When I see an ad for a one-day sale, I assume it’s little more than a scam to create false urgency.

Oh, there’s Black Friday, of course. (And Woot, I guess.) But even the post-holiday sales have been lackluster for years. The upcoming Labor Day sales seem more like an excuse for lazy advertising than a real chance to score a bargain.

“Not so, in Luxembourg,” I was told, by several Luxembourgers. “You must go to the Braderie on Monday. Stuff is really cheap. All the stores will have bargains.” All the stores? You mean that they cooperate and all have sales on the same day? “Yes,” they said, “It’s always the same. Go to the Ville-Haute.”

The Braderie isn’t such a bizarre idea. Say you’re a shopkeeper in the city center, selling nice women’s clothes and competing with the big box stores on the periphery. “I’ll have a sale,” you think. “I’ll put a bunch of my stock out on the sidewalk, at really good prices.”

But how to bring in the shoppers? In any given week, only a small proportion of Luxembourgers will walk past your shop. Advertising helps a little, but will people make a special trip just to see your overstock? Plus, this is Luxembourg — it will probably rain. Who would come then?

The answer: Everyone will come, if they know that every store in a walkable area will have a sale. Especially if the food shops serve inexpensive beer, champagne and sausages on the street. And if, on that day, you’re bound to encounter friends and family from all over the country, because they want high fashion and cheap food, too.

It’s just a matter of picking that day. And one day for that, in Luxembourg, is the second Monday of Schueberfouer. (It’s not the only one. There’s also New Coat Sunday.)

Fortunately, it wasn’t raining when I visited the shops of the city center this Monday. (If you’d like a multimedia experience, LesFrontaliers.lu has a video report in French.) There were thousands of people strolling among the tents on the streets. There were banks and charitable foundations and radio stations and newspaper publishers, giving away gewgaws and handing out brochures. There were lots of signs announcing markdowns of 60% and 80%. The big shops, like M&S, didn’t seem as committed to the idea, but hardly any stores appeared to be doing business as usual.

It’s a good thing, this Braderie. Sure, it’s materialistic and all that, but it’s the most civic-minded One-Day Sale I’ve ever seen.

I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t really need anything that was on sale, which was mostly women’s clothing and shoes anyway. I don’t think one goes to Braderie expecting to find something in particular, and I wasn’t in a browsing mood. But I don’t think the shopkeepers of the city center were depending on me, this Monday.

By the way, this tradition — which strongest in Lille, but also exists in Belgium and the Netherlands — is thought to originate centuries ago in the Middle Ages, naturellement.

Next, Will managed to connect Australia and some of south east Asia to the main section.

Some puzzle work escaped the all-seeing eye of the camera. As you can see, Europe, most of Asia and Africa came together too quickly for Will to grab a snapshot.

We must admit that the puzzle has some “cheats” because each piece has a number and an arrow pointing to a neighboring piece. We do believe that the oceans would be nearly impossible without these aids. Here is a view of the inside of the puzzle.

We were able to get most of the land masses connected, giving us what we briefly called “the Pac-Man world”:

At this point, the puzzleball was sturdy enough that we used the stand to hold it up.

Will’s own challenge was the Pacific Ocean. So while I finished the little bits here and there, Will filled out the Pacific.

And then it was time. We had the Pacific ready to attach to the rest of the puzzle.

We thought it would be easy! We were wrong.

We will spare you the 45 photos and 10 minutes of video. It was a lot more difficult than I expected to get it all in there. Finally, between the two of us, we got it together.

We love our puzzleball! It is really sturdy once you get it together. I appreciate having a globe in the house, as it give you a much different perspective of county/continent sizes. Most maps don’t do the southern hemisphere justice.

Hearty recommendations for the puzzleball from this house. Ravensburger had a ton of designs — not just globes. Perhaps you and your sweetie could have a Valentines day challenge!

