Friday's weather forecast is looking pretty rough for most of the island of Ireland. Still, nice to see that our friends in the North seemingly won't face the full Status Red ravages of #StormEowyn. [No 🍊 political comments please.] #SpeirGorm #SpeirGhorm

Has the ear of the US president, knows about rocketry and satellites, prone to letting the arm off the leash.

i'm losing it

Too cold, eh? I reckon Greenland ❄️ is safe from MAGA after all.

#Everton are riddled with contradictions. Their team tonight includes Young, who is ancient, and Gueye, who has previously avoided matches where he would have had to wear an LGBT 🌈symbol. Plus Keane whose eagerness mustn't have impressed his new boss much on the training ground as he's on the bench.

This public engagement is part of #CorkCityCouncil involvement in the 🇪🇺 #INTERREG North-West Europe project GreenDense - working with Dordrecht, Bremen, Stuttgart, Brest, Brugge & Mechelen plus other partners to explore new and multi-dimensional approaches to greening city centres. #Cork #EU

What elevates this cartoon is that the red faction of a fractured US also truly believes it lives on the north shore.

Even in this 🥶 weather I can hear the🍦van with the 'Match of the Day' theme tune driving around Mahon. 🤔

One week into 2025 means I have now invoked the personal statute of limitations on "Happy New Year!" as a greeting or conversation opener. Applications reopen in 51 weeks.

By the end of the week I expect there to be 'Cork people have 123 different words for snow' pieces running in the media.

This NCT 🚘car test waiting room is one of the most anxious-looking places I've ever been as ashen-faced drivers await the worst of the diagnosis from the man with the clipboard 📋. They should have a roaming therapy cat for people to stroke.

And with that, me not having reciprocated with the follow-back her/their lovebomb campaign of attention-seeking desired, she/they 🤖 and her/their multiple ways of spelling her/their names had disappeared from my Bluesky account and seemingly my life. Aleex/Alexxx/Alexxia etc., I hardly knew ya/ye.

Some very variable attempts to pronounce the word "Ferencvaros" in Irish sports bulletins today.

imo a car horn should be able to make both a mean sound and a thumbs up sound

Drove back to Cork this afternoon and think we may have stumbled upon the source of all that #sneachta, off the motorway before Portlaoise. Presumably Met Eireann have issued the chimney stack in question with a license. #speirgorm

More dramatic #sneachta ❄️ empty shelves today. This time genuine and from Kells, Co Meath, where the locals have stockpiled personal care and, intriguingly, hair colour products. #SpeirGorm

❄️☃️Panic-buying leaves local shops all out of frankincense and myrrh on the eve of the Epihany. #sneachta #spéirgorm #spéirbán

There needs to be a collage of clips of the few seconds in each episode of Columbo where the villain who thought he'd gotten away with literal murder realises "this pesky bumbling scruffy🥼detective is actually onto and reeling me in!". The moment their faces go from confident smarm to sudden alarm.

Two feet of snow here today

Am delaying 2025 to date, International Year of the Sandwich.

Is not having your suitcase emerge on the 🛬Arrivals luggage carousel the polar opposite of the "unexpected item in baggage area" recorded warning at a supermarket self-checkout?

Am transferring through Schiphol Airport, in a snowless land of milk & honey & bread and wondering should I unpatriotically be importing Dutch arán 🍞agus báinne🥛 to avoid empty shop shelves back home. #sneachta #SpeirGorm

Img 1: A pic from this morning by Maha Hussaini in Gaza of an abandoned kids hopscotch board etched in the sand. Img 2. Oh Rascal Children of Gaza by Khaled Juma. Written during the Israeli bombardment of 2014, that killed 547 children. (it always breaks my heart)

Travelling home after long Christmas break in 🇫🇷 and marking fifth anniversary of catching first (light) dose of what was surely, in retrospect, COVID, straight out of Wuhan, before it was fashionable or widely discussed beyond epidemiologist circles.

My timeline is currently all "#darts" this and "#traitors" that and I am abroad and haven't a clue what's what anyway so am presuming everyone is talking about people in places like Dalkey and Clontarf who insist on speaking with artificial accents. #SpeirGorm 🇮🇪

for donation: baby shoes, never existed

Looking at this more biologically than geographically, the at-that-point mothers-to-be would presumably have been close to burstin' at their due date.

The French have an interesting take on public advisory information/signage. Active and first person ("I do/don't...") rather than passive ("...is/isn't allowed") or imperative ("Do/don't...!")

