Any German-speaking musicians out there

I'm trying to get a translation for the following German expression:

"Nicht Schnell Und Sehr Gesangvoll Zu Spielen"

It is a phrase that accompanies a piece of music by Robert Schumann.



I understand the meaning of each word independently but don't quite understand what it means as an expression.



It's clearly a German phrase to aid the person playing the piece, just like Italian expressions used for the same purpose like Molto Vivace.



Can anyone out there help?



Danke Schön.

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How much coffee can you drink?

How many cups of coffee a day is considered OK?



I don't consider myself to be one of those people addicted to coffee but there are days where I'd drink 5 or 6 cups of the stuff.



Most of it would be the freshly made stuff from a Gaggia machine or similar. I rarely drink the instant stuff any more, a couple of times a week maybe.



Is there a point at which it becomes unhealthy and why exactly is it unhealthy?



I used to work with a guy in the US who drank so much coffee a day that it shocked me. He had a flask of the stuff, thick black stuff, that he'd pour out into cups at his desk all day long. He told me his doctor told him to cut back. That's the first time I ever remember someone who's doctor told them to cut back.



I understand what coffee does to the brain, effectively overriding the messages of fatigue coming from the muscles etc. Coffee essentially stands there saying "hey don't mind all those muscles, you're not tired at all. Keep going".



The more coffee you drink to keep the fatigue at bay the bigger the headache you're gonna get when you stop drinking the stuff.



In a local petrol station, the one I wrote about recently with the adverts playing on little TVs over the pump, there was an ad warning people not to drive when they are tired. It said pull over and drink some coffee.



I'm not sure how good this advice is. I know that a few times in the past when I've been driving home from Galway or Wexford or places like that I've nearly dozed off at the wheel and just caught myself in time.



I have developed a technique for keeping myself awake that simply involves taking really deep breaths through the nose to drag a load of oxygen into my system. This works by oxygenating my bloodstream and of course oxygen means energy hence I stay awake.



This idea of drinking coffee doesn't work for me. Lots of water (again for oxygen and for rehydration) and deep breathing is good for me.



Anyway, I digress. Is there anyone who knows what is a safe amount of "real" coffee to drink in one day?



Alas I must dash. The coffee is ready :-)

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Who has a perfect system?

I like this quote:

In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia

It's so true. If you don't sit down and plan what you want to get done at the start of the day you just kind of stagger through the day, ultimately doing stuff that you always do, with that nagging feeling that there is probably something else that you should be doing.



I've used electronic organisers like the Palm. In fact it was called the Palm Pilot when I had one, that's how long ago it was. I tried paper-based systems, such as the one from Time Management International. I used the ideas from Steven F Covey. I went on a half-dozen different training courses in Dublin.



I still don't have a good system that I consistently use.



Sometimes I make lists on paper. Sometimes I use post-it notes. Sometimes I stick stuff up on the wall.



I keep changing my mind.



The funny thing is lots of people think I am so organised. I guess I am organised to a degree but never quite happy with the system I have. So I keep changing it.



Someone out there must have a good system that they stick to.



I'd love to hear about it.

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Has Ireland peaked too soon

I was at the Ireland versus the Pacific Islanders rugby test at Lansdowne Road at the weekend.

It was a memorable event for a number of reasons.



First I had a free ticket, courtesy of my Brother-in-law. I have been very lucky in recent times with free (or otherwise paid for) tickets. I am always extremely grateful when other people offer to take me to a game, a concert or whatever.



Second it was the third of three rugby 'tests' during the autumn here in Dublin. A test, in case you don't follow rugby (or cricket for that matter) is another term used for an international match. More to the point, the two previous tests were against Australia and South Africa and Ireland won both tests. This is a BIG story here right now since it puts Ireland up to third in the current world rankings for Rugby. Not bad for a small country with loads of other sports competing for the best sporting talent on this little island.



Third, it was the last ever international sports fixture to be played at this famous old stadium, the oldest rugby stadium in the world.



Ireland won the match and won well so that was good. At the end of the game there was a bit of a send off for the old place, with some footage on the big-ish screen and some music blaring out for atmosphere.



I am wondering if Ireland has just delivered its three best performances. The rugby world cup takes place next year in France and we're in a really tough group. The press hacks haven't been able to come up with anything better than the stock phrase of "group of death". Zzzzzz.



Anyway, it's going to be hard to qualify for the latter stages and I'm just wondering if we might have peaked too soon.



Hope I'm wrong.



Anyway, a good day all in all and one that will last in the memory for a long time.

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Inventors - Get your skates on!

Why has nobody invented an unblockable shower drain. I mean how hard could it be to invent something as obvious as this.

Maybe you could combine the plain old drain with whatever is inside the garbage disposal unit found under kitchen sinks?



That could then chew up all the crud that seems to block up drains in showers.



Then again maybe it's just me that has this problem.

p.s. if someone actually has invented the unblockable shower then forget I said anything.

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Toy shopping at 11

On my way home from work tonight I stopped into a local toy superstore.



They have put a huge sign hanging up over the front of the building saying that they are open until 11 O'Clock at night between Monday and Friday.



Forgive me if this sounds old-fashioned but why do they need to stay open until 11PM?



I'm beginning to think the world is definitely going a bit mad.



What kind of person is out toy shopping at 11 o'clock at night?

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Blathering fool interrupts the Late Late Show

I wasn't watching the Late Late show on Friday evening last but it appears that a man emerged from the audience and walked straight up onto the stage where the show's host, Pat Kenny, was seated with three guests.

In what could only be described as a blathering tirade of abuse, the man proceded to call Pat Kenny a "piece of shit" among other things.

The folks over at RTÉ cut the video pretty quickly and went straight to an advertising break. It's just a shame they didn't manage it 10 seconds earlier before all the swearing started.



Postscript:
I am not impressed by what this person did. However there seems to be plenty of others who are pleased that this happened. I'm not going to link to other blogs that support this person's stupid actions for obvious reasons.

I can't understand how some people think this daft behaviour was somehow justifiable. Surely now the actions of this fool will impact every late late show for the forseeable future. Every guest is going to be subject to increased security scrutiny and so on.

Why is it that one person always ruins things for everyone?

What happens when you mix firearms, adrenaline and prejudice?

If you have read Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink!" you'll be familiar with the story of Amadou Diallo.

So when you hear of this you might be forgiven for despairing. It's surely time to look again at how society is "policed".

I'm not going to pre-judge what happened because I wasn't there and I don't have access to the facts.

What is clear is that up to 8 police officers were "involved" in an incident with three young men. No firearms were found in the possession of the 3 men it seems.

A young man is dead. And that can't be changed.

some other examples to ponder:
Patrick Dorismond (2000)
Timothy Stansbury Jr (2004)
Jean Charles de Menezes (2005)

I'm not pro- or anti-anything in this case. I just don't think people should be shot dead without there being some serious and verifiable cause.

Too many "gut instinct" reactions on the part of the person holding the lethal weapon.

Surely we can maintain order in the city without someone being shot.

The search for the right "the"

Yes. I was merely making a point about how bands these days don't really use the in their name so much. I'm sure there are exceptions however it does seem that in the 60s and 70s more bands had the in the band name than today.

Al then got me thinking about a reference to this idea in the film "The Commitments". If you haven't seen the film, quite possible if you are younger than me, then it's not a bad way to pass an evening.

