There we go again..

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NAMEJET are dirty stinking Yid bastards

NAMEJET sells children to the highest bidder.

NAMEJET worked for the Nazis in World War 2

NAMEJET supports Gary Glitter.

NAMEJET organised 9/11

NAMEJET supports Al Queda

Testing

It's not raining at the moment

Grand Theft and Wakefield Rugby Club

Earlier this week, when watching my favorite tv channel, Sky Sports News, I came across a bizarre but funny item about the Wakefield Wildcats Rugby League Club. No, they didn’t win a league or cup against huge odds, no player had gotten in trouble off the pitch or shot anyone, and they hadn’t made a big signing either. What had happened?

The entire electronic scoreboard had been stolen.

When I had stopped laughing, I considered that this was quite an impressive feat. The thieves had entered the ground during the night, dislodged the whole thing from one of the stands, and taken it. Now that is impressive. More on the story can be read on this BBC link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bradford-west-yorkshire-12641897

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of the scoreboard is urged to contact West Yorkshire police, so if you see someone walking around with a stadium sized electronic scoreboard in a wheelbarrow or the back of a car, please contact the appropriate law enforcement officer.

This news item brought back memories of similar weird and outrageous theft stories I came across in the past, so I decided to make a Top5 of the greatest thefts I have come across in my life.

5.

Item stolen: A garden gnome

Victim: Some guy in England

The thief: Unknown

I read this story about 10 years ago and it really made me laugh. Stealing a garden gnome, in itself, is not much of a feat. They’re easy to get to (they’re out in the open in gardens most of the time), are not big or heavy and the monetary value is low. Dozens, if not hundreds are stolen every weekend. Why this story made the Top5 anyway, is not because it was stolen, but because of what happened after it was stolen. Our victim, whose name got lost in the sands of time, woke up one morning and realised that his beloved garden gnome had been stolen overnight. After the initial shock, and probably a cup of tea, he examined the crime scene and found a little card saying ”Dear owner, I have been in this garden for many years now. It is time for me to leave and see the world. Thank you for your good care over the years. Goodbye, your gnome”

Or words to that effect. The owner decided this was some sort of drunken prank from one of the patrons of the pub across the street, bought a new gnome and thought nothing more of it. Until he started getting postcards from his gnome.

Apparently, some funny man who was about to go on a round-the-world trip, had stolen the garden gnome and taken it with him. The first postcard the owner received was a picture of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, with the gnome standing in front of it. The message on the card read something like ‘Aah, Paris, the city of romance’ or something like that and had a greeting from the gnome to the owner. After that, postcards started coming in at regular intervals, with the gnome posing in increasingly exotic locations across the world. Cards featured, among others, the gnome at the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. The gnome then crossed the Pacific Ocean and was found posing at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Great Wall of China and Sydney Opera House. This went on for about a year and, sure enough, one morning the astonished owner found the battered gnome back in his front garden, where it had disappeared a year earlier, with another card saying something like ‘Thank you for my year off, I really needed it’.

I really like this story because it is weird and different and it shows that a lot of people still have a great sense of humour.

4.

Item stolen: Garden furniture

Victim: My parents

The thief: Unknown

Somewhere during an early 90’s summer , I was woken on a Sunday morning by my mum, at some unholy hour like 11am. After enquiering why she had woken me up this early, she informed me that the joke was over and that she wanted me to disclose the location of her belongings. Puzzled, I got out of bed and asked her what she was on about. As we walked in to the garden on this sunny morning, I vaguely registered that something in the garden was not quite right, but I couldn’t exactly make out what it was. After deciding to get a glass of orange juice and sit down to think this over, it suddenly dawned on me that there was no garden furniture. The wheels in my head started turning and it finally came together: all the garden furniture had disappeared and my mum thought that me and my friends had pulled of some drunk joke by hiding it somewhere. It took me about 20 minutes to convince my mum and dad that I really had no idea where the furniture was and either way, I had been drunk the previous night so even if I had intended to steal their furniture, I was in no state to lift anything bigger or heavier than a bottle, so I couldn’t have pulled it off anyway. Considering this, I must admit that this had been quite an impressive case of theft. My parents live in a small town, population 4000, on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Everybody knows everybody else and if you were to steal something as big as garden furniture, word would be out in no time and you would be caught out in a matter of days. I once lifted a case of beer from someones garden shed on a drunken night when we had run out of beer and, sure enough, within a week, I got a phone call from a local police officer, telling me to come over to the station. I was reprimanded for trying to steal someone else’s beer and told not to do it again. That’s the idea of how fast news travels in a town like that, which makes it extra impressive to lift an entire set of garden furniture from someone’s garden. There are two other reason that made this an impressive feat. First, my parents have a pebble path around their house that makes a distinctive noise when you walk on it, especially in the dead of the night.

