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Good Night and Good Luck

The Irish seem more interested in stories about manufactured housing communities than anyone else. I suspect that that is because they connect with the themes of substance abuse, rural poverty and rural despair. God bless them. So what if they say, ‘to here’, when you ask them where their round-trip ticket is to, or if …

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Pianzi

Unless you have read The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,[1] Eskimo Words for Snow,[2] or Stephen A. Jacobson’s Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary,[3] or are a native speaker of Inuit or Yup’ik, you probably think that the Inuit have a limitless number of words for snow.  That is bunk.[4]  Yup’ik has rich derivational and inflectional morphology.[5]  There is …

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Triad in the Bughouse

Near the end of his life, the American poet Theodore Roethke went to visit the Irish poet Richard Murphy on the island of Inishbofin, off the west coast of Ireland.  After several weeks of increasingly erratic behavior (Roethke suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder), he became violent and was carted off to an …

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Colonoscopy Re-Redux

A few months ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York called me and said, ‘I’m hurt.’ I pushed a blonde out of my lap and said, ‘What happened?’ ‘I was threading the pins on the bucket to Old Bessie and it slipped.’ Old Bessie is what he calls the backhoe.  ‘Pin’ …

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Volatility in the Machine

Content Warning: This post contains language regarding option trading.  Readers looking for the usual crap should peruse old posts or copies of Mad Magazine.  Any discussion of investments herein is for entertainment purposes only.  Dirt Lease does not give investment advice.  Readers should consult their own advisers before making an investment decision.  Writers should avoid …

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Tribalism

The Dirtlease staff just returned from a literary tour of Ireland.  We read to a packed hall at The Printworks, in Dublin Castle.  We mansplained to a writer’s group in Crumlin.  We partied at Connor McGregor’s pub.  We turned down sexual advances from Eve Hewson.  We swam in the snotgreen sea at Forty Foot.  When …

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