Be warned, this film has loads of swearing, Dublin-style.

I remember going to this movie when my wife and I first started going out together. We went to see the film at a local cinema where my uncle used to work on weekends as a projectionist. It was a gas situation. He'd often say to me to give him a call if I was interested in seeing a film and he'd let us in through the projection room. A grade A freebie.

So I think, though I could be wrong, that we did see this film this way. No ticket. Courtesy of the Uncle. Excellent.

I think I remember him commenting on how there was a lot of swearing in the film and how he didn't think a whole lot of it because of that aspect.

Anyway, we took our seats and the film kicked off. "F*uck you Jimmy Rabbitte". "You can shove it up your *rse Deco" and so on.

The film was funny, very funny and very much in tune with the times in Dublin back then.

I remember there was a middle aged couple sitting behind us and all through the film one of the couple was heard to say "what did he say?" to which the other would translate into more conventional english. Hilarious.

I had a look today for the quote from the film that Al was referring to and I think it might be one of these two. The context is that the manager Jimmy Rabbitte is discussing possible names for the band with the band members.


Outspan Foster: There's a band around called "Free Beer". Always draws a big crowd.
Derek: I like "A Flock of Budgies".
Jimmy Rabbitte: We have to be "the" something. All the great sixties bands were "The Somethings".

========================= or ===============================

Billy: The Commitments?
Jimmy Rabbitte: It's a "the".
Deco: How do you spell it?
Jimmy Rabbitte: T-H-E.

Room service at home

My 4-year old has recently taken a liking to the room service concept.

Instead of asking for food and drinks to be brought straight in to him, he now requires me to knock on the door and wait outside the room for his permission before entering.

For example just now he's sitting in his pyjamas on the sofa watching scooby doo and eating toast.

When he asked for the toast he added "and will you knock on the door when you bring it?"

I'm beginning to think I'm on the wrong side of the equation here.

South of the equator

I read recently in the Telegraph newspaper's web edition a comment from a reader who declared himself proud to have never been south of the equator.

It was one of those things where readers are invited to declare things they have never done.

I realised then that I too have never been anywhere south of the equator. I've been to Hawai'i which is, at 18 degrees north, the closest I have been to the equator.

I know lots of people who have traveled to Australia and New Zealand, and just a few who have traveled to south America or Africa. I know a couple of people who live in or have lived in Japan.

Maybe I need to make this a goal once the kids are old enough for long haul flights. It would be great to see something different.

I do feel like I'm missing something by not traveling to new places.

Parking in a full garage

Did you ever try to park your car in the garage when the garage is full of stuff.

You know what I mean. You open up the big old door and all you can see is stuff. Boxes, maybe some old rusty golf clubs, a rusty bike, a gas cylinder, a few bags of hard cement, a small freezer, a spare tyre from your previous car, some football boots with the mud still on them from a game you played in 2001.

What the heck. I mean the obvious thing to do is to get behind the wheel and plough on in there. Right?

Of course not.

So why is it (this could be a tenuous link.. give it a chance) that so many people insist on trying to burst right into a lift (elevator) at the shopping centre when the people who are already in there are trying to get out of the lift?

Did I miss something here? Surely if Archimedes was around nowadays he'd have come up with some spin on his displacement principle:

"The amount of people displaced when a group of people enters a lift... " etc.

Come on. Let the people out before you get in.

Maybe I should invent a device to play back one of those Robocop voice-overs when lift doors open.

"This is a warning. Step back immediately and allow passengers to vacate the lift. Failure to comply will be punished severely"

After the lift had "dealt with" a few transgressors I'm sure I wouldn't have to re-enact a scene from a six-nations rugby match every time I try to get out of the lift.

The The, and other The's

Firstly - I can use an apostrophe to write The's when it's to indicate that I mean multiple instances of the word the. Richard and Martha said so.

So think about this.

The Beatles, The Who, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, The Monkeys, The Smiths, The Cure, The Bangles.

Loads of The's (come on.. stick with it)

So where are all the the's these days?

Muse, Evanescence, Snow Patrol, McFly, Arctic Monkeys etc.

What! no the's?

What happened to the - is it not cool anymore?

Do I need help?

I'm not moving.

I don't want to move to the new version of Blogger.

The good people at Google would like me to move but I am happy where I am.

"Why can't the status quo be the way forward?"

Am I now a luddite?

Thingummyjig sales technique

I love going in to shops and chatting with members of staff about products that they clearly know nothing about.

When sales people make stuff up, that's the best.

For example this morning I went into a shop at the local mall. It's one of those "convergence" stores where they sell mobile phones, iPods, Notebook computers and all manner of accessories for these kinds of products. (btw I'm on vacation hence the swanning around the mall in the morning time)

It's clear to me that most people these days do a bit of homework for stuff like this. You just don't hear people walking in to stores any more saying things like "so what are these mobile phone things that I keep hearing about?"

So true to type I went on to the Apple online store a few weeks ago and did a search for some options for replacement headphones for my iPod. The earbuds that came with it are grand but are very uncomfortable on an airplane.

I searched and came across a nice set of headphones from AKG.

So I went in to this shop and asked this guy if he carried this brand of headphones.

He told me that they sell the apple earbuds and they also sell Sennheiser which he proclaimed to be "the best".

Now call me dogged or maybe even tell me that I was asking for it but I just had to know why he thought these Sennheiser earphones were the best.

Before I go on to regale you with what he said I have to admit something.

I like the world of audio technology. I always have been interested in it, from a very early age. I remember blowing all the fuses in the house as a child when I stuck some bare wires into a wall socket that I had opened with a pen, in an attempts to get a tape recorder working when the batteries were dead.

I remember getting my first chance to open up a boombox with a screwdriver and having a look inside, removing motors and loudspeakers and all that.

I also went through a phase of buying audio equipment and going around Hi-Fi stores comparing the various items. Granted this was in the days before the internet.

I also studied in this area, spent years selling this stuff and even worked for what was at the time the world's largest company in the computer audio area.

I know a bit about it and know when someone is telling me rubbish.

So anyway I asked him why these Sennheiser earphones were better. I think if I'm honest I just wanted to see what he would say.

He looked at me and said "you know these earphones are really good. For example you know the way when you are using your iPod on a windy day and the wires are outside of your jacket you can hear the wind".

Right.

I discussed this with my wife and she and I both had different interpretations of what he "could" have meant.

I mean what the hell is that all about?

What happened to answering a question with a question when you don't have an answer? Here's how it should be done.

Crazy blog idea.. part 2

OK. If you're reading this in isolation then you might need to click on Al's blog for an explanation and for the start point of this "emergent" posting.

I like the idea.

One person starts the posting and points it at another blog.

Maybe that person can then add something to it and then point it in turn at someone else's blog. Or maybe that person thinks "I'm not doing that" and it dies right there.

The idea is to see how far the thing goes.

Anyway, what about this whole idea from Fox about OJ Simpson. Can there ever have been a worse idea for a television programme? Makes "monkey tennis" suddenly seem viable.

So let me fire this over to Stephen Smart (hope Stephen goes along with it) to see if he's willing to forward and backlink and see where this goes.

So, for the next posting click here

Another star falls to earth

What the heck was this all about?

Michael Richards, known to most TV viewers as Kramer from the show Seinfeld, has disgraced himself big-style by letting off a foul-mouthed racist rant at some people in the audience at a comedy club.

