More of those please… actually the Dutch have a very strange public holiday system,

Easter (Good Friday & Easter Monday)
QueensDay (30th April) the Queen’s official birthday  – her real one is in Jan
then…. this is where it gets complicated,
Liberation Day (5th of May) which we get once every five years!
Assencion Day (22nd May)….
Whit Monday (1st June)
and that’s it…. nothing again until Christmas Day! Not a Sausage! But we do get compensated in our time off allowance.

Anyhow, as tonight is my good friend Keith’s 26th Birthday.

That’s the fabulous Keith at the Drag Party he threw in his pad at Muntplein.

As the fact he is 4 years off 30 depresses him… WTF?

I have found the perfect cocktail for the occasion.

Corpse Reviver #One

• splash of absinthe
• 25ml brandy
• 25ml calvados
• 25ml sweet vermouth

Method
1. Pour a splash of absinthe into a Martini glass and swirl around to rinse the glass, pouring out any excess liquid.
2. Place the brandy, calvados, sweet vermouth into a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard.
3. Pour the drink into the prepared Martini glass and serve straightaway.

According to Underhill Lounge “Corpse Revivers” were a class of pre-prohibition drinks meant to be taken as “hair of the dog”. This version seems to be credited to Frank Meier of the Ritz, Paris and is identical to Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon”. A shot of Absinthe topped up with champagne  Which is a pretty fitting name for such a concoction.

So Drink in hand… we move to the links!

I made my debut as the Mainland Europe Culch.ie, it was a bit paltry as debuts go, but I’ll be back and I’ll find my stride

The hair razingly wonderful Alan Costello wrote a moving and intelligent post on Adoption

We all know the Obama’s got the famously promised dog, BO (Barack Obama?) – and that he’s a Kennedy!

But they also celebrated the White House’s first Seder for Passover.

Kiera Knightly HATES the internet? Well if she does but still has a compulsion to update her status…

Perhaps she should invest in one of these.  An offline status updater if you will, basically a reduced day diary, but it looks soo cool! Wantsies!

On the topic of good ole hand written journals, the much loved Moleskin have launched their DIY inserts for your Moly Love, MSK by Moleskin allows you to create your own pages based on your iCal or Outlook Calendar and contacts from your iPhone or Outlook.

There was a #Big-scandal when it was noticed  that Amazon had tagged any products with the labels LGBT as “adult” and thus removing them from search results and recommended titles many blogs have picked up on this, and our own Daimen Mulley wrote an interesting piece on the immediate overreaction to what was a system failure Amazon came back later and apologized for the “embarrassing and hamfisted” error.

Our own supermum Sharon Fennell got a mention in the New York Times no less, on her reactions to the book about the supposed “fight against autism”  The Horse Boy, by Rupert Isaacson. Well worth a read!… the NYT article and Sharon’s blog that is…. skip the book!

Phil of Icedcoffee fame organised a photowalk in Dublin at the weekend, results here, here, here, here, here, and here

The ever wonderful RP’s and her highly addictive game…. be warned, it will suck you in!!

Mr Evert Bopp went a ways to dispelling my Mum’s idea that I’m talking to no one on the internet, when he was interviewed on The Business on Radio One last Sunday about his start up support project GreenHouse Limerick. Please support it here, and if you are on twitter Evert is too, and GreenHouse. They are hoping Dell will help them out with some furnishing or supplies, computers… so tweet about it using this hashtag #doitdell. If you think GreenHouse Limerick is exactly what your startup or business idea needs, let the crew know.

In an update to last weeks link where Sweary pondered and ranted about those that believed friendships that began on the internet are less than those began in say the pub, Sweary takes a moment to remember her friend Chris, who has sadly passed away. Remember him and those that miss him.

And finally… a useful tool I discovered via LifeinJars, check it out at www.925ing.com

So, Ive run out of energy,  I’m writing this on Thursday night so I can party with Keith and Co safe in the knowledge that my blog will be fed! Its now (as you can see)  almost 2am and I need sleep.

My soundtrack to this post has been Ben Folds, who I love so much! And so I will leave you with not one, but two classics!

Still Fighting it – which always reminds me of how much I love my nephew.

“And you’re so much like me, and I’m sorry”

Click here to view the embedded video.

and

The Luckiest - I like to listen to this to remind myself that I am very blessed and lucky.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At present I am at home in my mom’s and this is brought to you on macbook (@fontfiddler’s macbook) so we’ll see if bloging is better by mac certainly there are enough mac bloggers so it cant be that hard! lol

Ok on with the Drinky, it being Easter, there is really only one way to go!

