Photo Books - Pure Genius

I must preface today's missive with a disclaimer. The following comments and opinions regarding a certain commercial company are entirely my own and have not been solicited or paid for by said company. Having stated that, if Blurb.com feels obliged to send me a small-yet-exquisite gift in recompense for my testimonial, well, who am I to argue?

What's the first thing you do when you arrive home after a wonderful holiday? After doing the unpacking, chucking your dirty undies in the washing machine and recovering from jetlag and Montezuma's Revenge? Okay, what's the fifth thing you do? You want to see your photos, don't you? All those happy memories sitting in your camera just waiting to remind you of the sunburn, the IHOP breakfasts, the extra four inches that you've added to your waistline after those IHOP breakfasts.

In the olden days you had to take your 35mm film to Boots to be developed so you had to wait and hope that the person doing the developing wasn't having a bad hair day, the result being that you'd be handed an envelope containing 36 black rectangular pieces of paper.

The beauty of digital photgraphy is that you already know that your snaps are half decent because you've seen them on the little screen on your camera. So you download them to your PC as soon as you set foot inside your home. You ooh and aah over them for a few minutes as they scroll past your eyes in slideshow mode. Then what? They sit in a folder, unloved and forgotten for all eternity. Sure, you can print them out but after the first couple of times you do this you realise that you've just gone through three or four print cartridges at twenty quid a pop so you tell yourself that you'll do it later. And as we all know, manana never comes.

Even if you do print them, what happens then? They end up in an album or just stuffed into a box, never to see the light of day, along with all the old black ones that you got developed at Boots.

Well, I'm happy to inform you that there is now an answer to this problem. I'm currently...er...'resting' as the acting profession has it and I recently decided to use my spare time to do something about all of the boxes of photos that the Brunette and I have amassed during our seventeen year marriage. That's a shedload of photos.

My first thought was to go online to see if any companies were offering cheap bulk orders of photo albums. I'm not a great lover of albums as I get a bit fed up with turning them around every time the photos change from portrait to landscape, but it seemed to be the most cost-effective solution. So I googled 'cheap bulk photo albums', only to see the words, 'photo book', pop up everywhere. "What can this mean?" I thought to myself. I clicked on a link to a company called Blurb.com (there are many others) and I was immediately intrigued.

There has recently been a revolution in the publishing world thanks to the advent of 'print on demand' (POD), which is a form of self-publishing (also known as vanity publishing). Years ago, if you wanted to get your novel, cookbook, autobiography or non-fiction history of Chipping Sodbury into print but you couldn't get an established publisher to do it due to it being too esoteric, too complex or just plain rubbish, you had to pay for it to be published yourself. This was an extremely expensive business, often running into thousands of pounds as most publishers wouldn't consider printing less than a few hundred copies. You would then be left with a garage full of rotting tomes that you couldn't even give away. Now, with POD, you can order a single copy (or a couple of thousand if you are mad) of your meisterwork for not much more than you'd pay for Dan Brown's latest epic in a bookshop (I wouldn't pay anything for it but you get my point).

How does this work for photo books? To cut a long story short(ish), you download a bit of software called 'booksmart' from the Blurb site and upload to it whichever photos you choose. You then click and drag your photos onto Blurb's page templates, of which there are many. For example, you can opt to cover a whole page with one large photo or you can have twelve small photos on a page, with many variations in between, including montages. And it doesn't matter if your photos are portrait or landscape.

You have a choice of three covers - softcover, hardcover with a separate dustjacket or printed hardcover. There are also several book sizes and formats to choose from (e.g. 7x7 ins, 10x8 ins, 12x12 ins, portrait or landscape) and a huge range of coloured backgrounds and themes. As if that weren't enough you can also add text, from short captions to full pages.

