A salute to the Irish: love, friendship, loyalty

Posted Mar 15, 2012 By Mark Bergin

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Mark Bergin, Frontenac EMC

Even Ireland's national airline, Aer Lingus (which means "air fleet" in English) has a sense of humor, and can tell a good story. They used an image of a young Shane MacGowan in an advertising campaign.

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Mark Bergin, Frontenac EMC

A Claddagh ring from Ireland. Hands hold the crowned heart: "Let love and friendship reign."

EMC Lifestyle - We Irish are an odd lot. I think it would befit the Irish, so close to the earth and sea, to honor Brigid on Feb. 1 or Colum (Columcille) on June 9. Both were native born and in tune with the gentle ways of the land.

Instead, each year we celebrate our Irishness by honoring a man who wasn't Irish, was never canonized as a saint, and who we claim drove snakes out of a country where no snakes existed. If there ever were snakes in Ireland, the cold-blooded creatures would have died 15,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, long before Patrick's life in the 5th century. But not even python popsicle fossils have been found in Ireland.

I realize it's all about symbolism, and the snake in some cultures is a representation of evil. So they say Patrick drove evil out of Ireland, yada, yada. Despite an endless number of tales about Patrick, very little is known about him.

In some Celtic regions, the serpent represents power and wisdom, andespecially a snake coiled around itselfhealing. What "driving the snakes out of Ireland" reflects is that we Irish are natural storytellers. The fact that tourists pay money to kiss a stone in Blarney is evidence of our skill at weaving a fine tale. P.T. Barnum would be proud of us.

To celebrate my culture on March 17, I'll be wearing my Claddagh ring and listening to the Mahones and Shane MacGowan/The Pogues. Shane MacGowan is one of the most beloved of Ireland's modern poets/musicians, and nothing could be more Irish than the wearing of the beloved Claddagh ring.

You've probably seen the Claddagh image on a ring or necklace. The Claddagh symbol dates back more than 300 years.

The ring comprises two hands holding a heart, which wears a crown. Friendship, love and loyalty are captured in the image. The Fenians designed the rings without the crown. That just seems scary. It would be like having love and friendship, with no loyalty. I guess political correctness isn't confined to our current world.

Claddagh, which means stony shore in Irish Gaelic, was a small fishing village on Galway Bay, outside the eponymous town. The ancient village maintained its sovereign settlement until Martin Oliver, their last king, died in 1972. The king, periodically elected, held the distinguished privilege of using a white sail on his hooker (a type of fishing boat, not a career choice). Today, the area is part of Galway.

The ring can be traced to the 17th century. Algerians captured Galway's Richard Joyce while he sailed to the West Indies. Joyce became a slave to a Moorish goldsmith, from whom he learned the goldsmith trade. When released from slavery, Joyce returned to Galway and opened a goldsmith shop. He created a symbol (what we now know as the Claddagh ring) of his undying love for his homeland and friends. Today, we wear it to honor our Irish heritage. It's also become a symbol of friendship and romantic commitment for the non-Irish. I've had many an interesting conversation with strangers after they've noticed my ring or I've noticed them wearing the Claddagh. "You're Irish?" is often received with a big smile. If the answer is "Tá," then I know I'm dealing with someone who speaks the language.

You can still find one of the earliest Claddagh shops in Galway. Thomas Dillon's, established in 1750, is also home to the Claddagh Museum. John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney and John Fitzgerald Kennedy each wore a ring from Dillon's. Queen Victoria wore one, as did King Edward VII and Winston Churchill.

The ring serves as an indicator of one's relationship status. There are many variations, but there are two main fashions. To wear the ring with the heart facing the wearer means the person is committed/married. If the heart faces out, the person is unattachedthe heart is still searching. However, there are some complicated variations on this theme. For example, some jewelers tell you that if the ring is worn on the right hand facing out, the person is footloose and fancy free. If it's facing in, the person is not available for romance. If worn facing out on the left hand, the person is engaged. If facing in, the person is married. Not sure what you're supposed to do if you're divorced...or a bigamist.

As for our March 17 festivities, it's time to start celebrating modern Irish culture. Perhaps we've been commemorating Patrick's death (March 17) because he didn't drive snakes from Ireland, he wasn't a canonized saint, and he wasn't Irish.

More fitting would be a day in honor of Shane MacGowan. If you're not familiar with him, you've likely heard his songs. Every Christmas, his Fairy Tale of New York rules the airwaves in Ireland and other Celtic countries. During his concerts, songs like Haunted, A Rainy Night in Soho, Thousands are Sailing, and The Band Played Waltzing Matilda bring many the staunch Irish man and woman to tears.

