Irish Media Nation

But who was she talking too? And oh, those roaming charges! Belfast filmmaker George Clarke is a big Charlie Chaplin fan and as he studied newsreel footage shot outside of Grauman's Chinese Theater at the opening of Chaplin’s 1928 film “The Circus,” he saw something he couldn’t explain. Showed it to 100 people. They couldn’t explain it either, but all agreed that it sure looks like a woman talking on a cell phone...82 years ago. Evidence of a time traveler? Here’s an excerpt of the YouTube clip he posted a few weeks ago.

How do say “Play Ball!” in Irish?

With the long baseball season finally segueing into the playoffs, I was using the time between pitches, while the batter wanders around adjusting himself, to wander around online, and just as the batter stepped back out of the box to start the adjustment process all over again, I surfed onto this internet factoid: “Baseball was probably derived from Rounders, a game played in Ireland since the fifteenth century.” I hate to admit it, but this was news to me…but not of course to the GAA.

This revelation came from a HuffingtonPost.com slideshow entitled “US History: 13 Myth-Busting Facts That Will Make You Rethink Everything You Know,” written by three guys from the endlessly diverting Mental Floss website (http://www.mentalfloss.com/). Myth #5 was “Baseball is Distinctly American” (http://huff.to/92Bz97). The post noted that by the 18th century, the Irish game of Rounders (Irish: cluiche corr) incorporated many of the basic elements of modern baseball and that starting in the 1820s Irish immigrants brought Rounders to America “where local variations developed.”