At several social functions during our recent visit to the US, my spouse Will told a somewhat humorous story involving the shooting of a movie in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland. I would like to address my remarks on those occasions.

In the course of his story, Will sometimes speculated that the movie being shot may have been Leap Year and cited evidence to support that guess. In most cases, I ridiculed this conjecture, claiming that the timing was impossible.

Recently, ads promoting Leap Year have appeared on local television. In response, I indulged my curiosity regarding the movie and its making.

I discovered that Will’s adventure in County Wicklow did, indeed correspond with some dates that filming occured in Ireland, generally. Thus, it is at least possible that Will’s hypothesis was correct.

I regret any impression of implausibility that I may have generated regarding that hypothesis. I also have deep regret for having deprived Will’s listeners of the pleasure of a story untainted by my commentary.

In all good faith,
Anita

As it often happens with these things, the actual purchase of the globe was constantly delayed. The globe store had limited hours; I didn’t like the colors that I saw; and so on. Globes are expensive so I wanted my globe to be perfect.

Christmas 2009 arrived and I had not yet gotten around to buying a globe. Will was fed up with my antics and decided to take matters into his own hands. He reached into the interweb and, once again, found something to hold me until I find that perfect globe.

So I am now the proud owner of a Ravensburger Puzzleball. What he didn’t know was I had nearly bought the same thing a few weeks earlier! I saw it in a store in Luxembourg, but they only had the Puzzleball in German or French — and English names is one of my (many) requirements.

We opened it last night and started it. We had fun looking at the pieces, testing our geographic knowledge. (We don’t know much about islands and oceans.) We also found:

Chicago

Luxembourg (Look carefully!)

Ireland (and some of the British Isles)

I envisioned a quiet evening after work that would end with a nice little globe. I’ll admit that I didn’t realize how time-consuming the Puzzleball may turn out to be. There is a lot of ocean out there, kids.

We plan to keep you informed of our progress. I managed most of South America last night, but now we need to tackle the ocean around Antarctica before we can go any farther. Personally, I can’t wait to get to Russia as it will cover a lot of ground!

(Insert obligatory “I can see Russia from my house” joke here.)

Subject Name: Will Bakker

Date and Time: 6 Dec 2009, 13:08

Conditions: Subject did not fast, but had a St Nicholas’s Day breakfast of a “bonhomme” and citrus fruit. Also, he consumed two cups of coffee within three hours of the test.

Preparation Step 1: Fresh bottle of Bovril was opened for this test. Contents had slightly higher viscosity than dark maple syrup. Color was surprisingly dark brown, near black. Scent was mild, more beefy than yeasty.

Preparation Step 2: Filtered tap water boiled in standard kitchen kettle. Two teaspoons of Bovril pseudo-liquid moved into Test Mug. Each teaspoon measure of the Bovril pseudo-liquid was very difficult to pour into the Test Mug. Technician used all reasonable force and ultimately failed to accurately measure the amount of Bovril transferred to the Test Mug.

Preparation Step 3: Boiling water poured upon the gelatinous blobs of Bovril which clung to the sides and bottom of the Test Mug. Given its earlier intransigence, it dissolved relatively easily.

Preparation Step 4: The Test Mug and its contents were left to cool for five minutes. Used teaspoon placed in cleansing apparatus. Safety check completed: All Bovril pseudo-liquid confined to cleansing apparatus, Test Mug, and original container.

Observations at time of preparation: Contents of Test Mug now thin and very dark brown, with a bit more gray color than a cup of beef broth of similar depth. Scent changed significantly by addition of boiling water. Now, quite yeasty and very little beef odor. Subject mentions that it recalls the smell of the Guinness brewery of St James Gate. Test Mug appears unaffected by contents: no observations of melting, fizzing, or other alteration. Subject appears greatly affected, presenting facial expressions of hesitation and disgust.

