I'm not celebrating Saint Patricks day

Expecting any one with even a drop of Irish blood or a tiny bit of information about the Irish diaspora to be "celebrating" St Patrick's day is to suggest Native American's should be celebrating Columbus Day. For what St Patrick did to the Irish, is just as horrible as what Columbus did to the indigenous people he "discovered" Please before anyone drinks a drop of green beer do some research about what really happened to the Irish. I'll even start you off with some information and links. The reason the Irish did not return to Ireland had nothing to do with the famine, and everything to do with the English property owners. For many people they watched the "property owners" knock down their villages, dump them into open wagons with little more than the cloths on their back and dumped into "plague ships" Many Irish only spoke Galic, did not know how to read or write and had spent many years as the English slave class. The Irish were mistreated here but it was still better than living there. Check out these web pages Irish Diaspora The short over view of the reasons the Irish left (were forced out) of Ireland Great Famine Reasons behind the great famine. Little known fact, during the height of the famine Ireland was exporting food to England. Penal laws These laws made it illegal for the Irish to learn to read or own property. These laws were the base for the later Protestant Ascendancy which

Been doing a lot of reading

Just not the kind of reading that fits in this blogs focus. I went to Boskone in February and picked up some new books, Life Signs - Biology of Star Trek and Religions of Star Trek Notice a theme there. During the convention I attended a panel on the life of two amazing female authors who passed last year. Anne McCaffrey and Diana Wynne Jones The discussion wandered as discussions often do to the lives of these woman and the childhood experiences that formed them. We started discussing Anne's time in a boarding school and her treatment there. She was teased and bullied for her religion and appearance. Something that to many of us in the room was a regular occurrence growing up. The one man on the panel found it hard to believe Anne or any one would get bullied for their skin color, after all to him Anne was "white". I suggested he might want to read the works of David R Roediger including two books I thought I had in my lbrary The Wages of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness I could not find the Roediger books in my library, they were not even listed in my library thing, so I did something silly and I ordered the books. It has been a while since I read them so I started re-reading Wages of Whiteness. I also have been reading the second book in the Fire and Ice series for the upcoming season. I read them a long time ago, and I kind of like to have the new book residing in my short term memory as I watch. I got them as E-books since they are door stoppers in all the best ways. Speaking of which, if you have read the books they jump chapters between point of view characters. I would like to be able to read the books reading every characters chapters as a whole. I have also started tossing out some books!!! Well not really books, I tossed out many magazines, and baseball annuals (kind of a big magazine about baseball teams and players) Not really something worth keeping. So I have been doing a lot of reading, just not a lot of reading that fits into the theme of this blog. So many I will expand the theme of the blog, or at least make more posts like this one.