"I heard a County Kerry farmer interviewed on Irish Radio, ... and they asked him, "Do you believe in the Pookah yourself?"
And he said, "That I do not! and I doubt much that he believes in me either!"
~ Robert Anton Wilson
"A jug of wine, a leg of lamb and thou! Beside me, whistling in the darkness."
http://countykerrylogic.blogspot.com/
The FBI - Most Wanted List*:
Edward Eugene Harper
Usama Bin Laden
Jason Derek Brown
James J. Bulger
Emigdio Preciado Jr
Robert William Fisher
Victor Manuel Gerena
Glen Stewart Godwin
Jorge Alberto Lopez-Orozco
Alexis Flores
The FBI is offering rewards for information leading to the apprehension of Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Check each fugitive page for the specific amount.
Notice: The official FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list is maintained on the FBI World Wide Web Site. This information may be copied and distributed, however, any unauthorized alteration of any portion of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives posters is a violation of federal law (18 U.S.C., Section 709). Persons who make or reproduce these alterations are subject to prosecution and, if convicted, shall be fined or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
A couple of economists reported in Social Science Quarterly this week that there's a link between having an unpopular name and ending up in trouble as a teen boy.
To figure this out, Shippensburg University economics professors David Kalist and Daniel Lee (both of whom, it must be noted, have very popular names) gathered up four years' worth of boy names (15,000 in all) from one state's birth records and compared them with the first names of about half of that state's juvenile delinquent males born in those years. They found that the more unpopular the name, the more likely it was to be associated with kids who ended up with substantiated charges in the juvenile justice system.
Kalist and Lee take pains to point out that simply having an unusual name is not going to lead to a boyhood of crime. "It is not that the name is causing the crime," Kalist said.
Instead, he said, it looks like troubled families—the kind that tend to raise troubled kids who end up in the juvenile justice system—also tend to give those kids unusual names.
So go ahead and name your boy Rocky (No. 914 on the Social Security Administration's list of 1,000 popular names for 2007), Bentley (No. 990) or Blaze (No. 876). Your family's solid, right?
Naming a son can be a terrible problem for some parents. My own parents ( Pat and Ginny) found this out when they named my brother Kevin. You see, in Irish families especially those with roots in the Culchie(an old Gaelic term "cúl a' tí", meaning the back of the house.) ** West of Ireland ( Donegal, Sligo,Mayo, Galway, Clare, and the bogmen of the Kingdom of Kerry) where families tend to give boys the same name for generations; thus Michael Patrick, Michael Joseph, Michael John, and have Mickey Pat, Mickey Joe, & etc. or a family brand set of names like the Hickey Clan. The Hickeys of County Kerry can be distinguished by these male cognomens - Lawrence, Sylvester, Barthlomew, Patrick, John, and Michael with very few exceptions.
Last year I took My Love to a Hickey Wedding - an event of lavish welcomes and warm embraces by the women, who dance every dance, and the men to tend stand with hands and forearms locked at the groin and nod ascent or damnation to their male counterparts and dance when bidden to do so by their better halves. The young woman who holds my affections comes from Ohio and is unfamiliar with the Chicago Irish tribal subtleties. At one point in the evening, the band leader called into the microphone, 'Will Pat Hickey go to the photographer's set-up for a picture with the bride' and me and twenty of my cousins showed up.
The Hickeys tend to have waves of children and all the males bear the same names handed down for generations with multiples of given names spiced by the baptism names and the concomitant nicknames attached to weaknesses, foibles, quirks, sins or physical traits. Patrick the son of a Patrick might become the diminutive Padgin *** or 'Little Pat'( pronounced as Pat Sheen in Chicago dialect) and he may have seven to ten cousins bearing the exact same handle. Hence Red Pat, Paddy Piss-in-His -Britches, Paddy Mike, Larry's Pat, Paddy the Goat, Pig-eyed Little Sneak Paddy, Pat The Girl's Rump and Run, or Father Patrick,O.S.A. Who is Still in Orders e.g.
When my brother Kevin (Caoimhín in Irish and means 'fair begotten'), a very blond man, was born my mother and father named him Kevin after St. Kevin of Glendalough, which is no where near County Kerry. Lovely.
My Grandfather ( Lawrence) a genuine Kerry Bogman, roared in response 'Christ Jesus Almighty! And where did the two of them come up with a bollocks of a name like that, so?'-as if my parents had named the wee man Caligula or Adolph. Kevin is a rock-solid Union Man and gifted carpenter who has only generous bones to match his expansive heart.
Remember, it is for the deeds one does in this life that a name bears honor, shame ignominy or whatever the hell else follows in the wake of your deeds - Unless of course the Family are Kerrymen. ' I see no Sylvie, or Bateen or Mossy up above on the names in the FBI Listing, so.' Like the story . . .
* Please note that there are No repeats of the first name in the Ten Most Wanted List
**The term in Ireland is often a derogatory one used by those living in the capital (Dublin) for anyone who lives "outside of the pale" or "down the country"
In Hiberno-English, culchie is a term sometimes used to describe a person from rural Ireland. It usually has the pejorative sense of "country bumpkin", but is also reclaimed by some proud of their rural origin, and may be used by either side in banter between town and country people. Dublin GAA fans call supporters of any other of the county teams from Ireland as culchies, fans from counties in the north are called nordies. Dublin's fans are themselves called Jackeens in retort. In large cities such as Cork, Limerick and Galway, the term may be sometimes allocated to anybody who comes from outside an urban area. The same is true for Belfast and the rest of Northern Ireland, where the term is also popular.[1] Generally the term is more humorous than abusive in rural areas, as opposed to the more offensive term "muck-savage".
*** - Your humble correspondant was tagged Patrick Francis Hickey - My father is Patrick Eugene Hickey; thus, Padgin and subsequently as 'Dipshit,' 'Useless Amadaun (,Amadaun; Irish for 'fool'. It also refers to the court jester of the Sidhe - the people of the hills of Irish legend. The Amadaun is beautiful and graceful, but can kill with merely a thought.) and more than universally - Hickey,
