SoManyThingz

Halloween is normally thought of as a time of ghosts and ghouls, banshees and fairies, and the night were the dead were once again among the living. For many Irish schoolchildren in times past, however, it was also a time when the strengthened connection between the world and the occult could help them see into the future (or at least pretend to).
Irish folklore is ripe with different games, charms and tricks so that a young Irish girl can use the power of Halloween night in order to find her husband. We’ve compiled some of our favorites below.
READ MORE: Top ten Irish traditions for Halloween (PHOTOS)
1. Groups of girls would put some lead in a tin box and put the box on small coals over the hearth to melt the lead. Taking an old key that had a big ring key holder, they would throw the box through the ring into a basin of cold water to cool down the lead again. It was said that “queer figures” would appear out of the lead and one girl would say to the other “that is the boy you are to marry.”

2. Three saucers were placed on a table - one containing water, one a ring and the third clay. A blindfold was placed on the person taking part and they would make their way back to the table trying to pick a saucer. If the saucer of water was the first they find, they would be sailing across the water to a new country before next Halloween. If they placed their hand on the saucer with the ring, they would be married before next Halloween, and if they placed their hand on the saucer with clay, they would be dead and buried within the next 12 months.

3. Every Halloween, a ring would be baked into a cake. Whoever came across the ring in their slice was said to be married in the next year.

4. A girl would stand at an open window with a spool of thread. She would throw the spool out the window keeping one end of the thread in her hand. Winding the thread back in the window, if any boy should pass by before she was done, he would be her future husband.

5. Another good way to apparently use thread as a marriage prediction device was to head to the limekiln after midnight on Halloween night and drop in a string of thread. It was believed that when you pulled out the thread again you would see the one you were going to marry.

6. Twenty six small pieces of paper with the letters of the alphabet written on them would be, dropped into a bucket of water and left overnight on Halloween. The morning after, the name of the person you would marry would be floating on the top of the water (so nobody with the same letter in their name more than once, apparently.)
7. If you placed a leaf under your pillow on Halloween night it was said that you would dream of the person you were set to marry.

8. Girls would peel the skin of a full apple and throw it over their heads. The way the peel would land on the floor would spell the initials of the one they were going to marry.

9. If a girl took the skin of a potato and hung it beside the fire on Halloween, the next man to walk through the door would be her husband. You’d want to hope it wasn’t your brother or your Dad!

10. One story tells that before finishing up the evening of fun, the group of girls would go out to the cabbage patch and each pick a head of cabbage. Any girl who picked a cabbage with a crooked stump would marry a man with a hump while any girl who picked a head with a straight stump would marry a tall, straight man.

READ MORE: The spookiest ancient Irish myths and legends surrounding Halloween
 This list was compiled using the digitized version of the Schools’ Collection, a collection of folklore and local history gathered by Irish school children between 1937 and 1938. You can search the Schools’ Collection and find out more information on the project at www.duchas.ie.

A group of Turkish shopkeepers get more than they bargained for when they take on a solitary Irish tourist. In an amazing show of sporting prowess and plucky determination, an Irish tourist was allegedly forced to take a break from enjoying his vacation to defend himself from a group of angry Turkish shopkeepers.
Taking on the group of men single-handedly, he holds his own, proving true the saying “You’ll never beat the Irish.”
The mass brawl began earlier this month in the Istanbul neighborhood of Aksaray when the man, described by Turkish media as an Irishman and an alleged “professional boxer,” accidentally knocked over a fridge filled with bottled water. In a severe over-reaction to the tourist's mistake, the shopkeeper proceeds to attack the man with a stick in punishment for his clumsy blunder and is joined by neighboring shopkeepers in his attack.
Not happy to take the abuse lying down, the man stands his ground, knocking a man straight to the ground at one point in the CCTV footage. Such is his enthusiasm to protect himself that he eventually has to be calmed down and led away once the shopkeepers accept defeat.
The alleged Irishman has become something of an unexpected hero in Turkey since the video was released on Tuesday. Not only has Irish fighter become the country’s ultimate underdog but he has become a surprising symbol of the division in Turkey between the progressive left and the conservative government.
Shopkeepers are generally supporters of the current government and were involved in attacks on protesters during an anti-government protest in 2013. Anti-government social media users have hailed the Irishman as one of their own for fighting them off.
This is one case where the stereotype of the fighting Irish comes out to help a man in need. Hasn’t Liam Neeson made enough "Taken" films by now to show the rest of the world that you should never mess with an Irishman, even if you do outnumber him ten to one?
* Originally published Aug 22 2015.

