Browsing Posts published in December, 2008

Bloody teenagers. All they do is sit around, playing video games, smoking, drinking cider and coming up with fantastic ideas like TeenCamp.

TeenCamp Ireland is a gathering of the techies/bloggers/fanboys age 13+ in Ireland to give talks, meet others, share ideas and have a laugh. TeenCamps are organised/planned/run by teens for other teens.

They are holding it in Filmbase in Dublin on Jan 17th.

If you know anyone in this age group who fits the bill, let them know about it. I’d have cut my arm off with a rusty saw aged 15 in 1983 to attend something like this and swap ZX Spectrum programming tips.

Whilst growing up from age 6-18 in Kilkenny, one group of people I never got on with were the park-keepers (“parkies”) in the Castle Park. They always seemed to be fun-killers.

It looks like nothing has changed in over 20 years. I watched at least 50 people walk away gutted from the park yesterday with bawling children due to this:

Frost Stops Play

One person claimed it was because a child had slipped and hurt themselves on the previous day. A child. Hurt. In a playground. Shock! Horror! How could this happen? Quick! Sue someone!

We just went and climbed some 100 ft tall trees and let the children fall into the unfenced pond instead since that was much safer.

And don’t get me started on the “We close at 4pm but actually lock all but one of the gates at 3.30pm so we can be in the pub at 4.01pm”.

Office of Public Works eh?

If, like 99% of the local population, you think Annaghmore is the best idea we’ve had in Ireland since feeding PCBs to pigs, check out this excellent site with information about it.

Any politician who votes in favour of Annaghmore is basically admitting to being a shill and will be out on their ear in the next election.

So 47 farms used contaminated pig feed. Unless the FSAI confirms that Gubbeen or Caherbeg are two of those farms, I’ll be having a lovely bacon sarnie for my breakfast.

If the State’s Chief Medical Officer says that dioxin is only dangerous if a person is exposed to it over a long period of time, then why the hell are we destroying millions of Euro worth of food?

We all eat chicken that spends its life sitting in its own faeces in the dark and lots of the pork we eat is dosed up to the eyeballs in sub-therapeutic antibiotics, so how is a slight possibility of a touch of PCB going to make our health any worse?

Related to this, I’ve met with a few small food producers recently and I don’t know how they stay in business with the nonsensical levels of paperwork and measurement that they have to deal with. Is this actually part of the problem? An unbelievably bloated bureaucracy unable to measure and react quickly because they are drowning in irrelevant form processing? A bit like Sarbanes-Oxley in the US causing people to be so obsessed with process, they forgot about the intent and allowed the banks to trade recklessly for years. 

Finally, I thought we had full meat traceability from field (or concrete pen) to fork? Why not just release the tracking codes of all the individual batches we need to destroy? Or are we all a bit too thick to manage that?

This Sunday’s rasher sandwich brought to you by the letter P and the Caherbeg Television Workshop:

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