Skirmish

This photo is on thefront page of the Irish Times this morning. What they describe as a "skirmish" between Cork's Brendan O'Sullivan and with Kerry's Séamus Moynihan just before the end of the first half of the All-Ireland senior football semi final at Croke Park yesterday.

Stumbleupon

I installed an extension toolbar called “Stumbleupon” into Firefox this morning. It’s really good, gets you random pages on subjects you are interested in – it can be as wide or as narrow as you like. I’ve always liked the idea of randomness as there is always something in the back of my mind questioning the whole notion of randomness. And yet, for all its perfection, sometimes it seems that the whole of the cosmos is random. But then it can’t be, can it? Anyway, I just clicked on “stumbleupon” and up came this page : http://www.nokama.com/tao/index.cfm?fuseaction=chapter&ch=73

the home page came up and I randomly chose chapter 73 which was this :

Chapter 73

A brave and passionate man will kill or be killed.
A brave and calm man will always preserve life.
Of these two, which is good and which is harmful?
Some things are not favored by heaven.
Who knows why?
Even the sage is unsure of this.
The Tao of heaven does not strive, and yet it overcomes.
It does not speak, and yet is answered.
It does not ask, yet is supplied with all its needs.
It seems at ease, and yet it follows a plan.
Heaven's net casts wide.
Though its meshes are coarse, nothing slips through.

I like that line about the brave calm man. It’s a hard thing to do and to be, calm and brave.

Saved

Great photo in the papers today of two firemen saving a baby from a fire in a Dublin apartment building. The flip side of Edward Bond's old play, "Saved" is what came into my head for some reason.

Statue

A statue is to be erected in Dublin today in the memory of Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott

busy woman

I love this ad from the ESB in Dublin in the 1950s.

reminder 2 me

http://www.neatimage.com/

the demise of the dinosaurs

From today’s London Independent……..
Did double whammy of volcano and asteroid wipe out dinosaurs?
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 16 August 2005
Volcanic eruptions may have triggered the demise of the dinosaurs.
Many scientists believed that an asteroid caused the mass extinction 65 million years ago. However, a new study points to a more complex event that began with a series of eruptions which took place in what is now north-western India. The Deccan Traps in Maharashtra state are flows of lava resulting from huge outpourings of molten rock and ash. A mile deep, they cover about 200,000 square miles. Vulcanologists have long thought the eruption, dated to about 65 million years ago, could have caused the extinction.
However, the Deccan Traps resulted from a series of eruptions that occurred over perhaps a million years. This would have given the global climate plenty of time to adjust. But the study shows a major part of the eruption occurred over a short period.
Scientists from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Pariscalculated that at least 2,000ft of lava was deposited in 30,000 years, which could have greatly altered global climate. They have also shown that the Traps were erupting when the asteroid crashed into what is now Mexico. This was a spectacular and almost unprecedented double whammy for Earth.
Mike Widdowson, a vulcanologist, said it seems the end of the dinosaurs may have begun with climate change brought about by the eruptions and ended with the asteroid. "The eruptions pre-conditioned the global environment toward a catastrophic tipping point before the impact occurred. The asteroid was the coup de grâce," he said.

JAWS

JAWS

Steven Spielberg's groundbreaking film was released 30 years ago this summer.