Travellers' Rest

A father noticed that his son was spending way too much time playing computer games. In an effort to motivate the boy into focusing more attention on his schoolwork, the father said to his son, "When Abe Lincoln was your age, he was studying books by the light of the fireplace."
The son replied, "When Abe Lincoln was your age, he was the President of The United States."

Well, here we are, six months away from that near-tragedy. I think it was resolved well; quietly and well. Enough said.

Structure vs. freedom. Repeat visitors to this site will have noticed the addition of a Google search engine, referencing Travellers' Rest by default, to both this page and the Home page. As the most likely entrees into this site, I think that these are the logical locations for it. When in use, the engine opens a separate superimposed window for the results of the search (and subsequent bouncing around via hyperlink). When that window is closed, users are returned to the Home or What's New page with its URL history stack intact, so that a single mouse click on "Back" will let them return to their original "jumping off" point.

In addition, I am in the process of adding threaded links at the bottom of each What's New page in the archives to enable users to more quickly access the prior or subsequent edition directly, without returning to the current What's New page to do so from the link matrix at the bottom.

As of April 28, 2003, reports of my death are still pretty much premature (to paraphrase/plagiarize from the best). But it is true that my e-mail has been congested off and on for the last several weeks and that amounts to the same thing, So I had better attend to that and my non-functioning embedded MIDI music files before I get around to the newer bells and whistles promised above. I get a lot of undeserved credit from e-mailers, for having had the gall for lifting those Gaelic tunes from other sites and presenting them on Travellers' Rest. [Okay, it's 5/16/03 and the MIDI files are working, the e-mail is flowing, Google is re-searching, and the threaded linkages are neatly stitched; please feel free to try them all out and let me know that my confidence in this one regard is not misplaced.]

Believe it or not, there is a causative connection between the e-mail blockage and the MIDI music files, but you don't want to know what it is. And there is no connection between that congestion and the pathetic clown who keeps sending me e-mail messages with virus- and worm-filled attachments once or twice a day. She (He?) has no apparent agenda worth declaring and my constantly updated anti-viral system seems pretty secure, so the offender has yet to make any particular impression. It was months after the attacks started before the background A-V software had trashed enough attachments in a reserved bin to attract my attention.

On the other hand, I may have been more comfortable dead than alive, judging from my reaction to Vincent D'Onofrio's performance on the latest (5/14/03) episode of "Law & Order, Criminal Intent." I was prepared to rant and rave about the usual ignorant treatment of all Irish Travellers as a criminal class, which they did wind up perpetuating. The allegations of childhood betrothal were also unwelcome but not entirely unexpected (like nosy neighbors), and the use of "authentic" Traveller lingo ("They have their own language, Shelta") must have puzzled the hell out of any Travellers beside myself who were watching. "Shelta" is a century-old academic construct and no Traveller calls his language by that name. The "Shelta" words in the script were no closer to today's IT Cant than Chaucer would be to rap lyrics.

You can use the search engine below to check out our previous responses to the same postulates; after all: why reinvent the wheel? No, there were no big surprises there, save two: the illogicality of Joe Gannon's screenplay, and the lurching from one aberrant and absurd mannerism to another that D'Onofrio wants us to believe is acting.