This Irish Life

I come to work and pass through the M50 Toll Bridge.  I got an easy pass gadget for my car to allow me to pass through without having to look for change.  There is a dedicated lane for cars that have the easy pass gadget and my understanding is that any car that use this gadget should be able to pass through without having to stop and should, in theory, be able to ‘beat the queue’

I’ve noticed that the queues in the easy pass lane are now usually as long, if not longer, than the queues on the other lanes and the barrier on the easy pass lane is always down, when most of the other lanes the barriers are usually up.

I know that the easy pass gadget works in any lane, I just don’t know why the lane that is dedicated moves at a slower pace.

Another thing that bothers me about this are cars that use the lane that don’t have the gadget and the attitude of the people who run the bridge to those cars.

If a car arrives to the barrier and doesn’t have a gadget the barrier won’t rise.  A queue will form and it would appear that the attitude of the people inside the toll booth is to let the car sit there and take a horn beating from other cars.  Why do the booth operators do this?  Why not just open the window, take the cash and tell the driver not to do it again or get a gadget.  Why slow everyone down just to make a driver feel uncomfortable?

Why would someone pull into a lane without a gadget?  Well its not as clear cut as that.  They may have a gadget but it may not work properly.  They might be a tourist, they might have taken the gadget out of the car etc. etc. 

If you’re reading this and thinking I’d never do such a thing, you might be suffering fundamental attribution error syndrome.

As I drove work this morning in my 1.9 Turbo Diesel German engineered car I listened with interest to Morning Ireland on RTE radio one as I do each morning to catch the news headlines. The section ‘it says in the papers’ was on and Caroline Murphy was talking about the usual things in the broadsheets and the rags. She mentioned that Easons may include a section called ‘Painful Lives’ for books by people, z-lists celebrities mostly, who are writing books about their shitty lives. Waterstone’s have already created this section.

What is wrong with these people? Is there nothing they won’t do for cash and attention? They think they have it hard? Let me tell you something about MY painful life.

1. I have only four bedrooms in my detached house. How do you think that makes me feel when five friends / couples might want to stay over? Terrible, that’s how.

2. 8Mb. That’s how fast my broadband connection to my four bed-roomed house is. How painful is that. Knowing that I have to wait one or two seconds for a page to load. Oh sure its contention free, but I’m sure it could be MORE contention free. When will I be free of this pain?

3. My Apple MacBook Pro is one year old. And as far as anyone is concerned that too old. How can I be seen with something so outdated. Its like a computer from the last century or something. its probably not even year Y2K compliant. I’m sure that my laptop will be hit by the Y2K bug. How can I show my face outside?

4. My German Turbo Diesel engine is only 1.9. The shame I feel every day knowing that its not 2.5 or 3.0 or even a hummer. Why must I be forsaken? Why can’t I have a hummer? You tell me? Why is life so hard?

5. I only get to work from home up to two days a week. Enough said about that.

6. Only one room in my house is en suite. Tears are rolling down my face, as I’m sure they are yours as you read about my painful life.

So I’m sure that my life is far more painful than Kerry, Posh, Brian, Jordon etc. They’ll never understand the pain that I feel when I have to listen their stories mentioned on the radio or Sky news. That’s a pain that just won’t go away.

TV bounty hunter Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman has been axed from TV due to a Race Rant in a private conversation.

Fishbowl NY runs a partial transcript from the tape, where Chapman asks the film crew to not record the girlfriend:

“I don’t care if she’s a Mexican, a whore, whatever. It’s not because she’s black, it’s because we use the word n- - - - - sometimes here [...] “I’m not going to take a chance ever in life of losing everything I’ve worked for, for 30 years, because some f- - -ing n- - - - - heard us saying n- - - - -. [...] It’s that we use the word n- - - -. We don’t mean, ‘You f- - -ing scum n- - - - - without a soul… We don’t mean that s- - -, but America would think we mean that.”

 Neuronal circuits, that’s the brian wiring to you and me, can now be seen in a multicolour ‘brainbow’.

Next stage an idiots guide to brain circuitry!

This story appeared in this months Nature.  Worth checking out…here.

Andrea found this and described it as my mornings with the the Count.

