Country Living
August to be highlight of our 2017 weather?
Country Living with Francis Farragher
There’s nothing quicker to raise the blood pressure of meteorologists and scientists than the mention of canny New Zealander, Ken Ring, whose almanacs make a stab at predicting the weather in different countries for well over a year in advance.
His publications circulate worldwide, and of course, whenever he ‘hits the jackpot’ with a prediction of a heatwave, storm or cold snap, his stock rises with a sizeable cohort of the population who just love wacky forecasters looking months ahead.
A couple of years back, the UK Met. Office splashed out almost £100 million on a super-computer that can perform billions and billions of calculations in a fraction of a second, and yet after all that, they are hard pressed to accurately predict weather more than five days in advance.
Incidentally, one of the big stories in the weather forecasting scene in Britain is that from this Spring, the UK Met. Office will not be the contracted supplier of weather information to the BBC, breaking a 94-year link.
A private weather company, called the MeteoGroup, has won the contract to be the official forecaster of the BBC, something that has greatly annoyed many of the loyal followers of the UK Met. Office, despite a number of slip-ups over the years.
Anyway, there’s no official contract with the BBC for Ken Ring, but the New Zealand mathematician and former schoolteacher, often causes a stir in his own country, with his weather and earthquake predictions.
An earthquake prediction is a serious piece of news to generate, leading to some people hightailing it from their homes, so when one or two of those forecasts went astray, the New Zealand authorities weren’t exactly enamoured by Mr. Ring’s ‘antics’.
He is though a regular interviewee in newspapers and radio stations across Ireland and of course we do tend to hear more about his successes than his failures. His big ‘winner’ in 2016 from an Irish perspective was his prediction that by far and away the best of our summer weather would arrive across late May and early June – for that fortnight with many people, he could do no wrong.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Country Living with Francis Farragher
WE all get attached . . . nay, even dependent . . . on our technology devices, most notably the mobile phone, but here and there the technology does spook me a bit.
A couple of weeks ago, as I sat into my car one evening as I prepared to head for the hills, I began to sing a verse or two of the Beatles classic ‘Yesterday’.
The Apple CarPlay system was on in my car and I had scarcely completed the first verse of the song when lo and behold what started to play on the speakers but of one Paul McCartney with the ‘real thing’.
Now, some of my technology nerd acquaintances will come up with a simple explanation as to why this happened but it surely wasn’t a coincidence.
There are times too when I think I’m paranoid, or maybe not, when after certain conversations have taken place about anything from cars to canisters, an ad flashes across my iPhone about the topic we’d just been discussing.
And now, the latest buzz words in the whole chain of technology advancement are Artificial Intelligence or AI, which I have to admit is just a little bit above my basic level of competency or understanding of high-tech jargon.
Being of country stock, the AI initials always meant only one thing back the years – artificial insemination – when the man with the straws of bull semen would arrive on the farm to impregnate cows in what had to be a very non-pleasurable experience for all concerned.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Country Living with Francis Farragher
Sometimes, the return drive from Dublin after a weekend sojourn in The Capital can feel a bit longer than it should. The passengers are generally tired and try to steal forty winks so often the radio is the best companion to court. With local stations out of range, I flicked through the channels on a Sunday evening and stumbled into one of those programmes that once you hear the beginning of . . . well it just sucks you in.
It was a documentary made a number of years back for Radio 1 on the Whistleblowers’ theme, featuring the story of one Father Gerard McGinnity who in the late 1970s and early 1980s was regarded as one of the ‘up-and-coming stars’ of the Catholic Church in Ireland being appointed as Senior Dean of Maynooth College in 1978 at the age of 32, decades younger than any of his predecessors.
The Armagh native seemed destined for high places in the Church hierarchy, with ‘the sky the limit’ for someone so young to have advanced so quickly through the ranks. However, all was to change dramatically around 1984, when Fr. McGinnity was made aware of allegations of possibly of improper contacts between the then Vice-President of Maynooth College, a Fr. Micheál Ledwith, and young seminarians.
Fr. McGinnity, still alive and well in his mid-70s, spoke on the documentary about how he wrestled with his conscience and what he should do after these concerns were raised with him.
Eventually, he made the decision, that he needed to express his concerns to a number of bishops and the then Papal Nuncio, Gaetano Alibrandi, expecting that his concerns would be treated in confidence and properly investigated. Neither of those two things happened.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Country Living with Francis Farragher
It’s a condition that’s eased with the passing of time but here and there little symptoms of it return. A sore calf muscle; a cough that lasts more than a week or so; a stiffness in the back of the neck of shoulders; a soft little lump on the bottom of a foot . . . now that is a whole range of harmless enough symptoms but when you add in a measure of hypochondria to that cocktail . . . well then the medical self-diagnosis can be devastating.
The only little consolation for an ordinary Joe Soap, who might occasionally suffer from this condition, is that it’s one shared by many famous people across the globe. Over a decade or so, a pretty widely acclaimed book by Brian Dillon, entitled, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, documented the lives and times of nine famous people spanning the centuries who were afflicted with extreme doses of the condition.
From Charles Darwin to Charlotte Bronte to Andy Warhol, these are famous people who had an unhealthy preoccupation with their health or what they believed was impending doom coming down the track for them. Of course, the inevitable is coming for all of us either sooner or later, but the trick is not to be envisioning the final whistle being blown early into the second half of the match.
Mark Twain was probably ahead of his time when he cautioned about reading too many health books ‘in case you might die of a misprint’ and now for every little pain of headache we experience, the temptation is there to flick through Google where invariably you will find a fatal affliction connected to that occasional twinge in your big toe.
Hypochondria can be defined rather simply as an irrational fear about health and death and while to non-sufferers, it’s the butt of many jokes and moments of jocularity, the rather more serious side to it is that it can make life pretty miserable for the person that believes, for no particular reason, that the end is nigh. It can lead to depression or be caused by depression but the simplest cure for it may be just a simple heart-to-heart chat with your GP.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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