This one took the help of the good people of Reddit, who found the spot within a few hours even though I think I posted in the middle of the night over in Ireland. Downtown Cork.
It has changed quite a bit. I leave the butcher-to-fashion-store jokes as an exercise for the reader.
Trinity College, unsurprisingly, has not changed a whole lot in 60 years.
I’m nearly positive this is the same building, though as you can see the left side has been expanded.
Here’s the previous post in the series.
Here is the second in the series of photos my grandmother took in 1966 that I have attempted to recreate on our trip in 2026.
This one has changed a bit over the years but is still quite recognizable.
The clock is a nice addition, but the small signs beneath it are not as cool as the old sign.
You grammar pedants can discuss how in both versions, “Bowe’s” is written with an apostrophe on the sign right above the windows but without on the signs higher up. This means something, I’m sure.
I recently digitized a roll of film my grandmother took on vacation in Ireland in 1966. I can tell she it was her roll and not my grandfather’s because every single one of the photos is shot horizontally EXCEPT a picture of her in front of a waterfall.
In anticipation of our trip to Ireland a few weeks ago, I printed copies of a few of her photos and tried to recreate them. The Where Was This Taken Reddit sub was enormously helpful.
First, this shot of downtown Dublin
Wasn’t too hard to recreate, and it hasn’t changed a lot.
Some new trees. The walkway extension over the water.
Next we have the famous O’Connell Monument in downtown Dublin.
The seagull and the Burger King are new. Otherwise, sixty years hasn’t done much. Again, the trees are bigger.
Facebook is reminding me of our trip, 7 years ago, to Europe for the Women’s World Cup plus some more. I had recently tracked down where my french last name came from (My grandfather was British as far back as anyone knew) and found that the first Renaut came to England from Dinant, Belgium, in the early 1600’s. I looked it up, and it’s a gorgeous little town on the Meuse River. So that’s one of the places we visited on our trip, along with some more common tourist spots (including watching a USWNT win from the front row).
A few years later, the wife and I were on a food tour in Copenhagen during my daughter’s soccer trip, and met a Belgian couple.
Making conversation, I said to them, “We were just in Belgium a few years ago!”
“Oh, where did you go?”, he asked.
“We went to Dinant…”, I said, doing my best to pronounce it properly (I don’t speak French but my wife lived in France for a while and I heard her pronounce it).
“That is… NOT what I was expecting you to say.” He said.
I explained the connection, which of course made it make sense. I love having that kind of interaction with strangers. That couple will likely remember the Americans with an unusual trip to Belgium, and I will always remember the look on his face.
Another reason to go on food tours when you travel. They’re a great way to meet people, plus you get to see parts of the city and stop in places you might have missed otherwise. The food is really just an extra bonus.
A friend just posted pictures of sandpipers on Flickr and it made me think of walking on the beach on Nantucket with my grandmother. She had the technique for walking on soft sand down and when I was a teenager and she was in her 70’s I had to work to keep up
She would get up early every day to go walk on the beach. I am a morning person so I would often go with her. I loved the dew on the sand after a cool night.
My favorite story is one day walking by the ocean near Quidnet pond. A ray had beached itself – it was nearly four feet across, just lying by the edge of the ocean. Grandma walked past and without breaking stride she grabbed it and flipped it back into the water. It was so nonchalant, I couldn’t speak. She saw something that needed doing so she did it without interrupting her walk.
She passed away in 2011 at age 97, having been the first female GS-15 at the Department of the Treasury and meeting her first two great grandchildren.
My father-in-law started going to the Preakness every year when his eldest daughter was in grad school at Hopkins (I’m pretty sure this is right. I don’t think anyone who reads this will be able to correct me if I’m wrong, but it ALSO doesn’t really matter for the story.) and continued for many years, eventually turning it into an annual family event.
One of these visits, May 15th, 2015, we were all excited to watch American Pharoah. He had won the Kentucky Derby already. He was a strong favorite to win the Preakness as well.
If you’ve never been to a horse race, this may be news – the featured race is usually not the only race of the day. It’s just the one everyone spent a lot of money on. The earlier races are often smaller fields, and there’s often a very heavy favorite. Let me tell you, it is super boring to bet on a horse running at 2:3 odds. Especially if you, like me, don’t bet large amounts. Winning a $2 bet and earning like $1.25 is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but it’s not exactly exciting. So I liked to bet exactas. This means you pick the horse to win AND you pick the horse to come in second (you can do up to five but the odds of that are so low it heads back into boring territory again).
In 2015, I bet the exacta on the Preakness. I picked American Pharoah to win and long shot Tale of Verve to finish second. I’ll save you looking it up – this is the order they finished. I won about $340 on a $5 bet. It’s my biggest win at the track ever, by a good bit. This is partly because I do not bet large amounts – betting is fun in moderation, but it gets problematic fast.
It took me four days to finish this post and it ended up not being that interesting but I’m going to publish it anyway and you can’t stop me.
I love cooking with this thing.
It’s a carbon steel griddle from Made In, if you’re interested in getting one.
I particularly like using it for this recipe. My dad called it egg with a hat. I don’t think he made it up but I’ve never heard of it anywhere else. I haven’t looked it up, though. It’s pretty simple. Use a glass and make a hole in a piece of bread. Put some butter on the bread and some butter on the griddle. When the butter is hot, put the bread on butter-side up. Let it cook for a minute, then flip it over and dump a salted egg into the hole. After it cooks for a bit, flip the whole thing over. Ideally you want the white part solid and the yolk a little runny. To serve, put it on a plate and put the “hat” piece of bread on top of the egg.
You can obviously jazz this up in all sorts of ways but I’ve honestly never bothered. Easy, delicious, reminds me of my dad.
Originally posted today in 2023
This year for my birthday, I’m not asking for donations to a charity. Donating to charity is great, and if you have the means, please do, but this year I’d like you to think about something different. Since my birthday is on Earth Day AND I’d like a habitable world for my kids and grandkids to grow up in AND I’m an insufferable bike advocate, for my birthday I’d like you to think about biking.
Think about replacing ONE car trip this week with a bike trip. If you don’t have a bike, for the purpose of this exercise assume you do. Don’t get bogged down in not having a bike and miss the broader picture. If replacing ONE car trip with a bike trip would be really difficult, please think about why.
Is it money? Even a top of the line electric-assist cargo bike costs less to buy than the average yearly cost of owning a car. And a solid utilitarian bike can cost WAY less than that, probably less than one month’s car payment.
Is it safety? Imagine there was a network of bike lanes completely separated from car traffic and see if that would fix it.
Is it weather? This is a legitimate challenge, but I promise you that someone in your situation in a MUCH worse climate has solved this problem, and you can, too.
Is it logistics? Where do you park? Think about how much we subsidize car parking and think about how little we would need to throw at bike parking to make this problem disappear.
What else is keeping you from using one of the most environmentally friendly modes of transportation available?
I was listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast on MBS, as recommended by Peter, and subsequently recommended by me, and one little aside was about how ultra-wealthy libertarians are always trying to build cities. MBS is trying to build a crazy wall-city that I’m sure will totally happen.
It got me thinking that, when you put aside the fact that cities are HARD to just build from nothing, all of these ideas are doomed to fail because anyone with the wealth to just build a city is fundamentally incompatible with a well-functioning society. When you have a society where one successful adult makes a nice salary, and the God-King of that society spends that annual salary on a random Saturday evening get-together with friends, that society is sick. No number of shiny new skyscrapers and efficient vertical farms or whatever the latest trend is can make that society okay.