A mystery letter among the leaves

Walking clears my head. Especially here, on the eastern lip of the Atlantic, the fresh winds gusting in over Galway Bay clear the cobwebs of editing and writing from my mind. When I need a break from work – from books, paragraphs, sentences, words, letters – I walk.

Sometimes, though, the letters follow me. This one gave me a proper surprise, almost glowing in the wet autumn ground:

Photo challenge: Dancer on the door

On the Daily Post blog, Cheri Lucas Rowlands has invited WordPress users to share photos of doors as part of a photo challenge. For a break from my usual subjects, I’m joining in with a repost from 2010, just because.

Doors, Cheri writes, can be a source of beauty in the mundane, and in this case I love how an old building with a certain mournful, dilapidated charm was briefly transformed by an anonymous street artist into something quite magical.

Zombie wisdom

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

The phrase “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” was coined in 1972 by Forest Long, an adman, as part of a UNCF campaign. It has since become “part of the American vernacular”.

Though the slogan is widely known, many people are unaware of its origin. (I was, until I began writing this post.) More recently, the UNCF made the phrase more prominent in its logo.

None of which has anything to do with zombies, but I was interested to discover that the phrase is so new: it has the feel of folk wisdom about it.

And I liked the graffito; zombie puns aren’t very common on the streets of Galway.

Dancer on the door

A ballerina appeared on a door on Dominick Street in Galway last year.

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Sadly, she’s not there any more.

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I think she clicked her heels three times…

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…and woke up somewhere else.

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[Note: I took the fourth photo on 18 November 2010 and edited the post to include it.]

Swanlike boat, boatlike swan

Swanlike boat:

Boatlike swan:

These two photos and the next one were taken last weekend in Galway, Ireland. Photos no.4 to 6 are a bit older. Post edited to add two more photos, one from yesterday and one from March.

Here’s where the boat was (view from Nimmo’s Pier):