Weekly Address: American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan

Wow! Here's an idea whose time has more than come: Jazz on the Tube, "the internet's jazz video juke box." Click here to watch Bud Powell, the greatest jazzman to ever tickle the ivories. You will not believe Bud's hands. Thanks to the New Orleans New Ladder for this one!...

I don't think it's quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a few holes. There's only so much a Corps of Engineers can do...

A tired poet spends the night in the car park at Thoor Ballylee, the gaunt Clare tower where Yeats made his home from 1916-1928. "Then just the noise of a windy western night, the body of the car being buffetted by the gusts, and, briefly, the sneeze of a fox. I also heard a loud crack, as if a branch had broken in the wind ('a pear tree broken')..."

I lay no claim to understanding the tortured politics and history of the Middle East. But I find this sort of obvious propaganda to be racist, offensive, and insulting to anyone's intelligence. It's a mystery to me why the Washington Post continues to give a forum to this guy...

Gingerbread house conflagration here...

A couple of new Citizen K. features: The quote at the top is the first line of a notable book, essay, poem, play, or screenplay. You are welcome to submit your guess as a comment. (Foxessa, no fair guessing this one!) At some random time, I'll put the answer on a sidebar and change the quote. Also, I've changed the NOLA links to reflect a month-by-month calendar of the festivals, parties, and happenings in the Crescent City. It promises to be a long list...

Carrowholly

We get to look at this every day!

The house is in an area of west County Mayo called Carrowholly. Or Carraholly or Carracolly: Around these parts, we aren't too particular about such things. The people who live here call it Carrowholly, which is good enough for me. Specifically, we are on Carrowholly Point, four miles from the town of Westport; now you have all the information you need to understand the mailing address:

Carrowholly Point
Westport
County Mayo
Ireland

That's right: No house number, no street name, no zip code. The mail gets here, anyway. When we first got the house, we didn't get any mail for a while. I dropped round the P.O. to find out what was going on. It turned out that postman didn't recognize my name, so the P.O. held the mail until I showed up. No problems since. In fact, you can receive mail here so long as you send it c/o me.

Westport itself is a delightful town, with no shortage of amenities -- including some excellent restaurants. (I'll blog later about the surprisingly high quality of Irish restaurants.) Take a virtual tour here and treat yourself to my photos here. Also, Premium T. has some great pix of local jellyfish and of storm clouds gathering here. And all the pictures you'll ever need of Carrowholly are here.

What are we doing today? We're sitting around listening to Irish music, munching on a local cheese, drinking a bottle of wine kindly left for us by some recent guests, and reading aloud from the poetry of Westport's Sean Lysaght. No doubt there are better things to do; I just can't think of them right now.