red mum

I HAVE had most of this post written for over a week now listing the top pages on the site during 2007. I had hoped to do a bit more work to it, but not having the internet at home has put paid to that so I am just going to put it up now as is.

A quick trawl through Google analytics has shown me the top ten pages here during 2007.

1. Red Mum homepage
2. Podge and Rodge classic quotes
3. Post your secret to Twenty
4. Talking Pictures
5. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
6. World School Photos
7. Yet another Moo card use – moofobs
8. Leinster ladies are not bruisers
9. Where are the mini-pops now
10. Is your child an emo?

The top posts of posts actually written during 2007 are:

1. Stomach bug anyone?
2. Rainy Days
3. Happy International Womens’ Day
4. Gizzajob
5. Great Irish Women part 4 – Mary Field Rosse
6. Let Sleeping teens lie
7. Great Irish Women part 3 – Susan Jocelyn Bell
8. Discover Ireland – all these highs and lows
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. Moving on – a big rant

Other honourable mentions (well I consider them honourable) are the Junior Cert entries, Grumpy Old Women and the Belfast Flickr Meet up.

The top 10 referring sites to here are:

1. Google images
2. irishblogs.ie
3. Awards.ie
4. Twenty Major
5. Beaut.ie
6. Mulley.net
7. Google.com
8. Slugger O’Toole
9. Blogger.com
10. Dublin Blog.ie

Coming up close behind are Arse end of Ireland, Flickr, Bloglines, Sinead Gleeson, Jason Roe and Gingerpixel. Many thanks to you all, I hope this site has reciprocated in some way back.

The top key words are nothing out of the ordinary as in they are keywords you would expect.
1. Red Mum
2. Podge and Rodge
3. bebo names
4. Overheard in Dublin
5. The boy in the striped pyjamas
6. Guilty Pleasures
7. Stomach bug
8. Emo phrases
9. Post your secret
10. Regulation knickers

There were also some other strange searches, aren’t there always, such as “Red Mum – what does she look like?” or “Who is Red Mum?”, “teenagers who lie” and loads more, some 25,000 of them so there is no way I can get through them all.

I also had a fun year with photography. You may have seen some of these before but here is a month by month round up of some of the images I took last year.

January – Rainy day on Baggot Street

February – Shots taken during filming of Capital D feature on Dublin bloggers.

March – Lots and lots of photo ops during March

April – Full moon and chimney pots

May – Dogs, shoes and little feet, oh yeah and elections…

June – Into the West and rest and rain

July – Jesus loves, more elections and strange sights

August – Turkey lots and lots of Turkey

September – Flickr meet

October – Free Burma and commuting

November – Rain

December – Far too much

The next installment of Great Irish Women features Susan Jocelyn Bell, who was born in Belfast in July 1943 and was the first person to discover pulsars.

Susan Jocelyn Bell among the antennae

Her interest in astronomy was massively influenced by her father and his library of books on the subject. He was an architect who designed Armagh Observatory. Despite failing the Northern Irish equivalent of the 11+ she continued her studies in a Quaker Boarding School in England where she discovered a love for physics.

She later attended university in Glasgow and then Cambridge where she made her groundbreaking pulsar discovery.

In 1967 while at Cambridge under Anthony Hewish she assisted in constructing a radio telescope to track quazars. Her role was to operate the telescope and analyse the charts produced by the telescope. During this analysis she noted unusual data or scruffs on the chart recorder data.

Scruff

She ruled out interference from the ground and the signals were initially called LGM or little green men. It was later identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star and named them pulsars, for PULsating radio stARS.

This discovery led to a 1974 Nobel prize in the newly introduced Astronomy prize for her supervisor Anthony Hewish and a controversy over her exclusion in the prize.

According to Ken Howard who writes in Physics for all mind-sets where she points out that science is seen as more collaborative, and shared Nobel prizes are more common.

During an after dinner speech in 1977 she spoke of not being included in the prize:

“It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this:

“First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them.

“Finally, I am not myself upset about it –after all, I am in good company, am I not!”

Despite not getting the recognition she deserves (in my non-scientific opinion) by the Nobel Prize she has totted up more than enough prestigious awards such as the J.R. Oppenheimer Prize, the Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute, the Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society for “especially innovative research” and the Royal Astronomical Society’s Herschel Medal.

