I hate to do the outraged Celt bit, but "none of whom live in stolen land"?

The Plantation of Ulster and the Highland Clearances both happened within the current borders of the UK.

This will continue well into April now.

Our resident Blue Tit spotting his reflection every somewhat bright Spring morning:

Mine text? Main text!

Yes, I’ve adopted that as my mine text. It gives the balance of critical vs “well, you do still kind of need to know the mainstream stuff” that I was looking for.

It’s appropriate that the very composition of the place exists in a place between individual experience, collective memory and mythology, whereby whether a room actually existed needs to be recreated through patchy archives!

I’d be oddly disappointed if a floor plan could give a definitive answer!

Um. I remember the back bar (where Danascene was, right?), and I also remember the slightly lower level venue through the double doors. Has AI conflated those? Don't recall either of them ever being called the Village, but that might be just a memory gap.

No, sorry, that place must have passed me by! Maybe a year or two before my time.

I struggle to articulate why, but I’ve never quite developed the same appreciation of Paul Brady as of some of his contemporaries.

Maybe I just prefer my folk singers to have a bit more gravel in their voices!

Yeah, I think they played Cork a couple of times.

I can’t say the Village rings a bell: was it down the back of Jack Plugs?

The Planxty version for anyone that might be unfamiliar:

(Will I spend most of the morning looking up different versions of Arthur McBride instead of working on the article I’m supposed to be co-authoring? There’s a solid chance, tbh).

youtu.be/uaewHkA9CD4?...

Mercury Rev and the Futureheads for me.

I’m going to try to do this, to an extent, in my Intro to Social Psych module this coming term. My idea is to write a weekly forum post pointing out how concepts covered in the lectures can be seen in Traitors gameplay. Worth a go as something a bit different, I think.

Likely student reaction:

An enjoyable blog picking up on some of the additional social psychological aspects to the current series of #traitorsuk

Further material for my thesis that you could teach an entire introductory social psychology module, just using examples from the Traitors.

bsky.app/profile/psyc...

This is another one of those odd pop-culture generational valleys - younger children (e.g. my sons) know who Jim Carrey is because he's Dr Robotnik in the Sonic movies!

Being a parent means you also run the risk of including pop culture references your students are too old for!

Yes, when current first year undergraduates would have been six years old! It's the relatively recent* pop culture references that catch you out, not, as is often assumed, the ones from the 90s.

*From the perspective of a fortysomething.

Although, to be fair, I think the article itself is defining 'now' quite specifically as the mid-2020s.

(Brooklyn Nine-Nine ended four and a half years ago, which brings it perilously close to the 'stuff you assume your students will have watched, but it turns out they haven't' valley).