The worst-named pub in Dublin is O’Donoghue’s. Since few people will recognise the name, I’ll give another hint: Thing Mote. Ah yes, that place.
I’m not sure when Thing Mote changed hands and was renamed O’Donoghue’s. I can say that in the last 18 months that I’ve been back in Dublin, every conversation that mentioned O’Donoghue’s also included the phrase “the place that used to be Thing Mote”. More frequently, it’s referred to directly as Thing Mote, since many people including myself have trouble remembering its real name.
“Thing Mote” is just odd. It’s slightly jarring, and very distinctive. It’s quirky. The music they played before they changed hands was also quirky and distinctive. In fact the main problem with the place was that it was jam-packed every night of the week.
O’Donoghue’s, on the other hand… For a start, there’s already another Dublin pub called O’Donoghue’s, a few streets away on Merrion Row. It’s well-known for its live trad music, and has apparently been around for over 200 years.
More to the point, O’Donoghue is a bland, unmemorable name. It’s like O’Neill’s (of which there are also two in the south city centre). People have to say “O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street” - not just to distinguish them, but because there are so many Dublin pubs named with generic Irish surnames, that there’s nothing to stimulate your memory. Of course, after 200 years, pubs like O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street and O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row develop enough character and reputation that they stand out in people’s minds. But 200 years is rather a long time to wait to build a reputation.
On the other hand, at least there’s no difficulty getting a seat these days.
EBay lets potential buyers ask questions about items for sale. But they don’t want them to arrange the sale outside eBay, since they would lose most of their commission. Solution? Get buyers to report themselves, if they catch themselves breaking the rules. This notice appears when the buyer uses the contact form:
Marketplace Safety Tip
Is this message an offer to buy your item directly through email without winning the item on eBay? If so, please help make the eBay marketplace safer by reporting it to us.
It reminds me of the question on U.S. Immigration forms: “Are you a member of a terrorist organisation?”
If you printed out the whole internet (disregarding content behind password-protected logins etc), how much space would it occupy?
In conversation the other night, I pulled a figure out of my rear and claimed it was something like “2 1/2 times the distance to the moon. So let’s see:
Well, assuming you had an infinitely fast printer and were therefore priniting off a snapshot of the web which you’d somehow downloaded, the closest estimation is probably that Google now indexes about eight billion pages. Even that is well short of the total amount of content available as a lot consists of flash-pages or other types of content which Google can’t index, or are password-protected forums, etc.
But taking eight billion as a starting point, and assuming that those pages take one sheet of A4 paper each (you might fit more than one on some sheets, but other web pages will take several), you’ll need a lot of paper to print them all out.
Assuming your infinitely-fast printer uses both sides of each sheet of A4 paper, and that a web page takes on average a single side of A4 (so some sheets will have several pages on them), you’ll need at least four billion sheets of paper. With an average paper thickness of 0.1mm for standard paper, that would be equivalent to a pile of A4 paper roughly 400km (250 miles) in height.
(link)
Other estimations of the number of pages indexed by Google range from 3 billion to 11 billion, with a suggestion that it might now be much higher. Still, this is still in the same ballpark.
As for the total number of pages (search engines deliberately try to omit junk), here’s one suggestion from 2 years ago: 1 trillion. That stacks up to 100,000km. While not terribly scientific, I’m going to end with that figure. At least it’s a quarter of the way to the moon.
I never imagined I would find myself shopping for a hoody in Penny’s. There was a perfectly good reason for it… but anyway, that’s another story. Just as I was trying one one, a small man with a heavy foreign accent came up to me and asked “do you have any sizes larger than XL?”
Penny’s employees wear a white shirt, tie, and black trousers or skirt.
I had just hung my big fur-lined leather jacket on the clothes rail at head height, together with my Tom-Baker-style scarf. My bright orange cardigan was slung over a rail beside me. I was wearing a purple shirt, baggy brown trousers and tan Dr Martens. My shoulder-bag and some other shopping were at my feet, and as I say, I was trying on a hoody.