Speaking to Starchild website, Nasa, on the question of whether astronomy is more inviting for women today in comparison to 30 years ago she said:

“Yes, I believe it is and I believe it’s getting better all the time. We are becoming more conscious of the differences between men and women, the different ways they work, and the contribution of women is becoming more and more recognized. It’s still got a bit to go, but it’s coming along very nicely.”

Now retired Susan has held senior posts with the Open University, the University of Bath, the Royal Astronomical Society, Oxford University and Princeton University.

Talking to students

“I was 24 when we discovered pulsars. It made a very dramatic end to my doctoral studies. I get cross when people say ‘What are you going to discover next?’ Very few people make that kind of discovery.”

Sources: Here, here, here, here and here.

Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs Great Irish Women Susan Jocelyn Bell Astronomy pulsars

JUST IN case I don’t get around to it next week, which is probably a more apt time, here’s my top lists concerning this blog over the last year. (Maybe next week I will make a blogging new year resolution list as in 1. write those posts I plan and never get around to. etc etc.)

The largest amount of visitors was on February 27 followed by November 1st, the first concerns the Dublin Riots and I don‘t know why the surge on November 1st.

The top content over the last year here at Red Mum (I haven’t included top contents if it was written during 2005 including Leinster Ladies which stands as the second most popular hit during 2006):

1. Podge and Rodge
2. Me No to Bebo
3. Moo Cards
4. Sinister Threats on Bebo
5. Grrrr Metro
6. Dublin Riots
7. Moofob
8. Love Ulster Top Tag
9. The only thing dark about them is their clothing
10. Is your child an Emo?

The top 20 keywords reflects the list above:

1. Podge and Rodge
2. Podge Rodge quotes
3. Redmum
4. Podge and Rodge quotes
5. Leinster women
6. Bebo names
7. Red Mum
8. Red+Mum
9. Overheard in Dublin
10. Dublin riots
11. Bebo
12. Leinster rugby calendar
13. Leinster ladies rugby calendar
14. Regulation knickers
15. Leinster Ladies rugby
16. Leinster Ladies calender
17. Mini pops
18. You’ve been tangoed
19. 18 teens
20. Hemel Hemstead fire

The top referring sources were:

1. Google
2. Direct
3. Irishblogs.ie
4. Google images search
5. Yahoo
6. Lifes a bastard
7. search
8. Flickr.com
9. Blogger.com
10. Technorati.com
11. Slugger O’Toole
12. Moo
13. Aol
14. Google images
15. Awards.ie
16. Bloglines.com
17. Sinead Gleeson
18. United Irelander
19. MSN
20. Emma in Canada

The top 10 countries were:

1. Ireland
2. UK
3. US
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Germany
7. France
8. Spain
9. New Zealand
10. Netherlands

Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs blog+roundup

Lady Icarus – Lady Sophie Mary Heath (1896-1939)

Considering United Irelander’s (asinine) comments on the last post I feel the next paragraph or two I am going to write would be blatantly obvious to most of us, but apparently it needs explaining to others. In many cases women’s achievements have been passed over because a male-dominated society has not deemed them as important as male achievements.

We should also ask the question ‘who writes the history books? Who documented events, who were the reporters? Who were the decision makers. What about the fact that women were not allowed to do what many men took for granted. So for those women who did rise above the parapet of a male-dominated society their achievements are all the greater because of the multitude of barriers placed in their path which their strong spirits still shone above. Barriers those great men never had to contemplate.

I am not writing a paper on woman’s struggle to be treated equally because I have done enough arguing over the years with people who do not hold my views to realise that some people are so bound in their ignorance they are not for swaying. Well neither am I in this. To paraphrase and rewrite some of one of United Irelander’s commentators Irishwomen are not rubbish just because a blogger’s straw poll threw up few women.

Consider that even on a basic level some of our great Irishmen have been great because they have had a great Irishwoman behind them whether their lover, wife, sister, mother or daughter.

On another level it is not just about recognition of fabulous feats of some people, in many instances in Irish life and in the not too distant past the fact that mothers were at the very core base of society insuring food was on the table and clothes on people’s backs. Without that strong matriarchal presence many people, men and women, would not have achieved a fraction of what they have.