>> END PAGE 1

Although Trier’s market is just 30 years old, and sometimes described as small, we were impressed. If you can’t be there in person, you can enjoy the market online, with a special Christmas-market-video-game (a Weihnachtsmarktspiel), or a page of promotional media. If you need to distract the kids, there’s a coloring book, too! (It’s a little weak, but do those little rugrats really deserve better?)

By contrast, Dresden’s Christmas market is now 575 years old. (Dresden is 680km away, about 6.5 hours by car. Maybe we’ll go next year.)


By Friday, Luxembourg City’s market was underway. It’s not as large or as well-decorated as Trier’s market, but we look forward to returning regularly.

At both markets, Will found glühwein (also known as hot red wine, or mulled wine). It was typically sold in decorative mugs, which could be returned for a deposit, or kept as souvenirs. We found the best mugs in each market, and we’re quite happy to share them with you:

Please note the lovely crest on the toe of the Luxembourgish boot.

You can look forward to more photos in the near future, and maybe some deep thoughts about the mix of secular and religious during the European holiday season. In the meantime, we present to you a brief video of the gigantic Christmas carousel pyramid in Trier.

To the landlord who aspires to competence:

Every building contains hundreds of minor errors, invisible faults, and premature wear spots. These details are the devils that threaten your investment, the principal capital itself.

Some of your residents will bring important problems to your attention, conditions which will cost you hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars/pounds in the future.

Furthermore, the most consequential problems appear to be petty as renter’s complaints. An unsealed shower which makes a tiny puddle, or a loose screw holding a soap dish, may be early predictors of a full and unscheduled renovation of the flat downstairs.

Some of your renters are just annoying. But some are noticing things that matter — to you. Things that the builder hid from you, that your inspector thought you didn’t want to hear about, that your maintenance staff doesn’t have time to notice.

The chances that this complaint is the one that really matters means that it’s foolish to dismiss it.

And this fact has nothing to do with the goodwill you could generate by being responsive. You’ll lose money, in the long-term, from unplanned capital expenses, not from a plan for slightly higher maintenance costs.

But it is so much more than that: We’re talking about an officially celebrated holiday in Luxembourg: Mantelsonndeg — roughly translated, “Coat Sunday”. (If you know that translation to be mistaken, please comment!)

Traditionally, Luxembourgers from the countryside would come to the urban areas just before All Soul’s Day («Toussaint» in French, Nov. 1 on your calendar), to buy winter clothes. They expected to wear their new clothes on All Soul’s Day, for visits to the cemetery and Mass. In 2007, the retailers of Luxembourg revived the tradition by opening their stores on the last Sunday of October. Voila, an annual fete is born!

As you know, stores are rarely open on Sundays here, so an opportunity to shop on the sabbath is cause enough for celebration. I haven’t seen many Halloween decorations, so I speculate that Coat Sunday also serves as a (minor) celebration of the changing seasons. I can imagine the nostalgia of elderly Luxembourgers:

I remember running through dry leaves of town, feeling a chilly breeze with the sweet scent of fireplace wood. In my day, of course, we walked into town, ten miles it was, and we were happy to have a coat at all. Why, for the Mantelsonndeg of ’52, all I got was a new pair of socks!

Okay, that’s a bit silly. Let’s talk about our plans for the weekend.

We have nice winter coats; what we need is more furniture! So our special shopping trip this weekend will be Anita’s first visit to Troc, a chain of stores selling (and buying) second-hand goods. Of course, we’ll also make the weekly trip to Cora to stock up on wine and cheese.

The past several weeks were plenty exciting for Anita and Will to last until Christmas, so Mantelsonndeg will be thrilling enough. Hopefully, we Luxembourgers won’t need a winter coat just to venture out on Sunday afternoon!

Today, we want to share her discovery on that day: the mostest wine glass ever. A goblet of manifestly Brobdingnagian proportions.

Pictured below, from left to right: the new glass, a standard 750ml wine bottle, and one of our old wine glasses.

