Darach Ó Séaghdha

We’re good friends with English neighbours/ classmates, and the dad brought my 11yo on her first trip to Spirit Halloween to pick a costume. “Mom! James spent $376 just on house decorations!” I told her Halloween was an Irish thing. “Then why don’t you go to Spirit Halloween?”

She doesn’t understand that I’m completely stuck in the emotional economy of Bin Bag Witch or Bedsheet Ghost (“Do NOT put holes in that bedsheet! Your sister will lead you.“)

Also, wealthy Asian American neighbourhoods in gated communities hand out red envelopes with $5 to $20 notes. (At least in the SF Bay Area.) One Halloween, someone handed out free mobile phones with one year plans. Was voted into city council years later.

If there are still humans in five hundred years, they will talk about our obsession with economics and the stock market the way we talk about medieval fanatics sacrificing people to appease the spirits.

A penny for the boogie…. We were after cash not sweets

Its funny how much we know about the English and how little they know about us. But yeah going door to door trick or treating was not what you guys did. But I have some notion the Scottish had a version of it?

It was called 'Guising' in Scotland as you dressed up in a disguise and you went round folks home reciting a joke or a poem. #Halloween

Bavaria is Cork and Kerry and this has been confirmed by both Irish and Germans.

Berlin is most like Belfast. Around 1990, the two halves of the city, long enemies, had to learn to live together, and tensions still break out sometimes despite young people caring less and less about what they see as ancient history.

oh wait, technically north going by the Aldi Nord vs Aldi Süd line of demarcation

We did Halloween stuff (bobbing for apples, carving a turnip, toffee apples), though I don’t remember knocking on doors. Merseyside, late 70s. My dad wouldn’t let us “do” Bonfire Night because Catholic.

You know that parlour game where we say what county or town in Ireland matches each American city or state? Very hard to do that with Ireland and Germany. Berlin is definitely not Dublin, Frankfurt is certainly not Cork.

This reminds me of when I moved to Germany and found out that the 31st was Reformationstag: I imagined all the little kids dressing up at Luther and banging their 95 theses on the neighbours' doors

The thing about watching an old movie is sometimes you realise that Mr. Burns was right, Rory Calhoun was very good at standing.

I moved to France in '95. Almost no one had heard of Halloween. These days the shops are full of it, but I'm not aware of the bonfire element of it gaining any traction, possibly because it's seen as a US tradition rather than that of a neighbouring EU country.

I grew up in Ireland the same period, and remember being surprised that Halloween wasn’t that big a deal in the UK, but then they had Guy Fawkes and we didn’t. As teenagers, we collected, scavenged and stole materials to build a bigger Halloween bonfire than rival housing estates.

My first job was in London in 1999. I started in the middle of October and the first piss up we had was for the Guy Fawkes fireworks the company laid on. I felt *very* conflicted about this... Like Dara o'briain says, look, I might be an atheist, but I'm a Catholic* atheist (* Irish, more)

I remember talking to my aunt in England on the phone in the 1970s and asking her was she enjoying the Halloween fireworks. She said they didn’t do Halloween, but they did do fireworks on Guy Fawkes night

💯

www.rte.ie/news/uk/2022... "one of the bonfire societies in Lewes...still has ‘No Popery Here’ as its slogan. Rev Ian Paisley came to preach there in 1981. However he was reported to have gotten a cold reception and the following year they burned an effigy of him."

The wind that shakes the barley starts with lads playing hurling (or coming back from playing hurling).. so does that make it a hurling movie ?

Anyway, the idea of RFK Jr being handed a manila envelope with a report on the sperm counts of young men this year and him looking at it aghast like it's Tesla shares and immediately calling a meeting of the Sperm Council.... that's funny to me.

In 70s Belfast we chanted, 'Halloween is comin and the goose is gettin fat', until we got lazy and then it was 'enny money fer Halloween?' Also did the apple bobbing, my mum made a tart with 5ps wrapped in greaseproof paper and got sparklers and indoor fireworks. Beezer.

A lot of the world’s problems is people refusing to engage with other human beings with a spirit of both kindness and curiosity. Trans people don’t mind answering questions and talking about our experiences as long as there is an undercurrent of kindness and curiosity.

So baseball stories are about fathers and sons, American football stories are about your school or your town, boxing stories are about refusing to take the bribe, cricket stories are about a sweet Australian puppy, ice hockey stories are about fucking.... what are hurling stories about?

Ha! I seem to remember it being established that Ball Boy from the Beano was canonically Scottish when a similar question arose?

It's a propos of nothing, but this story is great fun, literally the Jocks and The Geordies duking it out on the newsstands DC Thomson | Viz Wiki | Fandom share.google/Bjgsn8usl0N2...

(A reminder that I hate this term, but can't believe that there are memes with it included)

A lovelorn fellow wrote to Savage Love some years ago, lamenting that the ladies were uninterested in him on account of his smaller-than-average todger. Dan Savage replied that if size was as important as that, there’d be porn stars winning People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive tournament every year.

'Purgs' sounds awfully like another addition to the collection of fucking awful terms like "Menty B" 😑

I'm older than you. When I was wee in Belfast in the 50s, Hallowe'en was all & 5/11 was a weird English thing utterly unimportant. There was apple pie, fireworks, turnip (ie swede not pumpkin) lantern, apple bobbing, dressing as ghosts; BUT no trick or treat which imho is a recent American import.

An interesting & very doable archival project would be to look back at British weekly kids comics from the 70s/80s/90s and see at what point themed Halloween specials came in. My memory from getting the Beano etc in the late 80s is that they went big on Halloween one week, and Guy Fawkes the next.

Thursday is a paid holiday. Because Flavor Flav said so.

I wrote something about gen-AI, and why we need to fight it now, while our brains can still imagine better... www.tumblr.com/joannechocol...