Would you believe I’ve written FIVE HUNDRED posts? The only interesting thing I found for 500 at Wikipedia is that’s about the year when they stopped burying people in catacombs.

I spent four minutes making that stellar chicken picture, too.

Some quick stats: I’ve had this domain for nine years. We had 1104 visitors in the last month. For the top 25 searches coming to my site, there were seven variations on my name. Other notable searches were vegetarian poop, cymbal-playing monkey, paperclips are more useful than, “happy chicken” indianapolis, and baby huts for guinea pigs from pet stores in glasgow. Visitors came from 65 countries, at least since I switched to the new stats service a couple months ago.

STOP THE PRESSES! It’s also four years to the day that I started blogging! This deserves another fine piece of art.

Our second day in Dublin (last weekend) included a trip to the Guinness brewery. Here’s how a conversation went after seeing the old flower ad above: How do you define flourish? Then looked up fleur de lis. That’s the symbol of the Three Musketeers. They were in Slumdog Millionaire: what were their names? Athos, Porthos, and had to look up the other one. Aramis, but can only think of someone in Ghostbusters… Harold Ramis!

Ireland is a country in love with its courgettes and aubergines. Now, I thought I loved zucchini and eggplant, but darn it, I’m getting tired of them. At home every token veg dish is pasta and here it’s pasta with aubergines or some other variation of aubergines with courgettes tossed in for good measure. Hasn’t anyone heard of BEANS? I miss beans.

There are no screens in the windows. Cheerios taste like sugar cereal here and are marketed by Nestle, not General Mills.

The letter Z is pronounced zed here. We have a lot of abbreviations and acronyms at work, so I hear zed just about every day. And I always think of General Zod from Superman II.

I found this handy from Wiktionary: (Latin script letter names) letter; a, bee, cee, dee, e, ef, gee, aitch, i, jay, kay, el, em, en, o, pee, cue, ar, ess, tee, u, vee, double U, ex, wye, zee/zed. But I’d also like to note that H is not aitch here, but rather haitch, so it’s p-haitch at work and spelling my name includes haitch in the middle too.

I’m sure it’s not dominating the US TV and water coolers like it does here, but the World Cup is going on in South Africa right now. The Irish folks at work said they would be rooting for the US since they didn’t want to root for England. We get a lot of British TV so I’m seeing a lot of support for England as it is. David and I watched the England/USA match last night and I still think soccer is boring. Somehow the US is considered to have “won” even though it was a tie game. And there was this horrible buzzing noise from the crowds the whole time. Oh well, I’m going to have to live here longer to understand this one.

Some good news from the States:
California bans plastic bags
Pet-friendly license plate will be available next year in Indiana!

Albuquerque bans companion animal sales in pet shops: “Since the ban started, animal adoptions have increased 23 percent and euthanasia at city shelters has decreased by 35 percent.”

And yes, I get almost all my news from Facebook.

We are in Dublin for the weekend. Casper came home tired but well from the vet and we seem to have found a good petsitter, so we went ahead with our holiday weekend plans. We are being boring in the hotel room right now but overplanning makes us cranky, so down time is good. We tried to fight it out from laptops with online Battleship but couldn’t get an interface that worked, so now I’m blogging and he’s working on an invoice.

Pardon the repeat first picture there. I’m not smart enough to figure out the gallery feature on this site.

Gallery: First we have the dogs earlier this week, in a picture that should be captioned, “No, we didn’t poop up here!”
The rest are Dublin pictures: a creepy statue with really long legs and huge feet. David finds Starbucks and is ecstatic (despite the way he doesn’t look ecstatic). Then we have streets and shops of Dublin. Dinner: boxtys (boxties?) at Gallagher’s Boxty House, which was a little touristy but they had vegetarian boxtys (kind of a potato pancake thing from the northern counties) and I’m just not likely to find those in most pubs. The food was really good.

On to “Why go Bald,” another bunny ad, and finally David jaywalked without me while I was looking the other way and then there was too much traffic to join him. I took a picture of him way over there, abandoning me, but that crazy giant guy (we’re calling him German) decided to be a ham as well.

We got into town in late afternoon, so mostly just wandered at St. Stephen’s Green and into Temple Bar for dinner and drinks. Hopefully tomorrow will hold more specific tourist visits.

The broadcast we watched was voiced-over by a British guy, who actually talked over the hosts on the screen and everyone else quite frequently. This made the show pretty funny because he made sarcastic comments on a lot of the performances and the voting.

It turned into a geography lesson for us too, because we looked up all the countries we weren’t sure we could find (like Moldova and Armenia) on Google Maps.

