast of County Antrim the previous evening after a glorious afternoon's drive north from Armagh. Our plan for the twelfth was to be as tourist-y as we could and visit the area's three big draws: the Causeway, the ruins of Dunluce Castle, and the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge. (And they are big draws: a little Googling shows that together they attract more than a million visitors per year, and the busiest month is August.)

I was a little anxious that morning, concerned about how my back would hold up with all the walking we had planned. For several months before we started our trip, I had been suffering from increasingly severe back pain and sciatica. About a month before we embarked, though, I had started wearing a pair of MBT shoes, and they had a dramatic effect on my back pain, almost completely eliminating it. There's a little problem with them, though: the reverse curvature of the soles puts a thick amount of material between one's arch and the ground, making them a little wobbly left-right and seem to increase the potential of twisting an ankle. Some of the terrain we planned to walk on this day would be particularly rough -- the head nurse in the emergency room would later tell us that they see a large number of badly sprained or broken ankles during tourist season because of it -- but I decided to wear them anyway, thinking that I needed to prevent the return of the back pain, which would put a damper on the rest of our vacation.

Diane (in yellow) navigates the Causeway.

We tackled the Giant's Causeway, the most heavily-visited of the three, first. Our strategy was to arrive early, before the shuttle vans started running from the visitors' centre down to the otherworldly hexagonal stone pillars. It worked; there were a few people there when we arrived, but nothing like the massive crowds that would be there later on in the day. The walk down was only about a kilometer, and my wobbly shoes carried me down easily. The Causeway itself presented a challenge, slippery and uneven, but I was very careful and negotiated its unevenness easily.

At the Giant's Causeway on a blustery August morning.

We spent a good couple of hours at the Causeway, marveling not only at the geology but also the sheer beauty of the north Antrim coast, and by the time we were ready to leave, the shuttle vans had begun their day and we were able to ride back up the hill to the visitors' centre. From there we drove westward along the coast to Dunluce Castle, where we arrived at about midday when the August throng of tourists (including us, of course) was starting to make itself evident.

Part of Dunluce Castle's ruins.

The castle's ruins are impressive, the coast it perches on is astonishing, and the surrounding terrain, while steep in places, presented no problems to my MBTs. By the time we had finished touring and exploring the old rockpile, it was going on two o'clock, though, and my legs were a little wobbly from the day's unaccustomed amount of walking.

Sherwood at a Dunluce picture window.

We doubled back along the coast, past the Causeway and our B&B, to the parking lot for the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge. By that time, the full onslaught of tourism was under way, though, and the lot was jammed. We decided to postpone an amble across the famous rope suspension bridge until the next morning, Friday the 13th, and spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the great stretches of dramatic coastline instead, away from the crowds.

Along the north Antrim coast.

One place off a narrow side road looked especially promising for photography, a bluff at the far side of a sheep pasture which I figured would present a great view of surf pounding against rocks at the base of the cliff. We parked near a stile across the fence to the pasture. I gathered my camera stuff, but Diane decided to wait in the car. She was a bit tired, and was happy to listen to music on her iPod and watch the view from the comfort of the passenger seat, so I set out over the stile on my own.

The stile.

The last step down into the meadow was a very high one, but I managed it just fine. The fifty yards across the meadow to the cliff top was rough, as any soft surface trod by ungulates will be, but carefully watching my step brought me to the cliff top without problem. The view was every bit as spectacular as I had hoped. I looked around, planning the individual frames that would later go together in a Photoshopped panorama. When I had twisted around to my far left, though, rapid motion at vision's periphery caught my attention. I turned quickly to look back the way I had come from and saw two people at the stile, waving energetically at me. I started to wave back, but then saw that they weren't waving a greeting, they were gesturing for me to come back.

And then I saw Diane's head between them, just above the top of the knee-high grass.

She had decided to follow me to the cliff after all, but, distracted by the beauty of the scene and her music, she hadn't noticed the stile's last deep step. She had fallen badly, hitting the ground forcefully and awkwardly on her right ankle and knee, and could not get up. She was in excruciating pain.

(To be continued.)

A Quick Teaser

Uh-oh.

Tune in when the Blog returns! We're still on this little island in the Atlantic for another week yet, and we'll probably have to sleep for a week after that, so we'll have to keep you in suspense for a while.

A Quick Whisper

Regular readers might understand why we're using some of the only few hours of internet time we've had for a week (or will have for at least one more) to post just this silly picture of a cat. Others will have to go back in time four years.

