Conor's Bandon Blog

Running, Food and Local stuff from a blow-in

Annual Paddy's Day Post

The cold seemed to reduce the numbers quite a bit this year but still a great display by the locals. Fire engines and tractors still firm favourites in our house with the Steam Tractor being my own personal highlight·

Rosmini Community Event Needs Your Help

I’ll keep it short and sweet. If you know of any family-friendly comedians or mind-trick guys who would be able to perform on March 26th in Bandon, can you get in touch with me and I’ll pass it on to the Rosmini Centre people? They do have some budget for it, so pro or semi-pro is fine. Also the dog owned by one of the kids who was going to perform has gone missing.

Community Variety Show on March 26th in Bandon

Every year the great people who run the Rosmini centre for adults with an intellectual disability organise a fun and interesting event to promote community integration and inclusion for everyone. This year they are organising a community variety show. It’s on Friday the 26th of March in the GAA Hall in Bandon. Doors opening at 7.15, show starts at 8 sharp. It is not a fund raising event so tickets will be at the very affordable cost of €5 each.

This is Masterchef not Master Scallops

It’s time to put Masterchef out to pasture. I’m watching an average show in about 10 minutes using Sky+. The formula isn’t working any more. No tension, no excitement, the same stupid catchphrases. Cooking doesn’t get any harder than this. Yeah, it does. Scallops. If I see one more bleedin scallop on that show, I’ll explode. Fabio Viviani, in the far superior US show Top Chef, described the same problem perfectly back in January 2009:

Learn about Twitter whilst having a nice glass of vino

I know the whole Twitter thing is still completely alien to a lot of people. How many wondered what the hell the papers were on about when discussing Dan Boyle’s “tweet”? Here’s a suggestion for dipping your toe in and getting a handle on it all. Karwig Wines in Carrigaline is running the third “Twebt” which is a Twitter wine-tasting competition (Bubble Brothers and Curious Wines ran the first two).

Techie updates have moved

I know the tech stuff annoys the foodie readers here and vice versa. So last week I started up a new Posterous blog over on conoroneill.net. It is much more high volume than this blog and consists mainly of pointers to interesting tech stuff, opinions thereof and the odd funny bit. So basically pretty much anything except food/Bandon, which will remain here. I’ll do the odd cross-reference when it makes sense.

Fat Club Update

The idea of relentlessly banging on about weight and fitness here and on Twitter didn’t really work. There are only two people that I follow on Twitter doing it and one of them is my sister. But I have been marking major milestones and today was one of them. So from Dec 29th to Feb 9th, I have lost 20 pounds. How? No booze, no snacking, no sweets, normal breakfast, normal lunch, smaller dinner, fruit whenever I’m peckish and a small amount of treadmill Mon-Fri.

Just in case you haven't seen/heard it

Very very funny.

Neven watchable but not memorable

I’ve always been a huge fan of Neven. Anyone who can run a successful restaurant in the middle of nowhere in rural Cavan gets my vote. His energy is always fantastic too. This new show is ok but nothing amazing. I’m surprised to see cookery programmes still being made that refer to “dinner parties”. Does anyone still have those? His three dishes in the opening episode were asparagus and smoked salmon tartlet, confit duck and a tiramsu variant.

The Rules of Fat Club

Pat Phelan’s recent post about losing weight and giving up ciggies highlighted that we all stand a better chance of success if we do some online group supoort of each other via Twitter/Facebook. The bruv in law came up with Fat Club. So here we go: #1 - The first rule of Fat Club is, you must talk all the time about Fat Club online. #2 - The second rule of Fat Club is, you MUST TALK about Fat Club online.