My first Blurb photo book was a gift for a couple of close friends of ours (photo books make fantastic presents). It was 70 pages containing 220 snaps of weekends away and parties that we'd been to with them spanning a couple of decades. I chose a black background on premium paper with a dustjacketed hardcover. All for the princely sum of 35 Euro delivered to our door within three weeks, all the way from America. Does this sound a bit pricey? Well, I thought so until I did some quick calculations. The price of developing 220 photos would be at least 20 Euro and a half decent photo album would set you back at least another 15 Euro. Same price. (You can, of course, spend less if you go for a softcover with fewer pages.) But what you end up with is so much more than a mere photo album. It's a beautiful, high quality coffee table book that is much more interesting to look at as each page is different.

It's not just for digital photos either. I've also scanned a load of hard copy photos onto my PC and uploaded them onto Blurb. The only downside with this is that the resolution isn't as high as with digital so you can't usually display them as full page photos. If you try to do this a little yellow triangle appears to inform you that the resolution is insufficient so you just reduce the size until the triangle disappears - very clever. However, I plan to overcome this problem by purchasing a negative scanner. Scanning the photo negative apparently gives a much higher resolution.

I've also put together a couple of holiday photo books. Blurb is great for this as you can scan pieces of ephemera as well as photos, e.g. train and show tickets, receipts, menus, adverts, you name it.

Enough already! As you will have guessed by now, I am becoming quite evangelical about photo books. And the absolute bestest thing about them? Once you have a bookcase full of them you can clear out all those boxes of photos from the spare room and put them in the attic.

The best invention since the DVD.

Say cheese,
oldblodger

What is This Thing Called 'Cash'?

Okay, we're back from Busch Gardens, safe and well. There are a number of new rides in the Gardens since our last visit, some of which make the older rides such as 'Scorpion'and 'Muntu' look positively tame.

One particularly evil addition is a torture-fest called 'SheiKra', a 'floorless roller coaster' that takes you up a 47 degree incline to a height of 200 feet. Once at the top you are dangled over a vertical drop for a few seconds before you plunge straight down into an 'Immelmann Loop' (don't ask me - if you want to know more check it out on Wikipedia). I was tempted to give it a try for all of a nanosecond before bottling it. It was the dangling bit that put me off. And the screaming of those onboard.

The Brunette had an excuse for avoiding the more robust rides in that she has recently been having treatment for a bad neck. I have no such excuse other than abject cowardice but I was happy to jump on her bandwagon as a display of sympathy. If she couldn't enjoy the significant g-forces involved in plummeting hundreds of feet into the bowels of hell then neither would I. What a hero!

Instead, she decided that she liked the look of a small, kiddie-friendly coaster called 'Cheetah Chase'. The short queue for the ride mostly consisted of pre-teens so I really didn't have a justifiable excuse this time, even though I didn't like the look of it and I'd had previous experience of supposedly lightweight rides that weren't.

Sure enough, what looked from ground level like a sedate trundle around a meccano set in a glorified Noddy car turned into a Formula One rip-snorting hell-ride that we both spent the majority of with our eyes closed. I realised afterwards that the problem with it was that there was no camber to the track. With the mega-rides the journey is usually fairly smooth (with the singular exception of Disney's Space Mountain, a once-in-a-lifetime nightmare) as the track is curved to take account of the bends.

The Cheetah Chase, however, is a series of hairpin bends with the odd up and down bit in between. You are thrown around these bends at speed and at no time does it feel as though you are in any danger of actually staying inside the car, centrifugal force being what it is. It was brilliant.

We also went on a few gentler attractions - the Stanley Falls, the Skyride cable car, Rhino Rally - but the best of all was the Congo River Rapids. We sat in a big yellow round thing with five other adults and three or four kids. The adults all wore plastic capes which we thought was cheating a bit. The big yellow round thing set off on its journey around a narrow course of 'rapids', banging into things and being spun around as it went. The spinning resulted in everyone having a turn at getting a bit damp. Except us. Every time we passed a water cannon (gleefully operated by bystanders on the bank) we'd catch the full jet.

Every time the big yellow round thing passed beneath a waterfall we'd be in the perfect position for it to pour itself over us and every time we hit one of the more turbulent rapids it would be our arses that would be sat in the spot where the water flooded in. At the end of the ride we couldn't have been wetter if we'd actually swum the rapids. It was the biggest laugh of the holiday.

