Happy St Patricks Day!
 

Happy St Paddy's day to you all, be you Irish, Part Irish or wannabe Irish:)

Happy St Patrick's Day.
50% Irish for me.

Thanks, as much to you.

Nothing Irish about me but I always wannabe Irish on that day.:D

I go pick up my kids and drink a beer in your honnor.:)

I knew there was a reason I liked you Kato :) Any idea what part of Ireland?

Thanks Mo - enjoy the beer!

Happy St Patrick's Day to you too Tig. I have mostly Scots blood but one of my great grandmothers was from Ireland, her surname was Ryan.

If I get a chance to talk to my sister I'm pretty sure I can get you the cities. She has been to Ireland twice researching our Genealogy.

Happy Paddy's Day...

R6 (100% Scottish here)

Thomas Patrick Kelly. My mothers Grandfather strait off the boat. Then back to the great war then 30 years working on the railroad and boxing underground too earn extra money. I have a Picture in my home on the mantle.

Just seen on the news that they've had to deploy riot police to break up street parties in the main student area of Belfast. Thats the same boys and girls that'll be heading for my bar tonight. If only my knee wasn't bad I'd be there pulling an 18 hour shift :)

Happy St Patrick's Day!
And take it easy, Tigger

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, ya'll! Especially you, Tigger.

I'll be eating some boiled cabbage and potatoes tonight and drinking at least one [Mexican] beer. It's all I've got.

I am on my second pint of Guiness and the rest is in the fridge. I have a single malt waiting to have later and oh need to put the corned beef on.

Oh yeah I am about half, a quarter on both sides. I am the lucky one though, the only one in the family who doesn't have the pugnose, I got my mothers pointy Finnish nose ;)

I don't drink. Can I have a green Pepsi? Oh, and I'll take a helping of that corned beef!

Paul you are always welcome! And sure green pepsi but wouldn't you rather have one fresh ;)

What is really messed up! I went to 3 Stater Brothers markets <a popular So Cal Chain with who promote their onsite butcher shops with the slogan "Its our meat that made us famous" two Vons and 1 Ralphs <Kroger> and a El Tapatio <local mexican chain> and no one had any corned beef! I was hoping to buy several cooking 1 tonight and cooking the others over the next couple months. Not this year! I only had the 1 I purchased on the way home from work over the weekend when I stopped at the market to get something for breakfast on the way home. Sheesh, next they'll be out of rabit for easter ;)

You could just go out and shoot or trap one. I dunno about SoCal but in the countryside around here there are heaps of the little buggers.

Can't walk more than three steps without tripping over the critters where I grew up...

Same with kangaroos. Had more of them than cattle back on the farm.

But kangaroos are at home, Rabits is one exemple of Human's stupidity. By the way I recall having watched on TV a farmer shooting at Rabits with a Machine Gun:D . Was I dreaming or are you that desesperate?

Wouldn't have been recent. Pretty much no one except the military and Police can legally own and fire machine guns in Australia now.

We have had enormous plagues of rabbits in Australia. That is why the Rabbit Proof Fence was constructed. Biological controls have helped but eventually the rabbits become resistant and their numbers explode again.

Various species of kangaroo are found in large numbers across Australia. They regularly graze around my mum's house in Perth's hills and you see them at many of Perth's golf courses.

The key word here is "legally"....

I know a few people who may not own actual GPMGs, but certainly have the odd automatic rifle and SMG tucked away. Gone out hunting with a few of them years back.

One had a fully auto SMG of some type (can barely remember what it looked like let alone what it was) in .22 LR. Ripped through a 20 round mag in less time than it took to blink your eyes. Couldn't hit anything beyond about three feet away due to recoil (mainly the working parts moving rather than actual explosive force), but DAMN WAS IT FUN!

Same fellow had an L42 sniper rifle - has to be about the most accurate weapon I've laid my hands on (but that's coming from a machinegunnner....)

It was at least 25 years ago and the action was taking place something like 30 years ago. Anyway, I was a kid at that time, I remember that the number of rabits was impressive, I remember that the guy was using an equally impressive weapon (no simple hunting rifle) but I'm not sure what it was. Actually, the guy could have been an official and that could have been put in scene for the purpose of the media.

