December 2005 Archives

Sat 12.31.05 - Sisters Hess!

Fri 12.30.05 - Lone Pine Ridge at Irvine Regional Park.

Thur 12.29.05 - Orange, Calif.

At El Camino Real! Cami Lynn Sigler - home from Africa!

Thur 12.29.05 - Graffiti on a grain car.

Wed 12.28.05 - At dinner with Lauren.

Mon 12.26.05 - I think I have crossed the line into Crane p0rn...

Mon 12.26.05 - Cute pink skis for powder. Gotta love the Demo rental shop.

Mon 12.26.05 - Mammoth Mountain. Happy Hanukah!

Mon 12.26.05 - ... Is covered in fresh, new snow. Joe woke us to look. It started snowing last night, but it wasn't sticking. We had a lovely non-traditional Christmas sashimi dinner at Shogun last night. Happy St. Stephens day.

Sun 12.25.05 - It is very windy and we are going to Narnia & not skiing.

Sun 12.25.05 - Merry Christmas!

Sat 12.24.05 - Christmas Eve dinner with Joe & Christine at the Convict Lake Restaurant.

Sat 12.24.05 - Skiing at Mammoth.

Sat 12.24.05 - When I was last in Mammoth, in Oct 2004, there was no cell connection at all with my carrier, today I have full bars & GPRS! Yeah.

Sat 12.24.05 - Happy Christmas Eve. Mom & I are off to ski.

Fri 12.23.05 - The southern most section of the Sierra Nevada mtns.

Fri 12.23.05 - Now stuck on the 15 northbound on the way to Devore.

Fri 12.23.05 - On our way to Mammoth, sitting in traffic on the 91 eastbound.

Tue 12.20.05 - Driving west on 3rd Street, looking up. Glorius.

Tue 12.20.05 - View looking East from the Empress Pavillon's parking structure.

Tue 12.20.05 - The only time I am bright eyed and bushtailed at dawn. Ever.

Mon 12.19.05 - ... of SoCal in December. Driving through the Mullholland Pass.

Mon 12.19.05 - Up early trying to read, used as a launch pad.

Sun 12.18.05 - The only treat in an otherwise bad layover - an American Airlines employee serenading the waiting lounge with "Winter Wonderland". I am back to the glories of moblogging on my AT&T SIM chip!

Mon. 12.19.05 - View from the airplane window.

After weeks and weeks of looking at them, after being given one in a promotion last July but it has never arrived, last friday during a very good Vodafone holiday promotion, I went out and bought a Nokia 6680. The deal was that if I signed up for a one year contract, of which I have been meaning to do, I could get a Nokia 6680 for cheap. Relatively cheap.

Now with my lovely and beloved 7610, I could blog directly from the phone with Lifeblog in the US with AT&T Wireless as well as send and receive any email amongst a host of other features for a reasonable price per month. But Vodafone in Ireland does not provide such features, to blog my photos from my Nokia 7610 phone, I have had to use MMS rather than Lifeblog, there is no email with the Pay as you Go plan, as well as very little other features, and data transfer and/or internet features are expensive. It has been a frustrating eleven weeks in moblogging land.

Upon the purchase of the Nokia 6680 and the signing of the contract, most of these troubles dissolved, but at a price. From the 6680, I can moblog to any Typepad installation with Vodafone ISP (their email access point, not their GPRS/WAP access point), but I can't moblog to my Movable Type 3.2 installation (once again, Martin has kindly provided a hack, but it is not working for me). I can use the Lifeblog on the 6680 and on my PC to send photos to Flickr and then to this blog via email or MMS.

But how does the 6680 perform compared to the 7610?

Ok, MeFi has once again delivered. Link to a beautiful, all over the place rant against American style Christmas and everything that the Bush regime represents, including Foxville (so does this mean that in Foxville 2005 the Grinch is played by Karl Rove or Dick Cheney?)

Christians just stole a bunch of traditions from other cultures, slapped them together, stuck a fucking tinfoil star on top and called it the Most Important Holiday of the Year. Modern American Christmas makes Michael Jackson look positively organic.

The amount that the F-word is used in this entertaining rant is almost, but it is not used quite as much as the "gentlemen" in O'Brien's last Friday evening. I went to O'Briens to buy some cheap wine to mull for our class Christmas party, when two fellows at the beer cooler were in a barage of "Fuckin, fuck, fuck". I don't think there were any other words used, just lots of F's.

They queued up behind me in line and dropped their case of Budeweiser. More profanity. More invectives, all of the F variety. The gentlemen in question had the particular working class accent that was so indecipherable that it could have been north Dublin, west Glasgow, Southie (in Boston) or Brisbane. Really, I had no idea except the use of the F-bomb for every 3 words to 1 one non-F word.

