It’s nice to sit down after a busy day and read the paper or a book on your journey home. Sometimes little things will conspire against you. Like this evening and the sound of a faulty air conditioning unit on a bus. I actually laughed when I heard it at first. After a while, I must confess it was very annoying. Judge for yourself, I recorded 15 seconds of it.

This is a flash video. If you don’t see anything below with a big button to play the video, seek technical assistance to get it working. Don’t ask me, I can’t hear you!

Looks like you might be a new visitor to le craic. If you like what you see here and fancy some daily diversions delivered to your favourite feed reader, why not click to join Club le craic. Go raibh maith agat! Thanks a thousand!

I need my hair trimmed. Anyone other than myself would look at my hair and think “what’s he on about, he’s hardly captain caveman as it is”. This may be true, but I like how light I feel after getting a trim. I’m not obsessed about my hair or anything, I just like it to be neat. The concept of having a bad hair day is alien to me as I’m sure it is for most men. 15 to 20 minutes in the barbers every 3 to 4 weeks with (preferably) zero chat from the barber is hair grooming nirvana.

This isn’t the reason for my posting though. Since that part of my brain (the reticular activating system bit) is now telling me to get a haircut, I’m noticing all sorts of barbery related things, like:

• What a recession proof business model it is
• Virtually zero outlay on stock
• How the mullet seems to be coming back in to fashion
• The funny and clever names of some barber shops

Just this evening over a cup of tea I saw an ad for a new barbers in Greystones. The name : Sweeney Todd. Clever or what? Actually, there are one or two more with the same name dotted around the country. It must be great fun coming up with names for a barber. In Wicklow Town we have:

Mustdash, The Rebel Barber (he’s from Cork), Mick’s Barbers, Eoin’s Barbers and Carlos the Clipper. None of those names a particularly clever. I like Carlos the Clipper myself though.

I hit the goldenpages (as you do) to see if there were any good barber or unisex salon names in the book like Sweeney Todd. There’s not a whole lot of imagination in there but here’s a few that got my attention for various reasons:

• Ye Olde Baber Shoppe
• For Fir
• Bazzers
• A-Nu-U by Beverly (hmm)
• Busy Blades
• De Barbers (niiice – it’s in Cork)
• The Baldy Barber
• Boyz 2 Men
• Cru’cuts Barbers
• Just in for a Haircut (as opposed to what now?)
• Lord Snooty’s
• The Men’s Room (least it’s not the little boy’s room)
• Mr. Jose Gonzalez (Speedy Gonzalez came into my head - ariba ariba)
• Fat Tony’s Barber Shop (you’ll sleep with de fishes)
• Sizzers Hair Design
• and my personal favourite : Curl Up’n Dye (another Cork classic)

Any more good ones out there + to the lads (or the ladies) – what’s your hair maintenance routine like?

Header image photo by lecercle and modified under a cc license.

Stunning design for a rotating building in Dubai.

DMV in the US offers to replace 10,000 license plates. I’d love a WTF license plate What’s the bet someone is going to start selling replica WTF number plates on the back of this story?

Apes have rights too - Spanish parliament plans to write it into law. Doubt if the apes would do the same if the situation was reversed.

Reason #<infinity> why America needs to do something about citizens right to bear arms. Sickened.

13 people in a Volvo? Yeah, throw the book at him.

Having spent over 3 hours putting the previous post together and setting up Disqus  I’ve decided not to use it now having done some more tests + Ben pointed out he used something similar and it didn’t work out.

I lost the run of myself. Solly

Lots of blogs are using it successfully, so I might revisit Disqus at another stage.

Ah yes, it seems like only yesterday that I posted about the competition to name the Baby Elephant in Dublin Zoo.

At that time a whole other storm was raging among bloggers which I discovered when Jazz Biscuit linked to the post and with his typical good humour plus powerful Jedi mind tricks, he restored order to the galaxy in his own special way (oooh, that sounds very Graham Norton in my head - he used that line in I’d do Anything when one of the Nancy’s got the boot off the show).

A few months later and another storm blows into town. This time round I’m playing Sideshow Bob in the ever expanding Dramatis Personae and by a totally mad co-ink-e-dink, Dublin Zoo have another competition!

Yay for anything that stops these images in my head of wagons circling around camp le craic; images that only entered my mind when I read comments on various other blogs this evening. Last time I checked, comments were working on this blog but I guess that when there is a war on, comment etiquette (if there ever was one) goes out the window. Anyway, back to the competition…

This time round, the wonderful marketing people in the Zoo have come up with prize that must be every child’s dream. The winner will bag the super prize of a day as an assistant to the chief lionkeeper - how cool is that? But there’s more - they get an annual pass to the zoo and a private screening of the latest Chronicles of Narnia flick for 30 people as well.

I’m entering for my nephews and nieces. I’m sure they would love something like this. I’ve never asked them what their dream is, but I’ll be sure to do that next time I see them.

My dream as a child was to one day go to Disneyland. I remember playing in the park up the road from the house and looking for rainbows in puddles. I believed that if I saw a rainbow in a puddle and went to bed, I would be transported to Disneyland when the clock struck midnight.

I wish I was in Disneyland tonight.