Life is grand

I now know where the merry in Merry Christmas comes from. It comes from Ireland and it harks back to the state you find yourself at 2 minutes to midnight on Christmas Eve. A merry state. A drunk state.

I’ve never so much as thought of spending Christmas Eve in a pub but here, here, in Ireland, here, they get into the pub at 11am and don’t leave till Santa has delivered all his presents.

To be drunk on Christmas Eve is a strange thing to this South African. I’ve been to Midnight Mass, I’ve been up waiting for Santa and I have been fast-asleep late Christmas Eve but this is the first time I have been both hungover and drunk on the night. We visited three pubs, quaffed countless pints and sang many a good Christian soldier Christmas song.

It’s mad. It’s crazy. It’s all spirit. It’s Irish.

Happy Christmas all!

With quite unexpected quietness Trevanian passed away on the 14th of December, 2005. The author of The Summer of Katya is dead and not such as a cricket noticed. The man was a mystery while his works were celebrated. How tragic yet fitting, the pseudonym protected him till death and beyond.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

Kahlil Gibran

So the KFC you get in Ireland is very strange, different to what I have had in South Africa and England. The basic deep-fried chicken pieces looked the same (Brian had them) and the chips are normal but the Zinger Tower I had was a bizarre affair. The bun was one of those fancy seed jobs that you expect from the Health & Eco Warrior Bagel Shop, no reconstituted cardboard burger bun here. The chicken bit was a suculent fillet breast which was as thick as my thumb and damned tasty. Then there is the lettuce which is more like Haute Cuisine butter-lettuce than good old refrozen iceberg.

Now I love Zingers. That spicy mayo sauce is just out of this world. Well, this burger didn’t have that. No. It had the normal mayo sauce and then on the inside of the bottom bun there was a reddish, salsaish, spicyish sauce which when poked talked back. It didn’t taste of anything so who knows.

And horror of horrors, they put a freaking slice of cheese on it. Cheese on a Zinger! Who the hell puts cheese on a Zinger? Oh, the Irish, right.

Actually, the burger was great. It just wasn’t what I was expecting and, you know, when you lower your standards to that of KFC, Burger King and fast food joints you don’t want surprises. You want the same mush they served you in Calcutta served to you in Bangkok, New York, Honolulu, Cape Town, Rio and Waterford, Ireland.

Every year Google publishes their fascinating, if normally terrifying, Zeitgeist. I say terrifying because sadly idol worship is still the bane of our one God (Google) web existence. So is tragedy, it always trumps pleasure, joy, triumph, love, happiness, achievement and so forth.

Take the Top searches for 2005:

• Janet Jackson
• Hurricane Katrina
• tsunami
• xbox 360
• Brad Pitt
• Michael Jackson
• American Idol
• Britney Spears
• Angelina Jolie
• Harry Potter

The tsunami I can understand, people get their news and citizen journalism from the web and it was a life changing event, something important to the world. A similar story for Katrina with the added benefit of far more coverage (a thousand people died thanks to Katrina, over two hundred thousand died thanks to the tsunami. You do the accounting.)

But Janet, Brad, Michael, Britney, Angelina, Harry and American Idol? Do you spend your days searching for more information about the Jolie-Pitt tryst? Potter was fun no doubt but come now, it is not the high point of culture folks. Jackson we all just wanted to despise more, how progressive. As for Janet, well… well actually I have not a clue why she came up. Did she release another painful ditty or is she up for molestation too? And then there is the console that nobody loves but everyone hyped which has no games yet. I doubt Google.jp had xbox 360 anywhere in its rankings. No comment on American Idol.

One interesting blip is that more people were interested in the new pope than the death of the old pope.

Lastly it is good to see how mainstream the world wide web is. All the technology items are mass-consumer items, no Ruby on Rails or Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. This shows the common man, for better or worse, uses the web, not just us geeks.

Will 2006 be any different? No, just swap a few celebrity names around, throw in a couple of natural disasters and don’t forget the Playstation 3 is coming out. Joy to the world.

I feel conflicted having to choose a country when signing up for websites. Do I be boringly honest and select Ireland or do I keep the home fires burning and represent home by choosing South Africa?

For some websites it has to be Ireland as they depend on your location but for others I am tempted to select South Africa.

As I was reading Google’s Secret Weapon, an article on recruitment which is more interesting than it sounds, I kept having to adjust to the first world, low unemployment mentality.

Companies here fight for programmers.

Back home there is very little to none of that. I interviewed at a range of I.T. companies in South Africa and for entry to mid-level programmers you had to bend down and take it to have even a chance of getting a job. With 40% unemployment you don’t have to wonder why. Every offer is taken with gratitude. Perks are just that, perks and not expected rights.

So when I read an article like this or listen to co-workers talk about the job market I am often left feeling angry. The ungrateful bastards. But it is different here, companies fight for good recruits. I didn’t really understand this before coming to work in Ireland. I was ecstatic I was offered a job and did not haggle over salary or benefits. I took what I could and moved.

Now that I am here it will be different next time around, whether it is staying with my employer or moving to another.

Come to think of it, this attitude permeats every aspect of European life. What I see as whining, ungrateful demands by Irish citizens are really just part of the status quo, the expected level of life. It wouldn’t happen back home, the level is a good deal lower.

The lads and I put together this masterpiece of extortionist cinema yesterday. It has been delivered to a coworker along with a ransom note and a significant body part of our hostage. If our demands are not met the same fate that befell this Channel 9 Guy will happen to our hostage.

(We got a bunch of Channel 9 Guys from Robert Scoble. Brian and I placed them around the office as many of the chaps here are those evil Java types. Sadly over the last month many have lost their prongs, some have been drawn on and a few beheaded. Hopefully this educational video will show the world the horrors that befall Channel 9 Guys in a Java environment.)

Mt. Kilauea, Hawaii, has produced enough lava in the past 100 years to pave a 2 lane highway which would encircle the Earth 50 times.

Which begs the question; Why does Hawaii still not have a highway to the continent?

(j/k)