Alas, all good things etc. We left Busch Gardens about an hour before closing time to beat the rush. We drove out of the car park and promptly got lost. For an attraction as big and well-known as this the road signs are remarkably small. We followed a sign for the I-4 back to Orlando. It was the only such sign we would see for the next twenty minutes. It was by sheer luck that we eventually found the I-4 and I can't believe that there isn't a much more direct route. Still, we made it so I shouldn't complain too much.

As we approached Orlando there was a loud ping and a light flashed on the dashboard. We were nearly out of gas (yes, I know it's really called petrol but when in Rome...). I convinced the Brunette that we had enough to get us home but as the indicator dropped onto the red line I realised that I was being a little optimistic. We pulled off the Interstate and looked for a gas station.

By now it was dark. I don't just mean that the sun had gone down, I mean that the road we were now driving along was devoid of light of any kind. No house lights, no street lights, and certainly no gas stations lit up like Christmas Trees. We finally reached a toll booth where I asked the lady where the nearest gas station was. She said that there was one a couple of miles ahead. True to her word, we pulled in to the station two miles later with the gas indicator now below the red line. Imagine the relief. Now imagine how long the relief lasted.

I looked at the pump to see how the payment system worked as each gas station in America seems to have a different way of doing things. This one appeared to have some sort of membership thing going on. There was a sign on the pump saying that non-members couldn't pay with cash. Huh!!! This couldn't be correct, could it?

"Can I help you, sir?"

A guy in a security uniform appeared out of nowhere behind me.

"Yes please. This sign says that I can't pay with cash, is that right?"

"That's correct, sir."

"Why is that?"

"Well, it says so right there on the pump, sir."

"Yes, I can see that but that's more of a statement than a reason, isn't it?"

"Well, it's because you're not a member of our club and we don't know who you are. It's to prevent you filling your car with gas and driving off without paying."

"But can't I pay you with cash before I fill up?"

"No sir. But you can pay with a credit card, though that will cost you an extra 12 cents per gallon."

"But we don't have cards and we're nearly out of gas (Regular readers will know our credit card situation via posts passim).

"Well, there's another gas station about a mile up the road. Maybe they'll be able to help you out, sir."

Suffice it to say that we made it to the next station on fumes. Fortunately it was an ordinary gas station rather than one that we needed to be freemasons to use.

What's that about? Since when did it become impossible to pay for something with cash? This country is a never ending source of wonder, sometimes in a bad way.

Ah well, back to the pool.

Laters,
oldblodger

Florida

The Brunette and I are currently enjoying a little 'downtime' in Florida, hence the gap in my posts. In a repeat of our honeymoon, over 17 years ago now, we decided to re-visit the delights of Orlando. Nine days of lazing about by the pool interspersed with adventure drives into the hinterland. We call them adventure drives as whenever we leave the confines of our hotel we immediately get lost.

This isn't just a Florida thing, it applies anywhere in the States that we visit. It usually starts as soon as we pick up the hire car at the airport. We've been to California three times together and each time we've driven away from Los Angeles airport we've either taken the wrong turn or missed the right one, resulting in our arrival at our destination at least two hours later than planned, including one memorable drive through downtown L.A. at the height of rush hour.

Same thing this time. Our flight arrived on time at Orlando International, following which we were subjected to a one hour queue to get through immigration (sooo much fun), a further half hour queue for the car hire desk and a final hour of driving up and down and in and out of roads in search of the mythical SR528 Beach Line Expressway which would lead us to International Drive and our hotel - a journey that should have taken no longer than twenty minutes. Just what you need after a nine hour flight.

This is our third visit to Florida. During our inaugural honeymoon visit we rarely strayed from Orlando, other than trips to Busch Gardens in the west and Cocoa Beach/Kennedy Space Centre in the east. We did the whole Disney/Seaworld/Wet & Wild thing then and it was great fun, but exhausting.

On our second visit a couple of years later we flew to Miami, hired a car and drove across the everglades, up the west coast via Naples and Sarasota to St. Petersburg, across to the east coast via Orlando and back down to Miami via West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton etc. A fantastic drive but, again, pretty tiring.