Here's my argument for March 17 being (Saint?) Shane MacGowan Day. If you attend a Shane MacGowan live performance, you'll notice a certain sense of Irish sacredness at the event. Shane MacGowan is a living Irish punk legend. The wounded healer.

Shane MacGowan is Irish (okay, born in England of Irish parents who soon moved back to Ireland). Shane-o, as he is sometimes known, was immersed in Irish culture, especially music, from a young age. He's a brilliant poet/songwriter. And we love our poets and musicians. From Imelda May or Rory Gallagher to Van Morrison and Sinead O'Connor, we wear our hearts on our sleeves.

In the tradition of the likes of Irish poet, novelist, and playwright Brendan Behan, MacGowan is a tragic yet classic Irish hero. By the way, Behan once said that there are no snakes in Ireland because they all left and went to New York to become judges.

Next, supporting my notion of renaming March 17, to become a saint the individual must first be shown to have performed miracles. Bingo, we've nailed that one. The fact that Shane-o is still alive is a miracle.

A recent video can only help my argument. If you go to Youtube and search "Three priests and a Pogue" you'll find three Irish priests and Shane, the hellraiser, singing Little Drummer Boy.

Finally, are you ready for the clincher? Shane was born on December 25. Case closed.

Happy Saint Shane's Day.

Five Fun Facts about Unkillable Rock Star Shane MacGowan

You The Man3/15/2012

Filed Under: Booze, Brendan McGinley, Comics, Heroin, Irish, Punk, Shane MacGowan, The Pogues,Vampires

Fred Tanneau/Stringer/Getty

Rock stars are supposed to live hard and die young (and gorgeous) before they make a bad album. But jug-eared wolfman Shane MacGowan was never gorgeous, and he grew up too tough for the muses to kill. The Irish punk rocker has outlived everyone’s deadpool despite the combined efforts of every drug in the Western world.

Opinions of The Pogues frontman vary widely–to most, he’s a hero, while to others, a tragic talent who needed to be saved from himself, but all agree he’s a magnificent songwriter who performs from the heart. Here, then, are the weird details of an interesting life. 

1) He started drinking at four years old. An aunt gave him booze and cigarettes in return for promising to not worship the devil, though that might not have worked, considering he’s penned songs like “The Boys from County Hell” and “If I Should Fall from Grace with God.” From there his course was pretty well set; He was in detox by eight, and expelled from school at 14 for possession of “dope, acid, and pills.” But a year before his first drink came an even more defining moment–his earliest memory is of singing on a table for “more than 40 friends and relatives.” So he’s always been a musician first, and a chemistry set second.

2) He donated a door to a children’s charity. When the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children went looking for celebrity donations to auction off to charity, they never expected to get a door. But that’s what the bard gave them, and that’s what they had to put out to bid. The door raised €1602 (about $2,082), though it didn’t hurt that he had drawn a face on the door and added his signature. They should just be grateful they weren’t the recipients of the time he auctioned off a jar of urine.

3) He had a reality special about (not) trying to grow his own food. Back in 2009, MacGowan madeOzzy Osbourne’s attempts to use a remote control look like nanotechnological research. For an hour, Irish audiences watched as long-suffering girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke struggled to raise homegrown crops. His contribution was a few tips and avoiding any work–which, seeing as it might result in bodily fluids expelled on the produce, was probably the most productive thing he could do. The Irish Independent called the show “an alternative to all the how-to gardening programmes.”

Some of the crops did well, but the potatoes turned black, either out of sympathy for MacGowan’s liver, or because they heard him sing so many emigration songs, they thought causing a famine was what good potatoes did. And for some reason, the show ended with the aforementioned urine auction.

4) He once ate a Beach Boys’ CD. Not that he could have necessarily eaten potatoes. He has dental implants now, but for the longest time, MacGowan’s mouth was a fascinating pit of despair. Although some of his teeth were sacrificed pitching headfirst over a wall during a particularly boozy blast of vomit, the weirdest damage he ever wreaked upon his chompers was the day he tried to eat volume three of The Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits.

Glenn Fabry/Vertigo Comics

In an incident that could not possibly have had anything to do with drugs, Clarke found her boyfriend convinced that World War III was underway, that he was leader of the Irish Republic, hosting a superpowers summit, and that the best way to demonstrate America’s cultural inferiority was to eat a Beach Boys CD in front of the country’s leaders. And to be fair, he had the clarity of mind to chew up the least-essential album by one of America’s most overrated bands.

5) He’s an ageless bloodsucker. When UK comic creators Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon were designing an immortal Irish vampire for their blasphemous cosmic western Preacher, they reportedly modeled their heroin-addicted hemophile Cassidy after MacGowan.