My mom often said that she had woken up when I came home from the pub, because of the sound of me crossing the pebbles. Second of all, my parents’ house is right next to the police station. The furniture was never seen again and no one has ever had a clue as to who had stolen it. My mom always suspected the window cleaner who, as she argued, had free access to everybody’s garden and knew what was where. Even if she was right, that doesn’t make it any less impressive to steal an entire set of garden furniture, consisting of 4 chairs, a footstool and a 4foot round table from a small town garden that is surrounded by noisy pebbles, under the watching eyes of the police. A worthy number 4 in this list.

3.

Item stolen: The UEFA Cup

Victim: PSV Eindhoven Football Club

The thief: Local comedian Theo Maassen

PSV Eindhoven won the UEFA Cup in 1978. For 10 years it was their biggest trophy, until they won the 1988 European Cup after one of the dullest finals in living memory. The UEFA Cup still stood in their trophy cabinet as one of the clubs biggest achievements. Until 2000 that was, when the trophy all of a sudden went missing. The press had a field day when the news got out and football fans around the country were making jokes about the lack of security and the thickness of the ‘provincials’. (Thereby completely ignoring the fact that Eindhoven is the 5^thbiggest city in the country and also the smallest city ever to win the European Cup). Where had the trophy gone? There were no signs of breaking and entering, no security breaches on record and even after searching every inch of the stadium, the club offices and the training ground, the trophy was not found. It had simply vanished on thin air. The issue disappeared from the papers and was left as a strange anecdote in the history of Dutch football. 8 or 9 months later, the story was back in the paper because the cup had been returned. What had happened?

As it turned out, it was local comedian Theo Maassen who had lifted the cup while he was shooting a tv show in the PSV Stadium. As he was shooting the show, he had been given access all areas, and had smuggled the cup out in an equipment case. Being the funny man that he is, Maassen decided not to just give it back to the club, but chose to reveal his secret on national television. In a football panel show, several guests showed off their rare football memorabilia, mostly jerseys from old games, cup medals and other artifacts. Nobody had ofcourse expected Maassen to come up with the actual UEFA Cup, leaving both the show’s hosts and the other guests speachless. The cup was returned to the club shortly after the show, but the club could not appreciate the joke and pressed charges. Eventually, Maassen got off with a couple of days community service, which he performed with a smile on his face.

Theo Maassen 1 PSV 0.

2.

Item stolen: Stadium score board

Victim: Wakefield Wildcats rugby league club

The thief: As yet unknown.

On number 2 in the list, we find the Wakefield rugby score board from the start of the story. One can only wonder how the thieves in this case pulled off this amazing feat. Dislodging a stadium sized scoreboard and disappearing with it, without anyone noticing. I was discussing this issue with a bartender at the Woolshed last weekend and he commented that “If you pull off something like that, the score board is officially yours. It ceases to be property of the club and it is then rightfully yours.”

I must agree. Even though it’s probably something of a nuisance to the club and the fans, I can not conclude anything else than that I think whoever accomplished this should get free beer for at least a year in their local pub.

But, no matter how incredible a feat this may have been, we now reach the first place in our little competition and the winner for the most hilarious theft in history. Please put your hands together for ... Theo.

1.

Item stolen: 6 snooker tables

Victim: Theo, the proprietor of a local snooker hall in Holland

The thief: Officially, this is unknown, but most likely Theo himself.

When I was in high school, there were 3 locations nearby where you could play pool or snooker. One of them was the snooker hall, which was for serious players and had 4 snooker tables and a small bar. Another venue had about a dozen pool tables, a big bar, video games and the best location in the heart of the city. People often went there for a drink or to meet friends without the intention of playing pool. It was as much a social spot as a pool hall.

