#JennyPop: Irish dancer, Red Sox girl, writer. Photo: JSDevore, home dance-studio, January 2025.   Even really smart folk can be superstitious. Sure, science and logic objectively trump magic and emotion. Still, once the realities of pragmatism are acknowledged, isn't there room for a little something extra: like a decadent, après-dinner snackie? Think of superstitions as a crème brûlée or a German Riesling, or Cheez-Its: unneces...

  May the leprechauns dance over your bed and bring you sweet dreams. - Irish lessing   To this day, across much of the Western Isle, the lore of fairies remains so strong, farmers will divert crops, homebuilders will adjust property lines, hikers will swing wide of their treks and the burliest and beardiest of men dare not trifle with the environmental curiosity known as, the fairy ring, a.k.a. fairy fort. In Irish, they are called lios or raths and at the end of the 20th Century, there stood, it was believed, some 40,000 fairy rings spotting the Irish countryside. Archaeologists believe the oldest of date to c. 600 BCE. These earthen mounds, sometimes notable only as remaining stone-circles or ancient, circular impressions around raised soil, are generally believed to be the evidence ...

  A Hard-hitting Intro to the Game Square in the right eye. That's where the pitch hit me. (I'm a lefty-batter; so, the right profile got the brunt.) Third-grade, maybe fourth-, I don't recall. What I do recall is crying a lot, then my softball coach telling me to lie down on the bench and hold a glass of iced tea on my throbbing eye. The only thing worse than the pain, was the humiliation: lying there like a weirdo with a glass of Nestea on my face. Sh...