Save This Map for Later

Ballyvaughan is a tiny town in County Clare, pinched against the south side of Galway Bay by the Burren's otherworldly karst. Its most-photographed feature is a signpost:

Notice the very top: "This is just a signpost. If you want information, go somewhere else." (Photo copyright by Tina Manthorpe, all rights reserved.)

Diane and I passed through Ballyvaughan in August, 2006, and this sign changed our trip -- but we had become accustomed to Irish signs changing our plans by then. We entered Ballyvaughan planning to go out in a certain direction, but decided to go in another direction or three based on what we saw on the signpost at the town's center.

That's the way Ireland's towns' signs are, if you look at them in a calm and measured way. They are designed to be studied up close, not glimpsed at 100kph in BIG LETTERS. After all, if you're in that much of a hurry, you already know where you're going, or should. Signs should give options, not directions, and should be near pubs in which you can discuss the options with knowledgeable locals or charming liars. Or both, most likely. After such deliberations, your destination can be assessed and, if need be, altered.

All that by way of introducing this map of our tentative plans for the next month (please click on the image to see a larger and clearer one) from Google Earth:

This is where we're going to go. Maybe. We think. Or maybe not.

It should be fun to see a map in a couple of months that shows where we actually went and how much similarity it shows to this rough-out.

The green parts should probably look much the same; they represent excursions to places where we have reservations for overnight accommodations away from Birr (which is at the center of the map, from which four green lines and one white one radiate.)

The big northern green loop includes Armagh (historical center of Irish research astronomy in the 1800's, and current home of not only the old observatory but also a modern planetarium), Derry (from which my most recently-emigrated ancestor, my father's father's father's father, Patrick McMackin, left aboard the bark Fanny in 1848), and the Giants' Causeway. Recent events make a trip to Derry even more imperative for us. The return trip will take us through Donegal and Sligo -- I think.

The western loop marks our return to the Clifden Connemara Pony Show -- you really can't visit Ireland in August without going to that, can you? We've splurged on the Rosleague Manor House in Letterfrack again this time for resting between ponies, if only for the best croissants in the universe.

And the southwestern loop to Counties Kerry and Cork has its nexus in Killarney, which will be our base for exploring the Dingle and Beara Peninsulas. Of the latter, Ireland for Dummies says:

"When you get home, don't forget to tell your friends that the Beara peninsula was terribly ugly and boring. That way, the peninsula will remain the wild and unspoiled place that it is now, with many ruins (both ancient and more recent), magnificent seascapes, and sweeping hills."

If you want just a taste of what Dummies is referring to, you can start with a bit of a Google on Tuosist, Uragh, Drombohilly, and the Dursey Island cable car. While we're nosing around those places, thousands of tourists will be plodding around the Iveragh Peninsula to the north on the two-lane "Ring of Kerry," as we did four years ago. I'm glad we did it, but we'll never do it in a crowded August again.

The white lines are possible day trips from Birr, at our whim of a morning when we don't have anything scheduled in town or the castle archives. A return to Loughcrew is high on our list, as is a trip down to Waterford to see (starting with a skeptical eye) the new crystal factory, downsized, under different management, and with different employees. A trip through the Burren by a different track from before is important to me, and a venture to the more genteel environs of Wicklow can take us to the National Stud, too. And several jaunts to Dublin are in order this time.

Our list of places we want to see is long -- but I can almost guarantee that it's a very different list from the one we will have gone to when all is done in September.

That's just the way Ireland works.

2006: Actual peregrinations. I wish we had made a "planning" map for that trip; it would have been quite different from the actuality shown above. (Click to see a legible version.)

==============================================================

Weather Warnings

I feel as though I'm posting more frequently while on hiatus than I was before.

I was just perusing Met Eireann's website, checkin' out the Irish weather.


There are certain weather warnings that I'm used to seeing on our National Weather Service's website for our area of Northern California: rainstorms in winter, fire conditions in summer, high wind or dense fog warnings at any time, for example. But I have never seen this particular one on this side of the Atlantic:

Blight Warning

Weather conducive to the spread of potato blight will exist for a time today (Sunday) and again during Tuesday and Wednesday There will be opportunities for spraying this evening and for much of Monday
Issued at 22:00 on 03-Jul-2010

Note that this is on the national weather website, not one dedicated to agricultural issues. Some things remain close to the surface for a very long time.

=================================================

Chenango Darkness: the Prequel

June 7th, 1879, in the New York Times:

In the previous entry in this blog, writer Frederick Busch drew a parallel between his almost-murder in Nigger Hollow, Chenango County, NY, to a completed one in the previous century in the same place. He wrote of the murderer, "He used his rifle, this man who is a small notation in history, and he shot through an open window, and he killed the man whose chickens scratched among the onions and the beans."