So you see — you really can’t kill Shane MacGowan. And if you see blood running from his mouth, check his teeth for shards of Beach Boys — both the CD and the band members.

Goldman Sachs Exec Quits And Tells All

Posted by majestic on March 14, 2012

About to be former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith is the talk of Wall Street today as a result of his op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which he describes his decision to quit the temple of Mammon (my term, not his):

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief…

[continues in the New York Times]

The Pogues' James Fearnley on Celtic punk, firing Shane MacGowan, and St. Pat's

March 13, 2012 | By John Rabe

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Pogues accordionist James Fearnley at the Mohn Broadcast Center, March 8, 2012.

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The way James Fearnley tells it, he and the rest of the Pogues were pretty uneasy about how Shane MacGowan would take being fired from the band that he'd helped make famous. But he'd become too unreliable, so in 1991, in Yokohama, they asked him to come down to the hotel room they were meeting in. MacGowan's reaction, as Fearnley tells it in our interview and his forthcoming memoir, "Here Comes Everybody," backs up Fearnley's contention that it wasn't just MacGowan's drinking that was causing his erratic behavior; it was the pressure.

The Pogues, who formed almost 30 years ago in Ireland, a mix of Irish and English musicians who played Celtic music with a punk sensibility, were in trouble from the start. Their original name was Pogue Mahone, which means "kiss my ass" in Irish. The BBC didn't like that, so the DJ who championed them shortened it to The Pogues, which was done with MacGowan's other band, the Nips ... nee The Nipple Erectors.

Here's a spirited rendition of "If I Should Fall from Grace with God," from a 1988 performance in Japan.

Fearnley says the Celtic/punk mix "was odd, and I think galvanizing for people to listen to," and many Irish listeners were put off at first. "For some of them, it was difficult, but we quickly won them over because we were doing it honestly." In other words, it's clear from listening to the Pogues that they love this music.

Fearnley was not only a member of this seminal fusion band, but nearly joined Culture Club (!). He founded The Sweet and Low Orchestra, has played on Talking Heads and Melissa Etheridge albums, and currently plays with the Pogues and Cranky George, which plays locally on occasion. He just released his first single - Hey Ho - which we play at the end of the interview, and his Pogues memoir, "Here Comes Everybody," comes out in a few months.

You might see James Fearnley in the crowd at The Satellite in Silverlake as the East LA bandperforms its 10th annual Pogues tribute on Saturday, March 17th. Tickets are just $10.

Web Resources

• James Fearnley online
• The Pogues online

Rush Limbaugh: Fascist or Mentally Ill?

Posted by Good German on March 13, 2012

Or both?  Paul Rosenberg writes at Al Jazeera English:

Rush Limbaugh’s recent meltdown – his three-day sex-crazed rant/attack against Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, whose congressional testimony made no mention of her own sex life — has a rich and strange collection of backstories to it, none of which include the sort of follow-on this story has had, complete with pseudo-apologies and the subsequent, ongoing loss of sponsors, which might even conceivably damage or imperil his career.

Of those backstories, his own shady past as a pill-popping sex tourist is only the most lurid, not the most instructive. That only goes to underscore what’s already self-evident: that Limbaugh’s diatribes are heavily implicated in what psychologists call “projection” and the rest of know as “the pot calling the kettle black”. Much more instructive, to get things headed in a more fruitful direction, is Limbaugh’s long history of similar sorts of vindictive, name-calling attacks.  Media Matters has provided several illustrative lists, such as  “Rush Limbaugh’s Decades Of Sexism And Misogyny“, “The 20 Worst Racial Attacks Limbaugh’s Advertisers Have Sponsored“,  “Ten Of Limbaugh’s Worst Advertiser-Sponsored Attacks On The Poor” , “Limbaugh’s Advertisers Sponsored These Ten Attacks On Unions” – and a more all-purpose list — ”15 Of The Worst Comments Limbaugh’s Advertisers Have Sponsored Since 2004“.  These collections served to illustrate how continually Limbaugh resorts to similarly themed name-calling, thus reinforcing the point Media Matters made early on, that Limbaugh hadn’t just used a couple of “poorly chosen words” to describe Fluke, he had engaged in three days of prolonged haranguingincluding 46 separate attacks…

Read more here.

