Copra is dried coconut meat. “He don’t know Irium / From copra,” then, suggests that this lama can’t tell a newfangled teeth-cleaning product from simple food (maybe a food he eats and needs to clean from his teeth?).

Wikipedia explains:

[The toothpaste Pepsodent] was advertised for its purported properties fighting tooth decay, attributed in advertisements to the supposed ingredient Irium. Irium is another word for sodium lauryl sulfate, an inexpensive ionic surfactant. However, in a 1994 speech, then-FCC chairman Reed Hundt claimed that the “Irium” mentioned in Pepsodent advertisements “didn’t exist.”

A nice comedown from the heated language of the stanza before. The lover’s return wouldn’t work miracles, but the poet “guess[es]” that it would at least shake him out of his depressive funk.

The poet mocks himself, frustrated that all his “talent / for poetry” can’t charm, please, or win back the departed lover. What use is his writing if it can’t communicate in the way he wants it to?

A strangely unsupported statement. Were literature, history, philosophy, etc. not as necessary during the Civil Rights era? The Civil War era? Weren’t the humanities (Englihtenment philosophy, etc.) pretty much essential to the American Revolution and the founding of the country?

The idea that the present is uniquely disastrous forms the basis for a lot of editorials, but few editorialists go to the trouble of actually proving it.

ASVAB stands for Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

According to About.com:

The ASVAB has two primary purposes: First, it determines whether you have the mental aptitude to enlist in the military branch of your choice, and second, the results help the service(s) determine which military job(s) you have the mental aptitude for.

A cuckquean is the female version of a cuckold; i.e., a wife whose husband cheats on her.

Prediction: the hacking of automotive control systems will become a staple of action movie plots. To hell with the old “cutting brake lines.”

Current automated systems have already been demonstrated to be hackable. Cruise control, navigation systems, automated locks, automated ignitions. These are all very basic hacks, but the fact is that where there is a technology there is a hacker waiting to crack it.

Carnlough is a small village in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

Here’s a bit o' the harbour.