Easter Bunny

• 1 1/2 oz Creme De Cacao
• 1/2 oz Vodka
• 1 teaspoon Chocolate Syrup
• 1 teaspoon Cherry Brandy

Directions:
1. Shake creme de cacao and vodka with ice.
2. Strain over ice in an old-fashioned glass.
3. Float chocolate syrup and cherry brandy.

So here I am watching *roll eyes* Britain’s got talent with my Mum and @fontfiddler so if this seems off kilter but its a bit hard to concentrate, as Britain’s answer to the Kelly Family sing their hearts out, if for some reason you are interested, check this piece out or this piece, burlesque wardrobe malfunction.

Anyway, that cocktail is YUM and you should try it.

So furthermore with the links!!

This week was Ireland’s April 09 Bludget, avidly commentated on around the web’s and heavily Liveblogged. With over 150 livebloggers well done to Lexia and Suzie for moderating and leading the informative and smartass amongst us.

Even the Flatmates got in on the action, but it seems they weren’t to keen on listening to the reactions.

Anyone that follows me on twitter, will know that Im thinking about buying a new laptop, the one i have now is nealry 3yrs old and is really only good for blogging and surfing, but not the daily encoding and transcoding that i have call for. I’m somewhere between a MacBook 2.4ghz and a Sony Vaio with equal spec but with the dreaded Vista. At least until Windows 7 is released.

Any suggestions please please let me know!

If all else fails and I can’t decide, I may end up getting this….

Laptop that rolls up

Yes? No?

Another piece of tech I think is interesting is the Pogoplug, a plug type device that turns and USB storage into a networked drive, but better yet, an internet accessible plug and play drive Handy for travelers and accessing documents on the move.

I usually find something bike related of interest, and I have to say, I’m not the most knowledgeable cyclist. But I’ve always wondered why some sport saddles have a split in the middle

I don’t know about you, and with the focus in Irish media being about Bludget 09 and the Italian Earthquake this may have slipped under the radar, but the story of the young Uncle and Nephew in Doncaster, UK that were attacked by two brothers near an unused quarry. Disturbing enough if both the victims and accused were older than 12. But at 11, 10 & 9 this story is a chilling repeat of the Jamie Bulger murder.

I’m home for a few days over the Easter with my family. I love spending time with my young nephew, and sharing our mutual nerdy passions for Lego and Star Wars, which as John Keyes discovered, is even better when watched with the fresh eyes of younger family members!

The Lovely Lottie came to a decision about happiness, have to say I love the sentiment of this post,

“When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life.

When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I wrote down “happy.”

They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

the Sensational Sweary got annoyed about how some can judge the nature of friendships began on the internet,

And this has brought me to the point where I might have to stop myself piercing with an acid-tipped spear the fuckwits who claim that the Information Age, or the rise of Social Networking sites, or the evils of texting instead of popping by for tea, or whatever new-fangled gimmick is eroding the morality of our children, has lead to our being completely dissociated from society and from human contact. If it hadn’t been for this great evil internet behemoth not only would we not have been able to keep up with Best Man’s latest haircuts (Skype video calls feed the curtain-twitcher in all of us), but when he was injured we would have had no way of knowing about it. We wouldn’t have forged a tie between him lying in a hospital and all those strangers on Twitter who paused for the sake of empathy. His dad wouldn’t have been able to keep Best Man’s friends informed of how he was doing. We’d have been cut off from a friend we love, blind to everything but that which happens right in front of us. And if the Old Testament is right, and information was that which got Eve fecked out on her arse, well then I’m fucking happy to join her. I am human, after all.

and the Amazing Ann gave us some tips on SEO Optimization

In your goal to improve your search engine rankings, it’s very easy to overly focus on all these words and numbers — and lose sight that this is a good way to guide you to the information that your target market is looking for. So be organised in your research, use your site map, prioritise and don’t lose sight of the fact that these searches are being made by individuals that are interested in what you have to offer, so talk to them in their own terms

Being a bit of a closet Ad nut, a campaign that caught my attention was MTV.org’s Our Planet’s Losing Patience

And finally I leave you with this ….

Preeeeeetttttyyyy LED’s:)

For what its worth, blogging on the Mac was a bit slow and frustrating, but once i got used to the comands and keystrokes, it was ok and worked well. Only minus point was the inability to open more than 15 tabs in the one Firefox window, but maybe I ask too much of my computing systems.