The old wine glass holds, at full capacity, 450ml — well short of 16oz. The new glass holds much more than that. How much? We have a video to demonstrate the prodigious proportions of our new glassware.

That’s a full wine bottle, folks. Seven hundred and fifty milliliters, not a drop less. Yet another benefit of visiting the BBB&B: generous helpings.

Thanks to Neurowaxx for the music in the video above.

Anita and I sent a significant portion of our “together time” eating dinner and marveling at the Kissy Puppy. When we retreated to each of our designated corners of the apartment, I decided to follow up.

Note from the Staff: We recommend clicking on the images in this post, in order to fully appreciate the genius of American soda-pop advertising in the European market.

I followed the link advertised on the label, to find a record-setting website. The "www.coca-cola.lu" website easily set the record for “404 Message that Wasted the Largest Quantity of Will’s Time” by leading me to watch an anthropomorphised webpage dance around and then say, “I ran away for the summer” (as I loosely translate it). Furthermore, the webpage/human hybrid’s blog, which he/it so heartily recommends? It’s not worth the electricity required to render it on one’s screen.

But I was relieved to find something else to pass the time, when I noticed the website’s address: http://www.coca-cola.lu/threeway.php

I was intrigued, curious even, and I decided to try the tabs on the upper-right corner of the website to learn more about the constituents of this “threeway.php”. If you’d like to be whip-sawed, mentally, by the astoundingly cynical relativism of contemporary advertising, you should try it too!

First, get a dose of mega-corporation-approved feminism by clicking on the “Coke light” tab and then watching the commercial that features kicky and beautiful young women misbehaving, in a fashion that was probably described in a meeting as “fun like Drew Barrymore but as bankable as Jennifer Garner.”

If all those strong women make you uncomfortable, you can return to standard-issue 21st-Century male chauvinism by clicking on the “Coke Zero” tab. You’ll be greeted by a solicitous female body with her inconveniently-needy head and face covered for your pleasure. Gentlemen, say hello to the burqa, Coca-Cola style!

If you attempt to find a viable ideological alternative by clicking on the “Menu” tab to the left, you’re likely to find a broken link. I was disappointed that there was no follow-through to the comely bikini’d lady offering “Coke Mania”, which I still envision as a scene from Scarface. I never did find the promised “Happy Games” from the original label, nor the “Happiness Factory” (which I found improbable from the start).

Needless to say, this vitriol is unfair. I’m really just angry that I can’t learn more about the Kissy Puppy.

The move to Luxembourg created an opportunity for a review of our sugar-related resources and associated goods. In short, we have some candy and other food left over from Ireland, and we need your help.

The staff are positive that they can complete one food review before the inventory reaches its “best-before” date. They’d like you, the Bugle readers, to choose which confection (or otherwise) will be reviewed. Here are the five candidates for the next review:

1. Battle of the Turkish Delights

This review would be a comparison of the commoner’s brand, Cadbury, with the (relatively) exotic Sultans brand. It’s the British corporation against the representative of the Ottoman Empire. Think of it as a reappraisal of the Crimean War, in gooey, sugary form.

2. Yorkie

It’s NOT for girls. We’ll find out why.

3. Bovril: ground chuck in a jar?

The sole non-confection on the list, Bovril is a legendary element in the diet for the British Isles. It is labeled, “The Original Beef Extract,” yet it is meant to be served as a beverage. Will feels a little nauseous just looking at the jar, and Anita requires that any tests be performed while she is in a different country. But according to the back of the jar, “In 1888… over 3000 pubs and bars were serving hot cups of Bovril.” That’s a bit too Dickensian for us, but if you insist, we shall persevere.

4. The Great Chocolate Rod Showdown

Drifter, an offering from Nestlé, is a package containing two candy bars. Each of these bars is, in its own words, a “Crispy wafer dipped in chewy caramel & covered in chocolate.” Twix, from the good people at Mars, is the same thing. Two brands enter the Bugle ring — only one leaves.

