Tá mé go maith. Conas atá tú?

I'm almost fully recovered! There are still a few things I am having trouble with. Kneeling is the most important of these things as it is kind of necessary for crawling around with my dog, not looking lazy in church, easily cleaning my bathtub, and a few other activities.

St. Patrick's Day is this weekend, the one day a year when, if you aren't Irish, you can pretend like you are, and if you are Irish, you roll your eyes at all the binge drinking and other shenanigans involved in being pretendy Irish. The traditional (in the US) corned beef and cabbage is actually based on bacon and cabbage, an everyday meal in Ireland. As for me, I'm making a stobhach Gaelach with Guinness, lamb and barley. I got it from the Guinness USA consulting chef who did a demo at the North Texas Irish Festival earlier this month. Unfortunately I lost the recipe, but I believe I remember the ingredients. So I'll basically be making my best guess and hoping it's good enough to eat. What could possibly go wrong?

Whatever you eat, and whatever you drink (be it Guinness, Murphy's, or Beamish, a cheapass green beer, or a McDonald's Shamrock Shake), beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh. That is, Happy St Patrick's Day wishes/blessings to you! Why not take this opportunity to watch some good Irish-American movies? Like Boondock Saints or The Departed or In America. Or maybe some movies with Irish actors like Waking Ned Devine, In Bruges, or The Quiet Man. And here's a playlist of Irish artists to listen to whether you're Irish or you aren't. It's a bit long, but certainly worth a listen. I've added a few notes on some of the songs. Sláinte!

Primordial-Gods to the Godless
The Cranberries-Linger
Altan-A Bhean Udaí Thall*
Enya-Boadicea**
The Corrs-Little Wing
Westlife-Uptown Girl
Thin Lizzy-The Boys Are Back In Town
Rory Gallagher-Bullfrog Blues
The Pogues-The Sickbed of Cuchulainn
The Bothy Band-Salamanca/The Banshee/The Sailor's Bonnet (reels)
Planxty-3 jigs
Sinead O'Connor & The Chieftains-Foggy Dew***
U2-With or Without You
Clannad-Dúlamán****
Damien Rice (ft. Lisa Hannigan)-Volcano
Mary Black-Song for Ireland
The Dubliners-I'll Tell Me Ma


*The title of this song is translated as O Yonder Lady. It's a conversational song between a drowned woman and the young girl trying to take her husband and his wealth. The girl takes the woman to the shore on the pretext of combing her hair by the seaside, but instead drowns her by tying her hair to a rock. The interesting thing is that they insult each other in the first line of every verse but the insults sound very similar. The dead wife calls the young woman "a shi ogo", or Sí óg, literally meaning young fairy, but in this instance may be read as young deceiver. The young woman calls the dead wife "a shiogo", or Síog, literally a seam, an old measurement for a sack of grain (about as much as a pack animal could carry), referring to her bound state underwater.

**Boadicea-Boadicea was the wife of Prasutugus, ruler of the Iceni tribe, a British (as opposed to Gaelic) tribe of Celts. Prasutugus had a quid pro quo deal with Rome. He helped Rome out and in return he remained nominally independent and got credit from Roman financiers. In his will he left his land jointly to his daughters (Celtic women had far more rights than Roman women) and the Roman Emperor, but when he died(sometime between 43 and 60 AD), his will was completely ignored. His lands and people were annexed as if conquered, his daughters raped, his wife publicly flogged. In 60 or 61 AD, while the governor of Roman Britain was off conquering the Isle of Anglesey (formerly Mona), Boadicea and the Iceni conspired with the Trinovantes tribe in a revolt, led by Boadicea. The tribes sacked Roman colonies including London, (which was a small settlement called Londinium then), but were ultimately defeated in the Battle of Watling Street, which is thought to have taken place somewhere between London and Wroxeter. This particular track was part of a soundtrack composed by Enya for a 1986 BBC documentary called The Celts.

***Foggy Dew was written by Canon O'Neill, a parish priest, in 1919 after he attended the first sitting of the new Irish Parliament (Dail Eireann) where the Irish Declaration of Independence was adopted. This was the start of the Irish War of Independence, a guerilla war which ended in a ceasefire in 1921. The result was 1) the island of Ireland being separated into the newly independent Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland, free of British rule for the first time in about 7 and a half CENTURIES, and Northern Ireland, 6 counties which remained part of the United Kingdom and 2)sectarianism and decades of killing between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists in those northern 6 counties. This war followed the Easter Rising, a revolt that occurred in Dublin in 1916, which is detailed in the song. Although most of the Irish were not exactly supportive of the violence of the Easter Rising, the British response actually turned the men and women who participated in the Rising into martyrs/heroes. Over 3,500 men and women were arrested, 90 sentenced to execution and 15 actually executed, some who were not even involved in the Rising. This reaction led to the rise of the Sinn Fein party which backed the IRA in the War for Independence.

****Dúlamán is a type of edible seaweed. Seaweed was collected to dye clothing, but it was also a source of nourishment, especially during famines, and kept many Irish from starving . Seaweed merchants who collected the seaweed to sell were simply called by the seaweed they collected. So if you collected seaweed for dyeing clothing, you were called Dulaman Gaelach and if you collected seaweed for eating you were called Dulaman maorach. This is another conversational song in which the Dulaman maorach wants to court the daughter of Dulaman Gaelach and entreats the father to allow him to do so, finally saying if he doesn't approve, Dulaman maorach will simply take her away.