June 3rd, 2009, No Comments »
Dave Gorman is a writer and comedian whom I admire. His recent blog post about visiting Kilkenny, Ireland for a gig reminded me of the two years we lived in that country:
On that walk I passed three girls in tears with broken heels, three girls being helped out of the gutter by angry men, four men being helped out of the gutter by angry girls, one couple drunkenly helping each other out of the gutter, two people throwing up, two sets of lads squaring up like rutting stags preparing for a you-want-some scrap that probably never transpired and one fella clutching a blood stained hanky to his face because, I assume, he’d found someone who actually did want some.
That could be downtown Dublin on any given Saturday night. We actually spent a weekend in Kilkenny during the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August, had a lovely time and didn’t see any of what Gorman describes. We saw Michael Ondaatje read, and had a nice, brief little chat with him when he signed the unexpectedly Canadian edition of The Cinnamon Peeler. We also saw a bad Stephen Berkoff play, and wandered around the splendid Kilkenny Castle.
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September 28th, 2007, No Comments »
Speaking of the Canadian Football League…I was looking for some Vancouver Canucks news today, and accidentally learned that Joost users will be able to watch CFL content on the Internet TV startup’s network this winter.
I tried out Joost a couple of months back, and literally found nothing in their video network to interest me. Hopefully that’ll change, or I’ll develop an interest in Peruvian rugby.
In any case, I wanted to point out a hilarious quote from Stephen McCormack, CEO of Wildwave in the associated press release:
“There is a huge pent up demand for Canadian Sports and the CFL in particular, across the World and with the launch of Wildcard Sports Network on Joost, with the CFL as our featured launch partner, we can now provide this compelling League’s most hard-hitting content to a worldwide audience on today’s most advanced Internet TV platform.”
Really? A “huge pent up demand” for the CFL “across the World”? That just struck me as downright amusing. I see that Wildwave is based in Dublin (ah, Dame Street), where I never heard anyone mention Canadian football for the two years I lived there. And I’m Canadian. Maybe they’ve tapped into some hidden enclave of Roughriders fans in Kilkenny?
We’re not big fans of the press release, and we learned a long time ago not to write absurdly effusive quotes for CEOs. It’s unlikely that Mr. McCormack actually wrote that himself.
Also, I know I’m writing from a grammatical glass house here, but that release shows symptoms of that common marketer’s disease, Over Capitalization Syndrome. It’s a scourge across our industry.
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June 19th, 2007, 3 Comments »
The Irish love their fried breakfast, typically referred to as ‘a fry-up’ or ‘rashers and eggs’. Internationally, it’s called ‘heart attack before noon’. I never learned to love the Irish breakfast, with its tomatoes, runny eggs, baked beans and, irk, blood sausage.
Because there’s a blog about everything, now there’s a blog (courtesy of Neatorama) dedicated to reviewing fry-ups at Dublin-area restaurants. Here’s the accompanying Flickr photo set.
From a recent review of Cafe Moda in Rathmines:
The breakfast had scrambled eggs rather than my preference - fried, but there was an ample quantity. Along with the egg were two sausages, a very ham like rasher, a few slices of tomato and beans. On the side there was a slice of toasted bread cut in half. The menu said two slices of toast, but what came was one slice of bread cut in half.
Two bloggy notes to the site authors: get thyselves some permalinks, and give us a page which lists all the restaurants and their review ratings. You could do this cheap and cheerfully using a public spreadsheet from Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Longtime readers may recall when I had a fry-up with the President of Ireland.
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April 30th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Our hotel is right next to the Royal Dublin Society, commonly known around these parts as the RDS. The RDS is pretty much like Vancouver’s PNE, or any large exhibition grounds. Yesterday we saw a sign advertising a Supreme Cat Show at the RDS, and had to pop by to watch the feline strangeness.
In truth, it was less strange than I hoped. I did manage to get a few photos (as always, click for larger versions).
These cats just shouldn’t be:
I like the alarmed look on this cat’s face (and the creepy-looking kid at right):
This isn’t a cat photo, but what do you suppose this woman has in her Coke bottle?
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April 28th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Back in 2001, we paid the equivalent of CAN $2700/month for a slightly shabby but spacious two bedroom flat in the centre of Dublin. That was considered a pretty good deal at the time.
I know rental rates and housing prices don’t necessarily run in parallel, but I just thought I’d mention that figure by way of introduction. I actually wanted to write about Dublin housing prices, which have soared since the Celtic Tiger phenomenon of the mid-nineties. Consider the facts that I read in today’s Irish Times:
- In 1991, the average price of a ’second-hand house’ (meaning not newly-built) was €76,075 (or CAN $115,935).
- In March, 2007, the average price of a second-hand house was €429,151 (or CAN $654,005).
Prices have increased over five-fold in a 16-year period! That’s just nuts. No wonder there’s extensive speculation about an Irish real estate bubble.
To compare with Vancouver:
- According to Stats Canada (via a PDF whose location I failed to note), in 1991, the average Vancouver home cost about CAN $200,000.
- In November, 2006, the average Vancouver home cost CAN $519,294.
Why that’s a measly increase of two and a half times.
I suppose to do a real analysis you’d have to compare GDP or average net income and these sorts of factors, but Lord knows I’m no economist. Apparently the US is undergoing a significant, uh, correction. Will Ireland and Canada follow?
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April 28th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Dublin’s Landsdowne Road is the oldest rugby ground in the world that hosts international matches. They also have international soccer/football matches there–I saw Ireland beat Russia there in a friendly back in 2002. It’s currently undergoing a €365 million renovation, and due to be reopened in 2009.
In the meantime, the Irish Rugby Foorball Union is holding a massive auction of the stadium’s ‘assets’. It’s running online this weekend, and you can get yourself any number of bits of memorabilia: seats, coat hooks (?) and even sections of the turf. Highest priced item at the moment? A Scotland vs. Ireland ‘touch judge flag’ (is that the thing that sits in the corner of the field, like where they take corner kicks from?) from 1924, currently going for €1.626,00.
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April 18th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Internet access permitting, the next post will be from Dublin:
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April 10th, 2007, No Comments »
Posting will probably be a little light and unpredictable through the rest of April, as we ramp up for departure. In case anybody’s wondering (and I can’t imagine why), here’s where I’ll be:
April 18 - Leave Vancouver, fly to Dublin via London.
April 21 - Participate in BarCamp Dublin.
April 22 - Fly from Dublin to Carcassonne for five nights at our friends’ villa–this is vacation, so I’ll hopefully be totally unavailable.
April 28 - Fly back to Dublin to speak at ShareIT.
May 1 - Fly to Malta, stay overnight.
May 2 - Take the ferry to Gozo, meet our letting agent and, Flying Spaghetti Monster-willing, find a place to live.
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