St. Patrick's Day and Irish Pride

It's that time of year again. The time when I break out my Irish rugby jersey . 

Last night I read Lindsay W.B. Yeats Irish Folk and Fairy Tales. I tell the kids about Patrick Cooper Hunt, who was born in 1830 in County Mayo and stepped off on the docks in Philadelphia in 1848 leaving a land of famine and finding a land of opportunity.  He found a wife too, of course -- Mary Malone -- another Irish immigrant from the rocky west country. His son married Rose Casey, the daughter of Irish immigrants. 

I tell everyone in earshot how I got to live and work in Ireland after I graduated from college. I tell them about PJ's -- where I used to keep office hours after dinner -- and where you could view the Leprechaun bones for just a punt. I tell them about St. John's Castle in Carlingford and about the old Mint where I used to work. I tell them about climbing Croagh Patrick at sunset and losing the trail on the way down in the dark. Like a guiding angel, an old gent with a flashlight appeared on the sharp rock side of the sacred mountain to lead us safely back to the trail and the warm music of the pub.

 I tell them about the Pirate Queen Grace O'Malley, who once had an audience with the Queen of England. I took a mail boat out across Clew Bay to  to visit her castle one day and spent the night on her little Clare island. 

For though it's a Saint's day to be sure. Yet,  March 17 is really about Irish pride. A chance for all of us who have found prosperity a few generations removed from needle-bone fingers of starvation to look back on the land we've left behind. 

Oh, and there's yer man St. Patrick. If you want to read about himself, Slate magazine had a good scribble here.

She likes it electric

Okay, so I've got the headlight on and most of the nest of wires fits in the headlight bucket, so it really cleans up pretty good. It is a really tight fit, and I have some wires that don't have a home yet, but I've successfully got the headlight and turn signals connected.

That said, two things are apparent:

1) The heavy turn signals have no place to go. They will fit on the headlight bucket, and they look kind of cool, but the stalks they came with ~barely~ fit. I've ordered a lightweight cheapo set from Hong Kong that I can attach to the faring directly. This will also solve another problem I have. I'm eliminating the chrome from this thing, since much of it is pitted and rusted. I'll cover all the chrome parts in a gloss black engine enamel. However, the retro turn signals are just too pretty to paint over. The cheapos will paint just fine and blend in instead of standing out.

2) Things aren't blinking. When I relocated my rear turn signals to the back of the bike, they wouldn't blink. Not sure if they did before, but I know they worked before teardown. So now the question is what has to be connected to get them working. When I hooked up the front turn signals, they lit up just right, but did not blink. So either I have a blinker unit that is shorted out, or all the connections need to be made to get it blinking. I'm not going to over pursue it at this point. My battery will need to be replaced for the new season and it may just be that I'm short of power to work the blinkers.

Meanwhile, the motorcycle is looking pretty good. I tried the faring out with the new bars and headlight and it's is going to look like a cool old BMW going down the road. Much work left to do however, and summer is coming.

Wasted Calories are Sinful

Just read Slate's review of TC Boyle's new book "When the Killing is Done."  It follows the clash of an environmental engineer trying to eliminate invasive species from two islands and her running battle with an animal rights activist. The title comes from the animal rights activist who calls environmental engineers "Nazis" and states "I'll be civil when the killing is done." The Slate writer has a great line:

The killing, needless to say, is never done. Nature is as murderous as human beings, and neither is likely to change.

As an environmental science writer, I used to cover stories of these sorts of conflicts all the time. They also reveal two worldviews -- one scientific and analytical and the other moral without reason or perspective. As we've become increasingly divorced from nature as a people, we have lost our connection with its inherent brutality. The natural world is all about domination, all about killing and eating things. Our romanticism seeks to restore "order" and "harmony" that never existed. Natural systems are always dynamic and amoral. Everything is food for something else. Wasted calories are the only sin.