Sigurdur Hjartarson has an odd hobby. It’s not exactly the kind of hobby you’d freely discuss over dinner, unless you’re in Iceland apparently, as it would probably create quite a degree of embarrassment.
“What do you do in your free time Sigurdur? Fishing? Cross country skiing?”
“I collect penises.”
“..!”
“Yes, I like a bit of Dickie. I am a phan of the phallus! A master of manginas!”
“… sooo … did you catch the football last night?”
The bauld Mr.Hjartarson started collecting penises in 1974, as a “hobby” if you believe that, and now runs the Icelandic Phallological Museum which displays his collection of 261 one-eyed wonder weasels from 90 different species from mice to elephants and even sperm whale’s 70 kg wrinkle sticks! The museum drew up to 6,000 visitors last summer, 60% of which were dirty minded women gagging for a gander at the gag mallets.
One prominent species missing from the museum, excluding staff, is homo sapien (I struggled to find a way to squeeze homo erectus in there but failed) however 4 members of the public have promised to donate their dribbling dragons to the museum after they die.
In the mean time if you’re no longer in need of your love truncheon you might send it on to:
Sigurdur Hjartarson
Laugavegur 24,
101 Reykjavík
ICELAND
I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Don’t forget to stuff it first. 8===D
Two military related posts for you today…
• 160 troops of the 97th Infantry Battalion arrived in Chad this morning to begin their peacekeeping mission which brings to 390 the number of Irish personnel now in Chad with a further 150 to be deployed within the next two weeks.
• Something interesting and indeed historic is happening in Croker today … today is the start of a major international conference where delegates from up to 100 countries will be attempting to agree on a treaty banning the production and use of cluster bombs.
Ireland is actually one of a small group of nations leading the campaign to ban the use of these weapons. Negotiations started about a year ago in Norway and should the treaty be agreed in the coming 12 days of discussions a formal signing ceremony will take place back in Norway in December.
The three (of around 34) main producers of these weapons; the US, China & Russia, are obviously against the ban and are not attending. Not that it matters as agreement on a treaty would put serious pressure on these nations who would more than likely adhere to the ban even if they don’t officially sign up for it.
Why the ban on cluster bombs you ask? Because cluster bombs blanket a battle field by scattering up to (depending on the bomb) 2000 bomblets across a kill zone. Many of these bomblets fail to detonate essentially acting like a landmine; exploding only when disturbed usually by civilians weeks, months or years later.
Interesting to see how it turns out…
I’m a few days late with this but tonight I just noticed that Firefox 3 RC1 has been released! I’ve been using Fx 3 Beta 5 for a while at work and have been very impressed with it so would recommend upgrading to FX 3 asap; RC1 should be stable enough for the masses to install though most of your extensions probably won’t work yet.
p.s. some languages can be installed as language packs allowing you to switch between various languages if needed. Irish isn’t listed here yet but we’ll see if we can get it up there soon enough. Btw, when I say “we” I mean the Mozilla guys & the ‘Firefox in Irish’ team after I whinge so much that they decide to pacify me by adding it to the list.
…is a nightmare. I suppose if I haven’t have left it for so long it wouldn’t be so difficult but I did so it is. I was on version 1.52 until I upgraded; and the only reason I upgraded was because of some bug in MySQL which was reversing the order of my posts. The big problem I face now is sorting out problems with the incompatible template. I suppose the easiest solution is just to install a compatible template but then it means time trying to edit that to get the look I want and time is something I have very little of these days.
I didn’t get to test any of the plugins so if you have problems with the maths questions or posting in general I’d appreciate it if you could drop me a line.
EDIT: Bear with me while I try out a few new themes…
It’s not often I’d pay any attention to the ads in gmail but this one just caught my attention. It’s Get the focal, an Irish-English-Irish translator for your mobile phone created by a company called Maithú. It has 10k words and is bound to come in handy when you’re stuck for the odd word.
You can get the application by texting Focal to 53503 (Irish & UK mobiles), visiting m.getthefocal.com on your mobile or just download them to your PC via the following links: English-Irish, Irish-English [both *.jar files].
EDIT: I failed to do my duty before posting about this application, apologies for that dear reader. This application isn’t free as I found out after I posted about it; you need to pay €5 for a 1 year licence for each of the jar files. I bought a licence for the English-Irish dictionary and have tested it; and while it’s handy to have I certainly don’t think it’s worth €5!
This is by far the biggest spider I have ever caught or even seen in Ireland, excluding exotic spiders of course.
I spotted this on the lampshade last week and it scared the sh1t out of me … which was actually good timing because I was sitting on the jacks at the time. I don’t think i’m arachnophobic but spiders this big give me the willies.
I’ve another couple of pics on flickr for the curious.
… in case you haven’t noticed. Work is unfortunately infringing on my personal life, more so that its done before. Late nights and early mornings are becoming the norm these days. The end is in sight though; another few weeks should see things back to normal. Hopefully; so bear with me in the mean time.
You may also have noticed that workpress seems to be taking on a life of its own. It has decided, without consulting me I might add, to reorder the posts on my blog … the most recent post is now at the bottom of the page.
And it doesn’t end there; it also seems to have screwed up the RSS feeds as I am getting a lot of old posts coming though on Google Reader. In addition the 15 “most recent” posts it shows in the admin pages are actually the very earliest 15 posts I made on this blog.
Perhaps it’s time to update wordpress … i’m only about a year or so behind everyone else!
Accidentally posted, damn shozu has a mind of it’s own. Anyway, just took this snap of expert parking in Sligo; they managed to get it between two white lines, just not the two they were supposed to.
No April Fool’s jokes allowed here. Sorry. No can do. Only because i’m not smart enough to think of any good ones. So I’ll leave that to … hmmm … searched through my list of blogs and was amazed at the amount of them no longer blogging … which reminds me that I was supposed to re-do my blog list. While I put that on the long finger, the digitus medius or digitus tertius if you’re posh, these April Fool’s related stories might keep you mildly amused:
