See latest issue: i.e. the issue prior to March '87. Triad was written on a weekend in mid-March 1987.
Midsummer 1631: This refers to the sack of Baltimore, Midsummer 1631, when many of the O'Driscoll families were slaughtered or abducted by Algerian invaders who seemed to have gone to Ireland precisely for that purpose. One esoteric historian suggests that the reason for the slaughter had to do with bloodlines (see Atlantis Again: The Story of a Family, edd. Elizabeth Elliott, Arthur Ontario, 1993).
Coppinger: The name of the family who, after the sixteenth-century English invasions, dispossessed the O'Driscolls of their ancestral lands in County Cork Ireland.
Davis on his Deathbed: The Sack of Baltimore, delineating the tragedy of the seventeenth-century slaughter, was written by Young Irelander Thomas Davis on his deathbed in 1845. The last two lines of Davis's poem are given at the end of the stanza.
If only I had a filing cabinet:The line is from Francis Wamer's Maquettes which Professor O'Driscoll brought to Toronto from the Edinburgh Festival in 1970 and put on at Hart House as a tribute to Jewish financier and Art Gallery of Ontario patron Sam Zachs.
Sheila's Storm: In Newfoundland folklore, the storm that usually rages on the eve of St. Patrick's Day.
a sheilanagig: ancient carvings on churches and stone constructions of a woman exposing her genital organs, stretching the exposure with both hands.
The thirteenth cone: This is the cone, in W.B. Yeats's symbols, where the unique or unexpected interveners. Vico, Spengler and Yeats saw the movement of history in terms of two-thousand-year cycles. We are now on the threshold of a new cycle, an age of individuality and self-realization, but the actual transition point: is a dangerous one and full of false prophets.
geasa: a rather intricate ancient Irish ritual, but roughly it is the Celtic equivalent of Polynesian 'tabu'.
