Snow

It has been snowing on and off for the last week. As I have spent most of my life in warmer climes, this is the most snow I have ever seen (barring the times when I have been more than 2000 metres above sea level). There are parts of the DCU campus that have been covered by snow for an entire week.

I took advantage of this fact to test my new camera. It's a very new camera, so I'm not quite used to it yet. Also, it is a standard digital point and shoot camera, so the quality of the pictures is not comparable to the output of a DSLR or similar.

Many of the photos came out rather over-exposed, which is to be expected really. Several others were somewhat out of focus, which I attribute to experimentation with the various settings. Here are a few shots taken in Albert College Park which I quite like, even if the composition is less than perfect...



I tried to get more of a reflection out of the water on this one, but it was starting to snow quite heavily again (the mistiness in the background is snow) and I didn't want to hang out for too long. I made the mistake of walking through the puddle on my way back. It was much deeper than I expected and I plunged into it up to my ankle. I foolishly chose to press on - the entire section of path visible in this photo is waterlogged and I was thoroughly soaked by the time I got to the end of it.

I adjusted the colours of this one in photoshop because the original was a little under-exposed. I would have taken more care with the shot, but my feet were numb from their icy bath after the previous photograph and I just wanted to get home! As a result, I think the photo is a little redder than I would like it to be. It seems my photoshop skills are even worse than my photography skills!

Cleaning Up After Myself

I have a confession to make. Two, actually. The first is that I eat fast food. I know it's bad for me. I have seen this video, watched Supersize Me, read Fast Food Nation and even, unfortunately, seen the film version. I recognise that what I'm eating barely counts as food, but sometimes it is just convenient. Other times, to be perfectly honest, it just satisfies a craving for junk food.

Having said all this, I eat fast food quite rarely. I really do mostly do it for convenience. I estimate I eat a fast food meal twice per month, on average. Of course, this is an average figure. I sometimes go months without setting foot inside a Burger King, other times I find myself there twice per week. I don't think it's a serious problem, in the same way that a smoker who only smokes two per day doesn't have a problem.

My second confession is likely to be much more contentious, at least to those of you who frequent these "restaurants". I don't always clean up after myself. I sometimes toss a greasy napkin onto the pile of discarded wrappers, get up and walk out the door.

My motivation for this post is that I was in McDonalds last night (for the first time in about 2 years) with Rose. We had just been to the cinema and she wanted to eat something. I didn't, but I felt it would be rude to make her go by herself, so I tagged along and got guilted into buying a cheeseburger (why are girls unable to eat when in the presence of a man who is not eating?). When we finished, I announced I was not going to put the wrapper in the bin and she looked at me as if I had just urinated in her cornflakes, then proceeded to tidy up after me.

My reasoning for this is not just that I am a complete jerk. That's only about half of it. The other half of it is based on the fact that I am not obliged to clean up after myself. When I receive my tray of "food" I am not reminded of my duty to dispose of it properly. In fact, if you look closely the next time you are in one of these restaurants, you will notice that the person who served you your food will occasionally come out from the "kitchen" (I'm going to keep on doing this to food-related words because it entertains me), put away trays, straighten up chairs and drag a wet mop across the floor.

Of course, that is not the whole story. I am not so defined by my role as customer that I refuse to lend a hand when it costs me nothing. But the fact is that I regard the cleaning up after myself part of the exchange as a kind of a tip. In a normal restaurant, you eat your food and when you're done, you pay for it and, if you liked it and you felt that the service was good, you will leave extra money, often in proportion to how much of a good time you had (note to Americans and other people who pay their waiters less than minimum wage: I live in Europe). In a fast food joint, on the other hand, you pay for your food up front. The staff have no incentive to make an effort because they know they will not get remunerated for it. So I consider cleaning up as making their job a tiny bit easier and that is my tip.

As an example, if I go to, say, KFC, and I get served by a friendly young Chinese girl who doesn't obviously hate me and my food is served promptly and in a warm, edible and moderately tasty state, I will be happy. If I am able to find somewhere clean and warm to sit, I will be very happy. After this sort of experience, I will clear my table and leave it as I found it. On the other hand, if I go to, say, Burger King and I am served by some guy who doesn't understand my order, and gets impatient with me because I don't have the right sort of Dublin accent for his imperfect grasp of the lingua franca, then proceeds to serve me stale chips and a lukewarm, excessively oily burger and the wrong drink, I will not be happy. If I then have to clear a table to find somewhere to sit, i will be doubly unhappy. When I finish, I will plonk my tray on the table and saunter out the door. Bonus points for accidentally dropping greasy things on the floor.

So you are probably thinking that I am an excessively vindictive, crotchety old man. Maybe you're right. I can't say I care.

Coming up: my solution to shops stocking Christmas items before November - hiding them in interesting places (at the back of a freezer, on top of the shelves, etc.). Bonus points if the items are perishable.

