| Valentine's week |
[Mar. 3rd, 2012|11:19 pm] |
On the Monday, I made it to swing dance class. I've been trying to go to the improvers' class which is rock hard. You have to be on and in the zone as soon as you walk in. Even with a whiskey on me, I was cold and stiff. After, I met Catherine and Amye, and they suggested we head downstairs to the Blues dancing class. This was slow and sexy and way easier.
Tuesday was Valentine's Day. We'd been thinking of heading into Meeting House Square to watch Casablanca and The Princess Bride, but ended up staying in. I made us risotto, my first time, and it wasn't as good as it could have been. I didn't wash enough starch out of the rice before I boiled it, and the chili flavour prawns were a tacky addition that upped the MSG and added little flavour.
For entertainment, I downloaded Casablanca and we piped it into the telly. I'm a skeptic of old movies, like many people nowadays, but Tee loves them. I gotta say, Casablanca, set in the Moroccan city during the Second World War, is classic, with an impressive list of famous quotes.
"Play it again Sam." (Sam was played by a young, slimmer Louis Armstrong.)
"Here's lookin at you kid."
"Of all the gin joints and all the bars in all the world, she had to walk into mine."
"Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life."
Honestly, I thought Ingrid Bergman sleepwalked her way through, or maybe she was just being austere.
I saw FB pics of the setup at Meeting House Square, and it looked like a class act. Still managed to live it up well at home though.
Wednesday evening was a gruelling music rehearsal session. We're playing a wedding on the 15th March and our singer's throat is infected. Our other singer is gonna take up the slack. I knocked two cans of Grolsch back and was tipsy by the end, though I play better then.
On Thursday night, I made my way to the RIA (Royal Irish Academy) on Dawson Street, an institution I'd never even heard of. Me and Tee were attending a lecture about God and sex, which was about sex in the Bible. The place was a trifle odd to say the least. We all had to stand while their president, a bloke with a Lenin beard and a posh English accent, came in and took a seat. Then an announcer bloke said, "Now you may sit." The lecture was presented by an American who's written a book on the subject. We learned about the euphemisms that the Bible writers used, such as "wash your feet" meaning "have sex".
Friday night we had some of Therese's friends and Claire over. When Laura arrived stocious, she'd brought Anna Banana, a Russian, with her and we proceeded to raid my globe-of-the-Earth drinks cabinet. Next evening, we headed for super posh Oliviers at the Schoolhouse in Ballsbridge. My parents had bought this for us as a Christmas present, on a Livingsocial voucher. It was a tasting menu and although each piece was very small, there was a whole slew of them, and we were stuffed to our gills by the end of it.
Sunday morning and afternoon was spent going on a guided walk through Avoca in Wicklow, which used be a mining town. Honestly I don't think I even knew we used to have a mining industry here. They extracted copper and some of the work was incredibly destructive. In the 70s, right before they stopped altogether, they stopped drilling and just blasted away the mountainsides with dynamite, neighbours bedamned.
Our guide was an English guy who'd been living here for 30 years and whose family had run the mines a century ago. They were originally from Cornwall or something. We rounded off with a pint and some stew. We've been going on hikes for a while now to prepare for climbing Kilimanjaro this summer. |
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| Choice lyrics from Watch The Throne |
[Aug. 30th, 2011|09:32 pm] |
"I mean I might even make [my son] be Republican, So everybody know he love white people"
"Usually you have this much taste you European"
"I paid for those titties, get yo' own"
"Ix-nay off my dix-nay, That's pig-latin, Ich-Bay"
"314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago" |
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| Roomba Rhumba |
[Jul. 12th, 2011|08:13 pm] |
Thrilled with my new Roomba iRobot vacuum cleaner. It was very easy to set up and I had the little guy driving around the sitting room, eating dust and hair like a pro, within minutes of getting it out of the box. Fortuitously that day I'd been off sick (just back from Tallinn) so I had the full day to get him to try out most of the rooms in the house. As he drove around, I was struck by the resemblence to a trilobite, pottering around in circles and heading off in crazy directions with a little antenna poking its way this way and that.
The performance on wooden floors was flawless, though I had to move loads of cables and trestle tables out of the way, cause it kept snagging and dragging the cables and getting stuck under the trestles. But once you gave it an open playing field, it was unstoppable. Particularly crazy was our bedroom - you wouldn't believe how much dust two people can create just by sleeping there every night. I'd last swept the place only a month or two before but I still completely filled the robot's dust container twice over.
On the landing carpet, it had a "cliff sensor" to detect the top of the stairs (and prevent death), and after leaving it there nearly an hour, I came back up to find that it had scrubbed all the inground hair off the carpet, leaving an intact bolus in the centre like a little Roomba shit. I later found more hair entangled in its brushes - a morass so thickly matted that it looked like an arts and crafts project.
In general though, it's totally worth it - and a huge win technology wise: I felt like a Jetson. You put a robot in a room for half an hour, and look what it can do! |
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| Thoughts on China |
[May. 23rd, 2011|09:18 pm] |
The world is industrialising in an onrush of factories, roads, apartment blocks, vacant lots, car parks, toll booths, and railway lines, like a hyperactive SimCity goon who fills every tile in the game space with hastily tacked-together developments. Power lines thread their way across the landscape. Rivers turn brownish shades from effluent. The western world's onrush of technology and manufacturing output changed the world and left it in awe. That was then.
( ... ) |
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| Kindle |
[May. 6th, 2011|08:54 pm] |
Guys sorry for gushing but I really feel I must write about my favouritest gadget evar.