“I….. think XL is the largest they have.”
“Oh, okay. Do you have this in green?”
I regularly get asked if I’m a musician. I’ve been approached by complete strangers and told that I look like an actor or a rock star. My nationality is typically guessed as German, Swedish or Australian, but never, ever Irish. Thank you, weird little man, for making me feel at home.
People are paying far too much attention to what I eat. Earlier my flatmate mentioned about how hard it is to get the recommended daily amount of five portions of fruit and vegetables per day, and then added, “and in America, they recommend ten portions.”
Me: “Ten portions?? Hang on a sec… so example yesterday for dinner I had steak, potatoes and peas. [Potatoes don’t count as a vegetable apparently]. So supposing I swapped the potatoes for peas. And swapped the steak for peas. So I’d have peas, peas and peas. And then I also had peas, peas and peas for breakfast, and peas, peas and peas for lunch. I still wouldn’t have reached the recommended amount of vegetables. In fact, to meet the requirements, I would be forced to have a pea-snack between meals.”
What kind of a healthy diet recommends you eat snacks between meals? Bloody Americans, if it wasn’t for them, we would have peas in this world.
For Petite, who really is a lady. I think.
Well she’s all you’d ever want,
She’s the kind that likes to flaunt and take to dinner.
Well she always knows her place.
She’s got style, she’s got grace, She’s got a wiener.
She’s a lady… Boy, she’s a lady….
Boy, talkin’ about that little lady… boy, and the lady is a man.
Well it’s never in the way
Always something nice to play with, what a blessing.
I can leave her on her own
Knowing she’s okay alone, and there’s no messing.
She’s a lady… Boy, she’s a lady…
Boy, talkin’ about that little lady… boy and the lady is a man.
Well she never asks for very much and I don’t refuse her.
Always treat her with respect, I never would abuse her.
What she’s got is hard to find, and I don’t really mind,
Help me build a vagina from my little penis skin. Hey, hey, hey.
Well she knows what I’m about,
She can take what I dish out, and that’s not easy,
Well she knows me through and through,
She knows just what to do, and how to please me.
She’s a lady… Boy, she’s a lady…
Boy, talkin’ about that little lady - boy! the lady is a man.
Yeah yeah yeah she’s a lady
Boy, listen to me baby, she’s a lady - boy!
Whoa whoa whoa, she’s a lady
Boy, and the lady is a man.
Yeah yeah yeah she’s a lady
Boy, talkin about this little lady
Whoa whoa whoa whoa
Whoa and the lady is a man
Yeah yeah she’s a ladyboy
And the ladyboy’s mine.
I snapped these freaky figures in Jervis St shopping centre. Apart from myself and my friend, everyone seemed to walk past without noticing or caring. This was a week ago, so they could have been dual-purpose decorations - Hallowe’en and then Christmas. To launch the Christmas season, they would animate, claw wildly at passing children, tear off their foul black flesh and reveal themselves as elves. That’s the Santa’s workshop sort of elf of course, not the Orlando Bloom type. Imagine a giant toy factory full of Orlando Blooms, carefully hand-carving their arrows. The reindeer wouldn’t stand a chance.
I find Christmas shopping to be a traumatic experience.
Sssh… US exceeds overdraft limit
According to the US Treasury, the statutory limit on their public debt is $8.965 trillion.
According to the same source, as of last Friday, the actual public debt was $8,968,607,956,049.61. Oops.
I’ve searched news sources for an hour, and all I can find is comments that the debt ceiling was expected to be reached in October, and would need sorting out before then. I can only assume that there was a sudden increase due to the Federal Reserve’s actions to the stock market/liquidity crisis in the last few days. Perhaps that explains why their contributions ($2 billion today) were so puny compared to the ECB (€48 billion today).
The Treasury has issued press releases in the past, when previous limits were in danger of being breached, and temporarily stopped selling securities. There’s no such press release at the moment though. So why isn’t this rather dramatic event being reported? Could it be because, with markets already panicking, it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s bank?