“Annita P” is an anagram of “anti-nap”.
I’m just sayin’.
15 September 2007
11 September 2007
Irish America, #1 of a continuing series
In my sister Theodora‘s neighborhood in Manhattan, there’s a pub that displays two Irish flags beneath the US flag: The Kinsale Tavern.
On the left is the official national flag of the Republic of Ireland. On the right is an unofficial flag of Ireland, representing the four provinces of the island. According to an unsourced website:
The Four Provinces flag has two main uses. Firstly, it is an economical way of flying the flags of all the provinces – one saves the cost of three flags and three flag poles! Secondly, it is sometimes flown when a politically neutral flag representing all of Ireland is required. For example, Irish hockey teams, which draw players from both the Republic and Northern Ireland, use the Four Provinces flag as their emblem in international competitions.
That last explanation rings true to me. As I’ve seen on numerous posters, placemats, and menus:
A Publican must be a democrat, autocrat, acrobat and doormat. He must be able to entertain prime ministers, pick-pockets, pirates, philanthropists and police whilst sitting on the political fence. (from the web)
Travel in America
First, fair play to Dave for the Dubs spy-photo. I wonder what story brought that jersey to Lake County. Also, thanks to Sharon for the suggestion. The staff are already hard at work on the first word of the week.
My travels took me to O’Hare airport in Chicago, suburban central New Jersey, and Manhattan. My flight to New Jersey took me through O’Hare. I had a window seat facing north, and the sky was clear. So I felt a little twinge when the plane was low enough for me to see the baseball fields, wide-open parks and roads, and distinctive spaces of my most recent home. My first bit of home-sickness — just a few miles from home!
Walking around New Jersey and New York City brought my attention to some features of Dublin life that I’d failed to notice. I kept starting sentences with the phrase, “In Dublin…” and I got self-conscious about that. (I heard an echo in my head: “One time, in band camp…”)
I can’t get those new observations organized right now, but I’ll work on it soon!
5 September 2007
On hiatus for a week
Due to unexpected travel for the staff, there probably won’t be any posts until September 11. We won’t award a commenter of the week for this week. So we’ll have an extra-super Commenter of the Two Weeks ending September 16, and we’ll consider this week’s comments towards that prize.
3 September 2007
Re-decorating the Blog
No Labor Day holiday here! While Americans are BBQ-ing and watching baseball and all that American stuff, I’m going to play with the blog’s code. So, to distract you from the experimentation over here, 
I invite you to look at the new photos posted on flickr. The first two days of our holidays with Cindy generated a lot of photos of Dublin and its environs.
I’m sure you’ll find them useful for planning your own holidays. Here, the volume of tourism dropped noticeably last week. Anita and I speculate about how the city will change. After all, we moved here at the start of tourist season! Our prognostications focus on the incoming students for the several universities. Will they replace the tourists in the city centre, who tend to be backpack-wearing youngsters anyway? Or will this place show an entirely different face?
2 September 2007
All-Ireland Hurling final
Anita and I went shopping this afternoon, just off Grafton Street. On the way home, a local pub, Doheny and Nesbit’s enticed us. The county flags for the two teams playing in the All-Ireland Hurling championship were flying at its front entrance.
County Kilkenny was heavily favored over County Limerick. Since we didn’t follow hurling this season, we didn’t have a strong opinion in the matter. The folks in the pub, however, did: they were plainly cheering for Limerick. So we ordered a pint of Guinness, a Jamieson and ice, and sat along the rail.
It’s amazing how much easier it is to understand a sport when you’re watching with a crowd. Their cheers and sighs were better signs of what mattered than the announcers’ drone. Hurling is an impressive sport, when you actually pay attention to it. In retrospect, we had hurling on the TV in our home, but we never gave it more than half our attention.
Kilkenny dominated Limerick. We missed the two goals that gave them a solid lead, but we saw them protect that lead for the rest of the match. It reminded me of the way that a great hockey team can make a slightly less talented team look ridiculous using defensive tactics.
