Slugger's been having a fine old day of it today. What with the 132 comments on the new cross-border road thread (and counting of course), discussing such central issues as 'how my culture is threatened by road signs' and 'where are tourists when they're in a border town?', the place is a bundle of giggling toddlery joy.

And then there's some people's responses to Darren Graham's allegations of sectarian abuse while playing hurling for Fermanagh... I gave up just about at the point where someone had announced that 'no, you're really really bad.' So who knows? Maybe the thread emerged unstained by all the nonsense on the first few pages. I didn't stay to find out. While lots of people made sense, there's only so much creeping you want to do into a thicket of comments when some of them read like a colonic irrigation.

Still, what really made me blush with chest-bursting effervescence was the series of comments suggesting, essentially, that it's fine to call someone a Protestant cunt because - because - lots of people get called black cunts. Ah sure, isn't it only a spot of roughty-toughty gamesmanship?

Indeed, why don't we all hop onto the new road to Dublin so we can make monkey noises at Jason Sherlock or Seán Óg Ó hAilpín from the stands? All in the name of equal opportunities of course.

I'm off to Croke Park on Sunday to watch what - if the first match was anything to go by - will be a marvellous hurling replay between Cork and Waterford. I wouldn't for the life of me consider any other way to cap off what for me is set to be a very important weekend - more on that mid-month.

I'm constantly amazed at the degree to which the national game (rather too national for many people's comfort¹) continuously reflects Ireland's fluid, shifting society. And I am stunned at the capacity of people to give up their time to train when - everwhere else in industrialised world - voluntary activities are in decline.

But it's the people (not solely Ulster people by any means) who insist that every action - every signpost and every kick of a ball - is more than itself, it's these people that seem most foreign to me.

They are foreign because the state they are most happy in is very much a state of mind - one where the semiotics are facts and the facts mere semiotics.

1 I'm not all that impressed with Michael's rhetorical flourish here, but surely it's time the constitution of a sporting organisation sort of clarified that it's not our Marianne? (back)