Bakker Bugle Blog Say it three times fast. In Luxembourgish.

3 September 2007

Re-decorating the Blog

Filed under: culture,dublin,travel — Will @ 18:44

No Labor Day holiday here! While Americans are BBQ-ing and watching baseball and all that American stuff, I’m going to play with the blog’s code. So, to distract you from the experimentation over here, Photo 12 aug 2007I invite you to look at the new photos posted on flickr. The first two days of our holidays with Cindy generated a lot of photos of Dublin and its environs.

I’m sure you’ll find them useful for planning your own holidays. Here, the volume of tourism dropped noticeably last week. Anita and I speculate about how the city will change. After all, we moved here at the start of tourist season! Our prognostications focus on the incoming students for the several universities. Will they replace the tourists in the city centre, who tend to be backpack-wearing youngsters anyway? Or will this place show an entirely different face?

2 September 2007

All-Ireland Hurling final

Filed under: ireland,sports — Will @ 17:35

Anita and I went shopping this afternoon, just off Grafton Street. On the way home, a local pub, Doheny and Nesbit’s enticed us. The county flags for the two teams playing in the All-Ireland Hurling championship were flying at its front entrance.

County Kilkenny was heavily favored over County Limerick. Since we didn’t follow hurling this season, we didn’t have a strong opinion in the matter. The folks in the pub, however, did: they were plainly cheering for Limerick. So we ordered a pint of Guinness, a Jamieson and ice, and sat along the rail.

It’s amazing how much easier it is to understand a sport when you’re watching with a crowd. Their cheers and sighs were better signs of what mattered than the announcers’ drone. Hurling is an impressive sport, when you actually pay attention to it. In retrospect, we had hurling on the TV in our home, but we never gave it more than half our attention.

Kilkenny dominated Limerick. We missed the two goals that gave them a solid lead, but we saw them protect that lead for the rest of the match. It reminded me of the way that a great hockey team can make a slightly less talented team look ridiculous using defensive tactics.

Commenter of the Week (26 Aug – 1 Sept)

Filed under: award — Will @ 11:02

Congratulations to this week’s winner, Theodora! Theodora excelled in both quantity and quality this week. Her repartee on scones is especially notable. Theodora has been a reliable commenter since the early days of this blog, and this award is overdue.Theo Trophy We expect her to execute the duties of Commenter of the Week in a way that befits the honor.

The Awards Committee must also recognize two comments of outstanding quality this week. First, Sharon’s question regarding Cheeseheads is just the kind of contribution that keeps the fires stoked here at BB Central. It provoked an off-the-cuff response in the comments thread and it will probably serve as the inspiration for a full post in the future. Second, Katherine’s rant about inferior phones is precisely in the spirit of this blog. Although a relative newcomer to commenting, Katherine demonstrated a deep understanding of The BB Way.

31 August 2007

Trivial Surprise #47

Filed under: entertainment,ireland — Will @ 18:23

Coors Light is a real presence in Dublin. There are lots of billboards and commercials on TV for Coors Light, and they aren’t much different than American versions. Coors Light DealThe current tagline is “Amazing Things Happen High in the Rockies.”

In pubs, you almost always see just one American brand on tap, Coors Light. That’s odd, I thought, as I remembered stories about how Coors Light had to be smuggled into the Midwest in the good ole days. I thought no more about it, until I started this post and I googled around a bit.

I found a fascinating document from an Irish self-regulatory body for Irish advertising. Coors Light is imported into Ireland by Heineken, the 363-kg gorilla in the global beer industry. Apparently, Bud Light recently became the first real competition for “light” beer in Ireland, and is brewed in Ireland.

Do I remember correctly — Didn’t Guinness recently run an ad campaign in the US that said that Guinness has fewer calories than major American lagers?

29 August 2007

Ah, the Dubs

Filed under: dublin,ireland,sports — Will @ 21:09

Sunday, County Dublin’s gaelic football team lost to County Kerry. So Kerry will play Cork for the All-Ireland title on September 16th.

In the spirit of self-deprecation, here are a few jokes that require a basic understanding of Irish culture to understand. In the spirit of sadness at the Dub’s loss, I’ll give bonus points towards Commenter of the Week to commenters who kill the comedy by explaining the jokes. (Jokes courtesy the culchies at askaboutmoney.com.)

What’s the difference between a Dublin jersey and a school uniform??
You can see school uniforms in September.

Paul Caffrey, Dubs manager, was arrested last night after vandalising a cigarette machine. He replied by saying he was in a bad way for 20 players!!

What is blue and navy and goes beep, beep, beep?
The Dubs’ bus reversing back into the garage.

What do you call a Dublin man with an all Ireland medal?
An antique dealer!

What I find remarkable is that County Dublin comprises almost 20% of the population of the island. Many of the 32 counties have less than a tenth of that population. Croke Park, the site for the All-Ireland contests, is in Dublin (although it is not Dublin’s home stadium). Yet Dublin is relatively unsuccessful in both football and hurling.

The Bakker Bugle staff are engaged in a long-term research project to determine the cause for this anomaly. We hope it will bring insights to similar oddities in American sport.