5. Little Pink Marshmallows for you and me

These apparently fluffy enigmas pose so many questions for us to answer. First, their name: “Chamallows” — is it a tribute to the purveyor of Southern rap? How can pink candies be created without artificial colours or flavours? Why, pray tell, did Haribo need to change the recipe? Finally, the question that haunts so many candies in this world: what the devil is that mascot supposed to be, and is it a marshmallow-cannibal?

The Poll

These are the questions before you, our dear readers. Vote for your choice right now, as the poll will close at 0800 UTC on Saturday, 4 July 2009. As always, electioneering in the comments is encouraged.

On the way, we passed an IKEA near the border with Belgium. IKEA would come to dominate the remainder of our weekend. Almost as soon as we arrived at our new apartment, we dropped our airborne burden and drove to Belgium (15 minutes away) to seek a bed for our unfurnished apartment. If we failed, we would need to spend the night in a hotel and try again the next day.

We found a big, comfortable bed and mattress. A very big mattress, for a relatively small car. Unlike everything else at IKEA, the mattresses don’t come in flat-packs. Our Skoda did a great job — except when we exceeded 50 kph, when our new mattress threatened to take wing and make its own way home. We took the back roads, which were gorgeous on that warm and sunny day.

We got some wise but discouraging advice from a neighbor, in French, about the likelihood of getting our mattress up the spiral staircase to our 3rd floor apartment (4th floor, the way Americans count). We pushed and shoved and by the time Will exhausted every curse he knew in French, we made it all the way up.

By that night, we had a partially-assembled bed and a mattress in the middle of our bare, unlit living room. We had two days before the movers arrived — but that’s a story for the next post.

We are in Ireland for our second Easter, so some of the subtleties of the season have become more apparent. A Midwestern American’s Easter is not subtle. A common sight in a young Christian American’s life is the Easter Basket. A wicker (or plastic) basket, filled with “grass” and chocolate – chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies, chocolate pieces. If you are really special, there might be a Peep or two to introduce a more pure form of sugar into the mix. A token to good dental hygiene could be made by throwing in a toothbrush or some floss. A classic American sight, Will, I and most of our childhood friends received – and you probably did too, if your childhood was middle-class and middle-America.

In Ireland, they take a different approach. Instead of a basket of goodies, they go for what we refer to around the Bugle newsroom as the “Heroic” egg. The “Heroic” egg is a total package – a box, sometimes containing just one large egg, and other times supplemented with some ancillary chocolate pieces. The packaging is rather intimidating and overwhelming.

So is the egg. But Will discovered that the egg is hollow, with a surprisingly thin shell. The chocolate is good, but in lesser quantities than an American Easter basket. Too bad it wasn’t filled with the product advertised on the box!

Everybody makes a “Heroic” egg – Snickers, Mars, a multitude of Cadbury brands and even the high-end Irish chocolatiers like Lily O’Brien. Speaking with some of my colleagues, each had fond remembrances of receiving their first egg. I didn’t have time to dig into whether the gift of the Heroic Egg was motivated by one’s age or as a reward — mainly because Good Friday is a public holiday in Ireland and I have the day off.

One of the fun aspects of living in a foreign country is the differences in celebrations, like the “Heroic” egg. I can’t wait to be in Luxembourg next Easter to see what the local traditions are. Who knows – we could be getting some chocolates from a bell or something equally unlikely.

Pink Panther cookies, timed to arrive in stores just before the movie arrived in Irish theatres. I was amazed and intrigued; the BuProcSqua did good. I was stunned that the cross-promotion monkeys were working so hard for Pink Panther brand. You can expect such timely promotions with a Star Wars movie or some Hannah Montana vehicle, and Ireland is no stranger to this style of marketing.

But would the Pink Panther 2 be in the theatres for as long as the cookies would be on the shelves?

A little research vindicated my suspicions — sort of. These Pink Panther cookies appear to be more retro than metro. Er, let me try again: They have more in common with the classic 1963 film than the 2009 flick. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the rhyming catchphrase.)