Restaurant: My 10 year-old (Belgian-born) daughter has seized on the post-meal coffee Speculoos biscuits, tasted one and, fuelled by the cinnamon, gone off in a Proustian moment of nostalgic reverie about Brussels. I have never been prouder to be European. Nor more pretentious about it.

On New Year's Eve, I posted this ⬇️ temporary timezones merger proposal, in jest. Two days later the excellent book I've since started reading informs me that this, but on a permanent basis, has actually been a subject of academic study. 🤷‍♂️

1 January 2025: *This* has yet to come to pass and my faith in Data analysis takes yet another hit.

Fair play to the Austrians (Viennese specifically) and their waltz music for collaring so much (largely hungover, slumped on the sofa) international attention on New Year's Day. How ever did they manage to swing that with the European Broadcasting Union?

@ronronzo.bsky.social has caused North Atlantic consternation, bamboozling humourless, self-centred (mainly) Americans & Brits unfamiliar with our 🇮🇪 ways. He will suffer the fall-out for the year to come. The baton must then be passed to another brave soul next NYE, creating an annual tradition.

i've played like 10 hours of 2025 and it's a huge letdown. graphics aren't improved at all, same boring fetch quests, and they still refuse to implement any of the QoL changes everyone's been asking for

🇺🇲!🇺🇲!🇺🇲! [2025]

Interested in the Main Character Syndrome of many social media users ? Or in the differences between the Irish take on humour and the apparent prevalence of dry-shitery in the US/UK ? See the replies to this tongue-in-cheek post about Buckfast. ⬇️

VINCENT [discussing Europe]: You know what they call a prosecco with crème de cassis de Dijon? JULES: They don't call it a prosecco🍾 with crème de cassis de Dijon? V: No, man! They got the metric system there. J: What do they call it? V: They call it...a Royale with Kir J (repeats): Royale with Kir

Damn! Forgot to take advantage of the long vowel sound in the final digit of the new year to sing "Tonight we're gonna party like it's twenty twenty FIVE!"

I was today days old when I suddenly realised that the rivals for the 1980 US Presidential Election, Ronald & Jimmy (RIP) shared their surnames (with one small variation) with the key protagonists of The Sweeney, Jack & George. Presumably these were the only two surnames available in the late 1970s.

Greetings from the future (Marseille, 2025) where, disappointingly, the hoverboards as promised in Back to the Future are STILL not a feature of daily life. Despite that, may any problems you are facing into the New Year last no longer than your resolutions to deal with them were ever going to.

Idea: 🌏's timezones to be merged, just for New Year's Eve, to synchronise everyone's midnight as a simultaneous shared moment. They'd alternate annually with just one staying on schedule as the rest lose/gain a few hours then reset back to normal. Yes it'd Y2K things, for real, but worth doing once.

Nobody had genteel indoor bowls down as the sport to bite the bullet in banning 🇮🇱competitors while the Gaza genocide continues. The decision seems to have been taken to avoid further pro-🇵🇸 demos interrupting the tournament rather than as a statement of political principle but it's at least a start.

Weather-wise, this decision seems to have erred very very far on the side of caution. As if St Patrick's Day in Dublin were to get cancelled (for anything other than a pandemic or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease).

Following hot on the heels of the widely reported (apparent) Guinness shortage in the UK ahead of Christmas, you have to admire this next level work by the marketing people at James' Gate.

Played Cluedo for the first time in a generation over Christmas. Good to catch up with that cast of characters who've gone through some changes since last I groundlessly accused each in turn of using a specific makeshift weapon to off someone somewhere in a posh country mansion. Here's an update.>>>

One of the very first political details I realised as a child was that the (perhaps by then former) President of America (as he was called) was a peanut farmer of all things. #RIPJimmy

Still got a day or so.

Jimmy Carter was right about climate change. He was right about the Mideast conflict and apartheid in Israel and South Africa and the ongoing plagues of poverty and racism. It was he not Reagan who freed our hostages in Iran. A true man of God, he died beloved, which not many presidents do or will.

The late Jimmy Carter. Some man for one man. And, in living to the ripe old age of 100, probably not a bad advert for nuclear power.

Family ✈️ from Dublin cancelled (after check-in) earlier. Change of aircraft = a few sacrificial lambs? Air France rebooked us with a less than ideal Plan B tomorrow (+connection Monday🙄). Bad enough but Google Wallet (where I save tickets) keeps sending fictitious boarding passes as if all's well. 🤔