Quote Originally Posted by geomick View Post
I can't wear a kilt at work (dress code restrictions on employees who work in the labs prohibit anything that short) but did wear my semi-trad Murphy kilt to Irish Fest of the Fox Cities (Appleton WI) on Friday.
Appleton! I'll bore you with 3 personal memories.


  1. I grew up in Iron Mountain, MI. When I was getting ready to go away to college in CT, the school sent out a list of all the incoming freshmen. When I met one of my classmates (from VA) during freshmen week, he told me he had to look at a map just because of the name. When my proud Scot dad retired as the parish priest in Iron Mountain, his replacement was that SAME Trinity College freshman.
  2. I've been to one NFL football game in my life. Home from college for XMAS; 2°F at Lambeau, but bright sun and everyone well lubricated with Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Bart Starr threw 4 TDs. In my early 30s, as a nephrologist practicing in Santa Rosa, CA, one early January day I was working in tandem with an intensivist in the ICU of the local hospital on a lady trying very hard to die while the Pack and the Niners were vying for the NFC title. We'd glance at the TV from time to time, but I missed the event that set all the staff to cheering (field goal, last few seconds, sealed the win for the 49ers). I asked "what just happened?" and a nurse said "we WON!" I replied, "that means WE lost!" "Why is that?" asked the intensivist. I replied that if you were at Lambeau for a game, and afterwards you got in your car and headed straight north for 100 miles, that's where I grew up." "Where was THAT?" the intensivist replied. "Iron Mountain, MI" I replied. We'd known each other for a decade by then, but his next response just blew me away. "You know, I lived there; in fact, I was BORN there. Turns out we'd been born in the same hospital just a few months apart, but his family was military, so he'd urbanized somewhere else as an infant.
  3. Iron Mountain was (still is) directly on the border with Wisconsin. Back then, it was just as illegal to sell yellow margarine in Wisconsin as it is to sell heroin today. People would cross the border to buy it in Michigan, because all you could get in WI was a blob of disgusting-looking white fat and a separate envelope of yellow food dye.