Radiohead have offered their new album ‘INRAINBOWS’ at a ‘pay-what-you-want’ price on their website.  They are not officially signed to any company so they can do this.  You can purchase the album from 0-100 GBP.  I chatted with a colleague about this sort of thing some time ago.  The colleague mentioned that if the music industry or film industry offered materials for people to download that a price that didn’t leave the consumer feeling ripped off then they wouldn’t rip off the music and they would indeed pay for it.  I’ve paraphrased, my colleague said it far more eloquently than I have written here, but it was some time ago and my memory isn’t what it was.

So when it came time to decide whether to ‘purchase’ the music from Radiohead or just take it gratis I decided that it is only right and proper to pay something towards their efforts.

The whole process is so simple. Log in to their site, register pay your money and there’s a link in your inbox to download a 48MB zip file.  The music is DRM free, so that means it will work on any device that’s capable of playing MP3 music.

I wonder if any other major artists will follow their lead?

Here’s a video of Paranoid Android from OK Computer, a beautifully constructed album.

Bravo to the team that put this web advertisment together. I fell of my seat watching the trailer. Click the link below, its well worth a look.

Thanks to Liam for sending it.

http://www.ffk-wilkinson.com/

Some pretty nifty toys for the phone. Apple and Steve Jobs are none to happy about it.

Although with updates from Apple to the firmware it could turn the phone from

this: into this

http://www.rugbyworldcup.com/home/teams/team=36/index.html

Marcel Marceau, mine, who silently passed on at a grand old age of 84.   I knew his name but I didn’t know he was a mime until I heard on the news that he passed.

Here’s a short video, including images, of our kitten ‘The Count’.

Enjoy your weekend - whatever it is you do.

German ambassador to Ireland doesn’t hold back and tells it like he sees it and delivers funny anecdote.

• Ireland is a coarse place with a sad history where the natives are obsessed by money
• Junior ministers earn more than the German Chancellor
• 20 per cent of the population are public servants
• Health service chaotic
• Hospital consultants turn down ‘Micky Mouse’ money (200,000 euro) to work in public sector
  
• Irish history “even sadder than Poland’s”

He said that he was at the National Concert Hall when an announcer appealed for the owner of a 1993-registered car to move the vehicle because it was blocking an entrance. “Of course no one moved,” said Mr Pauls. “All the Irish are driving 2006 and 2007 cars. For all I know the car is still there.” He also said that tourists from the United States had stopped visiting Ireland because they were sick of the incessant traffic jams.

Is this true?  Perhaps, perhaps not, but its better than being called a ‘bunch of ditch-digging drunks who like nothing better than to sing and fight and fight and sing’

Sure isn’t it one of the things that makes the Irish…well Irish. Tea. Mrs Doyle, Lyons, Barry’s they all make a nice cup of tea.

A well know five star hotel, Herbert Park, has a hotel policy that dictates that customers who order a pot of tea are restricted to just one teacup with the beverage.

This came to light when a customer was refused an extra cup to share the pot of liquid gold. The customer was refused not once but three times. The manager on duty told her that this was the hotel policy and they were sticking to it. What a crazy policy. What could be the reason behind it?

Not very refreshing customer service.

Probably something like “Awww Crap!” or “I wish I worked at Apple”

Ever hear a song on the radio and make a mental note to look it up or wonder what the name of it was or tell yourself you’ll try and get a copy of it, then forget all about it and wake up at 3AM with same song in your head and wondering why you’ve woken up at 3AM listening to it….? No. Me neither!

Anyway that may be a thing of the past with the new WI-FI enabled iPod from Apple. You can hear a song in a store and go and purchase it right from iTunes while you wait in line.

This will open up a whole new marketing channel for advertisers and companies. This will be huge.

Apple announces iPod Touch. I hope the battery lives up to the hype.

Touch screen,

Safari web browser,

You Tube,

Purchase music from iTunes on the fly.

Deal with Starbucks (US) for instant access and SB Store Song information.

Recently I started watching a show from Comedy Central called ‘Frisky Dingo’.  A very entertaining yet insane show about something (or someone) called ‘Killface’ who wants to send the earth into the Sun using a device called the Annihilatrix.   The large rocket cost 22Billion to make and because of the large cost Killface can’t afford to do a big marketing blitz to all the TVs on the planet as he originally intended, so a mass-mail campaign was devised.  The big problem is that the mailing card contains spelling and grammar errors.

and if you want to see the pilot episode then have a look here: http://www.adultswim.com/shows/frisky/

So a week or so ago a menu for an Indian Restaurant arrived through our letterbox at around 1.30AM, that’s right, AM!  Who delivers menus at that time, odd-balls in Portlaoise, that’s who.

