Story of My Life

And yet . . . it always seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Worlds

That's the World Pipe Band Championship competition held annually in Glasgow.  It was last Saturday.

You missed it?  Well, I have good news for you.  You can see and hear the finals courtesy of the BBC who have archived the videos here.

St Laurence O'Toole Pipe Band is always a favourite and I thought Boghall and Bathgate had some excellent tune choices this year.  But in fact Inverary and District swept all before them this year.  There were 6 prizes available to them and they took 5 of them.  (O.K., O.K.  They swept most before them.  Picky, picky.)



[Funny how the mind works.  I came this close to typing St Peter O'Toole Pipe Band.  He's a fine actor but I'm not aware of a pipe band named after him.  And he's probably still a few years away from canonization.  Even under the current pontificate.]

Lammas Day

The first of August is indeed Lammas Day.  The Inn dug up a few things about Lammas Day last year which you can still find here.

It's also the feast of St Peter at the Chains and of the Holy Maccabees.  The chains that fell from Peter's limbs are found in chapter 12 of the book of Acts and the Maccabees can be found, not co-incidentally, in the 1st & 2d books of Maccabees.  Today's martyrs are in chapter 7.

Are these things still called memes?

Or is that something else now?  Whatever it is, it arrived on my desktop this afternoon and was so wonderfully pointless and absurd it had to be tried.

So herewith:

"However, the war-song at the commencement of this famous battle was recited by MacMhuirich (MacVuirich), the hereditary bard of Clan Ranald, and the MacMhuirichs were descendants of Muiredach O'Daly, of Lissadil, County Sligo, a famous Irish minstrel."

So sayeth the book nearest to me at the top of page 45.

Um, O.K.

I guess.

Total Eclipse

On Monday Aug. 21, a solar eclipse will cut across the entire United States. And wherever you are, you will be able to see it. Even though the "totality" — the area where the sun is completely blocked out by the moon — is only 70 miles wide, the whole country (even Alaska and Hawaii) will experience a partial eclipse. This is what you'll see, and the time you'll see it, in your zip code.  

So says the message in my inbox this morning.  This site explains it for us.  And it reminds us not to stare at it unprotected.  But we knew about that already, didn't we.

Apparently I'm about 700 miles southwest, more or less, from where I need to be to get a "totality" experience.  Still, there should be something.