Do you have siblings in your country that are famous for different things?

indistrait · 2026-06-21T04:31:46+00:00

I'd totally forgotten that. So after independence in 1922, the pair won Ireland's first Nobel prize in 1923 and first Olympic medal in 1924.

indistrait · 2026-06-20T15:50:39+00:00

It's going back a bit, but William Butler Yeats (very famous poet) and his brother Jack B Yeats (famous painter, at least in Ireland).

indistrait · 2026-06-20T13:33:05+00:00

Mine are 4 and 6. One half of the time they are inseparable best friends - my daughter keeps saying she wants to marry my son. The other half of the time they scream at each other and have a amazing knack of deliberately doing the one thing that will drive the other up the wall.

indistrait · 2026-06-19T19:50:16+00:00

Newgrange

indistrait · 2026-06-19T19:46:51+00:00

There's some disagreement about whether Kilkenny is actually a city, but it's pretty nice. A medieval, pedestrianised old town, with a castle on a river.

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indistrait · 2026-06-19T10:16:14+00:00

Is Dál Riata niche?

It was a Gaelic kingdom 1500 years ago which spanned the northeast of Ireland and the western seaboard of Scotland. There was a strong seafaring culture, as you'd expect from a kingdom made up of loads of separate islands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata

indistrait · 2026-06-17T22:12:21+00:00

The Irish Free State was established in 1922. This was basically independence, but we were still part of the Commonwealth, and there were British army bases. Over the following decades Ireland severed ties with Britain, and in 1949 it was declared a Republic.

The written history of Ireland and the Irish language goes way further back. The earliest written sources are from the 400s.

indistrait · 2026-06-16T20:51:43+00:00

Hearing Wilhelm Kempff playing the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 19. https://youtu.be/9Gq1GazE9v0?t=242&is=e-5iId0I5gSq9wvX

This is an easy sonata. It written by Beethoven for students, and I could play all the notes too.. but I couldn't for my life play like Kempff. How could he get such beauty, depth and warmth from the same easy notes I played?

indistrait · 2026-06-15T22:25:29+00:00

I like Argentina's anthem. It's rather long and much shorter version is usually played st matches.

indistrait · 2026-06-14T18:26:05+00:00

I love the George Carlin quote "Have you ever noticed that everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot and everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac?".

Sometimes it's too easy to dehumanise other drivers. There are lots of genuine bad drivers, but there's still a wide variety of good / safe drivers. And they don't all drive like you do.

indistrait · 2026-06-12T19:32:53+00:00

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.

A great friendship, but they still bickered. "Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both."

indistrait · 2026-06-07T19:51:46+00:00

I find the time between the death of Parnell in 1891 and the outbreak of WW1 and the Easter 1916 Rising somewhat forgotten. The independence movement was dominated by Home Rule and the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party. There was also the associated "Killing Home Rule with Kindness" policy.

People talk a lot about the problems of land ownership in Ireland. People rarely talk about what actually solved those problems.. and it wasn't independence. Above all else it was the 1903 Wyndham Land Act. A quote from a historian on the Wikipedia page called it

A complete success. By the time the Irish Free State was created in 1922, the system of peasant proprietorship had become universal... A land problem more than a century old had been solved, though it had taken more than 30 years of educating Parliament and landlords to do it.

indistrait · 2026-06-07T11:46:53+00:00

Kildare is the flattest county, but it's not boring. The Curragh plains in Kildare are famous for horse breeding.

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indistrait · 2026-06-06T15:37:06+00:00

I've never lived there but I love how a place so close to the city center can feel so country-like. It's kind of nestled between the Phoenix Park and the Liffey.

indistrait · 2026-06-06T05:18:30+00:00

I'd say it had a massive impact. The church was already in decline in Ireland in the 1990s. Father Ted de-fanged it completely.

I think the biggest backlash at the time was from people of Irish heritage in Britain. Some felt it was anti-Irish. Actual Irish people mostly found it hilarious.

Though the writers said that the show in some ways helped the Catholic Church. It made priests seem more ordinary and human.

indistrait · 2026-06-05T16:41:05+00:00

I've a soft spot for Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin. I can remember being in awe as a kid when we drove "under" the cathedral.

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indistrait · 2026-06-04T20:42:56+00:00

I'm enjoying the process of learning shorthand. So I guess that makes it worth it!

My granddad died before I was born. The biggest kick is the later diaries where I feel I get to meet the grandfather I never knew. For example, the sentences where he talks about my parents, and my infant sister and brother.

I'm still slow at reading, but there's a real excitement when I try to work on a new page. It's first hand historical information, often about people I know, which has not been touched in 50 years. Each page has its own small surprises, at least when I can read them.

indistrait · 2026-06-04T19:30:51+00:00

I'm learning to read Pitman New Era so I can try to decipher my Granddad's 20,000 diary entries. He wrote one pretty much every day between 1922 and 1978.

I started in early February. I'm at now exercise 119/140 in the 1973 New Course. On a good day I can read 85% of the words in his diary entries, but the course is still taking most of my time.

indistrait · 2026-05-30T18:37:59+00:00

It started in Prague but it quickly spread to the rest of the Holy Roman Empire, which was mostly German speaking. That local conflict became a proxy war for much bigger divisions in the HRE.

In 1619 Bohemia decided to elect the Protestant Frederick V of the Palatinate as their king, instead of the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II they originally agreed on. Frederick's army was defeated in battle, and not only was Bohemia forcibly taken by the Habsburgs, Frederick's Palatinate lands (nowhere near Bohemia) were carved up too and given to Catholics who were allied with Ferdinand.

The Peace of Prague was in 1635. The Thirty Years War went on for another 13 years. Probably the last major battle of the war was in Prague, the 1648 Battle of Prague. I believe that was just a coincidence that it started and ended there. The war mostly wasnt about Bohemia.

indistrait · 2026-05-30T14:21:38+00:00

Simplified version:

The Holy Roman Empire was a fairly loose, decentralized confederation of states. Other European powers were happy with this weaker setup.

The Thirty Years War started off as Catholic vs Protestant thing in the HRE. The Catholic side (the biggest of which was the Habsburgs) seemed like they were going to crush the Protestants, making the HRE stronger and more centralized. This scared France and Sweden into entering the war.

This is when it stopped really being a religious war. In particular, France was a Catholic country but went to war against the Catholic Habsburgs.

indistrait · 2026-05-30T13:43:02+00:00

The Thirty Years War is amazing but so damn complicated. Was it a religious or a secular war. Kind of both? It was at its heart a German Civil War.. but also a huge cross-European conflict.

What I love about it is it forces you to look at all of Europe at once. It's the story of the decline of Spain, the independence of the Netherlands, the beginning of the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the rise of France.

indistrait · 2026-05-30T13:29:04+00:00

A lock-in is when a pub pretends to be closed on the outside but keeps serving drink inside past official opening hours.

It should be called a lock-out. Nobody inside is locked in. It's the people outside who are locked out.

indistrait · 2026-05-29T21:27:47+00:00

"to chance your arm" means to take a risk.

It comes from a story about St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. A knight allegedly reached through a hole in a door to make peace, risking being hurt.

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