And then there was Theo’s place. Theo’s place had a bit of both, snooker and pool, and it was conveniently located, literally 30 yards from my school. Consequently, I spent more time in the pool hall than in school, but still managed to pass my central exams, albeit (and I quote the dean of students here) ‘by the smallest margin in the history of the school’. The pool hall was situated in a semi-rough working class area, a grimm neighbourhood with a relatively high unemployment rate and an urban jungle street feel. Lots of boarded up windows, graffiti, cheap appartments, people drinking in the street at 10am, that idea. On the main road through the neighbourhood was Theo’s pool emporium.

Theo’s place, most often simply referred to as ‘the pool hall’, was a right dump. Flyers from parties that had taken place 4 years earlier were still in the window, most pooltables had unidentified stains on the cloth, unmatched, rickety bar stools, a slot machine with a broken window, cracked mirrors, all the characteristics of a full on dive bar were there. But hey, table rent was cheap and the bar opened at 9.30 in the morning so me and my friends could be found there with alarming regularity. The beer was also ridiculously cheap, so that may have been another reason for the constant presence of students at the bar. Behind the bar, Theo ruled with an iron fist. What Theo says goes, was the law of the land and most people obeyed the law. The occasional trouble maker would often find himself out through the door, and by this I mean literally through it. Theo was a 6”5’ hulk of a man, with a receding hairline, permanently unshaven and a look on his face as if somebody has just killed his dog and then ran of with his wife. Still, we spent many an hour in the place, getting drunk on our study grants and playing pool for a couple of bucks per hour. When I graduated from high school, I somehow found myself returning to the place, even though I had nothing left to do in the area and the place was a dump. I guess the cheap beer was still an incentive to return, so I kept playing pool and snooker there on a regular basis. Until one day I found the door closed. I assumed that Theo had had a couple of his cheap beers himself the night before and would open again later, but the doors stayed closed throughout the day. A couple of days later, when I went to visit a friend who was living near there, the door was still closed and a police car was in front of the entrance. Later that week, when I was in the other pool hall (the nice one) I found out what had happened and why Theo’s place was closed. Theo had been robbed.

And not robbed in the street robbery kind of way (no one would dare) but robbed from his pride and livelyhood. All 6 of Theo’s snooker tables had been stolen.

This, ofcourse, went on to be THE talk of the pool playing community in the weeks that followed and no one could surpress a smile when Theo and his disappeared tables came up in conversation.

When I had stopped laughing, it dawned on me what a monumentously stupid claim this was. For those of you who have never played snooker or live outside the sphere of influence of the English speaking world, let me give you some back ground: a tournament size snooker table is a huge thing. It is 6 foot wide, 12 foot long and about 4 foot high. It weighs about 3000 pounds and as I was discussing the matter with the manager of the other snooker hall, he told me that it takes a team of 4 professional snooker table builders at least 2 hours to put one together or take one apart. Mind you, that is 4 experienced professionals who actually know what they are doing, in broad daylight, with all the professional tools that are specific to the snooker table building trade. And that is for 1 table (one).

In Theo’s story, however, a goon squad of villains had broken into his establishment, allegedly somewhere after 2am, when he said he had closed the bar. They had consequently disassembled no less than 6 tournament size snooker tables, put all the parts in a truck or whatever and ran off with it. All of this happened in the time window between 2am and dawn and without anybody noticing a thing even though the pool hall was on the corner of the 2 busiest streets in the area.

The story of Theo’s stolen snooker tables has gone down in local folklore as one of the most ridiculous stories of all time.

Consider this; it is simply physically impossible to even take apart 6 snooker tables in a 4 hour time frame, let alone load everything in a truck and get away with the lot. Then on top of that, 4 of the 6 tables were on the first floor, which made the whole operation even more complicated. And then on top of that, all of the heavy and big parts that make up a snooker table (including the big slabs of stone that make up the playing surface) had been shipped out through a single front door. This all combined makes this claim so outrageous that I happily award Theo with the first prize for the most ridiculous theft of all times.

The story later got out that Theo was in dire need of money because of a huge tax claim that the revenue service had levelled at him for not paying any taxes in the previous 10 or 12 years. Consequently, he ‘most likely’ staged this outrageous operation with the idea of cashing in on his insurance policy. The insurance company, despite it being ridiculously obvious that this was an inside job, could not exactly prove that the tables had NOT been stolen, and eventually threw out his claim on a technicallity (no alarm had gone off and no alert had come in at the security centre during the night the tables were stolen, rendering his claim void).