Meeting my pseudonym

I have been reading about Lewis Carroll recently. In particular, I have been reading about the fact that his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and that he first adopted his nom de plume when he was 21.

Reading about this reminded me of my own pseudonym, and the time that I met him.

When I was about 17, I chose the name "Robert Kane" to be my pseudonym, if ever I needed to give a false name, either when publishing classic children's literature or when apprehended by the police. I chose this name because I reckoned it would be easy to remember. The reason for this is that my parents initially planned on calling me Robert (my uncle Robert apparently talked them out of it, so that my name is now Dónall Eoin Roibeard McCann). As for the name "Kane", it is close enough to McCann to be easily remembered (and, in fact, I have read in more than one place that it is an anglicised derivation of McCann, although I can't attest to the veracity of this claim).

So, for a few years, I used this name when I needed a convenient pseudonym. I never used it as a fake name for the police, but I did write a few things here and there that were attributed to Robert Kane.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was studying for a year in Valencia, Spain, and Robert Kane began posting to the forum used by my university ultimate frisbee team in Dublin! As it turned out, one of the new players that year was actually called Robert Kane (also known as Blonde Rob) and was just as surprised as I was that somebody else was using his name.

Since then, I haven't used it as a pseudonym, but I have failed to come up with an alternative that I find suitably fitting and similarly easy to remember.

I'm sure C.L. Dodgson never had the problem of accidentally bumping into Lewis Carroll...

Fun with Hairdressers

Here is something you can try at home (assuming you live in a hairdresser's) . One prerequisite is that you will need about a week's growth of facial hair.

Go home (or to the hairdresser's if you're not trying this at home) and find a hairdresser with a pretty poor grasp of English. Get in the chair and tell her what you want done to your hair (this is, of course, merely a formality, due to her aforementioned loose grip on the local tongue). Sit back and relax while she performs her dark arts, but remember to pay attention towards the end, when it comes to the part when she gets the razor and trims the edges at the back and sides.

Assuming you aren't some freakish testosterone fiend, a week's worth of facial hair should be relatively sparse - enough to be noticed and make you look badly groomed, but not quite enough to be considered a beard. The hairdresser will not know whether or not to trim the sides, in case you are, in fact, growing a beard and wouldn't appreciate a negative side-burn look.

To complicate matters, your carefully selected hairdresser will not have the ability to ask you to disambiguate your fuzz by the standard method of asking you a straight question. Instead, she will look puzzled at it for a minute, then decide to go for it, and apply the razor to the edge of the hairline. She will then, naturally, turn to the other side of the face, look puzzled again, decide the original decision was a mistake, and turn the razor off and put it away wordlessly, leaving you with a fashionably lop-sided look and a date with the razor when you get home.

Or maybe that just happens to me.

Vocabulary - Pie/Foot

These are the latest additions to the vocabulary saga. All rely on the fact that the Spanish word for foot is "pie" (pronounced pee-'eh)

"Easy as foot"
"I have a sore pie"

I will recognise that this is probably in no way funny to read. I'm just documenting...

Vocabulary

I like unusual terms for things. I particularly enjoy made-up terms for things. I thrive on neologisms and newly-minted phrases. A good portmanteau or a recycled and re-purposed cliché can have me chuckling quietly to myself for hours (sad, isn't it?).

Unfortunately, I find that most of these terms tend to be transient and fleeting as they never become mainstream and they are eventually forgotten. With that in mind, I would like to record a few here, for posterity (so to speak).

I suppose my father is the main culprit cause of my interest in this sort of thing. For as long as I can remember he has been happily ignoring general vocabulary conventions and making the language up as he goes along. So much so that I think it would be an interesting project to compile a lexicon of terms that he uses, along with their definitions and usage criteria - but that's for another day.

My father's main source of neologisms is repurposed words, often word pairs combined in new and unexpected ways. As an example, the remote control for the television (which is known to most people as a remote, zapper, etc.) is known as a "bollard jumper" in our family. There is no apparent logic behind this, which is probably what makes it so memorable. Another example of a word used only by our family is arch, which is used to describe something that is in some way excellent or otherwise superlatively positive. It is a very commonly used word, describing anything from a meal to a film to a flight.

There are also "generic" words, like the Hiberno-English (is this getting pretentious yet? I didn't want to say "Irish" because it would be confusing) yoke or the Latin-American vaina. The standard catch-all word used by my father is raspberry, giving rise to exchanges such as:

Dónall: Have you seen the bollard-jumper?
Father: It's under the raspberry.
Dónall: Arch.

In this case, the word raspberry could refer to absolutely anything, and yet the meaning is often, and surprisingly, apparent from the context.

A more easily interpretable word is shed, which is used to describe anything that can contain something else – in practise, cupboards, drawers, wardrobes, attics, cellars, etc.