The issue seems to have been that some of the audience were heckling him, or perhaps they were just talking while he was doing his set.

Either way the reaction was just insane.

You can watch it on YouTube here. It's pure madness.

I wonder what the defense for this will be from Richards. Surely his career is doomed.

My Aughrim Street shame

One of the places I passed on my way through the traffic on Monday evening was a community hall on Aughrim Street in Dublin city. ('Aughrim' is pronounced ock-rim)

This hall is a relatively new building erected alongside an old church and I think it's main use is for local people to come and play indoor sports, as well of course as being used for community meetings and so forth.

Many years ago when I was a student some friends asked me if I wanted to join their team for a 5-a-side indoor football tournament. Clearly here I mean football in the European sense, in the original sense if I may.

These guys were all good players. I'm certain I was only asked to help make up the numbers :-)

Anyway the day came and we all headed over to this hall to get ready for the tournament.

We chatted briefly about who would play where and I ended up as goalkeeper. Now anyone who knows me will tell you that this is a bad idea. As a goalie I'm about as useful as an inflatable dart-board. I suck as a goalie.

Well heck there was no time to debate and sure what the hell, I said I'd do it.

The first game started and we were off and running quickly. Well the rest of them were. I was shuffling about on a padded mat in front of a metal goal about 1 metre high and 2 metres wide.

Suddenly one of the guys from the opposing team was bearing down on me. I have no recollection of what he looked like. I just remember him coming right for me.

Next thing I knew I had moved out very quickly to prevent him from shooting. He drew his leg back and blasted the ball. I flew across and the ball bounced off me.

All around I could hear shouts of "great save Shuman".

I was quickly back on my feet and darting from left to right tracking the play.

Again the opposition team swarmed towards the goal I was protecting and again for reasons unknown to me now, I threw myself towards the attacker smothering his attempt to shoot.

This continued much to the amazement of my team-mates. They couldn't believe where this raw energy was coming from. They had never seen me like this.

The referee's whistle blew. I had managed to survive without conceding a single goal. I was elated and really pumped up.

I walked towards the half-way line and stuck out my hand to shake hands with the guys from the opposing team. "Well done" I said.

"it's only half-time" snapped back one of the opposition.

In all the excitement and the intense concentration I was feeling during the first phase of play I had not stopped to think about how the match would be timed. I was sure the game was over.

Now I was overcome with a sense of dread. The confidence drained from me right there and then.

Suddenly we were underway again. The fear came back and I remembered all about how crap a goalie I was. Soon enough a shot flew past me and shortly after the game was over.

I didn't feel like shaking hands at this stage.

As I drove past that hall on Monday night I vividly reconnected with that moment immediately before the half-time whistle. The sense of invincibility and fearlessness that I felt that day, briefly but memorably. I also reconnected with the feeling of foolishness and self-consciousness right after my opponent pointed out that the game was not yet over.

Back then those negative feelings would have stayed with me longer but on Monday evening I smiled to myself, turned up the volume on the radio and refocused on the endless line of red lights stretching into the dark rainy distance ahead of me.

Does anyone talk about web hits any more?

I like the idea of knowing where people are when they read the stuff I write on this little blog.

I'm fascinated by the diverse range of places on the planet that show up on the cute little map on the right hand side.

I do wonder sometimes if this "content" has relevance for people say in Norway, Turkey or China for example. But then I remember that blogs are just another way of saying something and it doesn't have to make enormous sense or have great relevance. It's just someone saying something in their own way.

Anyway, I was at a business meeting on Monday evening. I arrived late, very late, due entirely to the rush-hour traffic in Dublin on a typical weekday.

One of the people at the meeting was talking about a website that she was responsible for and she said that she had been looking at the web statistics and they weren't positive. The site in her own words was getting very few hits.

When she said that it struck me that hardly anyone talks about hits anymore. It really doesn't mean anything nowadays.

There was a lot of work done in recent times to shift the thinking of advertisers away from simple hits and clicks language, to something more meaningful. It transpires that simple click statistics can be very difficult to interpret, making it hard to know what it really means when a website experiences a large number of hits or clicks.

Thus there is a move now to something more meaningful, often called web analytics. The idea is to derive a more meaningful interpretation from the data recorded so that the raw data is not what is used to make decisions, but rather what the data actually means.

Business Week magazine had a recent exposé on the phenomenon of click fraud. They focused on online advertising specifically but surely the theme can be extended to any other situation where clicks lead to rewards.

I'm not sure that hits mean anything per se. It's nice to see people (or computers more precisely) are visiting your page but you really can't read any more into it than that.

Belts are out, then in, and then out again?

Belts.

Where would you be without them?

In the 1980s. That's where you'd be.

I was watching an episode of CHiPs this morning with my two boys and it struck me that apart from the good men and women of the California Highway Patrol, nobody else seemed to be wearing a belt.

Everyone was wearing jeans, mostly too tight, and nobody was wearing a belt.

Then of course the 80s belt-less trend seems to have been halted and people nowadays wear belts.

Is this some kind of turning point in fashion? Was there a point where someone "reintroduced" the belt, uttering something like "You know dahlings, belts are the new must-have accessory. They are to die for!"

Peculiarly enough, I was watching an episode of CSI last night and there was a young guy who had attempted to murder a complete stranger. A belt loop from his jeans was found at the scene. When Grissom and Stokes followed two sniffer dogs to this guys house there he was playing basketball out front. He was wearing jeans with no belt.

Perhaps my "theory" about the introduction of the belt is not so watertight. Unlike those jeans from the 80s.

Ouch at 9 AM

So I was in a hotel today with a group of people getting ready to take them through some work and I had just written some stuff up on a flip chart.

Then two members of the hotel staff appeared with a trolley with fresh coffee and some danish pastries.

I pointed to the flip chart and told everyone that we'd get to this right after we grab a coffee. As I lowered my arm down along the side of the flipchart I gave myself an almighty paper cut right along the top of my little finger.

I winced but no-one noticed as they were already at the back of the room pouring coffee and tucking into pastries.

How can it be that something as harmless as paper can inflict pain?

Still. It could have been worse.

Clarification

Just to clarify. I was serious about the whole satellite thing.

If you have just bought one of these systems and want some help then I'll be happy to do that.

That message perhaps got lost in what turned out to be a very lengthy posting.

Organic Fooled

There is something bizarre going on with organic food. It's everywhere.

My wife came home from Lidl today with one of those weekly specials brochures. Inside there is a 2 page spread about all of the organic fruit and vegetables they sell.

Then this evening I was down in Blackrock and while strolling through Marks & Spencer's foodhall I noticed that everything in sight had that now familiar yellow organic label. It transpires however that there is a whole variety of labels that can be used. This is not clear for consumers in my view.

Call it coincidence but driving around in the car today the podcast that came on was from Business Week. The subject?

"The organic myth"

The gist of the article was that interest in and demand for organic foods has risen spectacularly and producers are struggling to keep up. So much so that it's now hard to tell if 'organic' really means what you think it means.

The folks talking on the podcast discuss how in some cases cattle that produce organic milk are not in fact roaming and eating in lush green fields. They are in muddy pens eating organic cattle feed.

And for this you have the privilege of paying extra for the 'organic' milk.

