Greetings from Dublin, Ireland where Woods will play tonight in the Temple Bar district.

I’m here for 48 hours and then head to Toulouse, France for five nights.

I’m staying at a small reasonably-priced hotel in the Ballsbridge part of town. Immediately in front of the hotel is a bus stop. When I took a long, hot shower this morning, the plume of steam coming from the bathroom set off the fire alarm which prompted a call from the front desk asking if I was ok.

Whenever you enter this hotel, the person working the desk asks if you would like coffee or tea.

I had an excellent meal at the nearby pub Searsons of Baggot St. on Monday night. The shepherd’s pie and side salad combo cost 14 euros. The pie was served in a bowl and it was as good as I’ve ever had this dish. Pints of Guinness were five euros a pop.

Newspapers in print form are in great abundance and of high quality. Sports journalism is taken very seriously with much of it coming from reporters who put their copy under a picture of their face and let the words flow in long-form style.

I arrived Dublin the morning after the country’s Gaelic football championship was settled. Kerry beat Donegal at Dublin’s Croke Park. Fans from both sides wore their team’s jerseys as I saw them head for home at Heuston train station Monday morning.

The broadest of broadsheets The Irish Times devoted the first four full pages of its sports section to what’s called the “All-Ireland football final.” I don’t have a grasp of the sport’s scoring system or rules but I enjoyed reading the colorful, opinionated prose. The large, serious-toned tabloid Irish Independent went twelve pages strong on Kerry’s victory and assigned rating points to each participant in the contest. The coverage was Super Bowl equivalent in its magnitude.

The daily newspaper covering European horse racing The Racing Post is available at almost all the stands here. Flat and jumper coverage in the regular daily newspapers is prominent.

While getting to England from here is at least a boat or plane ride away, Ireland’s newspapers devote great space to Premier League soccer. Man U’s weekend loss to Leicester and Lampard’s score for Man City against his old mates were the big talk here to start the week.

Bicycling is a very popular way to get around and the numbers of pedal-pushers out there is way more than NYC. Still, it appears as if bike riders in Dublin are vying for much the same pavement as vehicles. There are some protected lanes and paths but there is a definite free-for-all feel to it.

Public transit is great. The buses are double-decked and go everywhere at all times except real late at night. The two above-ground light rail lines are efficient and clean. I’ve taken them both – in both directions – using what’s called a “Leap Visitor” card which gives you unlimited rides for 72 hours at a cost of 19.5 euros. I’m gonna run out of time to use a DART train but that system appears comprehensive and is covered by the Leap card.

The pub scene is pretty incredible although it’s better if you can find ones not frequented by the guidebook crowd. I ended up in one in Ballsbridge last night that was kinda sleepy but had been in business for 150 plus years. The bartender wore a tie and I really enjoyed eavesdropping on regular day conversations with his patrons.

-Francesa’s unwavering insistence that the NFL is up to no good has created inevitable collisions with the sports establishment. To Mike’s credit, he stood nearly alone on the day TMZ released the inside-the-elevator tape by saying there was no way the NFL hadn’t already learned of its contents. Francesa is now ridiculing the notion of an NFL-commissioned “independent” investigation headed up by former FBI director Robert Mueller. He’s dead-on correct in saying that a probe paid for by the entity that’s the subject of the investigation cannot produce an outcome that will be respected regardless of the stature of the guy heading it up. This assertion put Jim Nantz in an awkward spot on Mike’s regular Sunday football program a couple days ago – just before I left town. Nantz is one of the top two or three television voices of the NFL and his career is tied deeply to the League. He wants to talk about the games when he goes on Mike’s show. Instead on this most recent appearance, Mike pulled him into a debate on the validity of the Mueller probe and it got genuinely heated. Both sides ended up looking bad when it was over. Mike hung up on his longtime friend abruptly while Nantz sheepishly adhered to the NFL party line. All of this of course is a net positive for the listener given both Mike’s willingness to call ’em as he sees ’em – and the day-to-day excitement over what you may end up hearing on his program.

