Archive for ifiik
Once upon a time, there was the telephone…
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The icy weather has more or less dominated the news headlines over the last week or so. At the weekend we heard about the work of the DSPCA feeding starving horses at Dunsink. It’s horrible to think of all these beautiful animals being neglected like this.
An “overheard” conversation on Twitter prompted me to write this post. A well known Irish model replied to a tweet about the plight of the horses saying she had mailed the DSPCA “ages ago to do volunteer work and no one got back to me”.
I had to shake my head and wonder why someone wouldn’t follow up with a phone call about volunteering if they were really serious about it or simply just pick up the phone in the first place and talk to someone.
I see queries all the time on Twitter from people asking “anyone know if XYZ shop does XYZ product” OR “what time is XYZ restaurant open until tonight”. I just want to scream “WHY NOT FUCKING WELL RING THE NUMBER OFF THEIR WEBSITE AND ASK THEM”.
These are probably the same type of people that default to email for everything without realising that a phone call is a lot quicker. Probably the same type of people that get into a long drawn out SMS conversation to arrange a meeting rather than make one phone call.
There was a time when it was possible to function in the world without the umbilical cord of the internet. What ever happened to plain old common sense and intuition? Google/Twitter/whatever doesn’t always have the answer to the question. A lot of the time the answer is but a phone call away.
Get a book published with Poolbeg Press and TV3
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Nice competition running on TV3 at the moment.
If you’ve ever dreamt of being a published author now is your chance to make it happen. The Morning Show with Sybil & Martin have teamed up with Poolbeg Press, Ireland’s leading publishing house, to offer you the prize of a lifetime -the chance to see your novel published and on bookshelves around the country
Full details on the TV3 website.
For flip sake – Aer Lingus are confusing the Americans
Posted by: | CommentsThe Cliffs of Moher as we all know and love them
The Cliffs of Moher as seen on the Aer Lingus website.
Seriously like. Why does the web graphics person think it’s ok to flip an iconic scene like this? It’s even worse then they horizontally flip a persons face for the web or newspaper. It just looks weird…
Customs House, Dublin. Friday 26th March 2010
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You mean you didn’t know that about mules?
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Fascinated this morning by an article in the Feb 15 & 22 edition of The New Yorker about mules. I’ve never given any thought to mules before and my knowledge of them is limited to two facts:
1) They’re like donkeys
2) I can be as stubborn as one at times
After reading the 6 pages and 14 columns of the article I now realise that mules deserved better from me. I really should have made an effort to get to know them better. I think you should too. So here are the best bits from “Riding High. Mules in the Military. By Susan Orlean”
- A mule will carry up to 136 kg, seven hours a day, twenty days straight, without complaint.
- Mules have an inviolable commitment to self preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth, it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats.
- Mules are the hybrid result of mating a male donkey with a female horse. They have an uneven number of chromosomes and are therefore sterile. Every mule is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world.
- Once upon a time in America, a young man without mule handling experience would have been the exception.
- George Washington had a herd of mules – one of the first in the US. They were sired by an Andalusian donkey named Royal Gift, which he had received as a gift from the King of Spain.
- The mule population of the USA has been on a roller coaster ride since the highs of over 5 million in 1930. The Amish population explosion between 1982 and 2008 saw a big increase in demand for mules.
- A 2008 study of mule cognition at the University of Sussex fond that mules, over all, not only understood things better than either horses or donkeys but were also better at following instructions.
That’s the great thing about the New Yorker. You just never know what you’re going to learn from it, and when those little tidbits of information might come in handy. I know that next time some says I’m stubborn as a mule, I can say that, actually, it’s a form of genius.