I fucking love the Kindle. I want to have Kindle babies with my Kindle.
( more ) |
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| Adventures in Belgium |
[Apr. 3rd, 2011|09:41 pm] |
Back in November, I had a great 3-part holiday in Belgium. The first part was hanging out in Brussels with Tee and our friends. The third part was attending a business conference on SQL and databases. The second part was the most interesting. I rented a car and tried to fulfil a lifelong ambition to go on a tour of Trappist beer-brewing monasteries nationwide. Needless to say, it didn't go according to plan.
( The day that was in it ) |
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| Paddy's Day 2011 |
[Mar. 19th, 2011|01:48 pm] |
Fun day yesterday. Tee convinced me to join her in the parade as part of the Dublin Cycling Campaign. All I had to was get up.... Also cycle my bike would be handy, but the getting up part was defo gonna take the lion's share of effort.
Her dad drove us in and I got dropped off at a Dublin Bikes while she scooted off to collect her bike from a 24-hour car park she'd left it in the previous night. Disastro, the car park was locked and the stand I was at had only one bike with a flat tyre. We both ran off to another stand, got working bikes, and hit the road. Due to street closures, it was really hard to get to Upper Dominic St and we arrived only 10 minutes before the parade started. On the way, I came across a completed section of the new Portobello-Fairview bike track. It was at least 3 metres wide, which makes a nice change, and had what looked like it own set of traffic signals, not switched on yet though. Not sure if they were just poles or what. The metal structures, not the Eastern Europeans.
We were the very last people in the parade and it was well over an hour before things started moving up ahead. In front of us were Chinese and Africans dressed as leprechauns in a cultural crossover that would have made Benetton proud.
We practiced our twee little chants - "Bicycles are brilliant!" and gleefully rang our bells. Off we set and well behaved crowds of mainly kids of many varieties cheered us on and held out little hands for high-fiving. I'd say at least 25% of the crowd was non-white.
We started way up beyond Parnell Square and it was stop-start the whole way. I tweeted my feelings. The sun was out most of the time but it was freezing otherwise. Therese had a green ballroom mask and I had a tricolour jester hat. Bemused gardai lined the way. Twice we passed stands with seated dignitaries who clapped politely as megaphone girls bigged us up. Coming down O'Connell St, we were warned by a sign that we were entering a "live television broadcast area". I got my game face on.
By the end, at Patrick's Cathedral, we were tired and hungry and dying for a pint. We broke away and, after ditching the bikes on Golden Lane, headed for lunch in Le Gueleton.
Over an increasingly drunk hour, I enraptured my gf with stories about trains. My croque Monsieur was suitably gourmet and despite trying to hold back, I suffered a post-meal slump in Nearys afterwards. My parents showed up which lifted my spirits, though my dad hadn't enjoyed his Wagamama's. We talked about my redundancy payout. I assured them I hadn't forgotten the cash gift. My mum gave me her bank details just to be sure. The other day I'd had less success with my sister. I transferred funds into her account and called her up, but before I could say much, she retorted, "What is this? Is this gonna turn into a chat? Cause I'm just sitting down to dinner. Look, I can't fucking talk now, I'll call ya later." An hour later I got a text, "Now I'm watching a film. Can't talk. What the hell do you want anyway?"
Still, the least drunk I've ever been on Paddy's Day. |
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| Battle: Los Angeles |
[Mar. 19th, 2011|03:18 am] |
So, Battle Los Angeles sucked.
Here's a shortlist of the other movies that it ripped off:
- Independence Day : alien spaceships and the plot involving a "control ship"
- Black Hawk Down : helicopter shenanigans
- District 9 : appearance of the aliens
- Saving Private Ryan : plot involving them having to avoid attacking the alien invaders and head off on some civvy rescue mission that placed the soldiers in unnecessary jeopardy
Silly, expository scenes hammer home the point that AMERICAN SOLDIERS HAVE A GREAT SENSE OF CAMARADERIE. The aliens are motiveless, slimy invaders that can be stabbed in the face with no remorse. In the silly plot device involving rescuing civvies, the civvies turn out to be Mexican so you can't complain too much about stupid this digression is because that would make you a RACIST. There is an epileptic cameraman who made me queasy within the first 10 minutes and that wasn't just because of the plot points taken from a Michael Bay notebook that he filled in while sitting on the jacks. Finally, the actors aren't personable unlike Independence Day which had Jeff Goldbum and Green Zone which had Matt Damon.
Generally I'd say that Battle Los Angeles was fucking horrible but it wasn't horrible like Independence Day, where you at least had the redemption of Will Smith punching an alien's lights out, but more like horrible like that time that Therese went to a hot springs in Budapest and a 70-year-old couple started going for it right beside her. The movie is horrible in a way that makes you want to glance over in disgust, get up and leave within the first 10 minutes because the rasping noise is just too much. |
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| Michael No More |
[Feb. 18th, 2011|01:27 am] |
I remember seeing the Michael Moore movie "Roger and Me" years ago where he interviewed Borders employees about why they aren't unionised (not allowed) and what their gripes are. He encouraged them to form their own union and was subsequently banned from public speaking in their stores (article.)
They said they couldn't get higher wages/pensions because company policy was to compete with Barnes & Noble at all costs.
It's all moot now, for 2 reasons: they're all fired anyway, and it doesn't matter because B&N are surely set for bankruptcy soon too. And so are any shops that sell items that (a) require a lot of searching in the store to find, this being easier online, (b) don't require the customer to try or touch the item before they buy. |
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