In the car earlier today, since I am traveling to Ohio to visit relatives before heading to Ireland, I decided to work on some of my required reading while in the car. Since I didn’t feel like having to concentrate on reading while listening to music, I decided to volunteer reading the short story I was reading aloud. That story? Nothing really, just A Modest Proposal…yes, THAT modest proposal, the one involving the making of baby jerky and viewing year old children as nothing more than a serving of veal (technically 4 servings, according to Jonathan Swift, the author, of whom also wrote such wonderful children stories such as Gulliver’s Travels).
This is also the first time I have ever read a story with much credibility to it only to find that there is a very blatant Jew joke in the middle of the pamphlet. Irish patriot: cynical and stubborn assholes till the very end.
I just finished watching one of the movies I am required to watch prior to going to Ireland called the Man of Aran. It is a black and white movie from 1934 directed by Robert Flaherty (the dude who created the fake documentary, aka The Office). The movie is based off of the Aran Islands on the coast of Ireland where there is little soil for them to grow potatoes, according to the film; they magically use seaweed in this process, which the film never actually explained as to how.
Judging from the fashion sense in the film, they seemed to have the same mentality as Quakers accompanied by a strange affinity for row boats. The films audio was also rather tricky to understand because of the audio editing and thick accents (I thought the first twenty minutes of the film they were speaking Gaelic). The entire last half of this film was the people of the islands hunting down a school of basking sharks that comes by once a year off the coast Ireland. The male lead in this film was almost killed because of violent weather crashing giant waves on rocks, including carrying his row boat towards those rocks. He survives and the movie ends.
The story actually reminded much of an Ernest Hemmingway short story entitled The Old Man and the Sea, specifically the scene where they say that the fishermen had to fight for two day to catch the shark, which in Hemmingway’s story, a similar event in the story happens almost identical to that.
That being said, time for an irish quartet!
Until next time, lads'n'lasses!
~Will
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