First Communion!

Why do we go through with this charade? Irish parents will collectively spend more than €33 million on their children’s First Communion while a further €20m will be given to the newly-pious in the form of cash gifts from friends and family in the moments after they walk down the aisles of Catholic churches all over the country.

 I'm a lapsed Catholic, but I must confess I let my two children go through with this charade also! Sometimes I really do annoy myself!

Where did it all go wrong?

Ever wonder where did it all go wrong for you? 

In my case there are far too many reasons to write about.

I will keep those reasons to myself, and sit back and relax in the knowledge that no matter what, I have survived life thus far anyway!

You Don't Say...

The right honorable Mitchie Mc said the Provisionals should also have come clean with information on the whereabouts of the so-called Disappeared long ago...you don't say! What a novel idea!

The IRA’s practice of secretly burying some of its victims during the Troubles was wrong and unjust, and besides that, what is a funeral director for anyway?

A funeral director, also known as a mortician or undertaker, is a professional involved in the business of funeral rites. These tasks often entail the embalming and burial or cremation of the dead, as well as the planning and arrangement of the actual funeral ceremony.

FDs may at times be asked to perform tasks such as dressing (in garments usually suitable for daily wear), casketing (placing the human body in the container), and cosmetizing (applying any sort of cosmetic or substance to the viewable areas of the person for the purpose of enhancing appearances).

In the case of Mitchies mates, they just dug a hole (after putting a hole in the bodies head), and throwing same body into a hole! ...having said that they where sometimes in their daily wear!

100 Years Later, Titanic, still Famous, still 2 and a half miles under water!

Fair play to the good folk of Belfast for finally getting their city on the map for all the right reasons. By their re-floating of the dream ship RMS Titanic 100 years after it left the Belfast shipping yard they have caught the attention of the rest of the world!

Last weekend I did a fair bit of reading up on all things Titanic and one of my burning questions to find answers for was, where the bloody hell is it today?

It was Dr Robert Ballard who discovered the wreck in 1985. Because of the planing actions both sections of the wreck underwent during their descent, they now lie 600ft apart. 450 miles out from her final destination of New York.

While I enjoyed my research of the Titanic disaster, I got a belly laugh from this photo that popped up with my Google search!

Water Fight!

Her Majesty Queen Edna wants us all to pay for water metres so she can establish how much she is going to charge us for the stuff.

Now charging us for water is a bit of a hard sell in Ireland considering it is almost always raining in this country, but having said that, they thought the Ballygowan people were off their head's too when they had the audacity to think that Irish people would pay for bottled water!

Brigade're Josie Higgins is having none of it though, and is now using terms such as 'Mass Revolt'! Good luck with that Josie, I would love the day out to revolt, but it will depend on the weather is like that day!

I'm a Twit...its Official

I am now on Twitter!

Eh!....Don't know why I am on Twitter at this time, but I am definitely there, on Twitter that is!

https://twitter.com/#!/paoloindublin2

If the Goddess... AKA...Oprah! can work minor miracles on Twitter, well, why can't I?

When Oprah Winfrey’s made her first on-air tweet back in April 2009, the traffic to Twitter jumped 43 percent, according to Hitwise, a Web tracker. And Ryan Block, former editor in chief of Engadget, estimated that more than a million new users joined after Ms. Winfrey called attention to the microblogging service.

For those of you (like me) who don't understand what the 'Twitter' fuss is all about, Twitter is much more than the collective musings of the tech-savvy elite. Twitter’s search page, search.twitter.com. (Today, Earth Day is big.) Using the search box, you can enter any terms to see what people are saying about a topic right at that moment — a real-time view into the Internet’s hive mind that Google simply can’t provide.

 Twitter is also a self-propagating recommendation engine. By carefully selecting which users and companies to follow, you can tailor a stream of steadily refreshed news that appeals to you, much better than any Google algorithm could. There are tools to help you minimize the noise, like TweetDeck and Nambu.

You can also sneak a peek at the random snippets of the live conversations happening near your current location. Most third-party Twitter clients, like Twinkle and Tweetie, offer the ability to check the most recent updates from nearby Twitter users.

Even the high-profile and celebrity accounts have their own merit. Granted, a large majority of them are self-serving marketing ploys maintained by handlers and publicists. But still, you get a level of access granted that is hard to find elsewhere.

They say that once you get sucked in, it becomes tricky to remember when to turn it off.

Some 'Good' things about Twitter

1. Simplicity. You sign up, start Tweeting, and the ball’s rolling within minutes.
2. It’s a brilliant way of breaking news. 
3. Celebrities talk like “real” people without agents/producers/editors getting in the way. And the best Tweeting stars actually interact with their audience. ...ask Courtney Love.
4. Immediacy.
5. 140-character limit makes you think more about what you’re saying (montemplar)
6. Anyone can do it.
7. Twitter allows people to fire-off inane day-to-day stuff that (hopefully) keeps other channels of communication (email, SMS, blogs) tidier.
8. Variety of ways to access: PC, mobile, multiple apps and widgets. (montemplar)
9. You can stamp personality and bespoke design on profile pages, yet they retain a simple, consistent structure.
10. Trend spotting. Services such as TwitScoop make it easy to spot what’s going on right now.
11. It’s free.
12. In a world of Flash, Java, Ajax and other attention-hogging wibbles, it’s refreshingly clean.
13. The API – inspired decision to distribute freely has created a million and one different apps, widgets and plug-ins. TweetDeck being our current favourite.
14. No need for niceities. You cut straight to the point.
15. We’re irrationally pleased when someone we like/respect starts following us.
16. We know what our readers think of us, thanks to TweetDeck search.
17. You’re not constantly bombarded with ads, as with other free services.
18. That said, it’s an amazingly powerful, well-targeted sales channel.
19. The man who founded it is called Biz Stone.

Some of the 'Bad' things about Twitter

1. It panders to our short attention spans.
2. Anyone can do it.
3. 140 chr limit makes us all spk like teenagers. FFS. (Yes, you know what I mean...if you have teenagers!)
4. It’s another bloody thing to keep up-to-date.(Like we need any more of this tech-no-social-interaction-crap in our lives!)
5. Presentation. It looks shite!
6. The number of companies that suddenly start following you after you mention their products. teeth whitening, cold remedies, condoms, bad breath....tweet any of these and you will see what I mean!
7. Reliability. Poor!
8. Media bandwagon. Sky News has now got a Twitter Correspondent....says it all!
9. Fake celeb profiles. btw...I am Bill Clinton!
10. It’s not (yet) sustainable. Trillions of users, no clear way to make money from them.
11. It’s hard to maintain a professional image. (if that is what you are aiming for!)
12. It’s horribly addictive.
13. Conversations are desperately difficult to follow.(thats if you have the will power to follow some of the shite that some people tweet!)
14. Spambots.
15. We can’t ignore it. Like a sullen puppy, it craves attention
16. “New Media” consultants are being paid thousands of pounds per hour to bandy about terms like Twitterverse to gormless corporate morons who are desperate to go Web 2.0. Someone pass the shovel.