Happy Bloomsday

Mike Miliard in the Boston Pheonix:

Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off:


— Rathgar and Terenure!
— Come on, Sandymount Green!
Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.
— Start, Palmerston park!

Just about this time of day, 105 years ago, Leopold Bloom, the fictional ad-salesman antihero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, heard those words as he was stopping into the offices Weekly Freeman and National Press, the next stop on his day’s perambulations around “Dear Dirty Dublin.”
Why should you care?