I’m Danny Ryan, you may remember me from such Front Square events as…
the Holi festival of colour throwing. Well Danny is back in Front Square, back to normal colour and no longer throwing coloured paint at revelers. Instead he’s presenting this rather with this rather impressive documentary about his PhD research on solar storms. It’s nicely put together, and Danny really does have The-Voice-Of-Authority. You can imagine that if the earth is thrown into some type of cataclysmic event due to a solar storm, that a prerecorded message in Danny’s voice that will issue forth and tell us how to survive it.
Good work, Danny.
Dublin Head of the River 2012
This beauty is the Diana Cooke Cup. It was presented to the best overall club at the 68th annual Dublin Head of the River Boat Race, held earlier today. That means that it shall be spending the next year decorating the Trinity Boat House. Our crews did well today, claiming the pennants in the following events:
Men’s Intermediate VIII – Dublin University Boat Club
Men’s Novice VIII – Dublin University Boat Club
Ladies’ Intermediate VIII – Dublin University Ladies’s Boat Club
Commiserations to the Ladies’ Novices, who missed out on the pennant by 3 seconds to Shannon Boat Club. But for that we’d have had the grand slam. Still and all, a good day on the river.
Well rowed Trinity!
A fashionable lot
Oh look! There’s the Captain and that-guy-from-UCD standing throwing poses in the boathouse, in some very fashionable attire (entirely non-suitable for rowing of course).
Bizarrely, the Irish Times has decided stage a fashion shoot in the Trinity Boathouse, which it has used it as a backdrop for an article about the Gannon Cup, which will take place on Monday. However, as rowing is inherently boring to people who do not row, it has decided to turn it into a human interest story about Mary McAleese’s daughter finding love. Ah sure, whatever floats your boat.
Rainbow Week II: Update
AJ has just put up some super photos of the colour explosion earlier. These were taken as soon as I came out of the ring. Danny appears to have been hit by the full whack of the rainbow, whereas I am red and blue in the front and then orange, yellow and green on the back.
N.B. My clothes have come out of the wash. The trousers came out fine thank God, but it appears that the tshirt was not so lucky.
Rainbow Week II
Thank you to Danny Ryan for dragging me into the rainbow powder throwing arena at lunchtime today. It was a moment of pure, infectious joy. I’m not sure what it was all about, but it appeared to be organized by the TCD Indian Society and it may or may not have had a rainbow week connection. I just know that I’m covered from head to foot in coloured powder and I’m hoping to God that is washes out.
I think most of the blue powder is attributable to Danny. He had a bag of it and a steady aim. My shower is going to producing blue rinse for the next week.
Toilet Humour
It is hoped that the graffiti that one finds on the walls of toilets on university campuses would be somewhat of a higher calibre than that found on the walls of a less lettered bog. Unfortunately, often times this seems to not be the case. So far, any graffiti found in the Arts Building seems to be most uninspired and lacking in any meaningful intellectual engagement. Maybe this speaks less about the university and more about the type of people who write on the walls of toilet cubicles…
Until now.
Ian found this on the toilets of the library yesterday and felt some moved by it (sorry!) that he was compelled to tell me about it. In many ways, this sentence catches the zeitgeist of Trinity College Dublin.
I TOOK THE SOUP AND NOW I’M HERE SURROUNDED BY YANKS, BRITS AND QUEERS.
For a definition of taking the soup, look here.
Prayers at exam time
This is the transcript of a text message conversation earlier:
Me: Exams start in forty minutes.
Frank: We’re all on our knees, praying like hures. You’ll do great.
Three hours later…
Me: Went well thank God.
Frank: Great, can we get up off our knees now?
Schol
The realization that you’re not as smart as you’d like other people to think you are.
Welcome to Trinity; some things you should know.
We’re in Week Eight by now, which means that the Freshers have been here for two months, and everyone else has been here for at least a year and two months, so buy now everybody should have copped on to some of the rules. However, some people appear to be struggling with the basics. So just in case you’ve thus far blithely managed to ignored the ettiquitte of university life, let me spell out a few things:
1. Get off your bike on the College Green side of Regent House and WALK your bike through Front Arch.
- Do not cycle through the Arch. Security will have your head if you try to, as it’s bloody dangerous. Just get off the bike, and get over it.
2. Walk on the right.
- That means keep right on the stairs of the Arts Building and going through the right side of the double doors. Very simple; keep right. There are signs on the stairwells to that very affect. Adhering to this simple guideline stops pileups at doors and allows for free moment on the stairs. If I find you coming down the stairs on the left, I will continue walking up the stairs on the right and I will bang into you and I won’t apologize. So keep right.
