Maybe the parents quietly whispered, “Please take this thing away from my children.”
A gift only grandparents could give.
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When I was a kid, we didn’t need plastic guns in order to make fart noises.
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Well, there was a US Senator who thought that the British Army patrolled Dublin. In the 1990s.
It would be much better for all concerned if Ireland left the EU (along with the North) and became a State of the US. It would also mean that a number of US companies would have to move or start paying taxes, so it would be a win-win.
Except, of course, for kids with fart guns.
I’m going to go out on a limb to be generous and suggest this is symptomatic of the fact that most people (including 90% of Brits) can only name two Irish cities, Belfast and Dublin, and not infrequently get the two confused.
(Brits of my generation are less likely to make this mistake, but only because for us Belfast = old news footage of troop carriers patrolling streets littered with concrete and barbed wire and Dublin = stag nights.)
I suspect that the thing the Irish really, really cannot bear is that despite all the jumping up and down, the bombs, the threats and the UN posturing, they are really a very small country which most people know little about. Their governments share with the Soviet Union the distinction that they had a habit of banning their greatest writers, they share with the most backward parts of the world their attitude to contraception and abortion, and their levels of corruption compare with the worst of the developing world. They are one of the countries that the younger generation tries to escape from rather than live in.
tl;dr Ireland would be a lovely place if it weren’t for their politicians and “community leaders”.
They search you after you have checked in your main luggage. Why can’t they have a suitcase for all the multitools with a blade you forgot about, bottles of liquids a bit over the minimum size, and toys with some reference to a weapon in them? That way, the stuff you forgot can be taken on board, and can be recovered at the other end of the flight, unless it is obviously dangerous.
If I wanted to take a gun onto an aircraft, I would now hide it within a “Despicable Me Fart Blaster”. Mwuhaha.
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Finally - an example of the TSA looking out for the wellbeing of air travelers!
(Seriously what kind of sadist parents would allow their child to take something like that on a plane, do they really, really hate other people?)
Ireland isn’t in the UK, so it would be unusual.
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I work for an Irish company. Got friends there.
I for one would be irked if I’d suddenly have to work for an American company, and deal with the proverbial US customs/immigration annoyance at every visit.
I have to vote against.
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I was being ironic, sorry if it didn’t come over.
I once heard this story; there was a demo in London about getting the British out of Northern Ireland, and a speaker was saying that the answer was for the British to hand over security in NI to the US. Whereupon a heckler announced “Well, I’ve been in the US Army and I can tell you, if we had to take over the first thing we’d do is bomb Crossmaglen (IRA stronghold) back to the Stone Age.”
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Oh, good ol’ Crossmaglen…
See also “Fighting Men from Crossmaglen”, and others.
…I have a weak spot for this kind of music/culture.
Don’t piss off Paddies.
I don’t think bombing that place - a typical American response to any such problem - would work. Irishmen are skilled in asymmetric approaches since when the Brits started walking over them. Asymmetric warfare is great against centralized, entrenched empires.
Ask the Vietnamese about this. The point was that the Irish tend to have a bit of a positive fantasy about the US, and a bit of the reverse about the English. But what do we know? We reduced the Northern Irish conflict to a low level irritation (with the help of Clinton, let’s not forget), while Netanyahu thinks the answer to the problems of Israel is to pour oil on them and call in the flamethrowers.
If you put Netanyahu and the late unlamented Ian Paisley in the same room with the sound off you would find it hard to tell them apart. The principal difference is that when the NI protestants went to the US they become the Hillbillies (Billy being a reference to King William) and a national joke, while the Jews are responsible for a lot of what civilisation the US has. On such little accidents is history founded. It’s a bit like the old joke about the congregation in Tel Aviv cursing Moses: “If he’d just turned left instead of right, we’d have the oil and they’d have the oranges.”
As a result for political success in the US it helps still to have Southern Irish ancestry, and almost all the Supremes are either Catholic or Jewish.
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Look, parents with kids:
Have some common sense with the toys you allow your kids to bring. Jesus christ on a cross and all the apostles- toys that make noise should not be on the list. Think: drawing. Books. Headphones/tablets. Soft squishy things. Hell, lego (if you’re masochistic enough to do that to yourself…).
Just think it through, people.
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…way too easy to misread the title as confiscating an old fart’s gun.
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Not unlamented, bizarrely, by Martin McGuinness.
Makes sense, former encourager of terrorism gets on well with former encourager of terrorism. They could both point at one another and say “See, the other side does exactly the same thing”.
Don’t give the game away!
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It’s generally a source of bemusement. I can still remember tourists showing great concern about being safe in Dublin when a bomb went off in Belfast.
Though assuming Ireland is part of the UK is frequently grounds for war.
And this is definitely the “don’t get me started” territory. Our government have handed some lucrative contracts for the hugely unpopular drive to charge for water over to a company owned by a man who has actually been found to have bribed a minister to get one of the first mobile phone contracts back in the 90s. (The tribunal which discovered this forwarded a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who has sat on it for years).
Though to be fair, we’re getting much better on the contraception front. The morning after pill can generally be bought over the counter now(though there are religous exemptions), which was the last big sticking point.
And I’m a pro-choice activist here, so I could probably talk your ear off about Abortion issues…
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“Any fool can make a rule and any fool will mind it” - Thoreau.
Also, the Irish are annoying enough. There is no need for any of them to own such a thing as a “fart gun”.
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Cork and derry/londonderry.