And in a final coincidence I recall an article earlier this week in the commenting on a scam in the UK concerning so-called organic eggs. The scam covers some 30 million supposedly-organic eggs which appear to have been so-labeled in order to jack up the price.

So, why is it all going wrong for the organic concept?

In my view two things have not helped.

If there was not such a price differential between "ordinary" food and "organic" food then there would not have been such a rush by big producers to get in on the act. They are changing the nature of what organic means, as they import 'organic' ingredients from China and Brazil where the organic concept is not quite the same.

Second consumers are too quick to embrace everything that is labeled as organic. They need to demand more information about why exactly the produce is organic and then decide if that's good enough. In addition there's plenty of stories about the dangers of this type of food such as this one or this one.

For goodness sake, according to the Business Week story you can now buy organic macaroni and cheese out of a box among other things.

Organic food is quickly losing its meaning and is in danger of becoming just another way of conning the paying customer who really does want to do the right thing when they go to the grocery store.

Satellites and the chain of love.. part 2

OK so I'd better begin with the chain of love.

It's a song that was out a couple of years ago by a fella called Clay Walker. Yes he's a country music singer. I'm not going to get into the country music thing here by the way.

Anyway the story goes like this.

A guy is driving home one terrible night. It's snowing like crazy. Up ahead he sees a woman desparately trying to flag down a passing car. He pulls over. It's a nice car, a Mercedes coupé, and the woman driving it is well dressed but desperate for help. She has a flat tyre and doesn't know how to change it. She says she's been flagging cars down for ages on this terrible night but nobody would stop to help.

The guy introduces himself as Joe and says he'll help. He changes the wheel and she asks him how much does she owe him for doing that, she want's to give him something for his trouble as it were. He tells her that she doesn't owe him a penny. He tells her that someone else did him a favour one time when he was stuck. All he asks is that she keeps the "chain of love" going by doing someone else a decent favour.

She gets behind the wheel and some time later comes along a roadside diner. She's hungry so she goes in and gets a bite to eat and a hot drink (I presume).

The waitress is nice and the woman notices that she is heavily pregnant, 8 months along she thinks. She looks tired and must be dead on her feet.

The woman pays and the waitress goes to get her some change from a 100 dollar bill. The woman writes a little note to the waitress, along the lines of "you don't owe me a penny. All I ask is that you keep the chain of love going. Do someone else a favour when you can"

The waitress comes back and is stunned to find the note and to learn that she can pocket the change.

The end of the night comes and she heads home to her partner. As she climbs into bed she whispers to him "everything is going to be alright, Joe".

So that's the idea. Some cultures call this Karma. In other cultures it is said that what goes around comes around (or maybe you've heard it the other way round).

Fortune and fate are cyclical. That's life.

Anyway, back to the satellite dish. Clearly I couldn't leave it clamped to a chair in the front garden with the wire running across the lawn.

So, I unhooked everything and brought it around to the back of the house. I found a wall that looked like it could be a possibility for permanent mounting.

I hooked up the satellite finder again and there wasn't much noise out of it to be honest. The back of the house is not such a good spot because the house is built in what was previously a small quarry. It has a vertical stone wall behind it, and a vertical stone wall to the left. In fact the direction I want to point the dish is a stone wall. The chances of getting it to pick up a signal with this wall in the way would seem to be slim.

I moved it about and amazingly I did get a good solid loud whine from the sat-finder. That was it. It was a GO!

I went to the car and fetched the drill, the power extension cable, the tool box and my big box of screws and fixtures.

When I come to do a job I come prepared and the whole boot of the car was packed with everything I could possibly need.

I got everything out and found some monster-strong outdoor screws and some rawl-plugs. I stuck a big hefty drill bit in the drill and I drilled that wall.

5 minutes later the bracket was on the wall. Now to put the dish up.

With the sat-finder attached I slipped the dish onto the mounting pole on the wall bracket and moved it about until I got a good whine from the satellite finder.

I got out the spanners and tightened it up.

I went back inside to check all was OK.

Disaster. No signal. Nothing.

I went back out and loosened the dish and moved it again. The whine dropped and then picked up again as I moved it to the left. Then there was a noticeable shriek as I seemed to hit a point of alignment with the satellite.

I tightened it up a little again and went inside.

Scooby Doo was loud and clear!

I returned to the dish, tightened everything up and did one more check inside. All OK.

I packed up all the tools and put them back in the car. They are still there today but today it is lashing rain. There was no way I could have done this in the rain so I am so relieved it worked.

I went back into the house, pulled up a chair and had a quick look at what was coming in on the receiver.

I counted 482 TV channels and hundreds of radio channels. There was a ton of stuff. BBC, ITV, Sky News, Channel 4, QVC, Movie channels, religious channels, shopping channels, Indian TV, Turkish TV, Middle Eastern TV, even Al Jazeera. Amazing. Granted many of the channels from the 482 were scrambled but they were lots of the specialist ones such as sports channels and so forth.

Last night I went up to the house with my two buys to teach my mother how to use it and how to locate the channels. In typical fashion she wrote everything down on a bit of paper she tore out of a diary. She has always done that.

So, she's pretty happy and I am too.

Now I just need to keep my youngest brother away from the house. He'd easily sit there all night flicking through all these channels.

Now that I have installed the thing I got to thinking about other people who have bought one of these systems. I got to thinking how if someone I know buys one I'd definitely offer to come around and help get the thing installed. I figure if I do that I can save someone loads of time and can help them get it all installed in no time.

It would be a favour. My way of starting some kind of satellite dish installation chain of love, or something like that.

So if you have one of these kits and want some help getting it working, let me know. I think I can help.

Hopefully now you can see the meaning in the title of this long double-posting.

Satellite dishes and the chain of love

This afternoon I spent 2 hours installing a satellite dish. I bought the dish and the accompanying receiver at Lidl a few weeks ago, it was maybe even months ago.

Before I bought it I chatted with some people in work that I know already bought the same kit and they all seemed really chuffed with it. I also did some poking around in forums and it seemed relatively straightforward.

For €99 euro you really can't go wrong.

I bought this dish and receiver for my mother's house, up in the Dublin Mountains overlooking Dublin Bay. The house is so old and there is no cable television in the area. Everyone up there on the road where she lives has either an old UHF roof antenna or a satellite dish for television.

The roof antenna on the house is attached to the chimney and in my view it has seen better days. It just about withstood any storms in recent memory and looking up at it from down on the ground you can see that it's missing a few bits.

They must have been important because the picture is crap. I mean every channel is like watching TV through a blizzard. You can't see anything.

To start with there are just 6 channels. When we were kids growing up in that house there were 6 channels. Since then the rest of the world has moved on yet this house still gets 6 channels.

Lately the TV just about displays pictures on two of them, RTE1 and RTE2. The rest are terrible. No picture, no sound. Just snow and a lot of SHIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHH coming out the loudspeakers.

So that's why I bought this satellite kit. To bring my mother's TV into the 90s. yes that's right the 90s. I mean it's not digital but it's a hell of a lot better than 6 channels of which only 2 are watchable. Barely.

So up I went a month or so ago and had a first stab at getting the thing going. Mistake number 1 was trying to get this working with all the kids there and my brothers in the garden shouting "advice" up to me. Needless to say it was not helpful and I couldn't get it going.

My mother knows me well. She knew immediately that it would annoy the heck out of me that I had to leave it without getting it going. She was so right.