Last week’s Zephyr Teachout freakout feels kinda hollow now that New York’s unshaken political establishment readies for a scare-free general election cycle.

Yeah, Zephyr put a bigger-than-expected 34-percent on the board. It’s the largest number by a challenger against an incumbent since NY gubernatorial primaries have been contested starting in 1970.

But hold on. Voter turnout was pathetic. Less than 10-percent of registered Democrats bothered to vote state-wide. For all the talk Teachout’s time-compressed but tireless and well-informed campaign lit a fire under progressive Democrats, it felt in the end to be kind of a depressing outcome given the huge number of no-shows.

When more than 9 in 10 of eligible party voters stay away from the polls, it’s difficult to get too excited about Teachout’s impressive slice being a true repudiation of a sitting governor under investigation by the US government.

If you look at totals by county, Teachout got creamed in the outer boroughs where you’d expect young, Facebook-using liberals would have an impact. Take Brooklyn, for example:

Cuomo – 69,110 (67.8 %)
Teachout – 26,037 (28.5 %)

The split was even more extreme in favor of Cuomo in Queens and The Bronx.

Teachout racked up a nice majority in Albany and did very well in several counties where the threat of gas extraction via hydraulic fracturing has created large numbers of activist single-issue voters.

But really, it’s now clear why Cuomo never mounted a campaign – even when Teachout gained steam in the couple weeks prior to the primary. He knew the machine would deliver X number of filled circles in the city while dead state-wide turnout would keep his opponent’s best-case scenario flat and low. Cuomo somehow locked up de Blasio and the unions with real pull and hid out for the ride out. It was strategically smart to duck the debate NY1 was seeking. Cuomo’s only minor campaign blunder was before he even knew Teachout was for real. He enlisted Kathy Hochul as his Lieutenant Governor running mate. Hochul’s voting record in Congress during her lone term before being ousted leaned the way of her conservative upstate district. In the end, though, people who voted for Cuomo voted for Hochul and there was not the split ballot scenario some had predicted when Teachout’s running mate Tim Wu won the endorsement of the NY Times.

De Blaz definitely tarnished his credentials for publicly lining up with Cuomo/Hochul. He turned his back on many of the same liberals who did heavy lifting during his improbable rise a year ago. But neither Cuomo or de Blaz will pay too badly given the net yawn heard from all the no-shows.

It’s all so rigged. Neither my state senator – nor my state assemblyman – faced opposition in the primary. Both will walk into fresh terms without even token resistance. Same goes for my congressman. Challengers don’t step forward because they know they can’t win. Teachout took a shot and ran a great issues-oriented campaign. But she got trounced. And she was largely ignored by the same people who perpetually complain about the state of politics but then don’t bother to lay down the one good card they have.

-Ian Frazier’s bio blurb in the front pages of the 9-8-14 New Yorker magazine included an exciting disclosure about his forthcoming book project. It’ll be about the now-shuttered Stella D’oro cookie bakery in the Bronx which symbolizes corporate America’s relentless effort to rid its workplaces of organized labor. Frazier wrote a story for the New Yorker on the subject and has made it the framework of a book you’d expect to see in the coming months. Frazier’s exhaustively researched piece about heroin use on Staten Island in the New Yorker two weeks ago again served as a reminder that tackling a tough story is best left to people who can effectively find, relate and listen to sources who in many cases only speak freely to those with a rare kind of credibility earned through persistent effort to understand realms many reporters will never grasp because of how they live.

-I’m disappointed Gus Johnson and Fox Sports have agreed together to give up on Gus as the primary US play-by-play voice of the 2018 World Cup. Johnson’s departure from what had been a promising start to an exciting progression to a mountain-top assignment has been explained by him to be an effort to relieve an overload of personal responsibilities That’s cool, if that’s the case, but it’s unfortunate to note Gus wasn’t embraced by hardcore members of the American soccer television audience. To those critics I can only say: You win. You’ll likely get a British voice on the mike now. I would hope this was all Gus’ call. If not, it’s too bad because he would have been great.