3. Keep off the grass. Unless you are a Fellow, there is no reason for you to encroach upon the square.
- If the sun is shining and you want to sit on the grass, do so on College Park. Do not sit on Fellow’s Square. Also, if you want to sit outside and eat, you may do so on College Park (read as, you many ONLY do this on College Park). Food is not to be consumed out of doors anywhere else on Campus and most definitely not on the steps of the Chapel or the Exam Hall; Front Square is not the place for a picnic!
4. The word Berkeley is pronounced BARKeley.
- It’s one of those E pronounced as A words, such as derby; named after George Berkeley. If you can’t get that much right, perhaps you should just call it “the library”.
I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike!
This is my new bike. I agreed to buy it today off Sam, one of the rowers. He’s on Erasmus and is returning home to France, so he’s selling his bike. So I’m buying it second, well now, third-hand. I had a test spin on it today after my exam, gingerly cycling around the Fortress of Solitude (College) whilst it crawled with cops, staking the place out in anticipation of Yer Woman, and then going for a further spin around the empty streets of the college perimeter. I’m delighted with it. I think it’s a very good bike at a good price, and it has a bit of character to it, so hopefully it will work out between us. I love the lovely blue colour; it has fantastic tyres and best of all, it has a carrier and mudguards. I still have to find a name for her, or maybe a him; it seems like a rather masculine bike. But I won’t know that until I have it a while and I’m used to cycling it, and I won’t get it until next week. Exciting bicycle times ahead!
Raging I missed this
There has been lots of chat on LAL and FB over the last few days about this video of Trinity Orchestra’s Daft Punk Medley. It was recorded at their concert in February. Fair play to them! It’s fantastic!
I’m raging I missed it (I suppose I’d training or the Hist that night and it went unnoticed). It looks absolutely brilliant and the Exam Hall is packed to the gills. The atmosphere is electric! Also, the production values of the video are amazing! Well done to everyone involved. I feel really proud that Trinity has produced something so wonderful and I’ll be sure to look out for it next year.
Google’s secret plan to take over the world using lava
Well I think that’s what this video is about. I kind of lost track of it somewhere around the magnets. Seriously though, this video is quite lovely; I think it’s the choice of music. It’s definitely worth watching a second time, on full screen, just in order to peer at the science experiments to see if you can fathom what’s going on. It’s a science nerd’s paradise. (I can imagine this video being very popular down the east end of campus.)
Eating Joey
Today I got some rather good news. In view of my financial circumstances and my commitment to my rowing, I received a sports bursary from the university. This is both fantastic and hilarious; anyone who knew me prior to starting in Trinity would have thought that I was the least likely person in the world ever to receive a sports award – and yes, that list included Stephen Hawking. But amazingly, I have and I’m absolutely thrilled. In fact, once I got the cheque, I briskly limped to the bank as quick as I could, before the university realised they’d made some dreadful mistake and tried to take it back off me. Rowing has changed my life (for the better) and now I’m getting a bit of extra encouragement to stick at it and to take it up to the next level. So I’d better start winning some stuff for them, to make sure they get value for money.
So great was the grant, and so monumentous an occasion was it, that I was determined to go out for a slap-up dinner (which meant starters, and main courses and possibly dessert) and I would bring a friend – and most importantly: I would pay for it myself. Since going back to college, I simply do not have the money to afford to eat out, let alone bring someone to dinner. This was very special; it was going to be my treat. Therefore I harangued Joanna into meeting me for dinner, so that I could tell her my good news and she could discuss Schols. And so we headed off to Le Bon Crubeen.
Once there, I could not resist the temptation of a starter of “Quail with quince and foie gras”. It just sounded so ridiculously decadent that I had to have it. I don’t think I ever had quail before, nor quince, nor foie gras; fois gras was something that, until recently, I regarded as a rather disgusting concept, rather than a culinary achievement. It turns out that quail are absolutely tiny. So tiny, in fact, that I felt that I was eating a budgie. My Nana used have a budgie. His name was Joey. He was delicious.
Anyway, as I tucked in to the quail/budgie, I couldn’t but think of Hugh Dennis’ wonderful Mock the Week newsreel voiceover of David Cameron as he goes about, meeting the plebs. “Incidentally, I’ve cut your pension by 90%. Barely have enough to live on, but remember we share your pain”. – Hmmm, I wonder if Samantha’s cooked quail for lunch?
P.S. As I stood outside the restaurant I noticed their wonderful sign; whoever taught it up was a genius. It read:
“FRENCH FOOD
FOR
FECK ALL”
(All main courses 10 – 12 Euro).
Brilliant; utterly brilliant, and really good food too!
