Samuel Beckett bridge on the Liffey designed by Calatrava.

Dad tales full advantage of the Luas as he rides for free.

Janice takes the load off on the Luas.

The Luas tram in Dublin is a fantastic way to get around.

Oscar Wilde on his perch in Merrion Square.

Mom and Sam.

At Ciara and ian's foe tea and bikkies. Dad, Ciara & Ella.

Interesting.

Say no more.

Where I got my first bike.

Sunny but really cold and sometimes a little wet.

Bram Stoker lived here when he wrote Dracula.

I was born here on the Howth Rd in Fairview.

Byrnes on the Howth Rd. A fav haunt.

Sunny between chilly showers.

Where I bought my first bike.

Wait for Dennis the Alien. He is accompanying us on his first
terrestrial trip across the Altantic for Christmas to Ireland. What
will he make of it. What the hell will Mom and Dad think?

from miFone-zilla.

I'm comin home I've done my time! Wohoo. On the Rocky Road to Dublin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEe7_b6NHtA&feature=youtube_gdata

from miFone-zilla.

Digital Reality

The future should follow this dream. A seamless interaction between the digital world and our analog reality. This man Pranav Mistry has invented something fascinating, by combining current technologies and bringing out our digital online world and allowing it to interact with our real world. This is the best vision I have seem to date.

Health Care Reform

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_and_Child_Scheme

Times and characters that they are, a comical and frustratingly farcical debate is raging in the US over Healthcare reform. Today whilst germanely (is that a proper use?) listening to a podcast of Irish History in which the topic is Health Care Reform in the 1940's and 1950's, I was struck by the parallels. Despite inadequate care and a high infant mortality rate the Irish Catholic Church's ArchBishop McQuaid (not of the Dennis type) abhorently opposed a 1950 government health proposal called 'The Mother and Child Scheme' to give free maternity care for all mothers and free healthcare for all children up to the age of 16, regardless of income. Wait a minute buster, I thought the Catholic Church would support such a system, well not so, they controlled all the hospitals in the relatively new Free State. Read on. The political meanderings and arguments against the reform cast a deja-vu over todays US debate. So long ago so forgotten, so many false arguments, so many obfuscations. So much B.S.

China Motors BMW X5 knockoff

Isn't that just a common sight these day? Cruising along the freeway and a BMW X5 flies by on the inside lane, but wait take another look, this is a China Motors car, a complete knockoff design of the BMW X5. This photo was taken by my buddy Brian while he was recently in China on a business trip. He said even the light clusters were indistinguishable from the real thing. Wow can you believe that? Well get used to it.

A bottle of your '43 Chateau LaFeet please?

Handy trick to open a corked Wine Bottle without a corkscrew but with a SHOE! demonstrated by a someone who has had a few already.

Halloween 2009 Santa Cruz

Gruesome Halloween stuff here! Cover your eyes! Remove the kids!

Dad has taken up oil painting in his endless days. I am impressed. He has a unique talent here. One of them is patience, you would know that if you ever tried any painting atall. I have and so far to no avail. 'What to paint?' ' how to frame the scene?'

Then again it's Oil painting. This requires even more patience as the painting can't be completed in one sitting, it has to dry.

Here he shows us what the Skerries windmill looks like through his impressionist eyes, and then what the little Guinness gazebo at the pond in St. Annes would look like without the obligatory social commentary graffitti or cans of BUD floating in the water. Me likes.

Hmmmmmmm

Chocolate Rugelach.

Happy Halloween, I love this time of year.

This is Tlachtga near the Hill of Tara (Teamhair na Rí - Hill of the Kings) in County Meath, Ireland. Over 2000 years ago this site witnessed a great fire on the eve of Samhain. Those fire traditions still linger in big bonfires that happen all round Ireland, mostly illegal, (the firemen hate this time of year), having been apart of a few in my misspent youth.

After Christianity came it absorbed some of those traditions, which we now know as Halloween.

We would dress up and trick or treat, but we would have to be prepared to DO a trick; dance, poem song etc. Most of the candy we got were nuts and fruits. I dont think kids like that anymore. This wasnt too long ago either!

--

One of the Hill of Tara's more famous Kings was Niall of the Nine Hostages (yes I always had a thing for that, Niall of the Nine Sausages was a nickname once!)

This is a nice Halloween synopsis from Huffingtonpost.com.

Halloween has its roots in Samhain, a old harvest festival held at the end of the Celtic year. The festival marked the end of summer and the beginning of the dark wintertime. It was believed the spirits of the dead returned on this eve to damage crops and play tricks on the living. It was also believed that the Celtic priests, or Druids, were able to make predictions about the future, which they did during large bonfire celebrations where they wore animal skins and sacrificed crops and animals to the spirits.

In early A.D., Romans came to the Celtic territories of modern day England, Scotland and Northern France, and were the first people to influence the celebration of Samhain. They brought their own holidays: Feralia, the Roman day to honor the dead in late October, as well as another holiday to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. It is possible that this Roman influence is the reason apples are given out and bobbed for on Halloween.

By 800 A.D., Christianity spread to the Celtic Territories and brought with it another holiday, "All Saints Day." Pope Boniface IV, the designator of All Saints Day, was likely trying to replace Samhain with a similar but holier holiday meant to honor saints and martyrs. Later on, All Saints Day was renamed "All Hallows" and thus the day of Samhain (Oct. 31st) began to be called "All Hallows Eve," and eventually shortened to "Hallowe'en."

All of the holidays that were melded together to create our modern version of Halloween involved dressing up in one way or another. The celebrators of Samhain wore animal skins at their bonfire celebrations and those that observed "All Saints Day" often dressed as saints or angels. Later on men in Scotland would impersonate the dead on the day, explaining the ghoulish tradition we still observe.