So today I am on vacation from work, and I had it in mind that if the weather was good I'd give it another go.

I went up there today, sans enfants, and brought every possible tool I might need with me.

First step was to hook up all the kit to the back of the TV.

Second step was to cut and re-crimp the cables going into the actual dish. I had left the cable out in the rain for the last 2 months or so and it had already started to rust. Doh!

Anyway, once I was satisfied that all the connectors were OK I hooked up the dish and tried to get a picture. I selected the satellite (without really knowing which would be best) and ran a channel scan. It counted all the way up to 100% only to tell me that it had detected 0 channels.

Sh*t.

I went back out to the garden and this time I hooked up the cheap satellite finder that came with the dish. Went back inside, scanned again. 100% scan and no channels. Not looking good.

I went back out and this time I got rid of the cheapo sat-finder and hooked up the one I bought for €10 with the dish. It makes a squealing noise when you point it at a satellite.

It did nothing for the first little bit, then squealed a little and then just as I was beginning to think that I was wasting my time it started to give off an almighty howl.

I thought ey-up, what's this then.

Problem. I had nothing to sit the thing on while I dashed inside.

No problem. Grabbing a chair from the house and a clamp from the boot of the car I managed to keep the thing squealing. I disconnected the finder, hooked up the regular cable and went inside.

Sure enough I had found a satellite and the channels were coming in. I couldn't believe it.

After a full scan I hit exit on the remote and up came a picture. Crystal clear. What would be the inaugural broadcast? Yep, Scooby Doo. The same scooby doo I have on at home every day. Hilarious.

The big question now was could I leave the satellite sitting clamped to a chair in the front garden? If I moved it to the back of the house would it work again?

Coming in the next posting: What the heck is the "chain of love" and what has it got to do with Satellite dishes...

No censorship here

OK. I never really thought about it before but the idea of having to log in to Blogger to post a comment makes no sense.

I don't make the rules. This was one of those things about the Blogger system that I just went along with.

So Stephen, a recent defector to wordpress, raised the point today and to be honest I'm not sure why I or anyone else would need to have comments only entered by those logged in to Blogger.

Maybe it's something to do with spam comments on blogs.. maybe those twisted deviants that send out spam are planning to fill the comments section with some gems like "make your lady scream Tuesday".

Anyhow I have now turned it off. I went in and reprogrammed the plasma core and uploaded a new cybernetic paradigm into the transmogrifibrilatoryneuralhypermarchéoverridematrix and it's all grand now.

Comment away if you will.

I welcome your comments, be they poetic, poisonous or just something else that begins with p.

It's always a bad sign when children are quiet

That will teach me to be reading about Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas over at Go Fug Yourself and not paying attention to what the kids are doing behind me.

I was browsing through a posting about Fergie's fashion sense, and looking at the various photos they have on there about her 'emergent' dress sense.

Then I noticed it was quiet behind me and turned around to see my two year old, sitting quietly at the kitchen table busy smearing chocolate all over something.

I gave him a chocolate coin, foolishly presuming he would eat it.

Instead he found something much better to do with it.

Smear it all over daddy's mobile phone.

Yep - he's managed to work it right in between the keys.

Serves me right.

What? What? I can't take an interest in the contemporary music/fashion scene as presented by the Fuggers? Sure I can.

I mean it's not to be taken seriously is it. It's not exactly breaking news.

Public toilet or public inconvenience?

Ah yes, the biggest burning issue in society today. The state of our public toilets.

Specifically I want to poll the world (he said with great humility) about the phenomenon of incorrectly-fitted toilet paper in public toilets.

Where you may live these facilities may be known as: Toilets; restrooms; washrooms; bathrooms; jacksies; jacks; bogs; and so on.

In any event the specific naming is of no consequence.

The problem persists in my view irrespective of what you call this most public of conveniences.

On the wall of the cubicle there are two principal types of toilet paper dispensers.

Type 1 is the the sort where there is a big pile of overlapping sheets in a rectangular shaped dispenser and you just help yourself. The only issue here is that sometimes an over-zealous employee crams too many sheets into the darned thing and you need arms like Geoff Capes to get the paper out.

And then so much comes out that you're worried about blocking the toilet up. This also happens with those napkin dispensers in restaurants.. either you get one torn paper napkin or 8 napkins and you start to have visions of young trees being felled in a forest because of your napkin greed.

Type 2 is the focus of my attention here. The old "roll of paper" variety. Hanging on the wall at arm's reach is the trusty old toilet roll holder. The toilet paper is installed, either on a regular sized roll like you have in your home, or on a huge indistrial sized roll. Now some fleet-footed students may indeed have the jumbo sized roll at home.

Anyway, it seems to me that this type of dispenser is designed to dispense the roll with the paper passing from the top of the roll. There is usually a bit of metal, like a plate shaped per the contour of the toilet roll, to rest against the toilet paper and make tearing off paper easy.

This only works if the roll is in the right way. THIS is the issue.

Lots of people have the paper in upside down. This to me is madness.

I don't have any proof that my way is the right way. I am just certain it's got to be right and right means that the paper falls from the top of the roll.

I have provided a handy diagrammatic representation of the issue to the right. If I come to your home I expect you to have the toilet paper lined up right. Otherwise I'm going to change it around.

I'm saving you here, I really am.

Flawed heroes

There's something very dangerous about hero worship in my view.

Often we are presented with a fairly narrow and one-dimensional impression of a person and of course we just get the positives.

Sports stars are heralded as great role models for kids, visiting schools to advocate the virtues of exercise, healthy eating and setting goals.

Film stars often directly play heroes, like Val Kilmer playing Batman for example. But it can be confusing for kids. Especially when the heroes fall from grace.

Sometimes it's something as stupid as Tom Cruise jumping on the sofa, making people wonder whether he has any credibility or integrity left. I personally don't think it was the worst thing ever done on TV.

Other times it's daft stuff like that kid from The Sopranos, Robert Iler, robbing people in Central Park in New York. Then you have Winona Ryder shoplifting.

More obscure examples might include the Olympic skier who was stripped of his medals after failing a drugs test. Time to lay low. Not this guy. Apparently he had been seeing Aliens and they were responsible somehow for the failed drug test.

What got me thinking about this today was a story in the news today about a former Rugby player who has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for murdering his wife. This guy is very well known in sporting circles, being a former captain of the French Rubgy team.

He doesn't to this day know what possessed him to go home and fetch a pistol and then shoot his wife in front of something like 60 terrified people.

Heroes have their flaws too like the rest of us. They just have further to drop.

The Ukrainian Cowboy has left the prairie

Jack Palance died yesterday at the ripe old age of 87.

He was something of a legend, certainly for his acting in some of the great cowboy roles of 20th century cinema.

There are a bunch of things about his life that are interesting.

For example, a fire in a plane during his military training left him scarred yet that rugged scarred look he had added something really special to his career as a real cowboy.

He was a heavyweight boxer in his youth.

And he was very proud of his Ukrainian roots, named Vladimir Palaniuk at birth.

There's a great story of him being invited to a Russian film festival to receive an award, along with Dustin Hoffman. He too has Ukrainian roots though the story suggests Hoffman is maybe not so clear about exactly where his roots lie.