As the F's subsided from the dropping of the Budeweiser (hello! It is Ireland, why is the whole beer cooler in every off-license filled with cheap, American shite???), I turned and said, "Hmmm, do you want to replace that case with another so it won't blow up in your face when you open it?"

F-ing Gentlemen #1: "Feckin, feck, feck, We'll fecking poke a feckin hole in the feckin can and feckin suck it fecking out."

Brain translates thick accent and all the adjectival, adverbal and verbal uses of the F word, "Oh, well have a nice night."

F-ing Gentlemen #2, who is now over at the wine tasting area bothering a cute blonde who works at Obriens, "FFFFFFFWhassszzzFFFFyerFFFFproblemFFFFtalktoFFFmeFFFWhazzFFFyerFFFthinkinFFFyerFFFFtooFFF" at this point he grabs a 60 Euro bottle of Bordeaux and sticks in down his pants, "FFFgoodFFFferFFFmeFFFC***nt?? FeckinGettheFeckin wine..."

It was 4:30pm in the afternoon...

The bigger question is Michael Jackson even organic any more, let alone human?

My Irish friends are complaining that Christmas is not what it used to be here, that it is much more commercial and not about family and tradition. From the point of view of an American in Ireland, the lead up to Christmas here is much less commercial than it is in the States.

Here in Dublin, the town is dressed up for Christmas in the charming way that Orange is dressed up with lights and swathes of street ornaments. Most of the shops have decorations up, only the Brown & Thomas department store has scary window decor. Restaurants have Christmas lunch and dinner menus up for the month of December in anticipation of office parties coming their way.

My classmate Amy tells me that her father's eleven siblings plus 50-60 some odd cousins / nieces & nephews will be coming to her house for Christmas morning (1pm and it is a drinking party - God love the Irish - 70 plus folks over to drink for baby Jesus). Now that's ambitious.

My mom's family of 36 (all total) can't ever seem to get in the same county, let alone city, let alone house, for any reason, ever. We're so fractured that my immediate family couldn't get themselves organized all at the same time for Christmas this year let alone the other 30 plus of us. The very idea of all the California Kilroys in one house on Christmas morning (1pm) drinking and eating cocktail sausages is enough to make one run for Punta Arenas or Nome...

But what I am here to bend your ear or reading eyes about today is Christmas shopping. A couple of years back, during the Port of Los Angeles longshoremans' strike, the big concern was that the christmas goods from China would not be off loaded from the container ships in time for the post-Thanksgiving Christmas shopping rush. At the time, I thought it was incredibly cynical to worry about Walmart's ability to make their Christmas shopping profit and aplauded the strike.

Today, I went shopping for Irish items to take home as gifts to the States and could only find Chinese goods. I was told by friends to go up to Henry Street for good shopping, but everything there is the same as everything at Target or WallyMundo (WalMart for the non-snarky amongst us). Why go cheap if I can wait a week and go cheap at home?

Thus, I consulted the trusty Lonely Planet "Ireland" guide book for places to buy Irish goods in Dublin and they recommended Avoca. I like Avoca on Suffolk Street, they sell lovely gluten free oat crackers. We love Avoca. But Avoca is really pricey. Think Z-Gallery for women in pink.

Avoca's selling point is that they are Irish made. Yep, Avoca Handweavers of County Wicklow, proud purveyors of handmade Irish goods. Guess what. I inspected all three floors of Avoca on Suffolk Street and found only two things made in Ireland. At least 70% was made in China, followed up by the US, Italy and Thailand.

I saw something cute, looked at the tag. Made in China. Something else cute. Made in China. etc. Irish sweaters made in China. Tea mugs made in Thailand. High end soaps, cosmetics, and doodads made in the US. Olives, jams, and oils made in Italy. Oat biscuits made in Scotland. Couldn't find anything made in Ireland.

I guess I should wait to get home next week and buy Irish goods at Macy's for cheap.

Wed. 12.14.05 - Waiting for Ruth & Helen in the front foyer at ely place, when they arrived it was all booked up even to have just a glass of wine. We moved on to George's Wine Bar on South Frederick St.

Wed. 12.14.05 - The fellow who was off and on loading the kegs tried to charge me 10 Euro for taking this photo.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Mon. 12.12.05 - Sarah, Lorna and Lauren - all the ladies from the


apartment above me.

Mon. 12.12.05 - Dublin at its contemporary gaudy best.

How did you spend your weekend? I spent mine re-installing Windows XP. Again. And Again. And Again. And Again. If it weren't for so much recent investment in Photoshop and Macromedia, I would throw Windows into the bin and just use Ubuntu Linux.

AAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!