March 31, 2016

Noting The Condom-Shaped Safety Zone of Santa Cruz Harbor

Advisory Notice Posted At the Santa Cruz Harbor, March 2016

March 29, 2016

Remembering Those Who Did Not Make The Cut

The Fence at Holy Cross Cemetery

The Fence at Holy Cross Cemetery 2

March 22, 2016

Florescence Alert

Flowering Stuff, September 2013

March 15, 2016

March 10, 2016

You May Drive Out Nature With A Pitchfork

Dredging the Shoaled Harbor Mouth, Santa Cruz CA, February 2016



March 09, 2016

Because Civilization As We Know It Needs A Break

The People Dream The Greater Dream Of Donald Trump

March 04, 2016

Tidying Up The Context for Patrick's Day

Lismore grew in time to be a great religious city, and a school of sacred sciences, to which pilgrims from all over Ireland and scholars from beyond the seas resorted.

—Patrick Power, Waterford & Lismore A Compendious History of the United Dioceses Cork University Press 1937 pg. 5.

As late as the 15th cent. the primacy of Lismore, among the Sanctuaries and Schools of Munster, seems to have been tacitly acknowledged. In recognition of the status in question, special immunities were granted to the city and church of Lismore, as well as to the attached manors, by the Provincial Synod, held at Limerick in 1453. These included freedom from exactions by anyone, even the Lord of Desmond, or the king's representative.

—See Appendix XIII.

Freedom from exactions sounds like a pretty sweet arrangement but the sordid truth is that, at least as passed down through my family's recollection, it was earned as tradeoff for Lismore locally settling with firm finality the whole snakes-out-of-Ireland controversy fomented from the first by fans of Patrick and occasioning there in Lismore as elsewhere throughout the Wooded Isle centuries of objectively unnecessary commentary ornamenting almost every conceivable aspect of the matter.

This local settlement did not countenance expression of certain divergent views, divergent in the sense that they strayed too far from the hard won consensus that for the good of all this snake-related nonsense must cease and Patrickology must move on.

In this way my forebears enlisted in a project of not only denying a place in Lismore to the snakes per Patrick, but actively subduing any idle talk of them as might arise in Lismore's vicinity from time to time as well.