The laws of attraction in the modern world are quite simple on the surface. If you like someone and they like you back, you eventually get together and then try to figure out if you’re a good match long-term. If it works, you stay together – if it doesn’t, you get to meet other people and have as much fun as you want until you find someone. But what if it’s not as simple as that? Some scientists around the world are analyzing the minutiae of relationships in terms of attraction and they’re finding some really interesting and surprising things. For example, did you know that men who have a super hot son are markedly more appealing to women than those with ugly ones? Somewhere out there, Brad and Leo’s dads are having an awesome time. Check out the rest of the findings below and follow the link for the rest of the story.
Your Hips Could Play a Role in How Many People You Sleep With
A professor at the University of Leeds has come up with a potentially controversial hypothesis in women’s studies: that ladies with wider hips have more sexual partners that those who do not. The educator came to this finding after measuring a group of Leeds womens’ hip width — the distance between the upper edges of the iliac crest bones of the pelvis — as well as their hip circumference at the widest point, and combined that information with their sexual histories. He found that those who were less-curvy tended to only have sex when they were in relationships, as opposed to their wider-hipped friends, who also had more overall partners. In the following excerpt from the article, we explain how this phenomenon might have come to be:
Some anthropologists theorize that as humans learned to stand upright, they developed smaller hips to make walking easier, while female hips became just wide enough for childbirth. Narrow-hipped mothers-to-be run a higher risk of gynecological injury and death.
Men with Hot Sons Score More
A biologist at Trnava University in Slovakia authored a recent study that found men with handsome sons tend to appear more attractive to women. How come? It turns out that the way we perceive the attractiveness of a mate, even after the birth of a child, can influence everything from whether we stay together, have an affair, or even how many future children we produce with that partner. The study asked 260 female volunteers to rate the attractiveness of a series of men that were placed alongside photos of boys’ faces and were told the pair depicted was a real-life father and son, or a stepfather and son; in reality, none of the men and boys pictured were related. We explain what happened next, in this excerpt from the article:
On average, when a man was placed next to what participants believed was his handsome son, his own perceived attractiveness tended to rise, an effect even more pronounced among the unattractive men. The effect, however, disappeared when the man was identified as the stepfather of the boy, suggesting that the women may have been subconsciously adjusting their assessments based on a perceived genetic connection between the two individuals.
Women Love Men Who Are Kind to Their Sister’s Babies
It turns out that women also like guys who are good with kids, according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment. Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of social and cognitive psychology at the University of South Brittany, conducted his study by creating a situation where a male volunteer acted like a kind and devoted brother to a woman with a baby. Guéguen found that on average, women were three times more likely to give out their numbers when the male volunteer acted affectionately toward the baby. But there may be a limitation to how much women will appreciate baby lovers, as noted in the following excerpt from the article.
The study also doesn’t reflect the real-life trade-offs between financial stability and paternal qualities, said David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. For example, Guéguen could have determined how dressing the male volunteer in a suit affected the women’s ratings. “Women like nice paternal guys, but there comes a point where he needs to make a certain amount of money,” he said.
Women Are More Direct at Flirting
Science says both women and men are terrible at flirting, with a recent study finding that only 18 percent of women knew a man was flirting with them in a one-on-one situation and men only knowing a woman was flirting with them 36 percent of the time. That is low! So how is everyone getting together in the first place? Jeffrey Hall, the lead researcher and associate professor of communications at Kansas University, says that it might be because women are more transparent when it comes to showing interest in everyday situations.

The deaths of Daniel Christie and others were the last straw for the state government. Barry O’Farrell, the premier of the state of New South Wales, introduced hardline “one-punch laws” including mandatory minimum sentences for crimes, declaring, “The new measures are tough and I make no apologies for that.” Soon afterwards, he fled politics, harried by the scandal of undeclared donations from property developers. In his attempt to transform Kings Cross from a red-light district to a somewhat respectable nightlife entertainment center, lockout laws were instituted in February 2014. Among other restrictions, no one can enter a Kings Cross pub after 1:30 a.m., and last drinks are now called before 3 a.m.