I have not seen Theo ever since. I would guess that he fled the country and now runs a pool hall in Thailand.

My alternative Christmas

As the new year makes its first attempts at waking up from the holidays, let me tell you the interesting story of how my Christmas turned out to be the complete opposite of what I had originally planned, but still ended up being great fun.

As in most years since my sister moved to Scotland, we had decided to celebrate Christmas at my sister’s place and for the first time it would be in her new house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. I had planned an evening flight for the 23^rd of December, which would give me an extra day in Scotland or, if push came to shove, would leave a day to arrange a plan B to get there, which seemed sensible at the time because, as you have probably noticed, the weather across continental Europe in general, and around the British Isles in particular had been horrendous to say the least over the weeks preceding Christmas.

I left the office on Thursday the 23^rd with my hopes up and the weather looking decent. I had been neurotically monitoring both the Dublin and Edinburgh airport websites all day (and the day before to be honest) and on Thursday, Dublin had been closed only for about an hour and a half around lunchtime. When I reached Main Street in Swords, the ugly grey banlieu on the northern outskirts of Dublin where I work, at around quarter to 4, it started to snow. And in true Irish fashion, all traffic came to a standstill within minutes. There were no busses coming in or going out of Swords, apart from one number33 bus which, I noted carefully, had made a progress of 60 feet down Main Street in the 10 minutes that I stood at the bus stop. I walked across the street to a taxi office, enquired if I could get one and was told that I would be picked up in about 10 minutes. Everyone who knows how the Irish estimate time, will tell you that such a statement normally means that you will be lucky to get going within half an hour. A very friendly local lad in a tracksuit, Nike runners and a hooded sweater let me take his taxi as I was on my way to the airport. This earned the guy an avalanche of abuse from his girlfriend, but my gratitude. After taking another 10 minutes to make the turn off Main Street, the taxi was standing in front of the building that I had left over an hour earlier. It still snowed. In the end, it had taken me about an hour and a half to get to the airport, which, at that time, was still operating.

I walked into the departures area, ignored the panicking crowd (people at airports are always panicking), walked through security, checked my gate and got a beer. As I had plenty of time until my flight was due to leave, I wandered around the airport a bit, got to my gate, ordered another beer and watched the neverending stampede of people running by, juggling bags and suitcases while franctically shouting into mobile phones. I saw no real reason to panic because even though it was snowing heavily, and delays where increasing, flights were still departing. I spent some time looking at the runways where airport staff in snow shovelling tractors where racing up and down the airport in an attempt to keep the show on the road. It looked surreal from up in the terminal bar, like watching some sort of real life Lego cart race unfolding in front of me.

Even 20 minutes before I was supposed to take off, my flight (and a
whole lot more) were still on the monitors as SCHEDULED. Obvisously with ever increasing delays, but hey, you can't have it all. And then.. then the worst blizard in the history of Dublin hit the airport. I have never seen it snow so ridiculously hard anywhere, ever. It started snowing so hard that I couldn't even see the plane anymore from the bar window. That is a 200 foot long Boeing 767, parked about 30 feet away from me. It was completely invisible. It was then that I realised that my flight might be in danger. Sure enough, a voice came through the PA system, incomprehensible as ever, and started to real off some sort of message. I walked out of the bar, beer in hand and towards the departures monitor. And then all of a sudden, flights started to fall like dominos including, 5 minutes later, my flight to Edinburgh. While people started rushing for the exits, I calmly finished my pint and had a strategy meeting with myself.

My first Plan B was spending the night at the airport, so that I would be in prime position to get an early flight out the next morning. I knew from experience that the bars at the airport normally close at around 1.30 in the morning, so by the time you have finished your drink and lazily made your way back through customs and to the arrivals hall, it would be well after 2am and there would be only 3 hours to go before the next day’s flight schedule would start. On top of that, I would have a significant advantage over the people coming in in the morning when it came to reaching the airline desks early. My first Plan B turned out to be short lived, because at around 8.30 bar staff started closing all the bars, reasoning that, as there were no more flights, there would be no more customers to serve. I didnt fancy just sitting around the departures hall for 10 hours with nothing to do. If I could have stayed in the bars until 2 in the morning, that would have been no problem, but I decided to go back to Dublin. I contacted my sister who was so sweet to book me on the lunch time flight to Edinburgh the next day, spent half an hour in the scrum at the Airlink stop and finally got back to the city. Annoyed by the fact that I had just spent 6 hours going away, and ending up about 6 miles in the opposite direction of where I had planned to go, I went to the pub, had a couple of beers against the nerves and went home.

