A story that got some play in Ireland last week was the opening and immediate shutting down of the Dublin/New York portal. The portal was a live video camera that had been established between the two cities, but had to be shut down shortly after its debut due to “inappropriate behavior.”
Here is a sample of last week’s news coverage. One commentator opined that perhaps the authorities considered flashing via the portal too dangerous because it involved “nipples of mass destruction.”
Please note that while I was in Ireland, I did not see any claims that the inappropriate behavior came mostly from the U.S. side. May just be because the Irish aren’t all that defensive nor offended about crap like this.
But because I was concerned about this little speed bump along the technological highway, I followed up on the story and am very happy to report that the portal is now back up and running and open for business. Check this out from NBC News as of yesterday afternoon.
Does make me wonder how long it will be before someone figures out how we could physically use a portal to get where we wanted to go. Just think, we could say to hell with wasting time dicking around with all this airport travel that we have to do. Probably won’t happen in my lifetime; but then again some other things have happened in my lifetime that I never thought I’d see, so who knows?
When our tour guide Dennis asked us to name the biggest selling world-wide Irish solo artist, I very smugly whispered to Pam “It’s got to be Van” as in Van Morrison. When Dennis informed us that it was Enya my first reaction was “No way.” Dennis then went onto explain how remarkable this is given that Enya does no touring, no promotions, very few interviews and yet still outsells her male counterparts such as Van and Ed Sheeran. (For a related story where she did grant a rare interview (click here.) It discusses how there is now a phrase for her business model “Enya-nomics.” (We would probably call it “Less is More.”)
If asked to name one Enya song, most folks would would cite her “Sail Away, Sail Away” song. Like my Van assumption however, they would be incorrect because the correct title is “Orinoco Flow.” (Orinoco is a river in Venezuela as well as the name of the musical studio where she recorded the tune.)
Years ago, when he was visiting Key West, Jimmy Cullison phoned and had me pull up the Sloppy Joe’s Live Cam at 4 o’clock so he could wave to and converse over the phone with the Buzzy Four O’clock Club. Fortunately for all of us, and everyone else for that matter, Jimmy did not do any flashing.
I recall doing a Buzzyblog post on the Jimmy-to-Buzzy video cam appearance, but couldn’t find it. I’ll keep looking for it, but in the meantime, here is a nice photo I took of Jimmy, Shea and Mary Lou last year at the No Name Pub. (I believe our signed dollar bill is still somewhere in there hanging on their wall.)