Why yes, I have the lil bunnies hopping through my backyard all the time. I also have hawks perched on a powerpole just out my back window, the odd skorpion in my garage and kitchen as well as a rattler in the garage once, and all maner of other small wildlife in my backyard. The perks of the backyard abutting a wildlife preserve, I litteraly open the gate to my back fence, then open the gate to the county fence and I am in a nature preserve. I bike along the newly made bike trail and a couple miles up I encounter a "Danger Mountain Lion" sign. And up until a few years ago they had wild pig running in the cane fields of the river bottom, being that they tend to hearty lil critters they will probably make their way back in a couple years.

HAPPY St.Patrics Day
 

Me and FMDCorba celebrated (kind of) with Cider and Jameson Whiskey (irish) playing Company of Heroes...yea and the-devild was with us aswell over the interweb he he

And a Happy belated St Patrick's day back at ya, Tigger.

Part Irish myself. I think my great grandfather came over in the very early 1900's. Grandfather's name was Casey Patrick Alvey.

Here in Perth is common for suburban back yards to contain a variety of deadly beasties, mostly snakes and spiders. Actually its mostly the snakes that are deadly around here (red back spiders usually won't kill an adult human). Over east they have funnelweb spiders that will kill you dead. Most Australians are aware of the dangers of snakes in back yard wood piles and sheds. Nasty way to go.

Now mountain lions, wow, that's a whole other deal. Cool and a bit concerning at the same time. Same goes for bears. I think bears seem like pretty impressive creatures but I wouldn't like to be attacked by one. You have some scary fauna in the CONUS.

Wild pigs over here are called razorbacks and they can get pretty darned big. Over the years a few people have been killed by male red kangaroos, they can disembowel you if you're not careful.

I'm Black Irish on my father's side. I have a good Irish Catholic name: Paul Michael Mulcahy. (Too bad I'm not a good Catholic...or even a Catholic at all anymore...) But my family's been here since before the American Revolution -- there have been Mulcahys in the US military since the Revolution, so pretty much my Mulcahy side is thoroughly American by now.

The smaller Eastern Greys can do the same thing and they're usually smaller than an average adult human.
Seen a dog almost disemboweled by one once - not a pretty sight with blood and gore everywhere. Dog lived, the roo suffered a nasty and very sudden case of lead poisoning....

Yes indeed. Seen a dog attacked by a western grey (dog and roo both lived although the dog needed stitches). Seen the results of a red kangaroo attack on a dog (no sign of roo, dog very dead).

...and tying it back to T2K....
 

Of course a good, well trained hunting dog can be worth their weight in gold. Although roos can disembowel, a good dog will strike from behind, knocking them over and wrapping their jaws around the throat. Smaller roos are quickly killed with a broken neck, while the larger ones have their windpipe crushed.

Which gets me to thinking that just because in T2K many people don't have firearms or even a home made crossbow, doesn't mean they can't hunt for food. As in centuries past, animals can be trained to put food on the table.

As seen above, dogs can bring down large game while hawks can catch rabbits, and so on.

Just how valuable would these animals and their trainers become?

Harnmaster/Gunmaster has excellent and very realistic hunting rules and those include using trained animals such as dogs.

In my current camapign there is a USAF dog handler NPC with the party's group who has repeatedly requested that she be allowed to train a security dog but so far her CO Major Po has refused her requests.

I thinks Bill Gant's Harnmaster house rules site Warflail.com still has Bill's hunting rules available for download. I'll have to go and have a look when I've got some time tonight.

I've had family here since the Revolution, but they were English. And Cherokee on my father's side. All my life I thought I had an ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence, but I found out a month ago it was my ancestor's brother. A Doctor named Benjamin Rush.

Ugh, I'd be afraid to visit Australia with the poisonous snakes and such, I hope the hospitals have anti-venin. I know we have our share, here in Pennsylvania, we have timber rattlers although they are more in rural areas, also we have copperhead snakes. My friend had a pet copperhead himself. Spiders, well, of course you have the Black Widow but some do say they are overrated unless you are really allergic to them. There are Brown Recluse Spiders, but they usually do not live up here, it is too cold although sometimes they can hitch a ride from the South in the warmer parts of the year. They have nasty bites and I've seen personally on what they can do when one of my co-workers showed me his bite.

BTW, Mom's side, German and Swedish although my grandmother said we might have Irish in us somewhere but I cannot confirm that. Dad's side, Russian, Russian Jew and Serbian, my last name is Serbian in origin.