In a way, that made them a much cooler cookie. This product was not some short-term, cynical marketing ploy. It could be historically situated, yet timeless — a meld of enduring pop culture and sugar. Retro and dextro. (That rhyme works!) But would the taste of the wafer fulfill its promise?

Eh.

They’re alright. I always like vanilla wafers, which these claim to be. But they had a lingering chemical aftertaste and a greasy mouth-feel that I can’t say I enjoy. I had to eat about 8 of them before I realized that they had a mild almond taste. Sometimes that’s nice. In this case, it isn’t.

Here at the Bakker Bugle, we strive to keep our promises, particularly when it comes to delivering the goods promised in our blog titles. So we have, for you, an Irish example of oddball cross-promotion.

On Dawson Street in Dublin, a Thomas Pink storefront includes a medium-sized, tasteful logo for the 2009 movie. The entire substance of the cross-promotion seems to be that this once-Irish shirt-making company is named for a tailor who happened to have a last name that is a homonym for the adjective in the name of the diamond for which the movie that gave rise to the sequel was named.

So there’s that.

I was about fifteen. I stood in front of the pantry, hanging from the door and staring into shelves devoid of anything that a teenage runner’s body needs. I just ran ten miles and what, I’m supposed to heat up some Cream of Mushroom soup?

My eyes scanned side to side, back and forth, looking for a genuine snack. Something processed, something salty and oddly, slightly, sweet, something crunchy and immediately satisfying.

Bac-Os. That would have to do. I upended the little bottle and bit down on a mouthful. The chemical taste wasn’t repulsive so much as off-putting. The texture of the bits was hard and gritty at first, and then broke down into a featureless mush.

I wasn’t going to do that again. Even my adolescent hunger wouldn’t drive me to chugging Bac-Os. I’d eat an apple or something, first.

The BB Procurement department recently returned from the supermarket with two products that attempt to improve on that formative experience.

With Sansabelt pants, cold fusion, and near-beer, snacking-bacon is among the great aspirations — and disappointments — of humankind. Beef jerky, my friends, is no substitute for the real dream: a bacon-product that one can eat in a manner befitting the modern man: directly out of a foil-lined bag.

Two nations with proud traditions of commercial innovation — Germany and Great Britain — are making another noble attempt to bring our species to the nutritional pinnacle of portable bacon. It is too late for me, my gentle readers, to benefit from such an achievement. At fifteen, I could eat ten-thousand calories of Bac-Os and still lose weight. Now, anything less wholesome than a quinoa-tofu salad, and I gain a stone. The hope that our children might be saved from Bac-Os by long-hoped-for attainment of snacking-bacon led me to put my HDL and LDL on the line and taste these two promising candidates.

Both products were bought from a British grocery store. I suspect that Bacon Pep may be a British product masquerading as an artisanal creation of the famously pork-loving Deutsche people. The snack’s full name, as printed on the bag, appears to be an insensitive caricature of the beautiful German language: “Weizen-Kartoffel-Snack mit Paprika-und Schinken-Geschmack”

Conspiracy theories must be laid aside. I shall let the taste speak for itself. And the taste of Bacon Pep says, “Pork rinds?”

Alas, the creators of Bacon Pep are not the only well-meaning experimenters to take the road to Pork Rind-land, thinking all the while that they were approaching the promised land. Bacon Pep is made of wheat and potato, and, like any of God’s highly processed snacks, it has the blessed uniformity of industrialised food. Nearly every piece of Pep resembles the Platonic ideal of a pork rind. If one considers Bacon Pep as an alternative to pork rinds, then it offers freedom from the unnerving soft spots and disagreeable hairs that one finds with the genuine article.

But pork rinds, ladies and gentlemen, will never be mistaken for bacon. No more needs to be said.