Commenter of the Week (26 Aug – 1 Sept)
Congratulations to this week’s winner, Theodora! Theodora excelled in both quantity and quality this week. Her repartee on scones is especially notable. Theodora has been a reliable commenter since the early days of this blog, and this award is overdue.
We expect her to execute the duties of Commenter of the Week in a way that befits the honor.
The Awards Committee must also recognize two comments of outstanding quality this week. First, Sharon’s question regarding Cheeseheads is just the kind of contribution that keeps the fires stoked here at BB Central. It provoked an off-the-cuff response in the comments thread and it will probably serve as the inspiration for a full post in the future. Second, Katherine’s rant about inferior phones is precisely in the spirit of this blog. Although a relative newcomer to commenting, Katherine demonstrated a deep understanding of The BB Way.
31 August 2007
Trivial Surprise #47
Coors Light is a real presence in Dublin. There are lots of billboards and commercials on TV for Coors Light, and they aren’t much different than American versions. 
The current tagline is “Amazing Things Happen High in the Rockies.”
In pubs, you almost always see just one American brand on tap, Coors Light. That’s odd, I thought, as I remembered stories about how Coors Light had to be smuggled into the Midwest in the good ole days. I thought no more about it, until I started this post and I googled around a bit.
I found a fascinating document from an Irish self-regulatory body for Irish advertising. Coors Light is imported into Ireland by Heineken, the 363-kg gorilla in the global beer industry. Apparently, Bud Light recently became the first real competition for “light” beer in Ireland, and is brewed in Ireland.
Do I remember correctly — Didn’t Guinness recently run an ad campaign in the US that said that Guinness has fewer calories than major American lagers?
29 August 2007
Ah, the Dubs
Sunday, County Dublin’s gaelic football team lost to County Kerry. So Kerry will play Cork for the All-Ireland title on September 16th.
In the spirit of self-deprecation, here are a few jokes that require a basic understanding of Irish culture to understand. In the spirit of sadness at the Dub’s loss, I’ll give bonus points towards Commenter of the Week to commenters who kill the comedy by explaining the jokes. (Jokes courtesy the culchies at askaboutmoney.com.)
What’s the difference between a Dublin jersey and a school uniform??
You can see school uniforms in September.Paul Caffrey, Dubs manager, was arrested last night after vandalising a cigarette machine. He replied by saying he was in a bad way for 20 players!!
What is blue and navy and goes beep, beep, beep?
The Dubs’ bus reversing back into the garage.What do you call a Dublin man with an all Ireland medal?
An antique dealer!
What I find remarkable is that County Dublin comprises almost 20% of the population of the island. Many of the 32 counties have less than a tenth of that population. Croke Park, the site for the All-Ireland contests, is in Dublin (although it is not Dublin’s home stadium). Yet Dublin is relatively unsuccessful in both football and hurling.
The Bakker Bugle staff are engaged in a long-term research project to determine the cause for this anomaly. We hope it will bring insights to similar oddities in American sport.
28 August 2007
I hate IE more than the British
Permit me a rant. For more than two hours this morning, I worked on a “Recent Comments” section for the BB Blog’s sidebar. I tweaked settings and code and got it looking very nice. Furthermore, the additions are compliant with all the relevant standards for HTML, CSS, and all those web-oriented languages.
So the blog looks great in Firefox, the best web browser, and Safari, Apple’s browser. I made the layout a little different in the comments area, so that it’s easy to tell who commented most recently.
Then, Anita calls at 5 pm (our time) to say that the blog is broken. She sends screenshots. Indeed, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer cannot understand the minor changes I made.
First:
The blog is not broken, Internet Explorer is broken.
When I tried to add a linkroll in June and Internet Explorer didn’t like it, I sighed and used an alternate, inferior service. A few weeks later, I fought an all-day, pitched battle with Internet Explorer in order to display our latest Flickr photos in the sidebar. I lost that battle, and so you get no pictures. In all cases, every other browser worked on the first try.
But the majority of our friends read our blog on Internet Explorer. So for today, no cool recent comments thingie for you!
And tomorrow morning, I’ll try to trick Microsoft’s demon-spawn into displaying simple text … instead of writing real content, or reading about Irish politics, or exploring the Northside.