In the story Palance is invited up to the stage to collect his award. However when he got to the lectern he used the opportunity to announce himself to be Ukrainian and most definitely not Russian. He walked off, along with his small entourage, and left the ceremony without accepting the award which he considered to be bogus and ill-advised.

Hoffman, who had spoken earlier, had supposedly accepted the award and thanked the Russian people for saving his family during World War II.

Palance was not impressed by Hoffman's blurred picture of history and the actual events.

Great story. Read about it here.

A tough guy on screen. A tough guy in real life. One of a kind.

Here's poo in my eye

Can't believe I did it again.

Some months ago I wrote here about the excruciating pain that follows when you unwittingly flick toothpaste into your eye.

Not deliberately of course, but if you're not careful a little bit of toothpaste borne on a globule of one's own spit can easily carve out a trajectory from toothbrush to cornea.

Well determined not to make that mistake again I am super careful with my toothbrush.

Alas there is a new threat to my ocular integrity. This time in the form of poo. Or maybe Sudocrem.

I was changing our little guy into his bedclothes and of course he had managed to fill up his nappy with some revolting mush from his prodigious bowels. The stench was overpowering. He had managed to get a nice coverage from his upper to his lower as it were.

I was wiping and dabbing, cleaning and cleansing. I then applied a little Sudocrem, a zinc-based skin cream, to his nappy area to keep the old nappy rash at bay.

Well me being a man I declined to clean my hands properly. Just like guys who fix their cars or lawnmowers at the weekend, why bother with proper hand washing when a quick wipe on the front of whatever one is wearing will suffice.

So, I gave the hands a quick dip but that was it.

And now my eye is sore. It could be the acidic poo. It could be the zinc-based cream.

Either way my eye is sore and I know I rubbed something in it that it was not designed to deal with.

My wife has delivered the Clear Eyes to me. These drops are great for sore eyes. Alas they can do nothing for my (repeat) stupidity.

Now I shall retire for the evening to dream about chocolate cakes.

Adieu.

Is American chocolate crap?

Last year I was working on a presentation about diversity.

One part showed that diversity can present difficulty and I showed just how many different types of telephone connectors there are in the world. Not all places use the trusty RJ-11 plug and socket you know.

Nobody disagreed with that idea.

Then I got to talking about chocolate. This is where things got a bit hairy.

Europeans are such snobs about chocolate and there is some real national pride at stake when it comes to describing which chocolate is best.

The British and Irish seem to like Cadbury's. It's a unique taste with high vegetable fat content and lower cocoa content than most other European types.

The Swiss claim to make the best chocolate in Europe, and most would probably agree with that. They have brands like Lindt and Nestlé which are famous, varied and very popular.

The Italians don't make any great claims and that's probably about right. They do make Nutella and that's not bad I suppose. And Ferrero Rocher stuffed with Nutella is pretty good too.

The French have a few well known chocolate brands, like Maxim's, but they are not hailed across Europe as far as I can see.

Germany doesn't have any great tradition of being master choc makers. Austria has the wonderful Mozartkugeln by Mirabell, which has no equal anywhere in my view.

Funnily enough when I came to asking people, granted they were mostly Europeans, what they thought of American chocolate the verdict was unanimous.

It's crap. It takes gak and nobody in their right mind would eat it.

Is this fair?

I suppose we're talking about stuff like Hershey's chocolate, those weird Reese's peanut-butter thingies and those big peppermint patties.

I personally once ate the best part of a family sized bag of chilled peppermint patties so I do like them.

But I got a fair bit of bashing for bringing American chocolate back to Dublin from some of my trips to the USA. I mean what was I going to do? Scour the stores of North Carolina looking for Cadbury's chocolate??

So. That's the question.

Is American chocolate crap?

Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin

Yes. Winston is right.

Mr. Putin is indeed a dab hand at Judo. He has written a book called "Learning Judo with Vladimir Putin".

No marks for the imaginative title so.

They don't have this exact one on Amazon but they do have another of his Judo books over there. Makes you wonder what other political leaders might write about in their spare time.

The other side of beauty

My wife showed me this advert and I thought it was interesting.

It suggests that no matter how much human intervention there is in the shaping of "beauty", ultimately it's a waste of time trying to get that cover page look.

Men of course don't bother.

Scary picture

Is this a scary picture or what?

This guy leads one of the world's largest nations, holding control of some of the world's largest oil and gas reserves.

He looks strangely "at home" with that gun in his hand.

And the upside down earphones... the mark of someone who (a) doesn't want to mess up their intricate hair-do or (b) has done this a fair number of times before.

You decide.

p.s. check out the "interesting" looking people in the background.

Stupid stupid politicians

Today's ignominious publicity award goes to Michael Fitzgerald, a county councillor from County Tipperary in Ireland.

For some reason known only to him, he took the opportunity afforded to him by a local radio station to say something meaningful to the listeners and regaled them with this pearl of wisdom:

"I have neighbours, and I have friends, and I have people that go to the pub every single night of the week and they drink three or four pints and they go home, they drive home in the jeep or in the car. They are not drunk they are well able to take it."

Yep. Michael is firm in his belief that it's ok to have a few pints and then drive home if you are an experienced drinker.. I'm paraphrasing but that's pretty much the gist of what he was saying. By the way he himself is a convicted drink driver.

He then went on to bemoan the way people are caught drink driving when just a short distance from their homes.

Check out Al's post on this a short while ago, on the shocking statistic that is Irish road deaths. There's even a few idiots doing the rounds broadcasting to anyone that will listen that there are countries in the EU with much higher road death totals per year than us. Great. We can all relax so. Everyone seems to have a desire to address the problem but we just can't seem to make any inroads. The Irish blogosphere has a whole section devoted to people writing about this awful problem.

And then you have this fool mouthing off irresponsibly about how it's OK for some people to have a few pints and then get behind the wheel.

Put some people in front of a microphone or camera and they just can't help but ease the old foot into the mouth.

From Dingle to Bangalore

There's a couple of similar stories in the news of late.

Both involve places that want to change their names "back" to something that is more indicative of their cultural heritage.

Good idea?

Hard to know.

What I do know is that the town of Dingle in the south-west of Ireland had been going through a process of name change.

It was one of those "will we / won't we" situations where some people were in favour of the change while others were not. The idea was to change the name back to An Daingean, the original Irish name of the town.

Needless to say it got a bit heated with suggestions flying about that "all these outsiders" living in the town were against the name change, with others saying the name change being pushed so passionately by "traditionalists" was impractical.

They went ahead and changed the sign on the edge of the town in 2004, removing the sign for Dingle and replacing it with a sign for An Daingean only.

There was something of an outcry from local businesses, claiming that Dingle was the name known to tourists and that the name change was throwing away the "valuable brand" that the town had built up.

Whatever way you look at it, there was probably some truth in that view. Some more forthright people even went ahead and erected their own sign, determined to keep that name alive.

Anyway, they couldn't work it out and the only way to resolve it was to call a referendum of people living in the area. Only one third of people living in the area can vote though.

To date no decision has been taken on when the vote will take place.

And then one of my colleagues in the office was telling me that the authorities in India want to change the name of the city of Bangalore to Bangaluru. In fact they already have. Well sort of. On November 1 the new name was to come into effect but it has not been officially ratified. There is some debate over whether this will actually take place.

Of course India has some prior experience with this name change idea, having changed the name of Bombay back to Mumbai and Calcutta back to Kalkotta. In fact 20 cities in India have been renamed since British rule ended in the late 1940s.

