Raiméis

I was asked last week by some Finnish friends how much a TV licence is in Ireland. Not having ever bought a TV licence in Ireland I (very badly) guessed around €80-€90, basing my guess on a discussion we had on the subject about 10 years ago. I was surpsied to read today that the latest approved increase (€3) will bring the current fee to a whopping €155. €155 for the shite they have the gall to submit us to!

Looks like the army deafness claims should be coming to an end soon. Overall liability will end up somewhere around €300 million [registration required] (€277 paid out so far). Not bad considering they had estimated it would be well over €1 billion.
Was it Andrews or the late Hugh Coveney who made the decision to not contest the deafness claims? Such an idiotic decision, I can still rememebr the laughs of some of the lads I knew in our local barracks, they thought christmas had come early.
Michael Smith has done a lot of work to limit the damage by introducing a settlement scheme. Smith seems to have done quite a lot for the Defence Forces going by this reposted Sunday Indo article. We need a strong Defence Minister to take the Defence Forces into the 21st century. They have made great strides in recent years, as have the Reserve Forces, lets hope it continues under O’Dea.

I see little point in posting much about the tragic events in South East Asia as it’s been covered on every news site on the web. Pete over at Slugger has made a good post on the subject with a number of useful links.
Check the links section in the right column of this
dedicated site for ways of donating.

I didn’t realise they were doing a big metric changover of road signs in Ireland! Shiite! It’s one of those small but somewhat significant things I enjoy about going home, using miles instead of kilometers. I’ve always thought it was of those interesting oddities about Ireland that we used both systems but now it’s metric only??

Wow, “The world’s highest road bridge is due to be inaugurated in southern France by President Jacques Chirac before opening to traffic later this week.” Check out the photo here and on the BBC site, very cool!

Trust the Japanese to come up with this one. A company called Trane KK has release a product for single men, a woman’s lap – made out of foam. Seemingly “Single men find this soothing,”. This is quite similar to the other product which has been on the market for the past year, the “boyfriends shoulder” pillow. Strange, but true!

I haven’t covered much Norn Iron topics in a while even though the negotiations are all over the news these days because, to be honest, the whole thing would bore the tits off an elephant*.
Anyway the following just caught my attention: “The Catholic Primate of Ireland has said that an alternative to photographic evidence must be found to provide certainty IRA decommissioning has taken place.” Here’s my proposal…
» Read more…

Blimey, the Former Pantera guitarist Darrell ‘Dimebag Darrell’ Abbott was shot dead at a concert yesterday. They (their new band Damageplan) had just started their set when some bloke stormed on stage, shot the guitarist 5 or 6 times before turning the gun on others. A policeman then shot the gunman dead.

I thought this was a bit crazy. “A father who was banned from his family home for six months after smacking his son in public has been allowed back after admitting common assault.” The man in question smacked his son on the backside once but was seen by a policeman and arrested. The slap certainly seems to have been over the top but according to the defence the child was misbehaving and had “run out in front of a car”, “the parents were at the end of their tether”. The whole family seems to have paid the price, the man was not allowed to go home, see his son unsupervised or even talk to him on the phone and the man’s girlfriend had two raise two children on her own for the six months including a new born baby. Not right I say.

I was on the Mozilla Development site today (or more specifically ‘Gaeilge‘) and noticed that they have a Scottish theme online. “St. Andrews day today isn’t it?” thought Maca.

Anyway under their logo they have the slogan “Spot the sassenach”. “Hmm ‘sassenach’ – interesting word” thought I, “not unlike our own ‘sasanach’ meaning ‘invading imperialist bastard’ “. *wink*
So I did a search on “sassenach” as i’d never heard that version of the word before in English or Scots and I came across the very interesting Royal Stuarts site with a nice explanation of the word.

“Sassenach are folk that are no Scots. Though ye could say that they’re folk that are no Celts – I dinna think ye can call most Irish, Welsh or Cornishmen real Sassenach.
Noo then, lad, I dinna want ye treatin Sassenach like inferior folk, een though thats often true. There are guid, kind, intelligent and een holy people among their different tribes … …”

Anyway all that lead me to this article on BBC. “A new online archive, “Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech”, aimed at recording the Scots tongue in all its forms is going live on St Andrew’s Day”.

[Update] I’ve been reliably informed that the Irish word Sasanach, or its Scottish Gaelic equivalent (Sasannach) has been borrowed into Scots and English. It could possibly have a pejorative meaning – comparable with the Irish and Scottish Gaelic “Gall”.