During the mid 1800's, Irish and English immigrants flooded the United States and brought Halloween with them. From these immigrants we received the Halloween traditions we recognize today, however skewed they are now. For instance, the first trick-or-treaters were far from today's smiling children with commercialized costumes. They lived in Medieval England, and practiced "souling," in which poor people would beg for sweet breads, in return for praying for the families' souls. Later, the immigrants who brought Halloween to America would develop their own version of trick-or-treating, but it didn't become popular here until the 1930s.

1) Halloween Is The Second Highest Grossing Commercial Holiday After Christmas

What used to be just a singular holiday with minimal things to purchase has turned into an entire "Halloween Season." Between decorative lights and lawn ornaments, elaborate costumes and loads of candy, the average American spends a pretty penny on this fall holiday. However popular Halloween has become, the recession has affected spending for this year's spooky night. Spending is down, according the the National Retail Federation. Shoppers will spend an average of $56.31 on the holiday compared to $66.54 in 2008. Some ways people are cutting down include making homemade costumes, using last year's decorations and buying less expensive candies. For the children's sake, let's hope everyone doesn't resort to giving out apples and pennies. Didn't you just hate that as a kid?

2) Harry Houdini Died On October 31, 1926

The famous magician was killed (accidentally) by a McGill University student named J. Gordon Whitehead who was hitting him in the stomach repeatedly as part of a stunt. A week later he died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix. Despite acute appendicitis, Houdini refused to seek medical treatment.

3) There's A Phobia For That

Samhaino-phobia is an intense and persistent fear of Halloween that can cause panic attacks in sufferers. Other relevant phobias for this time of year: wiccaphobia (fear of witches), phasmophobia (fear of ghosts), and coimetrophobia (fear of cemeteries).

4) The First Jack-O-Lanterns Weren't Made Out Of Pumpkins

They were originally hollowed-out turnips. The modern practiced mutated from the Irish tradition of carving faces of the the dead onto the gourds and putting candles inside to make them glow. These days your Jack-O-Lantern is most made out of a pumpkin, which most likely came from Illinois--a state that grew 542 million pounds of pumpkin in 2007.

5) One Quarter Of All The Candy Sold Annually Is For Halloween Night

Yes, no matter how much we eat for Christmas and Thanksgiving, Halloween has corned the market on candy. As a country we consume 20 million pounds of candy corn a year. Handing out Halloween treats is the perfect excuse to eat some too, as four-in-ten (41%) adults admit that they sneak sweets from their own candy bowl. And if you're a kid, hang on to your basket, because home is where the candy thief is as 90% of parents admit to sneaking goodies from their kids' Halloween trick-or-treat bags. But whether your stealing some, handing out some or having yours stolen, chances are you'll get your hands (or miss getting your hands) on a Snickers bar, it has been the number 1 Halloween candy for years.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/the-history-of-halloween_n_321021.html

It was always a suspicion of mine, as the Summer rolled through. Now it is no surprise that the Birther movement is made up of nincompoops.

Hunch, a new website that helps people make decisions based on survey questions, found some interesting stuff when they crunched the numbers on site users who described themselves as "birthers".

Asked a series of political questions, 12 percent of Hunch users said they did not believe the president was born in the United States. (About 2,200 Hunch users answered the question.) The Hunch team decided to see how they responded to other queries.

According to their answers, birthers are less educated, watch more TV, and read fewer books than non-birthers.

Some 43 percent of them have never traveled outside of their home country. They're 24 percent more likely to speak only a single language. They are 63% less likely to have ever owned a passport.

A third of them didn't vote in the last presidential election. Forty-four percent of them believe that the Big Bang didn't really happen and 47 percent don't believe in global warming. Birthers are also 19 percent more likely to believe in UFOs and alien visits to earth and 50 percent more likely to believe in alien abductions.

Interestingly, birthers are 115 percent more likely to think that human beings are naturally evil rather than good.

"What this data shows very consistently is that compared to those who believe Obama's credentials are legitimate, birthers are less educated and less likely to believe in widely-accepted scientific principles, yet more likely to believe in theories like alien abductions," said Kelly Ford, Vice President of Marketing at Hunch. "This may explain why they've passionately latched on to a birth conspiracy theory that by now has generally been dismissed as quite far-fetched."

This sample, of course, is small and unscientific.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/birthers-rarely-leave-us_n_339104.html

My Tranny, how often would you admit you love your Tranny. Well I do. This bike was designed by me in collaboration with the Ibis team; Colin, Hans, Roxy & Tom (in alpahbetical order), our third bike with them. It functions with much versatility. Can be a geared bike or single speed with a unique chain tensioning method at the bottom bracket and chainstay. The rear stays can be unbolted and put in a travel bag to avoid those costly bike shipping charge by the airlines. It rides great on our trails. I have set this one up as a single speed with a Talas 32. I did have it initially setup for laffs with a Talas 36 and a set of DT Swiss 2340's, wow sweet on the downhills. But the lighter setup is best for man-ups. Here is our portfolio at IDE Inc. & here is Ibis'. They are a great team to work with and look forward to many more projects with them.

My very first Chanterelles. Found 2 years ago.

What's particularly frustrating is I found only three last year right next to some dog poop on UCSC land. Yesterday work buddy Gary found one large one, a very early seaon one, yesterday in a secret patch on private land. El Nino may bring a bounty this year.

I have arrived. It has been quite a time that I have wrestled with my reluctance...to create a blog. Here it is. See where it takes me.