On this trip we decided to stick to short adventure drives and to give the theme parks a miss (did I mention that we're getting older?) though we are going back to the 'awesome' Busch Gardens tomorrow (we're not that old). We probably won't get there, of course, so stay tuned for my next installment - "oldblodger & the Brunette say hi to Savannah".

Yours, lost in translation,

oldblodger

The Bald Truth

I've always had a good head of hair. In my late teens my golden mane, shimmering in the constant sunshine of the summer of '76 thanks to a regular dousing with Timotei shampoo, sashayed its way down my back to well below my shoulder blades.

Although I've since adopted a shorter and more employment-friendly cut I've always assumed that I'd keep my lush bonce-carpet well into my dotage like my father did in his. By his late seventies my dad had lost a little off the forehead but the rest was thick, silver and distinguished, like that of an American soap-opera patriarch. I was looking forward to a similar image as I approached the same age, which is still over twenty years away.

Yesterday, following a quick trim at my usual hairdressing establishment, Fabian was waving a mirror around to show me the fabulous scissor work he'd undertaken at the back of my head when I noticed a gleam of pink. I asked him to do it again. It was true! The hair at my crown has thinned so much that I could see scalp through it. I was already aware that more and more of my forehead and temples have become visible over the last couple of years but I wasn't expecting this.

To add insult to injury Fabian insisted on trimming my ear, nose and eyebrow hairs as well, all of which are growing into luxuriant grey tresses at a speed to match the deforestation up top.

So, it looks as though I'm soon to be faced with the eternal dilemma of the prematurely glabrous - do I go for a rug, a transplant, a Ralph Coates comb-over or a buzz-cut?

I'll keep you informed...

All the best,
oldblodger

Blinded by the Light

I don't know if this is a universal problem or whether it's peculiar to Ireland, but lately I've noticed a marked increase in the number of drivers who haven't got the faintest idea how to use their car headlights. I suppose I'm noticing it more now as the clocks recently went back and it therefore gets dark earlier.

The issue doesn't arise so much when I'm driving in town as most drivers keep their headlights dipped. However, I spend a fair amount of time travelling between Galway City and County Leitrim - two and a half hours of driving along unlit country roads - and the number of times that I get blinded is astonishing.

It's not so much the cars coming towards me that are the problem. Drivers who leave their beams on full are easily reminded to dip them with a quick blast of my own full beams. It's the drivers behind me that wind me up. They seem to think that the road will somehow magically disappear unless they keep their full beams on until they are only a couple of feet away from me. How can this be? They must get the same treatment from cars behind them so why don't they learn to dip as soon as they see the tail-lights of another car?

Whilst I'm on the subject of motoring habits, what is it about country folk that makes them need to drive up the middle of the road all the time? It's as though they're driving Scalextric cars and they have to keep to the white line in case they lose power. I've lost count of the times I've nearly been creamed by a 4x4 that's left it to the last second to pull over to its own lane.

I was actally left speechless the other day. The Brunette and I were happily driving through the countryside when a car came around a bend ahead of us on our side of the road. It wasn't just straddling the white line, it was completely, totally and utterly on our side. If we'd arrived at the bend ten seconds earlier it would have been a head-on. It turned out that the driver was a farmer who wanted to get into the field to the left of us. Why couldn't he have waited to see if anything was coming towards him before he came around the bend?

The Government spends inordinate amounts of time and money on initiatives aimed at criminalising drivers who've eaten one-too-many chocolate liqueurs. Perhaps they could direct some of their efforts at teaching people how to drive when they're sober. Just a thought.

Bottoms up,

oldblodger

Computer Thrones

I hate to mention the 'R' word but somewhere in the next couple of sentences I'm going to anyway. I don't feel that bad about it as I have a business idea that might help someone out there to climb out of the slough of despondency in which they might find themselves as a result of the Recession (there it is).

Like many of you I spend too much time sitting in front of my computer typing nonsense, just to fill my day. Until recently I did this whilst sitting on my cheap up-and-down swivel office chair that I'd bought in a do-it-yourself hypermarket. That chair is now no longer with us. The first warning sign that something was amiss came when the back-rest fell off. A few weeks later the swivel movement froze, rapidly followed by the up-and-down mechanism jamming. I realised that the chair had completely given up the ghost when the central spindle listed to one side and I found myself on the floor (I'm putting this down to the cheapness of the product rather than any weight issues that I may have).

Desperate times call for desperate measures so rather than rushing out to buy a similar piece of tat I moved one of our carver chairs from the dining table to the computer desk (when I say 'carver' I mean a dining chair with arms).

I fully intended to buy a new, dedicated office chair when I next visited a suitable emporium but now that I've used the carver for a while I find that I like it, quite a lot. True, it doesn't do much in the way of swivelling and it doesn't possess any hydraulic lifting doo-dahs but thinking back to my previous chair I seldom used those functions anyway. My computer desk is narrow so I rarely have to swivel to reach anything and once the chair was set at the required height I never changed it.

The reason I like the carver so much is that it feels like a throne. It's a big, solid, monolithic no-nonsense lump of wood. It has arm-rests for me to rest my arms on. It has a generous padded leather seat that I can swivel and slide about on if the fancy takes me and it has a high back that supports me when I recline to ponder stuff. And because it feels like a throne it does wonders for my self-esteem.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, why settle for something that feels like a throne? Why not use an actual throne? Imagine the sense of self-worth that would envelope you every time you sat down on the throne in the photo.

So, for any budding entrepreneurs out there who are looking for a sure-fire, high-end, multi-million-selling product, why not try marketing the computer throne? I'd do it myself but I'm just too damned comfortable to get off my arse.

See ya,

oldblodger

It's Prog Jim, Just As We Know It

My name is Old Blodger and I'm a Prog-aholic.

Yes folks, we've reached a time when it's not only safe to declare a love of progressive rock music, it's actually cool. I'm old enough to have lived through Prog's first incarnation. My introduction to 'proper' gigs (I'll gloss over seeing Cliff & the Shadows in panto at the London Palladium at the age of nine) was Emerson, Lake & Palmer in Cardiff's Capitol theatre circa 1972. It had the lot - Emerson's stab-the-Hammond-with-knives trick, Lake's white suit with the tulip lapels, Palmer's three hour drum solo and Tarkus the half tank/half armadillo. Magic. It kicked off a lifelong love affair with all things ending with '-rock', including Hard, Heavy, Kraut, Folk, Jazz, Funk, Symphonic, etc.

I'm tempted to list the gigs that I subsequently attended but it's easier to say that the one major seventies band that I never saw live was Led Zeppelin. I could've, I just didn't want to.

Then, in 1977 my musical world fell apart as Punk reared its ugly little bonce and 'virtuosity' became a dirty word. Prog-rock died overnight, as did nipple-length hair and my wardobe of loons, tank tops and platform boots. Keith Emerson went from sell-out megastadium tours, replete with symphony orchestra backing, to playing his local pub in Sussex.

After a few intense years Punk, too, pretty much died out as a major force and rock gradually regained its foothold during the eighties. It has continued to morph into innumerable sub-genres ever since - Indie, Grunge, Hair Metal, Emo, Sleaze, Death Metal - but, until very recently, Prog remained persona-non-grata, the love that dare not speak its name.

In 1998 a mini media revolution took place when a new magazine called Classic Rock (CR) hit the racks. It started life as very much a niche market product, appealing to a select group of rock's cognoscenti. It covered a wide range of bands and genres from rock's genesis (see what I did there) in the sixties, through the glory days of the seventies and on to the contemporary cutting edge. Looking back, it was a bit chicken and egg. Did CR help create the rebirth of 'classic' rock or was it a reaction to what was already happening? Either way, CR is now one of the UK's best selling music mags, so much so that a few months ago it had the audacity and balls to publish an offshoot mag called 'Classic Rock Presents Prog'. For this to occur there obviously needs to exist a sizeable readership willing to fork out nearly eight quid per issue (try living in Ireland where this sum is miraculously transformed into over eleven euro!!!).

Both CR and its Prog sister are full of articles about, interviews with, and reviews of, hip young bands who've embraced their dads' record collections and are now carrying the torch into the 21st century and beyond. Which is marvellous. I love Muse, Bigelf, The Mars Volta et al but the best thing for me is seeing all the old guys crawling out from under their...er...rocks.

This month's CR's list of upcoming tours includes such luminaries as Jack Bruce, Roger Chapman, Alice Cooper, Curved Air, Deep Purple, Dio, Fleetwood Mac, Focus, Wishbone Ash, Gong with Steve Hillage, Steve Hackett, Hawkwind, Barclay James Harvest, Nazareth, Paul Rodgers, Uriah Heep and ZZ Top. In addition, Yes are playing Dublin at the end of November, Rick Wakeman recently played 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII' in its entirety at Hampton Court and Emerson, Lake and Palmer are all out there gigging, though not with each other. Amazing. It's as though the last thirty five years didn't happen.

And these tours aren't like those packages where a line-up of beat bands from the sixties, consisting of one original member and three twenty year olds, play their greatest hits in Butlins holiday camps. No, these bands may have lost a member or two to death or 'musical differences' along the way but they are largely intact. Neither are they resting on their laurels, the majority of them having recently released brand new material.

Of course, all things must pass, human nature being what it is, and a new derivative of Punk will eventually come along to once again cleanse the world of pompous circumstance, but for now I'm going to enjoy every last guitar twiddle, mellotron flourish, crumhorn toot and interminable drum solo.

Keep the Sabbath dream alive,
oldblodger

P.S. If you want to find out more about Prog (and who doesn't?) there's a myriad of websites dedicated to the genre. A great place to start is at the excellent www.progarchives.com

The Sky is Falling

At the risk of being branded a conspiracy theorist, I have a question. How many people actually have swine flu?

The medical bods in the governments of both Ireland and the U.K. are currently releasing, via various media outlets, data regarding the number of citizens struck down - thousands of new cases every day apparently.

Much moolah is being spent on setting up vaccination centres and even more dosh is being lost through uncertificated absenteeism. Does anyone out there in the real world actually know anyone who has contracted the bug? I don't mean someone who has taken time off work because they're feeling a bit icky as I'm sure that there are many, many people who've done so. I mean someone who genuinely has the lurgy in question. I don't personally know anyone in this situation, not even a friend of a friend of a friend.

I don't doubt that people have died from swine flu, underlying illnesses notwithstanding, but in the great scheme of things the numbers are thankfully low, fewer than are carried off by regular flu annually by all accounts.

I could be wrong - it's not unprecedented, ask the Brunette - but I just don't believe that the epidemic, or pandemic or whatever it's supposed to be, is real. It's not as if we haven't heard this before - whatever happened to bird flu? Every few months the powers-that-be come up with a new way to scare the populace, one that eventually fades away just in time to be replaced by the next potentially catastrophic...er...catastrophe.

The late, great Michael Crichton (yes, the author of Jurassic Park - don't laugh) wrote a novel called 'State of Fear', published in 2004. It's a typically Crichton-esque romp in which the hero has to save the world whilst being chased around by men with murderous intent, pulp fiction of the kind that you either love or hate. I loved it in a 'couple of days by the pool' way, but the really thought-provoking sections of the book are the appendices at the back.

In them Crichton puts forward the idea that there are a number of sectors in the developed world - government, media, law - with a vested interest in ensuring that the Great Unwashed are constantly on their guard against any amount of 'bad things' that threaten to wipe out their cosy lifestyles or, indeed, their very lives. There hasn't been a major conflict in the west since 1945, most smaller scale wars taking place far away from home in such exotic locations as Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Cold War, with it's ever-present threat of nuclear meltdown, is over so what is going to occupy the minds of the plebs and allow the powers-that-be to retain and increase their wealth and influence whilst no-one's looking?

Well, now we have a paedophile outside every school, a new virus attached to every handshake, a terrorist on every street corner, a clogged artery in each mouthful of food and we're all going to drown, fry or freeze sometime next week (don't get me started on global warming).

The truth, as Crichton pointed out, is that there has never been a time in human history when so many of us in the first world have the expectation of living long, healthy and productive lives as right now. Of course there are wars and diseases and droughts and earthquakes but you have to be in the wrong part of town to be affected by these, and the majority of us in the developed world simply aren't.

The thing that worries me is that one day something seriously nasty is going to appear on the horizon and we'll all be so threat-weary that we'll ignore it. Hopefully I'll be long gone before that happens.

I'll close on that happy thought - I've got to go because I can feel a sniffle coming on...

Toodle-pip,
oldblodger

A Good Walk Spoiled

Evenin' all.

Interesting story in today's Irish media. The Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by the Equality Authority, ruling that Portmarnock Golf Club in north Dublin was okay to ban women from joining as full members as it is fundamentally a 'gentlemen's club where golf is played'.

Now, I don't have any strong opinions either way on this one. I don't really have a problem with any group in society wanting to to form a club that is exclusively for their own use (with the proviso that they don't cause harm to anyone else, and I wouldn't put a bunch of blokes knocking little white balls around with sticks in that category). At the same time I can understand why, in this case, some women might feel aggrieved that their rights are being challenged.

Ordinarily I wouldn't care enough about golf for this issue to get my dander up. However, it struck me as I was reading about it that there is a much simpler, and cheaper, way of resolving this situation than going through the courts.

If the 'gentlemen' who run the club are so insistent that the fairer sex shouldn't sully their membership list then the latter should take them at their word and boycott the place. Completely.

I imagine that a plethora of women works directly and indirectly on behalf of the club. The club's website (www.portmarnockgolfclub.ie - take a look at their dress code if you fancy a laugh) states that they have a bar and a dining room and I would hazard a guess that some of the staff who service these areas are women. The website also states that 'caddies can be requested' and maybe some of these are also female, as perhaps are some of the staff who work in administration, reception, bookings etc. And what about external companies who undertake work for the club, for example in advertising, fund raising, catering or cleaning?

Also, I believe that functions are regularly held in the club and presumably the members sometimes attend these with their partners and other female relatives and friends. Apparently, the wives and daughters of members are 'allowed' to play the course on Sundays (thanks, gents, that's very big of you).

I suggest that each and every woman who has anything to do with the club withdraws their services and general kinship immediately. I'd take a friendly bet that a golf club entirely devoid of the input of 'the little ladies' would introduce full female membership in very short order. But if the boys still want to play with themselves then let them. If all else fails the ladies could join one of the 400 other golf clubs in Ireland that operate a mixed gender membership.

To paraphrase Groucho Marks, why would you want to join a club that has men as members?

Ciao,

oldblodger

Money for Nothing

Nostalgia – a country often visited, seldom bettered.

It’s nice to reminisce, isn’t it? Thirty years ago I lived in London and I still fondly recall being told by my bank that it would take up to five working days for my salary cheque to clear. Imagine. It seems so quaint now, doesn’t it? But this was a time of handwritten ledgers, quills and powdered wigs – no high speed broadband online transactions in those pre-computer days, so you had to make allowances.

Thank God for the 21st century, says you. Ha! I now live in Ireland. Can anyone please tell me why, in the name of all that’s holy, it recently took eight days – I’ll repeat that for the hard of reading – EIGHT DAYS for one Irish bank to transfer a couple of hundred yo yos from my account to another of my accounts with a different Irish bank? It was an online transaction that took me all of a minute to perform and yet my money was lost somewhere in the ether for over a week. I can picture the scenario:-

Tuesday – I click the send button on my computer to start the transfer process. A message zings across the airwaves at hyperspeed, finally arriving at the Galway branch of Bank One three days later, having stopped off for a chat and a cappuccino in sundry branches across the realm – Ranelagh, Carlow, Enniskillen and Limerick maybe.

