Thank you, Sherlock Holmes!

Some new great search terms by which people have found my blog:

“dolphins eating plastic”

“livestock in iran”

“howdodeers”

“old chinese american men”

“what fish do turtles not eat”

“pic of a deer eating a person” (four separate searches for this)

I have also got a lot of visitors searching for various terms I used in my Xinjiang riots post: “uighurs,” “Kashgar,” etc., and, strangely, “Kashgar dentist,” “Kashgar dentiset,” and “Kashgar dentisti.” I just hope that these searchers are not actually in need of a dentist in Kashgar.

Someone got here searching for “interning at nichibei times.”

I was a little frightened to return to my blog after so much time away. I wrote a few things in the fall – one of which I have now posted and more of which are yet to come – but I just didn’t have the energy to edit and post them. As my numbers of viewers understandably declined further and further, I stopped checking.

So I was surprised to see that although the decline continued through November, the numbers experienced a seemingly random increase toward the end of December and especially through January. At first I thought maybe it was due to the simple fact that my blog has been around for more time to be clicked, leading Google to rank it higher. But I also noticed that, in addition to the wonderful search terms cited above, more people have been getting here via searches – on Google and elsewhere – for “Whack follol de rah,” both with and without the exclamation point at the end. 46 of the 78 searches for the phrase without the exclamation point have been in the past 30 days.  (My blog is the second result that comes up for the term on google, after an Irish translation forum.) Others have come here by searching “follol,” “whack follol de rah meaning,” “follol de rah,” “whack de la de rah,” and other variants.

It would have been strange, especially since I hadn’t been posting for so long, if people were searching for my blog by name. It seemed near impossible that that so many people would have thought to look up the phrase after hearing the song from which it comes, “The Rocky Road to Dublin” (as much as I would like to think that Irish music is taking over the world). When was the last time I heard Irish folk music in pop culture, I thought, and that song in particular?

The Dubliners, the group who does the best-known version of "The Rocky Road to Dublin." Adorable, no?

Then I realized that I must have Sherlock Holmes to thank. I was thrilled when I recognized the jaunty, fiery “Rocky Road to Dublin” in the background of the movie’s boxing scene, and I probably annoyed my friends by hopping up and down in my seat as the Dubliners vocally accompanied Holmes in taking out the other fighter. (This was not the only fight scene where they played Irish music, I am happy to say!)

Not sure what this has to do with the rocky road to Dublin, but that's ok...

It wasn’t a movie I felt I should like. Apparently, it has a lame plot, though this is less apparent if one never reads mysteries and gets closest to the genre by watching House.  But good old-fashioned swashbuckling, however inappropriate for the Holmes stories, as well as repartee, always appeals to me. I saw the movie twice, once in California, once in Oxford (two tickets for the price of one with my phone service here!), and appreciated it both times.

Then I appreciated it again when I realized it was bringing me blog visitors. I also noticed, while doing research for this post, that google’s fifth autocomplete result for “irish song” is “irish song in Sherlock Holmes.” This post is dedicated to those searching for that song, and those searching for “whack follol de rah,” so that their quest may not be in vain:

Whack follol de rah is a set of nonsense syllables, which are common in Irish music. A more flavorful version of “fa la la.” In The Boondock Saints, which I watched recently, when detective Greenly explains the deaths of two Russians, who he thinks were Irishmen celebrating St. Patrick’s Day: “So these guys are stumbling through the alley. ‘Too ra loo ra loo ra!’ This guy takes a blunt object, fuckin’ WAAH! Hits the guy with the bandages around his head,” he’s referring to another, much less fun and more recent song, “An Irish Lullaby.”

I picked “Whack follol de rah” as the name of my blog because, although it’s doesn’t literally mean anything, it expresses quirky, spicy joy in what I think of as super-verbal rather than sub-verbal fashion. In “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” a song about a nineteenth century man’s adventures as he travels from Tuam to Liverpool via Dublin, the nonsense syllables seem to burst out to express some sort of undefinable triumphant intensity of living.

And for the song itself, I can’t resist: Behold! The Orthodox Celts, Serbia‘s most famous Irish music group:

They’re actually quite good, aren’t they? The words are hard enough for native speakers. I particularly like the way he sings “bundle it was stole.” The Orthodox Celts have apparently inspired a younger generation of Serbian Irish groups, including Tir na n’Og and Irish Stew of Sindidun. I would almost say these groups are trying harder than the Irish to be Irish, but then again, Dubliners isn’t so subtle a name either.

Explore posts in the same categories: internet sociology, movies, music

Tags: blogging, Boondock Saints, Dubliners, Irish music, movies, music, Orthodox Celts, Rocky Road to Dublin, searches, Sherlock Holmes, swashbuckling, Whack follol de rah

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