28 August 2007

I hate IE more than the British

Filed under: administrative,mental state — Will @ 17:19

Permit me a rant. For more than two hours this morning, I worked on a “Recent Comments” section for the BB Blog’s sidebar. I tweaked settings and code and got it looking very nice. Furthermore, the additions are compliant with all the relevant standards for HTML, CSS, and all those web-oriented languages.

So the blog looks great in Firefox, the best web browser, and Safari, Apple’s browser. I made the layout a little different in the comments area, so that it’s easy to tell who commented most recently.

Then, Anita calls at 5 pm (our time) to say that the blog is broken. She sends screenshots. Indeed, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer cannot understand the minor changes I made.

First:

The blog is not broken, Internet Explorer is broken.

When I tried to add a linkroll in June and Internet Explorer didn’t like it, I sighed and used an alternate, inferior service. A few weeks later, I fought an all-day, pitched battle with Internet Explorer in order to display our latest Flickr photos in the sidebar. I lost that battle, and so you get no pictures. In all cases, every other browser worked on the first try.

But the majority of our friends read our blog on Internet Explorer. So for today, no cool recent comments thingie for you!

And tomorrow morning, I’ll try to trick Microsoft’s demon-spawn into displaying simple text … instead of writing real content, or reading about Irish politics, or exploring the Northside.

27 August 2007

Commenter of the Week (19-25 Aug)

Filed under: award — Will @ 7:36

Our Commenter of the Week is Laurie! It was a down-week for posts from Bakkers, so Laurie came through in the clutch to contribute to the blog this week. Her comment on coffee was apropos, nostalgic, and funny. Laurie’s TrophyBut it was the dedication and hard-work of finding the Folgers commercial on YouTube that won over the judges. If you missed it the first time, take a look this morning.

Laurie’s comment gives us the opportunity to mention two Things You Might Not Know about the Commenter of the Week award. First, you can comment on a post from weeks past to win Commenter of the Week. (This week, we’ll put a “Recent Comments” list on the sidebar so you can see, well, the most recent comments — no matter which posts they’re attached to.)

Second, you don’t need to write a paragraph to win. In Laurie’s case, a clever reference and a truly excellent link were more than enough to gain the prize. If you’d like to include a link in your comment, you can simply copy the web-address (e.g. “http://www.rwor.org/”) into your post.

25 August 2007

Do You Hate the British Too?

Filed under: culture,ireland,travel — Anita @ 12:55

I’ve had the following conversation on three separate occasions with three different Irish co-workers:

Man: Hiya, Anita. What did you do on your holiday?

Me: We spent the weekend in Dublin, and spent some time at museums and especially at Kilmainham jail. We heard a lot about the Easter Rising in 1916. During the week, we traveled to the West, around Galway and Connemara.

Man: And you liked it?

Me: We did, it was beautiful. But we joke that it could have been depressing because it was like a “Famine Tour.” We saw famine monuments, and we even finished the trip with a visit to the Famine Museum in Strokestown.

Man: So now you hate the British too!

24 August 2007

Up the Dubs!

Filed under: dublin,sports — Will @ 18:25

Dublin’s football team will face Kerry in the semi-finals of the All-Ireland Football Championship, Sunday.

In Ireland: “soccer” means soccer. “Football” rarely means soccer, although it can. “Football” can also mean American football, but very rarely. In most cases, “football” means GAA (Gaelic Athletic Assocation) football, which is like a faster, less tackle-y form of rugby, played with a volleyball. Except when “football” refers to Australian Rules, which was even more confusing back when teams from Ireland and Australia would play each other. Recently, it seems, the difference over the linguistics of “football” lead to a game called “donnybrook,” which is (incidentally) a district of Dublin and a town in Australia. Anyway, Irish GAA football teams do not play Australian football teams, although players from Irish GAA football teams occasionally go to Australia to play professionally. All clear?

The Dublin County football team‘s colors are dark blue and light blue, and those colors have served as a casual uniform for Dubliners for about a month now. dublinnewcrest.png(The formal uniform is a fluorescent yellow safety jacket; more on that at a later date.) I didn’t know that there were so many variations on a blue striped collared shirt. Houses are festooned with the checkerboard of blues, especially on the northside.

There’s no chance of getting a ticket. But if we’re not busy after the Tour of Ireland passes through our neighborhood, we’ll probably go to a pub to watch the game. Dublin are the underdogs, so this should be fun.

22 August 2007

First Visitor, Departed

Filed under: entertainment,ireland,travel — Will @ 19:57

Good-bye, Cindy — We’ll miss you!

1150972490_3e2e4a10bc_m.jpgThe B.B. B&B said, “Farewell,” to its first customer today. Despite the threat of a pilots’ strike, Cindy was able to fly to Chicago today. With her help, the staff are now even better able to serve future customers of our B&B.

Although the staff haven’t finished putting together the book for this visit, we like to keep our friends informed. So, for an overview of her visit, and tantalizing information about the staff’s retreat, follow the link…

(more…)

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