Friday – Mr. Manager in Galway, having received my request, instructs an underling that Mr. Oldblodger requires a sum of money to be sent forthwith to a branch of another bank in County Leitrim. Underling rushes down to the vault to withdraw my two hundred groats. He saddles up his company vehicle, a.k.a. ‘Nellie the pony’, hops into the stirrups and rides like the wind (a very light breeze) up the N17.

Monday – Underling arrives in County Leitrim, having three times over-nighted in fields along the way, his first sleepover being just outside Dunmore, a rather drab little town in County Galway. [I shouldn’t say that really as I’ve never spent any time in Dunmore, merely driven through it on many occasions. It’s unfair to criticise a town based on impressions received through a windscreen at thirty miles an hour, but what the heck! It looks drab to me. I always get the urge to stop the car at the sign at the entrance to the town and paint the word “Could’ve” in front of the word “Dunmore”.]

Anyway, I digress. Underling has two further sleepovers on his marathon journey – one at Castlerea, another at Frenchpark – where he spends a little time researching his family’s genealogy whilst the pony gorges on lush green grass. He finally trots up to Bank Two in Ballinamore where he hands over the moneybag to Mrs. Manager, who puts it into the pocket of her pinafore and immediately forgets its very existence.

Wednesday afternoon – Mrs. Manager, searching her person for a Werther’s Original, discovers a moneybag in the pocket of her pinafore. It contains a note from Mr. Manager in Bank One stating that the money herein belongs to Mr. Oldblodger and that it should be placed in his Bank Two account without delay, lest he should find himself fundless and starving. Mrs. Manager is startled into action and she instructs one of her underlings, following a lovely long chat about her daughter’s success at the local Irish Dancing competition on the weekend, to enter the details of Mr. Oldblodger’s money transfer into the shiny plastic flashing box thing on the counter.

Wednesday evening – Mr. Oldblodger attempts, for the forty seventh time since starting the process, to withdraw some cash from a hole-in-the-wall so that he can buy some food and thereafter recover from malnutrition. Lo and behold, two twenties emerge from the cash machine and all is well.

Come on people! Transferring money electronically in this day and age should be instantaneous. It's not as if any cash actually changes hands, just zeroes and ones. Why do I have the uneasy feeling that banks are somehow profiting from these ridiculous transfer delays?

Cheerio,
oldblodger

Credit Cards - Who Needs 'em? (Everyone Apparently!)

Hi, and welcome to all of my loyal readers (of whom there will be a limited number, as this is my very first attempt at one of these blog thingies).

I'm intending to use this space for a number of purposes, as the fancy takes me - venting my spleen, sharing my thoughts, attracting your responses or merely arsing about. I may stick a few photos and videos up here from time to time too.

Anyway, enough prevarication, let's get into it. My inaugural comment on the state of the world involves credit cards and their usefulness, or otherwise, in a time of recession.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, the Brunette (a.k.a. She Who Must Be Adored) and I had our own business. The whereabouts, ins and outs and ups and downs aren’t relevant to this particular story (rest assured, they will crop up in future posts), suffice it to say that the business is now defunct.

During its all too brief existence we managed to max out three credit cards to the tune of tumpty-thousand euro. Since closing down our financial black hole we’ve succeeded in converting the credit into a fixed-term loan and hacking the cards into very, very small pieces. If you've never done this you'll find it hard to imagine the inordinately huge amount of satisfaction to be gleaned from "sticking it to The Man".

However, if you intend to lead a life that can be in any way described as normal, several months later you’ll realise that The Man is not that easily shaken off. For instance, try ordering or booking something - a DVD, a flight, a couple of pounds of Scottish salmon - on the Interweb without a credit card.

We are currently trying to pay for accommodation for a forthcoming overseas trip using a debit card. Not all that difficult you might think. Wrong. Error messages abound and it seems that the money that we haven't actually paid to anyone is not ours anymore, until it is 'repaid' back to our account several days later. No, we don't understand this either.

So, the moral of this tale is that someone, somewhere - the ubiquitous "they" - wants us to keep on using our credit cards in spite of the fact that the overuse of credit got us into this mess in the first place (it's not called the 'Credit Crunch' for nothing).

t.t.f.n.,
oldblodger