Busch got it backwards.

The killer in question killed because the damn' neighbor had killed two of his pet chickens, intentionally, and had lured them to their demise to boot. That's a shooting that I, a chicken-keeper, can understand.

And, besides, a thoroughly unpleasant person played a key role in the chicken-entrapment:



The whole story is recounted in this anonymous article from the New York Times of June 7th, 1879, and is at least as good reading as is Busch's tale from almost a century later. (Beware: the PDF file linked from that page is a little odd: you have to scroll halfway down the image to get to the start of the article in the left column.)


(So, I guess I have to thank my quarrelsome neighbors here in Creepy Hollow, California, for keeping the neighborhood from stagnating. Whoda thunk it.)

A plus in this well-written and engaging article from 131 years ago is that it doesn't take a gratuitous swipe at its then-current Presidential administration, something that caused consternation in comments about Busch's article linked in the previous blogpost. I'm happy to reassure the politically squeamish that the NYT did no such thing to the Hayes administration in this article (although there are some striking similarities between that administration and some controversies about the second Bush administration.) Dann, you can read the original article linked in this post without fear that your delicate sensitivities will be trod upon.

As a more serious side-note, the murderer -- who comes across very sympathetically in the article -- has a couple of interesting connections to "SherWords" and its readers: he was an immigrant from County Monaghan to County Chenango, and he was almost stony deaf. The latter makes some of the later parts of the article even more poignant, given the significant percentage of readers of this blog who are intimately familiar with that condition.

(One little correction: the reporter says that Chenango County is North of Utica; it is actually South of Utica, and by somewhat more than 11 miles.)

Sugar is a Ft. Harrington chicken. Mess with her at your own risk. Significant risk.

Once again, here's where to go for the original 1879 New York Times article about the hanging of Felix McCann. Happy reading!

============================================

Chenango Darkness: Disturbing Tales from Close to Home

I take this brief break from my break to pass along a find from an old Harper's Magazine that just riveted me to my computer monitor from start to finish. It's an article by Frederick Busch, who was a prof at Colgate during the time of the incident he recounts. He and his wife then lived only four miles due north of the little house where I grew up just a few years before, so I am very familiar with the territory in which the story unfolds... and with the pace of life there and then and with its flavor.

Like Busch's house, ours was very isolated (like him, we couldn't see smoke from any neighbor's chimney) on a small tributary on the East side of the Chenango River in upstate New York. Our hollow was called the "Thompson Creek Valley;" his was called, with great nonchalance, "Nigger Hollow." On maps it was called "Negro Hollow" before around 1950, "Pleasant Valley" thereafter, but the locals always called it "Nigger Hollow." As a kid, that struck me as odd, because the only people who lived there were white, and you had to look very hard to find anybody in the entire county who wasn't. Nobody seemed to know where the name came from; even my Dad, who was a great local history buff, didn't know.

Now I know.

Pleasant Valley/Nigger Hollow
(Photo by Lynn Harrington, October, 1964)

The article I'm about to link for you contains true stories of murder, pathetic KKK meetings, heroic dogs, a neighbor across the way who was said to be a pretty decent fellow when he was on his medications, and much more in a riveting ten to fifteen pages.  Busch (who passed away four years ago) weaves a stream of prose that I find enchanting.

Here it is: Standoff in Columbus: Guns, dogs and the language of totality. Enjoy.

And now I'm going back to my break, finishing the quarter and preparing for what will come right after the frenzy of a short summer session. See you in September!

====================

Gone Fishin' -- Back in About a Hundred Days

The residents of Ft. Harrington have a very, very busy three months ahead of us, including a lengthy return to our favorite island for some research and some relaxation, but also including some frantic times at school as we approach the fiscal year's end in a continuing sense of impending financial Armageddon. I am thus closing down most of my online activities until school starts back up in the Fall. (The wags among you, looking over the infrequent posts here this year, will be tempted to say that it's been closed down for quite a while, anyway. Don't -- or I'll send my tough-guy son after you.)

Tough-guy son. He will be assisted by the ferocious Kelsey and the bloodthirsty spaniels for the five weeks we're gone, so don't even think about trying to rob the joint then. Best plan on doing that while we're actually here.

We all -- humans and four-feet -- hope you have a great, great summer... and that you haven't completely forgotten about us come mid-September.