Right with that out of the way, let me introduce Lady Sophie Mary Heath or Lady Icarus as she was also known.

Lady Sophie Mary Heath arriving Croydon, UK from Capetown, 1928

Born in Knockaderry in County Limerick in 1896, Lady Mary Heath was one of the most famous women in the world in the 1920s. She became the first person, not just the first woman, to fly a small open cockpit plane from Cape Town to London starting in January and finishing in May 1928.

Born Sophie Peirce Evans, her early life had a traumatic beginning after her father murdered her mother.

Her epic trip from Cape Town to London was made with a Bible, a shotgun, a couple of tennis rackets, six teagowns and a fur coat, in a time when men flew with boiled eggs and ham sandwiches. She was the first woman to make a parachute jump, and was the holder of two altitude records for light airplanes.

She cut her aviation wings during the First World War when she spent two years as a dispatch rider in England and France where Sir John Lavery painted her portrait where she was dressed in the uniform of an air force driver.

A graduate of Science from the University of Dublin she moved to London in 1922 but before she did she took up athletics and had competed in events all over Ireland and even set an unverified world record in the High Jump in Galway.

When she moved to London she was a founding member of the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association and was a delegate to the International Olympic Council in 1925. She won the first ever British javelin title and travelled with British teams to Sweden and France several times helping to introduce women’s track and field to the Olympics.

However it is her pioneering interest and passion for aviation that she is better known having qualified for a private or ‘A’ license but a woman’s right to earn a commercial license to earn a commercial or ‘B’ license was revoked by the International Commission for Air Navagation in 1924.

Lady Heath fought this ban and the commission ruled that if she attended flight school and passed she would be granted a commercial license. She did and the ban was revoked.

A regular visitor to her aunt she is said to have landed her plane on every flat field in Ireland and is said to have taken many locals from Ballybunion for short trips in her plane for a small fee.

She was badly injured in a crash just before the Cleveland, Ohio, National Air Races in 1929 and returned to Dublin with her third husband in the 1930s. She died destitute in 1939 in London after falling from a tram car.

On flying she said: “a woman can fly across Africa wearing a Parision frock and keeping her nose powdered all the way”. My kind of woman.

A biography of her life is available written by Lindie Naughton, you can read Lindie’s blog here. Other sources from this post come from here, here and here.

Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs Great Irish Women aviation aviation pioneers olympian pioneers

TO COUNTER and compliment United Irelanders top Irish people which featured few Irish women (for shame) I thought I would do an ongoing series of great Irish women. Hopefully I can feature some women you have never heard of but should have and I am open to suggestions of women you think I should include in the series.

First up is the Angel of Tombstone Nellie Cashman. Nellie was born in Midleton, County Cork in the 1840s before emigrating to the United States in the 1860s. It is believed she worked as a bellhop in a prominent Boston Hotel before being urged by General Ulysses S.Grant to go West.

She set out to San Francisco in 1869 where she became a cook in various mining camps. Money she saved from these jobs enabled her to open the Miner’s Boarding House in Nevada in 1872. She joined some miners heading to the Cassiar gold strike in northern British Columbia and gained her reputation as the Angel of Tombstone by organising and taking part in a rescue of 100 miners by completing a 77-day journey through horrendous weather carrying 1,500 pounds of supplies and medicines.

There are many more amazing things about Nellie, her generosity of spirit for one but for me it was her journey to the Klondike gold rush in 1898 which is absolutely awe-inspiring. Bear in mind 100,000 people made the trek to the Klondike, half of which never made it. During that time she became famous as one of the great figures of the gold rush and was renowned by miners and mine owners.

Even into old age Nellie was still prospecting at the Artic circle and mushing her huskies well into her seventies. “Last week I came over the mountains on a fast dog train and the sled only turned over once. I had a little roll in the snow, but I am travelling light and feeling fine after the long trip. I’m still a long way from the cushion rocker stage. Those prospectors up north need me, and that is the country I expect to live out the rest of my days”.

When asked by a reporter why she never married she said: “Why child, I haven’t had time for marriage. Men are a nuisance anyhow, now aren’t they? They’re just boys grown up.”

Sources here, here and here.

EDIT: December 8 to include Wikipedia page.

Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs klondike Great Irish Women