Transmillennial

I emigrated to Boston from ireland in September 1977, and almost immediately developed a profound dislike for Irish Americans. People would ask me where I was from; I'd tell them Ireland, and they'd then say Oh, I'm Irish too , which usually meant their great-grandfather had gotten off the boat in New York 100 years ago. The disppointment was definitely mutual. I found them loud and usually bigoted; I deplored their taste in beer; their political views; and their ignorance about the rest of the world in general, and modern Ireland in particular. They didn't like my accent: they perceived upper-middle-class Dublin as 'English'; they didn't like my liberalism, or my irreligiosity, or my liking for soccer. I don't remember which annoyed me more; being told by Americans that they were Irish, or by being asked by Americans if I was English. It all culminated on St Patrick's Day in 1978, when I and a couple of compatriots headed to Fields Corner in Sout...

Toiling in the mid-morning sun, in a hot, muddy cotton field in Copiah County, in the south of Mississippi, three young African American men, brothers, aged 18, 20 and 22, hoed the rows. It was late June, 1860, and so the men were slaves. The ground was wet from yesterday’s rain, the air heavy, and the men were anxious to finish their work before the clouds gathering on the western horizon flooded the fields with another summer cloudburst. Inside the plantation house, unbeknownst to them, they were being enumerated . James R Fortenberry, the slave-holder, a man of about 35, was listing their important personal details to Elijah Peyton, Assistant Marshall. These details were three; age, gender, and race. The race was officially ‘mulatto’; at that time, and in that place, mulattos were usually the sons or daughters of a black woman raped by a white slave-holder. They had no names, as far as the United States Government was concerned. Instead they would be listed, in Peyton’s elegant,...

The Lincoln Journal Star comments page is infested with trolls, many of which are bots. The LJS requires you comment from a Facebook account; a pretty good sign you're dealing twith a bot, and not a real person, is if the Facebook page is blank. So a couple of days ago, I was congratulating the writer of a pretty decent letter to the LJS. And a bot presumed to try correct my punctuation, hilariously mis-spelling comma . So I had a little fun. The Helen Faust bot thought she could make me look stupid by editing her original comment. And another bot, a fake account, and a Nazi wench from Mitchell Nebraska tried to pile on. This gave me the opportunity I've waited for my whole life. Hello, Dirty Harry. As you can see, the Faustbot fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Now for the coup de grace. None of the four have since reappeared. Good clean fun.