Tesco’s Bacon Rashers, by its name, announces that it will avoid the Scylla of pork rinds. It will attempt a synthetic substitute for real bacon. But can it also avoid the Charybdis of Bac-Os?

My answer, alas, is that eating Tesco’s Bacon Rashers was like a trauma-induced flashback to that horrific afternoon almost two decades ago.

Every unit of the putrid-yellow coloured snack is disturbingly flat, and the insulting imitation of streaks of meat look like they were drawn on by an automated red Sharpie pen. In one’s hand, the “Bacon Rasher” is gritty. In one’s mouth, one learns that the grit was a warning, unheeded, of the extreme saltiness to come.

Salt is the flash-bang grenade of the SWAT-team-incursion that is Tesco’s Bacon Rashers. You are overwhelmed, unable to detect, let alone resist, the swarm of chemicals that have shouted “Clear!” in every corner of your mouth and zip-tied your taste-buds’ hands behind their backs.

For the next several days, Tesco’s Bacon Rashers will be holding your mouth and stomach in their secret detention facility. Your digestive tract has been lawfully confiscated and placed in the rasher’s custody.

It’s not difficult to synthesize a pitiful imitation of the taste of bacon. The triumph of this product is that it recombines in one’s mouth and stomach into a substance that withstands those environments for several days.

Whatever Bacon Rashers become, once chewed and swallowed — it is impervious to repeated toothbrushing, stomach acids, and the myriad of enzymes that millions of years of evolution developed to break down just about any other food.

The effect is that the most artificial of the original chemical flavours will taint your every waking moment, for at least 18 hours. You will taste it along with any other food your consume. When you do not consume food, your stomach will re-introduce the flavour in small burps. There is no escaping the long, long aftertaste of Bacon Rashers.

My fellows, we are no closer, as a species, to the realisation of the long-lived dream of snacking-bacon. I do not, however, write these words in sadness. My hope is that these honourable attempts will spur the next generation of food scientists and amateur experimenters alike to find this grail of human nutrition: bacon you can put in your pocket!

What I can’t grow accustomed to is the “snowflake” warning: when the temperature gets to about 5 degrees, I get a little snowflake next to the temperature reading. I assume this is to help me understand that it is cold, and that it could snow or there could be other cold related hazards on the road surface. In theory, that’s nice. However, I’m not sure I appreciate my car thinking I’m a moron.

Since I saw the snowflake last week, it’s been warmer in Dublin. I’ll try to remember to snap a picture the next time I see the warning. In the meantime, Will found a photo of a close cousin of my car’s dashboard on jiazi’s Flickr photos. Thanks, jiazi:

If you can’t wait to see the snowflake, here are two photos of something very close to what I see:

• jp087′s Flickr photo of snowflake on the dashboard
• gapey’s Flickr photo of the snowflake

A complaint of Irish workers: “Supposedly Irish companies leave Irish workers to redundancies and hire cheap labour in the US.”

The Irish government, business groups, and labour unions spent the summer negotiating a new National Pay Agreement — a kind of super-contract for Irish workers. The negotiations were rough for a while, and labour news became important to the Irish papers. I noticed an interesting tidbit in two articles last week:

Trade unions are dismissing reports that Aer Lingus plans to use American crew members on its flights to and from the US. The airline is reportedly planning to recruit American crew members who would fly over and back to Ireland during a single shift. This would eliminate the need for Aer Lingus to put its Irish crew members up in hotel rooms overnight.

The IMPACT trade union insists the move would be illegal under health and safety legislation. Irish Congress of Trade Unions General Secretary and Aer Lingus board member David Begg has said the revelation could effect [sic] the talks. ‘Quite clearly it will be raised since it is such a major employer but the veracity of it will be another matter,’ he said.

This should be interesting — anyone want to take bets on how many times Bugle staff will have their flights cancelled?

By the way, the new national pay agreement was settled last week. The Bugle Staff might be able to figure out just what that means before the ratification process is finished in four to six weeks.