Russia did it. South Africa is trying to do it. They both had good reasons to change the names of cities.

But for the rest of us. Is there really much to be gained from changing the name?

It's been a long time

I went to see Muse last Friday in Dublin.

Up until about a month ago I had no idea about Muse's music, except for my familarity with their song "time is running out". The song was ok but the video annoyed me.

My wife bought the tickets so I was all set to go along and give them the benefit of the doubt. I had been listening to their music in the car in recent weeks too to make sure I was familiar with their big hits, as it were.

At this point I think I sound like my parents. Hmmm.

Anyway, to put this into context, I am not what you would call a frequent concert-goer.

The previous concert I went to was The Dixie Chicks, over 2 years ago. Before that I went to see Crowded House, U2, Toto, Tori Amos, Bjork, Vince Gill and a Billy Joel/Elton John double-bill.

Not quite eclectic I suppose but there you have it.

Anyway, the concert was incredible and I came away deaf but more appreciative of Muse's music. My wife has since created a playlist on my iPod with a ton of their tracks. Thanks :-)

A couple of things struck me as interesting at the concert.

First, I witnessed a phenomenon I think is rare in Ireland. A barman yawning due to inactivity. Yes, everywhere I looked there were empty bar counters with bored-looking bar staff standing waiting for someone, anyone to step forward and buy a drink.

OK, it was a young crowd but there were plenty of people above the legal age for drinking alcohol.

It was just that the concert-goers were spending their money on O'Briens coffee and Cadbury's chocolate instead.

The other thing that was interesting was the behaviour of a guy sitting in front of me in the concert arena itself.

He was maybe in his late thirties or early fourties, with three others one of which I assume was his partner.

Anyway, what was interesting was the way he kept looking around. His body language was fascinating. He was seeking approval from someone, from somewhere, for permission to stand up and shake his ass or whatever.

All evening the people all around me were sitting, with occasional breakouts of standing quickly followed by an orderly return to seats.

He twisted and turned in front of me for most of the evening, looking enviously to the right when 3 or 4 people stood up and punched the air and then sat down again.

All night he sought the approval from someone.

Then, right at the end of the night we had the usual faffing around where the band runs off and "pretends" that they are done for the night. Only to come on again minutes later after everyone has kicked the floor for a bit.

Back on they came and that was it, the music started and this guy in front of me couldn't contain himself any longer. He leapt up out of his seat, hands pumping and ass swaying in my face. His partner jumped up too, punctuating the airflow with the fist of her right hand in a gentle stabbing motion. The guy to her left, the third member of their concert party jumped up too, also waving his arms and ass. The fourth member of the party, a classic party pooper like me, stayed glued to his seat.

They danced and swayed and I peeked between them at the stage and at the big screens. Then the third guy to stand glanced at the fourth guy, still sitting, and he sat back down. The woman then sat down, and alas there was naught to do but sit again for the gentleman with his ass in my face.

Call me sad but all I could think of was the chapter on "conformity" in Aronson's The Social Animal. This poor guy desperately wanted to do his own thing but the power of his own mind's desire to conform damned him to a night of fitting in. Classic stuff.

Right now I'm standing in the kitchen typing this with a piece of pizza sticking out of my mouth and Muse on the radio.

Am I a real fan or what?

Advertising license

I'm guessing most people are familiar with terms like "artistic license" or "poetic license".

The American Heritage Dictionary explains "poetic license" thus:

"The liberty taken by an artist or a writer in deviating from conventional form or fact to achieve a desired effect."

So I propose the concept of "advertising license" defined thus:

"The liberty taken by an advertiser in deviating from conventional form or fact to achieve a desired effect."

I was standing at a petrol station this evening filling up my car (not literally) when I noticed that the petrol station has installed some television screens right above the petrol pumps.

On the screen ads are displayed so people like me can be targeted while we wait for the tank to fill up.

Anyway one of the ads said that Dom Perignon, a blind wine cellar master, when he discovered Champagne was heard to say "come quickly, I have tasted the stars".

A charming image. Like small boys in the park, jumpers for goalposts etc.

Charming yet utterly false.

Over at Wine on the Web, they clarify that this is in fact a myth. Dom Perignon did have a problem with his vision (probably an eyelash in his eye or something along those lines) but he was most certainly not blind.

Unfortunately the truth does not end there. In fact he did not "discover" champagne either.

This reminds me also of last Friday night at a concert at The Point when I encountered something similar in the mens toilets.

Again there was a bunch of adverts above the urinals for the viewing distraction of men at work, as it were. Most were famous sports quotes. Some were believable while others were clearly misquoted or plain concocted and false.

For example the following quote:

"I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father."

At this site the quote is attributed to Paul Hamm, a US gymnast.

At this site the same quote is attributed to Greg Norman, the Australian Golfer.

Advertisers huh. They'd tell you anything to catch your attention.

p.s. might write about the concert later. It was amazing.

iPod 1 - Zune 0

In what can only be described as a piece of badly-timed news, it emerges today that if you have been buying music from Microsoft's MSN service and playing it on your "plays for sure" compatible music player, then you forget about trying to play that downloaded music on one of Microsoft's new Zune music players.

It's not compatible.

To quote a Microsoft spokesperson:

"Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices."

Ahem.

And then she went on to say:

"We will not be performing compatibility testing for non-Zune devices, and we will not make changes to our software to ensure compatibility with non-Zune devices."

So basically if you've bought some music for your existing MP3 player and go off and buy a Zune (when it comes out) then you'll still need your old player to listen to the stuff you've already downloaded.

Oh no wait. According to Microsoft you can burn it onto a CD and listen to it that way.

How convenient.

Apple has 75%+ of the portable music market. Anybody like to guess why?

I'm sticking with my Nano.

Click here for the full article.

Respect and extra cash

I love the story on NPR about a fast food restaurant in the USA that seems to have bucked the trend in that particular industry.

They pay almost $3 an hour above the minimum wage and seem to have very little trouble hanging on to people.

There's a wonderfully vivid image in the newscast about how people in the kitchen are peeling potatoes and chopping them by hand to make french fries.

One employee who works there used to work at a law firm but now makes more money at this restaurant.

At another point in the report you hear an employee say that one of the reasons why he remains an employee is the respect the company has shown him.

It sounds so simple.

Pay people well and treat them with respect.

Now why can't/don't other companies follow the same simple ethos?

A sense of regret

I was listening to The Writers Almanac in the car today while driving home on the M50.

It is dark now at 5 PM and the roads are jammed with cars trying to get home along the motorway. The motorway is a big building site now so traffic moves even slower than it did before.

So a soothing few minutes of Garrison Keillor was just great.

It made me remember something that happened a few weeks ago.

I was at a training course with some colleagues at a hotel a little outside the city. A colleague suggested that he, I and another colleague could all car pool for obvious reasons.

It was a good idea and a nice gesture on his part.

I remember he had "The Writers Almanac" on in his car when we met in the morning at 7 AM, but the volume was down very low and it was impossible to hear. I think he turned it off shortly afterwards.

At the end of the afternoon when the course was over we all jumped in the car and again he switched on the radio and then switched on The Writers Almanac.

I remember feeling a little giddy, not sure why really, and distinctly remember taking the mickey out of the presenter's voice.

He switched it off again.