There is an entire category of words that are melanges of two or more languages, and commonly used in my family. Possibly the most common is to the platform, which means "OK" (via the French au quai). Any conversation between any two members of my family will be liberally sprinkled with unusual terms, mostly taken from combining English and Spanish, although French is usually acceptable too.

The general formula for these terms is to take a sentence in one language and purposefully mistranslate it into another one. This will frequently take the form of literally translated idioms, such as to give oneself of low, meaning to unsubscribe from something. These are usually the funniest types of neologisms, although the potential audience for the joke is restricted to those with a reasonable grasp of all the languages involved…

My friend Tinsley (who apparently doesn't like to be called Tinsley on this blog) has come to appreciate many of these bilingual terms in recent years. He is also frequently a good source of interesting monolingual terms. Probably my favourite one of his is ramipercussions, which is a portmanteau of "ramifications" and "repercussions" and has a wonderfully awkward sound when said out loud. Also, if you believe in the idea of morphological onomatopoeia, I think the surface similarity to the word "rambunctious" gives it a pleasantly whimsical connotation.

A recent gem of Tinsley's is to pronounce things as the crow flies, meaning to pronounce them directly as written, as opposed to whichever roundabout way is required by the language. It was, in fact, this term that inspired me to write this particular post.

My most widely-accepted neologism is weblord. I suspect some people might dispute that I came up with the term as it has reached a certain amount of currency in some of my social circles, but I am quite certain that I came up with it independently of anybody else. The origin, for me at least, is Robert Rankin's use of the term barlord instead of barman. Many years ago, I felt the term webmaster wasn't quite as grandiloquent as it could be, and so modified it to weblord. It gained currency because I insisted that the official title of the webmaster of the DCU ultimate club (and, later, Captain Drinking Binge) be WebLord.

This is quickly becoming a long-winded article, and so I will now cut it short, with a promise to post more on this topic at a future date (as I have only really scratched the surface here). I will leave you with my latest favourite term: The Kablammo. It comes via my friend Gráinne (who uses the word Kablammo as an adjective in much the same way as my father uses arch) and it is a variation on the unnecessary use of the definite article commonly used in the term The Awesome (or Teh Awesome, if you're that kind of nerd).

And that's all I have to say about that. I know this isn't a particularly arch ending, but think of it as more of a "to be continued". Now that I have laid down some basic facts, I will probably sprinkle this blog with occasional new terms as they pop up.

So, for now at least, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny: "That's masa del dedo del pie, false".

Judo

I started judo about a month ago. I have, thus far, been to about 8 training sessions and I am enjoying it immensely. I am conscious that I am very new at this (I am, as yet, unranked - not even a white belt), and so anything I say about the subject will probably seem embarassingly naive in a couple of years, so please don't judge me too harshly if you are a seasoned judoka.

I have been meaning to take up a martial art for years now and judo was my first choice as I did judo for a couple of years when I was about 7 years old, although I don't really remember any of it for that to be of any use to me.

This is certainly the first time I have taken judo seriously and I am very impressed with it. It seems elegant and graceful while at the same time being violent and aggressive. It is unlike anything else I have ever done.

For my first few sessions, we practised some basic throws and ground work. We also did a lot of very intense fitness work (one of the requirements is that we be able to do backwards rolls into handstands – which is even more difficult than it sounds!) but, all in all, it was kind of bland – there was a sense that we weren't being thrown hard and that our opponents were cooperating too much for it to be challenging. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it immensely and always looked forward to the next session.

In the last couple of sessions, however, things have been different. I got a new judo suit, as opposed to just wearing a tracksuit and a t-shirt (and it makes an incredible difference!), and we are starting to get thrown more often when we do randori (a kind of practise fight). One guy in particular is very satisfying to practise with. Whereas the higher-ranked members of the club would allow me to set up with grips and offer helpful advice as I made a mess of putting in attacks, this guy refused to let me have any grip at all and actively counter-attacked anything I put out there. Fighting him for 5 minutes was more exhausting than any other aspect of the training. And for that reason, it was all the more satisfying when I managed to successfully execute any throws.

Call me a testosterone-fuelled stereotype, but there is something greatly satisfying about grappling with an opponent of similar size and strength, then executing a manoeuvre and throwing him over your shoulder. I now wake up the day after training to find myself sore and covered in bruises, but I'm still craving another session. Last weekend, I found myself dreaming about judo and actually waking myself up because my body physically carried out the move I imagined in my head. I think this is a good thing.

The nezt training session won't be until Monday and I feel restless for having written this. I find myself looking forward to the adrenaline of the fight, the feeling in my stomach when my legs are swept out from under me and, most of all, the grace of a successful throw and the satisfying thwack that my opponent's body makes as he hits the mat.