BANKSY VS ADVERTISING

A War In Outdoor Space: Banksy Versus Advertising

Posted by majestic on March 5, 2012

The art world’s most intriguingly anonymous character, Banksy, is known for appropriating all sorts of outdoor and arguably “public” spaces. Who else does that? The advertising industry of course. I think one has to agree with his sentiments, albeit with a wry smile given his own predilection for placing his art in places our eyeballs can’t avoid. Here’s his statement:

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• Posted in: Advertising, Art, Banksy 

Japan invents speech-jamming gun that silences people mid-sentence

Updated: Friday, 02 Mar 2012, 6:43 PM EST
Published : Friday, 02 Mar 2012, 8:26 AM EST

TOKYO (Newscore) - Japanese researchers have invented a speech-jamming gadget that painlessly forces people into silence.

Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University, developed a portable "SpeechJammer" gun that can silence people more than 30 meters away.

The device works by recording its target's speech then firing their words back at them with a 0.2-second delay, which affects the brain's cognitive processes and causes speakers to stutter before silencing them completely.

Describing the device in their research paper, Kurihara and Tsukada wrote, "In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking."

They found that the device works better on people who were reading aloud than engaged in "spontaneous speech" and it cannot stop people making meaningless sounds, such as "ahhh," that are uttered over a long time period.

Kurihara and Tsukada suggested the speech-jamming gun could be used to hush noisy speakers in public libraries or to silence people in group discussions who interrupt other people's speeches.

"There are still many cases in which the negative aspects of speech become a barrier to the peaceful resolution of conflicts," the authors said.

Read more: http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/news/scitech/science/030212-japan-invents-speech-jamming-gun-that-silences-people-mid-sentence#ixzz1oBV8La1H

Starting March 1st, A Red License Plate in Nevada Means the Driver is a Robot!

by Aaron Saenz February 22nd, 2012 | Comments (6)

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Governor Sandoval of Nevada exits one of Google's robot cars last summer. The bill he signed into law is now allowing automated cars on Nevada roads.

An extended campaign in Nevada by Google has led to a new host of provisions which will allow automated cars to legally drive in the state. Starting March 1st, 2012 innovators like Google can officially apply for a new kind of robot driver’s license that will give them permission to openly test their cars on the road. Automated vehicles will be able to travel the same streets and highways as human drivers, with only a red license plate marking them as robots. Once research on those automated cars is complete (which may take years), the Nevada Department of Motorized Vehicles will issue them a neon green license plate – an indication that the robot drivers are good to go. Google, whose robotic Prius cars have already driven 200,000+ miles in California quasi-legally, will undoubtedly take full advantage of Nevada’s openness and further develop their technology for general use. Just as important, other states like Hawaii, Florida, and Oklahoma may follow Nevada’s example, paving the way for robot cars to operate all across the United States.

Last June Governor Sandoval signed AB511 into law, making it explicitly legal for cars to drive themselves. That same bill, however, required the Nevada DMV to establish rules and regulations as to how companies would apply for permission to get their robotic vehicles on the road. As of February 15, those guidelines are now in place, and Nevada is ready to hand out red license plates to Google and other robotic car developers. Each vehicle will require a $1-3 million bond to insure against damages and will have to give the Nevada DMV a detailed report on what they are testing with each car. Whether or not those provisions will prove adequate has yet to be seen, but actually having concrete rules on the use of robotic vehicles goes a long way towards legitimizing them. In the eyes of Google and other automated car researchers, Nevada’s become a paradise.

There is some concern however, that the new automated car law could actually stifle innovation. Under some interpretations of the bill, cars with computers that automatically engage brakes may constitute a robotic car and thus need to go through further red tape before the general public can drive them. Such systems, already developed by companies like Volvo, represent a stepping stone towards fully automated cars and it would be a shame if Nevada squashed their use just as the state was opening up further research into robotic vehicles.

Nevada’s new bill will undoubtedly come with complications, but overall it is a very hopeful sign for the future of automated cars. Previously I had been very pessimistic about the legal and social hurdles these vehicles would have to clear before they could be accepted by the general public. Now, however, it seems that at least a few states are trying to prove me wrong, clearing the way for robot cars to take their rightful place on our roads. Along with Nevada, the Hawaii, Oklahoma, and Florida legistlatures are all considering bills to allow automated vehicles on their roads for research purposes (or more). The Florida bills (HB 1207 in the House and SB 1768 in the Senate) seem to have considerable support. It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that robot cars from companies like Google will be able to take over driving for humans much sooner than anyone had anticipated. Such a transition could save thousands or even millions of lives each year.

I’ll leave you with a video featuring Sebastian Thrun, the project lead for Google’s robot car. Both his motivation for automating cars, and his vision for the future are inspiring:

[image credits: Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, Steve Jurvetson (modified)]
[video credits: Google via NPR]
[sources: Nevada DMV, NY Times, NPR]