Last night we decided or order-in and Andrea pulled out the menu.  She started to laugh as soon as she looked at it and when she showed me I thought of Frisky Dingo.

The menu has in print the following:

Whay not enjoy some of our favorite Indian delicacies, finely prepared by our highly qualified cheas in the comfort of our own home.  Surely, your family would enjoy that so much! [sic]

and further down

‘our staff would be help you’.

Also you can get a ‘can of cock, 7up or orange for 1 euro 20 cent at this place.  If you fancy a starter then number 17 is:

‘Prawn Piyari’ which is Tiger Prawn marinate with Indian spice and cooked on girl.

I regularly make awful blumbering mistakes when I start writing anything and often have to be corrected so I’m not being nasty with this post.  I just thought it was funnie, sorry funny!

In case you doubt the text, here’s an image or two of the take-away menu.

All things considered it was a pretty good meal.

BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6935343.stm

“One planet. One experiment”,
Edward O. Wilson, The diversity
of life.

A freshwater dolphin found only in China is now “likely to be extinct”, a team of scientists has concluded.

The researchers failed to spot any Yangtze river dolphins, also known as baijis, during an extensive six-week survey of the mammals’ habitat.

I’ve just finished listening to ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, by Bill Bryson, and he closes out the book, last four minutes or so and says the following (not verbatim):

If you were to design an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and to keep a record of where it has been; you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job. Here’s the salient point, we have been chosen, wheather by fate or providence or whatever you want to call it. We may be the best there is. We are the best there is; we may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare; simultaneously. Because we are so careless at looking after things when they are alive and after they have died off permanently that we have no idea, none, about the amount of things that have died off or will soon die off and what part, if any, we have played in the process.

The fact is we don’t know, we don’t have any idea. We do know we only have one planet and there is only one species of being capable of making a
difference.We got to this position is a stunningly fast time. Behaviorally modern human beings have occupied this planet for only 0.0001% of the earth’s history.

It has taken a great deal of luck to get here, not just humans, but every living thing. To continue we’ll need more than just luck.

When I was in San Diego most restaurants, including the one I worked at always used Pepperoncini with side dishes or with Pizza etc. They are really good with salads or Pizza.

The thing is, since I’ve been home I’ve not been able to find them in any store large or small.  I ordered a pizza from Pappa Johns, again a pizza brand that I’ve only ever seen in San Diego and now Portlaoise.  When I opened the pizza box there lay a medium size veggie pizza with Pepperoncinis.

Now I need to find out where they are getting them. If anyone knows where I can get these in Dublin or Laois feel free to leave a comment.

So a year or so ago a buddy of mine, let’s call him PC, brought back a bottle of hot sauce from a trip abroad. The sauce was called ‘Colon Blow’. No, you haven’t misread. Colon Blow. It advertises itself as “Colon Blow A Red Habanero Enema!“

This is not for the faint hearted. Believe me. It’s pretty good to liven up…well just about anything. You have to use it in small measures. Some time after he brought CB home another friend, let’s call him FG held a barbecue at his place. PC came and brought some fantastic Mexican food and his bottle of Colon Blow. I brought Garlic Bread!

Anyway during the day FG decided that he was going to try the CB and spread it liberally over some bread, not my garlic bread, but over some regular bread. I decided that this might send him insane or do what it said on the bottle so I got my digital camera out and captured a small slice of the event. Well it turned out to be a non-event, it didn’t do what it said on the bottle, well not right at that moment anyway.

Sometime after that I uploaded this short video clip to my YouTube account to use on the blog. I put it up and forgot about it. But like all things spicy, they always come back when you least expect it.

An email arrived one day to let me know that someone had left a comment on my video, which I’d called ‘Fabio and Colon Blow’. So I went and had a look to see what whoever it was thought about my video. It hasn’t impressed.

So six months ago 3 comments arrived.

1. You people have such large houses. That’s from someone called ‘washu2002′

2. Worst video clip EVER! This is from someone called ‘PK3000′

and my personal favourite,

3. It’s a shame that Youtube allows just any piece of crap video on here. This gem is from ‘ronleon62′

What are people looking for to bring them to this video and why are they even bothering to make a comment on it?

I was also surprised to see that there have been 1,306 views of the video.

I showed the video to FG and he was surprised that it was up and that it had gotten so many views. I’m going to take it down in one week so for the last time, here’s the video in all its boring glory.

This is boring. You’ve been warned.