Nothing more was said about it really since then.

I do regret that I did that. It was daft.

I have since discovered what a charm that little daily podcast is.

p.s. Interesting article about Garrison Keillor on Slate here.

The biggest lie?

I think Al Gore has done a sterling job of getting around the place, keeping people focused on the notion that all is not well with our planet.

The idea is simple. We are screwing the place up, big time. We are depleting resources at an alarming rate, we have little or no regard for the long-term sustainability and don't seem to have a plan.

There has been some trash talking about Gore's agenda, people commenting for example that he's just a lefty tree-hugging stooge and that kind of childish nonsense.

He seems to be serious about his message and has the track record to back it up.

However something is making me uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable in fact.

The recent Stern report commissioned by the UK Government painted a bleak picture of what awaits the planet. We're depleting fish stocks that marine life will be all but obliterated by 2048 if we keep going at this rate. And on it goes. One bleak projection after another.

One of the things that seems to be common across world governments is that we need to tax people more to support green policies to reverse the impending environmental disaster.

This is where I am not comfortable.

Is there any basis in evidence that suggests that increasing taxation of large car users results in any improvement in the environmental situation?

What about the fact that only people with money can pay taxes and penalties yet other countries with poorly developed infrastructures pump junk into the atmosphere?

Isn't there a western bias in the search for a solution, an asymetric apportioning of blame to those who can afford to pay?

I'm not saying this is wrong, per se. What I am saying is that there is a suggestion that this has not really been properly thought through.

There's a need for urgency to solve all problems. I'm just worried that we don't have full and impartial information about whether this problem really exists to the extent that it has previously been defined.

Am I alone in thinking that although we do need to slow down our consumption, it could be the case that "someone" could be distorting the real extent to which we need to change so that it can be channelled into so-called green taxation?

The mystery of Borat

Is Borat a phenomenon yet?

Looks like he's getting there, or maybe I should say "it" is getting there.

I mean Borat is not really a person. Is he?

He's a vehicle for comedy. He's a mechanism to mock people while mocking himself. Except he's not mocking himself. Because he doesn't exist. It's a character.

Borat has been on the TV in the UK for years. He has been a part of the Ali-G concept for so long. Ali-G eventually wore out due to overexposure. Now it seems the creator, Sacha Baron Cohen is trying to relaunch Ali-G. God help us.

Will Borat go the same way.

So why do so many people find it funny?

Is there some kind of "car crash" curiousity about the idea of the character. You just know something terrible is going to happen and you can't look away.

Borat is not shy about saying things that most people couldn't get away with. Because some of what he says is at the very least dodgy, and in other cases downright wrong.

I'm not trying to spoil anyone's fun. I'll probably watch the film myself. I just wonder why it is that this humour is captivating to so many people.

The phenomenon reminds me a little of Wayne's World.

Buzzwords and catchphrases.
TV to Movie crossover.
Overplayed.
Forgotten?

I can't end without mentioning the story I just saw about a person who lost her job, in her view, due to her experiences with Borat.

Not sure what to make of this really.

Am I the only one who thinks that cheap laughs are not so funny?

Kids these days

Now every generation tut-tuts about the one following it. Kids these days, they are all hooligans, wasters, lazy, and so forth.

Yep that's just the way it is.

Soon people like you and me will be saying to the kids of tomorrow "would you take those blasted iPod ear-buds out of your ears while you're eating".

And there are televisions everywhere. I went to the "ideal homes" show in Dublin last week and in the show-house there was a very expensive looking bath with a big flat-screen TV at the end of the bath.

Now I thought this whole fireplace/Plasma TV in the bathroom was limited to people on MTV cribs and shows like that. Now it's aspirational for the average person.

So, instead of when you were a little kid and your parents banged on the bathroom door saying "come on, you've been in there for ages", in the future parents will be saying "how much more of that DVD is left?" from outside the bathroom.

Mental.

Anyway, teenagers are bad everywhere. Isn't that the gist of how older people see younger people. They are all out for trouble.

But what about those pesky 3 month-olds? Yep, there's a great story on Yahoo/Reuters today about how police in India arrived at a house to arrest a 3 month-old boy accused of robbing people on a bus.

I tell you, you've got to keep any eye on these youngsters.

Stereotyping the place where you live

It's one of those silly things. People have crazy ideas about other countries and cities yet often they can't explain where the ideas come from.

We make associations and attributions based on corny and hackneyed ideas that maybe made sense in some tiny way at a single point in time.

For example I live in Ireland. This is not news to regular visitors to this blog. Ireland is a great place for many reasons.

However when I travel abroad I hear all kinds of daft things about Ireland.

Many people, when I have told them where I am from, get this look of sympathy and compassion on their faces and look at me as if to say "you poor thing".

I explore these expressions of sympathy to find they are talking about all the bombings. I live in Dublin, while the bombings (in the past) took place mostly in the 6 counties of Northern Ireland.

I also get the "you're from Ireland, you must be a blathering drunk" line quite often. I've had it said to me in the USA, in Italy, in the UK (loads of times), in Holland, and in Germany. I am not a blathering drunk but the general perception is often that "all" Irish people are complete drunks who can't be trusted near bleach let alone alcoholic drinks.

Ireland is pretty, certainly green, but we don't all stand around at the crossroads with bodhrans doing ceili dancing (curse that Michael Flatley for that idea alone) in the rain with a grand pair of Brogues on our feet.

Do you understand what I mean by this.

So, anyway I was looking at the cluster map for this blog, which by the way I think is really interesting. I'm intrigued by some of the places from which people have been reading this blog.

Hawai'i caught my eye.

That's because I went there in 1999 with my lovely Wife on our honeymoon. We had a wonderful time and would love to go back some time.

One of the things that struck me about Hawai'i is how little people know about the place but most people have some associations in their minds. Examples:

Hawai'i Five-O.
The old enduring image of Jack Lord standing on top ofthe skyscraper in downtown Honolulu as the camera panned around, waiting to meet Danno and tell him to book some poor unfortunate.

I have to say that I didn't see any cops standing on rooftops while I was there.

A workplace shooting
Carried out by an employee at the offices of Xerox. This happened while I was there and I was amazed at how many people back home had heard of this when I got back.

It's something that people I meet seem to remember and associate with Hawai'i

Hula dancing
I think this might be a little like Ceili dancing. It's part of the culture but might just be that it's done a lot more for tourists who want to see it.

I saw some folks Hula dancing and thought it was great. I think I might prefer this to Ceili dancing or that "Riverdance" stuff. Am I a traitor for saying this?

Dog the Bounty Hunter
Yes. The great man does his best work in Hawai'i. I'm intrigued to know what people living in Hawai'i think of old Dwayne Chapman, the self-professed "world's greatest bounty hunter" although he did claim his daddy told him that on his death bed.

Is Hawai'i really that bad. He seems to beat up and pick up a lot of fairly flaky looking people down on their luck.

Then just when they think things couldn't get any worse his rag-tag mob of suburban-driving deputies arrive and things really do get worse.

I can't believe that these 4 things are so strongly associated with Hawai'i yet they do come up a fair bit in conversation when I talk about Hawai'i, not brought up by me of course.

Likewise I can't believe some people might think I'm a blathering drunk getting ready to go for a bit of Irish dancing to pass the night away in a dark and pokey little pub somewhere up in the mountains.

But they probably do.