January 9, 2006 at 12:11AM Happy 2006!
Holy crap! It’s almost five months since I last posted any up here, though I have attempted to write things up in the past. I think the last thing I intended on posting up was a long screed bitching about the awful phoneline quality at home in Sligo, and of how I hoped that Tony O’Reilly and the rest of the eircom board rot in hell for the pain they put everybody in this country through. I thought better upon reading back on it and realising that it was just a little too vitriolic to put online.
I still haven’t much to write about. In fact, I’m a bit bored off my tits right now and need to find something interesting to keep my attention. There are a few things worth mentioning.
Babylon 5: The Complete Universe
At the beginning of December, I was given the Babylon 5: The Complete Universe boxset for my birthday by my parents, which rocked! It puzzled me, however, that each disc has a little note from Warner Brothers telling me that it’s not nice to purchase pirated movies. Why they bother giving out to people with perfectly legal copies of their products is beyond me. After I went through all the packaging, the wod of these notes was over half a centimetre thick. I mean, if they’re really sure that I’m the type who’s going to pirate stuff, if one doesn’t convince me, sixty of them definitely isn’t. What a waste of tree.
Photos!
Though I’m not sure who could possibly be interested in them, I’ve thrown some of the photos I’ve taken on my camera up online. I selected them in Picasa on a kind of ad-hoc basis, so they’re slightly messed up, but they’re roughly reverse chronological order. Here’s a run down of them in the correct order:
A few days before I left Cork (August 24th, 2005)
- Rutland Street as seen from my bedroom. I lived along Douglas Street, which you can see a sliver of at the bottom of the photo.
- Goodbye, bedroom!
- Goodbye, kitchen!
- Goodbye, living room!
- Crossing the road at George’s Quay.
- The south channel of the Lee. Taken a few minutes later after I’ve crossed the bridge over into the city centre.
- Tall ships!
Visiting Niamh (August 30th, 2005)
- The view from her flat. Yawn!
![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif)
- Her kitchen/living room, with me ducking out of the way.
- Oooh! Georgian Sprite! Odd the things you find in shops these days.
Electric Picnic, Day 0 (September 2nd, 2005)
- Galway. I was walking with Seamus to an offie to load up with drink to bring to the festival. Quality!
- On the train. That’s the Corrib you’re looking at. I’d swear Iarnród Éireann never wash their windows.
- Kopparberg, a shaky train, and Seamus feigning a nap. You just can’t beat Mixed Fruit Kopparberg.
- Ominous clouds in the midlands. Let’s hope the weather sticks.
- Who knew the Acropolis had been relocated to Laois? Not me, anyway.
- Walking up to the festival entrance. Seamus has not yet discovered that all his Kopparberg is going to get taken away from him in five minutes time.
- Dead man walking!
Electric Picnic, Day 1 (September 3rd, 2005)
- Seamus buggered up his arm after we got there. A brain the size of a whale, that lad!
- A shot of the main stage before things got started for the day.
- The legendary Kopparberg tent, where they sold everybody’s favourite pear cider for horribly inflated rates. And they didn’t even have mixed fruit! The indignity!
- Stumped, absolutely stumped.
- Back at the tent, and after a few tinnies (Smithwick’s, yum!), we start planning the day. Seamus got the notion into his head to write his plans on any exposed area of his body.
- The big attraction for both of us was The Arcade Fire.
- Seamus admits to what really happened to his wrist. Yes kids, RSI kicks ass.
- Sweet, illicit nectar of the Gods!
- So many tents! Such a blue sky!
- Skippy!
- Keith returns to find Seamus unconscious with a half-drank tin of Tuborg, which he promptly steals. Bwa, hwa, hwa!
- International co-operation.
- Everything kicks off. Mmmm... cute girl with sachel...
- Beach huts and Gardaí on patrol.
- Frisbee!
- Bloke on stilts.
- Crêpes in the City. Groan!
- Time for a lie down.
- Plane!
- Sky and silhuettes.
- Stradbally House itself.
- Flags!
- A fantastically blurry picture of be your own PET (BYOP, henceforth), and another, and holy crap, another of Jemina Pearl. My mind, he is blown.
- The Chalets! How yummily twee! And hawt too.
- Bugger! I got to The Arcade Fire too late, and couldn’t get close enough to get a decent photo. Here’s a shot to show you how far away I was from the stage, and another at full zoom balanced on top of a barrier. Crap. And I couldn’t even here them properly.
- Röyksopp was pretty boring overall, but this photo ended up far cooler than I’d intended. Happy accidents!
- Ah, my other big reason for going: the Flaming Lips. That’s Wayne Coyne with a tannoy while the band were setting up.
- Giant furry animals!
- At the start of the gig, he got into a giant plastic bubble, and started rolling over everybody in the crowd. He came close to my position, but never quite got there. It rocked!
- Twirling lights!
- Giant heads!
- More FLips.
- Freaky puppet nun!
- WTF!?
Electric Picnic, Day 2 (September 4th, 2005)
- Almost time to rawk out with the Redneck Manifesto!
- Richie Egan does constipated
- Rawk!
- Uber rawk!
- Can I take much more? Not really, I want to put my camera away and mosh!
- What a rawk moment!
- Irish rawk! I love that photo!
The rest of the day was a mess. Boring photos, or just ones I, ahem, can’t show.
Stormhoek (September 16th)
The day I got my bottle. I’ve been meaning to write up a review, really! Suffice to say, it was great. Here’s the label.
Guinnie the Cat
Guinnie is the only one of our cats that my father will tolerate being let into the house. I think it may be in part down to her not having a tail anymore. As is tradition on teh intarweb, I thought I’d take a few photos of her playing with the newspaper, eating, relaxing, and giving me the evil eye.
Aclare (28th September)
- Sunrise in our back yard.
- Aclare. I used this shot in the village’s wikipedia article.
- The river Inagh, and the bridge from which the village gets its name.
Guinnie, again
Sleeping, can’t forget that. Most of what she does every day is sleep.
That old mirror photo meme
Do you remember the Mirror Project? Here’s me looking dishevelled.
Boston (October 23rd)
Mark brought me around the Freedom Trail. Here’s some of the photos I took. Unfortunately I lost my photos from the first time I was over, so I tried to get some of the same shots this time around.
- The Burying Place at King’s Chapel. Here’s the plaque.
- Ben Franklin. I took that on one knee, so it ended up a little shaky.
- The Famine Memorial plaque, and the statues. The ones on the left are those who stayed behind (and eventually became rich), and on the right are the ones who escaped to North American (and eventually became rich).
- Old South Meeting House.
- Old State House: bling, bling! And another shot from the front.
- Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market, and the home of Paul Revere. He has a statue too, lucky devil.
- Old North Church
I also took a shot of the hotel I stayed in, and the view from my room. It got mightily windy later on that week, and I was a bit worried that my flight home’d be cancelled.
But it wasn’t, so here’s the departure lounge, and a shot of Boston from the air.
Snow! (December 29th)
I stayed up watching B5, and noticed at around 8am that it’d started snowing outside, so I photographed it.