Thanks to JonasPhoto

Just outside the village (pictured above), we found a small group of white buildings that purported to be the oldest mills in Ireland. It was a lovely place, with flowers and running water all over. The “factory tour” was simply an open craft floor where you could wander among the machines at will! One crafter was using the flying shuttle loom and it was enthralling to watch — you too can watch with a few of our YouTube videos.

This was all pretty cool, and it made for a great afternoon. But it was not what we were seeking — we had been told of a larger, more shopping-oriented area, set in a former estate, with a world-famous cafe. This had a cafe, and some shopping — but not on the same scale as we thought.

Last Saturday, we found the right address and we visited the Avoca Handweavers shopping destination. It lived up to the hype. We had a delicious lunch in the beautiful setting of the Fern House Cafe, and the high-end shopping met our expectations. There were plenty of scarves, blankets, and clothes from Avoca’s mills. There were also lots of knick-knacks for the garden and kitchen. As you can imagine, the place was overrun with mother-daughter shopping trips and “ladies-who-lunch”.

After all that, I opted to follow through on my most testosterone-laden wish: to swim in the Irish Sea. The sun wasn’t out, and it was raining when we reached the Blue-Flag beach at Greystones. We walked around and considered the risks.

Finally, I said, “Now or never,” and changed into my swimming trunks. It took a little while to build the courage — perhaps some liquid courage would have helped — but I finally waded in. Then I contemplated the cold water around my knees for a while. And then I dove in.

It was pleasant enough, but thoroughly cold. Cold. Very very cold.

Unfortunately, the appearance of Maynards Wine Gums suggests far more complexity than the gums actually deliver. The flavours correspond to the colours, regardless of the shape and label. The typical colours are fairly tasty, but nothing special.

There is even the usual, very dark colour; you know, the unappealing gummy that nearly everyone avoids. It corresponds the only vaguely wine-like flavour. Rather than licorice, the dark coloured candies suggest a strong red wine that half-evaporated from sitting open on the kitchen counter.

So the name “Wine Gums” is mostly hype. Why “Wine”? I can’t say that the idea of wine flavoured candy was enticing so much as fascinating. Is this a cynical ploy to enthrall children by offering an adult transgression in kid-friendly form? When I see the little names of wine varietals, clearly chosen for their cultural cachet, I can only think of the candy cigarettes that I “smoked” at seven years old.

And then my mind asks the inevitable question: Is Maynards acting in the service of Big Grape? The inclusion of both “port” and “burgundy” suggests a cabal so wide that it stretches from the stuffiest French vineyards to the scrappy merchants of Portuguese fortified wine.

Back to the candies themselves. I’d rate the consistency and mouth-feel of the candies as a 3 on a 5-scale of gumminess. (For calibration: Haribo Gummy Bears are a 2 and Cadbury Swedish Fish are a 3.) The Maynards Wine Pastilles differ only in their coating of sugar crystals, which add little to the appeal of the confection.

In sum: Maynards Wine Gums are passable candy, but they simply cannot overcome the high expectations (and sinister lure) of their name and physical appearance.

The Milkybar is a thin, classic white chocolate bar. The Milkybar Kid on the wrapper, which is what first attracted the BB Procurement Department, is a pale blond kid, dressed in cowboy gear. He is suspiciously happy young man, but still strangely attractive.

On the surface, it wouldn’t appear to be much more than a white chocolate version of a classic Hershey’s bar. However, the Milkybar has a bit of a hidden treat – each bar has a wild-west scene in the chocolate, with the Milkybar Kid doing some sort of wild-west activity.

Not only do you get creamy, sweet and lovely white chocolate, but you also get the surprise of what scene you will unwrap. As this gentleman noticed, the scenes can be quite interesting. The experience here at the BB is that the scenes are more routine and uninteresting.

The Milkybar has become a permanent addition to the BB Candy Stores, thereby showing our continued willingness to all candy, whether it be brown, white or even Turkish.