Some highlights (the snarky Brit’s comments are in italics):

There were 25 finalists in this show, but other countries had been ruled out in previous shows. Spain drew second place for order of performance.
No one has ever won from second place. I see no reason why that should change tonight.

Spain’s performance was interrupted by a Catalan guy who sneaked in (apparently he does this a lot) and actually made the performance much better before security got him off the stage. The Spanish singer looked like Screech/Richard Simmons and had people dressed as toys dancing with him, plus a backup Screech guy appeared toward the end, who we thought was an interrupter too but was actually supposed to be there. Because of the interruption, they got to perform again at the end, to which the host commented during voting, They performed twice. Doesn’t seem to have helped.

On one of the onstage hosts: Nadia’s back for no good reason.

There was a jumping and spinning neon fiddle freak and a sax player from the 80s in the general freakshow that came from Moldova.

David on Belarus’ golden butterfly lady’s hair: “There was a semen accident,” a la Something about Mary.

On Niamh from Ireland, who won previously: No one has ever won wearing purple

David noted that Booger from Revenge of the Nerds made an appearance in the Albanian performance.

Turkey had a Robocop guy.

Steve Buscemi was in the Russian gig.

Armenia reminded me of the Stonehenge performance in Spinal Tap and was probably weirdest overall. Then I saw Moldova again.

On the appearance of another stage host: Now this looks like it’s going to be lame

Most countries sang in English, but I guess the rules have changed over the years about what languages are allowed (official languages of the entrants, artificial languages, etc). There were a lot of fake wind and fire swamp effects.

David thought the Denmark guy looked like MacGyver or Luke Skywalker.

Each country has judge voting and call-in voting, and gets to give points to their top ten entries. Each country’s vote would show up on screen like “22 of 39 countries voting.” Viewers can’t vote for their own country. It’s like the electoral college or something.

The representative reporting Poland’s results was a little awkward on satellite, saying, “And here are the votes from the Polish people. In Poland.” She was also being a little slow in her reporting. The voiceover host:
That’s where Polish people are from.
In your own time.

Niamh, the Irish entry, had won about ten years ago but did pretty badly in the voting last night. However, the UK did worse and the host guy wasn’t too thrilled about that. In fact the UK came in dead last. As Ireland continued to get a point here and there, Ireland: they’re getting a drip feed of points. They seem to have stopped for the moment.

On the French vote reporter from satellite view in Paris:
The Eiffel Tower again? Build something else famous.

Latvia’s vote reporter was apparently a previous competitor and mentioned it. I want that jacket. Oh let go of the past, Thomas. Latvian reporter: “I hear some applause, that’s good.” Rare for you I suppose.

On Belarus’ Olympian vote reporter: He’s better at skiing than presenting votes.

There was a lot of booing for Russia when they got votes from other countries.

The British vote presenter said, “Thanks for voting for us if you did.” Host: You’re not thanking very many people there, Scott.

When Israel presented their votes: And I did notice, nothing for Germany.

Ukraine have 108 points and we have 10. There’s something wrong.

In the end, Germany won by quite a bit. I’m glad we watched it but I think there may have been some Irish presentation of it that we missed. We enjoyed the British guy’s snark. The Norwegian broadcaster that hosted the event (because their performer won last year) sold their rights to the World Cup, a big deal over here, to be able to afford hosting the event. And I shall leave you with the German performance, a catchy song I like:

And a general picture gallery

I asked, the what?
Oh, it was the third ticket.

I don’t know what a twister cake is but the thoughtful comment at the end made me laugh. Is that like MMM yummy, or do you have to consider the snack before knowing if it’s yummy?

Streets of Kinsale. I’m glad I don’t live on those steps.

WTH is Morticia the weather lady wearing? Sleeveless patent leather and a dead thing stole?

Fota Wildlife Park

bunch of pirate kids

more than meets the eye

some kind of smoking dragon alligator thing following a Captain Hook type guy, out of the picture (I think this is a play on a movie I didn’t see but I’m vaguely aware of… Disney?)

Not really sure what’s going on with these guys!

The parade wasn’t very high energy in places, but there was a ton of people. I kept getting crowded by kids sneaking in front of me, which was fine except for the one too tall to see over! But his name was Paddy so it seemed appropriate.

huh huh… Doody.

While we’re on the subject, this is hilarious!

Arliss has her own blog! Yes, that’s right, I kicked her to the curb while I went on a European adventure for a year and she has already taken over her foster home’s computer to complain about it. I guess she got an even bigger head when she became a famous Disapproving Rabbit.

Please visit Arliss and I’ll try to let y’all know when she posts a new rant. Those are the only kinds of posts she will be publishing, I’m sure.