New Look at a Familiar Face, 25 Years On

Doug Harrington, circa 1985, by, courtesy of and copyright by Drew Fleming.

The web is an increasingly miraculous virtual place.

I have literally thousands of photos of my firstborn, taken during his 40 years here, but the web, just a few days ago, gifted me with this image that I had never seen before.

It stopped me in my tracks.

Taken by Drew Fleming in about 1985, it is the illustration for Doug's short entry on Wikipedia.

The Wiki article refers to Doug's partnership in songwriting and lead guitar performance with Jim Adams. Jim continues to keep Defiance alive -- along with his own successful IT career! -- and the band recently released a revival album, "Prophecy," much of which was actually written by Doug shortly before his death by melanoma four years ago. Even if thrash metal is not your cup of tea, I think you can appreciate the artistry involved in this two-minute home video of Jim laying down a couple of lead tracks for "Prophecy." Jim's fret-work is predictably impressive, but watch his right hand, too. Very, very cool stuff.

For No Other Reason Than That He's Still Here

This recent photo of Kelsey has gotten some positive reaction over on the "Flickr" photos arena, so I thought I'd pop it up here for my smaller circle of blog friends.

Kelsey, fresh from a laboratory victory over dire expectations, May, 2010.

Good dog. Yes you are.
Even if you are a geezer.

===============================================

Newsflash: Astronomers' Spawn Do Cool Things

If you live long enough, you're certain to rub shoulders from time to time with some pretty remarkable people. If you live even longer than that, you've got a good chance to encounter remarkable children of those remarkable people.

I'm lucky enough to work side-by-side with Karl von Ahnen, the technical director of the planetarium in which I teach my classes. Karl is worth an entire blog post all by himself... but this one won't be about him.

It will be about recent works by his son, and by mine.

Karl's son, Garth, recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, with a major in fine arts and a minor in astronomy. He combines the two fields in animations, and one in particular will strike a chord with long-time readers of this blog. Called "Arcada Fog," it is a romp through the Copernican revolution.

Garth
(Photo from Garth's Facebook page)

The animation's central and unifying figure is Tycho's moose. The music is by a group of Garth's college buddies, "Acid Westerns," who are just now embarking on a career. I really, really like their soundtrack for Garth's trip through our most colossal paradigm shift. Turn the sound up, if you can, for the treat:



My own boy, Adam, has a career in voice acting that seems right now to be on the first stages of an exponential launch. As the economy recovers, his gigs increase -- but it's more than that. His abilities and opportunities seem to be revving up like some of us remember a Saturn V's engines did before the huge clamps on the pad let go. He has worked hard for the ignition, and that alone is worthy of my salute.

But listen to this, in the context of its delivery -- W.E. Henley's most famous work delivered in an environment he couldn't have dreamt -- and turn the sound up. Don't bother trying to maximize the video window -- it will eventually do that all by itself. And, as Adam says, you'll have to "watch it all the way through to appreciate the incredible effects."

Shivers.

=====================================

While We Wait for Sherwood to Have a Thought Worth Communicating...

... a Diversion:

Fonzie on May 7th, 2010


Doggerel for a Cat

Who knows where his mind is,
Who knows where he goes?
Who knows what he’s thinking,
Who knows what he knows?

Deep thoughts about the future,
Or contemplating, if he can,
The foibles of his keepers,
And the final days of Man?

Perhaps he’s astrophysics’
Or mathematics’ sage,
Viewing in this corner
Hadrons' impact in the voiding gauge.

Or maybe he can see into
The chaos of our past,
Mistakes that litter pathways
That our curiosity outlasts.

Or maybe he’s just looking at a wall.

==============================================

Not Just Yet

Worried.

Old Kelsey had a blood test a few weeks ago as part of his annual check-up. The results came back with an ominous imbalance, which was confirmed in a re-test.

The most likely cause (but not the only possible cause) of the particular abnormalities is cancer of a variety of forms. His vet arranged for ultrasound testing in addition to full-body x-rays.

Waiting for results.

Those tests were carried out yesterday, and the results came back clean: no evidence of cancer, no tumors. We slept well for the first time in a while last night.

What is causing the abnormalities is still unknown, but the remaining possibilities are all imps to cancer's dragon. The imps are easier to deal with than the dragon if we know one's there this early, before it actually becomes visible.

Ultimately, of course, news will arrive that is not so good, for Kelsey, or for me, or for you. But not this time, not today.

We have been granted more good moments to live in, and we intend to take advantage of them as best we can. He knows how to do it.

2002

2004

2005

2009



=================================================