Chuck M.

Jeez, on my Mom's side, who knows? The Nazis put her whole village in a concentration camp in 1940, when she was only 3 years old, and she was the only member of her family to get out alive. The camp records show an ID number and her origin (Stanisicz, Croatia, which is now 20 miles inside of Serbia), but not her name. Franciscan monks gave her a name, since she didn't remember what her name was; "Helene" is French, while I suspect that "Horvath" is something that the monks thought sounded Croatian (though it's not). From some of the few memories she has from before the Germans came, I strongly suspect she was originally Croatian Muslim; from some of the rituals she remembers her parents doing, I also suspect she might have had some Gypsy somewhere in there. But who knows?

There is a firm in the US that will, for $150, send you a packet of swabs and test tubes so you can swab the inside your mouth. In a month, they will have used mitochondrial DNA to chart out your family's origins back up to 200,000 years. I hope to do that for her one day; it won't tell her any family names, but will give her an idea of where her ancestors are from.

My last name is a muddled up version of the original Serbian name, so I'm not sure what my exact name is. I could have other stuff floating in me as well, some even suggested that maybe I could have some Greek in my somewhere. That test does sound interesting, going back to 200,000 years. Sometimes I wonder if I have "UFO roots," I have trouble going back past 1880 although on Mom's side I can get close to 1850. I knew one guy on Fidonet, the old BBS system, who could trace his family history back to 600 BC in ancient Babylon.

As to Irish origins, some do say the Irish and Basques do share DNA types so it is possible they came from the Basque region a long time ago and went north. I've also heard of "black Irish" where some have dark, black hair although they say that came from Spanish sailors who settled there after the British wiped out their fleet in 1588.

Chuck M.

Chuck, I don't want to be rude but that guy was a liar. Almost no one on this earth can trace its ancestry to such an old time. At most you can trace it back to 800 A.D.

A question, nevertheless. Was he of Asian descent? Asians can trace their ancestry further than Westerners. Nevertheless, the world record for Family history remain that of Confucius (China) and that goes back to his birth around 550BC.

Paul, do you know that website? It might interest you.
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/jasenovac/

It is not entirely impossible to trace family records IF the family had records or there was a means at the time and their survived. To date we have traced all of the branches of my family to before they came to the New World, the oldest confrmed was a tax collector in Paris in the 15th Century and one of his younger sons was the first to come to the New World where he worked with or for some Jesuits. From there it was easy since the family didn't leave the area they settled in for several hundred years.

Oh yeah, if your family is lazy and doesn't move for several generations then it is pretty easy to trace them as well ;)

The male line of my family were the Sheriffs of Renfrew (in Scotland) during the 1400s, then became the Barons of Craigievar. Makes it kind of easy to trace.

You are very much right Jester. However, the thing is that no record had been kept in the western world prior to 800AD (Carlus Magnus). You might get some older records if your ancestry is from Constantinople but I'm not even sure about that. Records might have existed before the destruction of Alexandria's great library but all that is lost and no proof of it remains.

Several European leaders pretended to be heir to some pre-christ famous leaders but all that has always been lies and fantasy on their part. Actually, even if someone effectively has records of previous ancestry, you can be sure that it is a fake (but it may be a very ancient fake). I have worked on fakes from around 1000AD and that is a lot of fun just to know that the piece of history you are working on is the result of some kind of forgery.:D

I have a friend who can trace her ancestry back to a Bishop that lived sometime around 900AD but that is fairly rare.

A few Muslims can trace it back to about 600AD (to Mahomet, in fact). That's how we know that king of Morocco and king of Jordan are heirs to the prophet.

Asian, both Japanese and Chinese, can go back a lot further as they have retained some very old record. Still Confucius remain the oldest family tree in existence.

I would also suggest that some small primative cultures many who have an oral tradition of passing down stories and liniage could do a good job. As well as I said families who have lived in a small community that has been more or less isolated who have a cemetary that is maintained and....it is even better if there are is a church record.

Oral tradition is how Alex Haley found his ancestors in Africa in Roots.

Somewhere in the mix, I'm decended from the Count of Magdeburg in Germany. Right at the openning of the Prussian war, the count secretly sent his sons away to keep them safe as he could see the turmoil about to occur. A short while later he chose the wrong side and met with a "hunting accident".