I am … unhindered by talent

It’s late and I’m way tired, but I think the packing is under control (more or less) (sorta kinda) (as well as can be expected) for tomorrow’s grand journey to Dagstuhl. Not sure how much posting will happen from there; depends a lot on how good the wireless is in my room this year.

In the meantime I leave you with this travel (and research) related shot from my excellent visit to Dublin last month: a group of vehicles driving onto O’Connell Bridge. It looks like it’s the middle of the night, but it was actually only a bit after 6pm as everyone was hurrying home from work. Short days in Dublin in December.

Ciao!

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In doing my homework on things to see while I was in Dublin early in December, I was particularly struck by the description in one book of “Famine”, a sculpture group by Rowan Gillespie. The sculptures represent victims of the enormously tragic famine of the mid-1800’s, where a full quarter of the Irish population died or left the country in hopes of better elsewhere.

I walked out to the sculptures on the first of my two nights in Dublin (which was a long haul). It was indeed a incredibly powerful piece of art, perhaps more so in the dark. It was a bit weird, though, to have the holiday lights as the back drop for this harrowing set of figures.

It’s not clear in the shot above, but the man is carrying what I presume to be a small girl across his shoulders, and is bowed beneath her weight. Quite terrifying, really.

Sadly, as the assassination of Benzir Bhutto makes clear, we’re still learning how to live together on this small rock, and often not doing a great job of it.

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Best wishes for a great holidays!

(I caught this stencil on a building being renovated in Dublin.)

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I’m back after a wonderful three days in Dublin (thanks to Mike and the gang at UCD!). JOCP but there’s a lot of e-mail that piled up while I’m away, and my head is full to bursting with research ideas. It’s going to be tough to prioritize and focus here in the next few weeks.

I’ll try to sift through my photos over the weekend and get some of them posted.

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This morning I’m off for Dublin! With scheduled entries broken, however, so there could well be a yawning silence for a few days. I’m not taking a laptop (gasp!), so unless my B&B has a a computer out for their guests I’ll just have to cut you all loose for a few days.

Consider it a holiday gift from me. :-)

The photo? It’s from the Prairie Pioneer Days parade in Morris in July, 2006. Gotta love the glasses on that one young lady.

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Tuesday morning (4 Dec 07) I set off from our happy home for a few days in Dublin. To quote myself (how pathetic is that?)

At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.

Giovanni (my office mate) pointed out the helpfully obvious today, namely that I could probably get a tour guide to Dublin from our city library. Duh. I’d looked at some in shops, but spending £10 for a book seemed a bit daft when I’ll only have one solid day of touring to do. Checking one out from the library, however…

I’m hoping for some nice weather so I can spend a lot of time just walking around and taking photographs. The aforementioned walking tours are really nice and have me quite pumped. We are talking December in Ireland, however, so I’m not holding my breath. Happily, there are lots of cool indoor things that I also want to visit. Chief among these is Trinity College Library, as they have many wondrous things including the magnificent Book of Kells.

I’ll also be flying Ryanair for the first time. The flight is incredibly cheap, to the point that it seems fundamentally wrong. The true cost (including pollution and other environmental impacts) just has to be more than the £40 or so I’m paying round trip.

Thanks to Del Amitri for the cool photo, which I discovered using Flickr’s nifty “Places” feature. Being able to quickly sift through some very cool photos of Dublin has both given me some ideas of things I’d like to see and photograph, while also pointing out some clichéd shots I may want to try to avoid. (I’ll probably fail, since I’m a total sucker for a pretty cliché shot, but I can try.)

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