The next day I woke up, apprehensively moved my bedroom curtain a couple of inches and was quite stunned to look at Dublin, bathing in watery winter sunshine. Not a cloud was visible in the sky and, according to my sister, the weather in Edinburgh was excellent too. With a smile on my face, I jumped in to the shower, got dressed and happily set off for the airport again, walked through security and set myself at a bar. Can't go wrong now, can it? Beautiful weather in Dublin, beautiful weather in Edinburgh, Scotland, here I come!
So there I was, celebratory pint in hand, waiting for my flight (Aer Lingus this time round) to come in and take me to Scotland. A couple of flights were obviously still delayed but that didn’t faze me at all. Clear sky all the way from here to the East coast of Scotland. Not until the ‘Edinburgh 14.00’ message on the monitor above my gate was suddenly replaced by the message ‘Manchester 14.30’ did I sense that something might be amiss. Surprised, I marched over to the departures monitor and to my disgust found that my flight had been cancelled again. The one thing that I had left out of the equation was the weather in the rest of Europe. While it was great in Dublin and Edinburgh, the weather was still terrible in most of continental Europe. And despite fine conditions here and in Britain(well, most of it) most of Aer Lingus’ planes were grounded in Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels and Bachus knows where else. So now the problem was not that the airport here was snowed in but that there weren’t enough planes to fly all the people out!

So yet again, my flight was cancelled. And like the day before, I took up the idea to rebook my flight to Glasgow, Aberdeen or even Newcastle, reasoning that, if not IN Edinburgh, then to at least I was going to get somewhere NEAR Edinburgh.
I knocked back my beer, made the way through customs again and I knew all bets were off when, for the 4^th time within 24 hours, I entered the departures area. There were already over 700 people in the queue at the Aer Lingus desk alone. What I had initially assumed to be the end of the queue, was just the halfway point. Airport security had closed down all the queues in the interest of public safety and were manouvring people towards the exit. That's when I finally gave up on the idea of getting to Scotland. I had spent the better part of the last 24 hours in trying to get out of Dublin and it wasn’t going to happen. After briefing my sister of the events that had taken place, it was time to come up with a back up strategy. If I was not going to go to Scotland, at the very least I was’t going to give up on a party that easily. I called a friend who, as I had understood up until that point, was throwing a Christmas Party. It turned out that she wasn’t and she informed me that I had mixed up a couple of things. The correct version of the Alternative Christmas party was that another friend of mine, who is Australian and obviously couldn’t just go home for the weekend, was going to another friend of ours(also Australian) to celebrate Christmas at her place.

Here is where the story takes an unexpected turn.

I called Kylie and asked her what was up for Christmas. She instructed me to get back to central Dublin, load up on booze and walk to the Ulster Bank building on Eden Quay. I joined the scrum at the Airlink stop outside the airport again and forty minutes later I was, again, back on O’Connell street in the centre of Dublin. I walked to the nearest off license, spent 15 minutes in the queue there (Irish people are very, very afraid to run out of booze when shops close for 1 day) made my way to the bank building as agreed and called again for further instructions.

“Okay, to your left is a sign that has ‘KAVANAGH BUS SERVICE’ on it”

- Yes

“Get on that bus and get off when you’re in Kilcullen”

Now, I had never even heard of either Kavanagh Buses or Kilcullen, but I agreed anyway and got on the bus which, as it turned out, I had nearly missed because of the queue in the off license. I spent most of the trip talking to a Austrian girl who lived in Waterford and had been trying to get home to Vienna for 4 days but was turned back at the airport again and again. I then received another call, telling me to get off in Naas as that was more convenient. I walked up to the bus driver and found out that we had already passed Naas and he hadn’t bothered to stop there. Excellent. I then asked him to give me a shout when we got to the stop in Kilcullen as I wanted to get off there. He informed me that that would be the next stop but, ofcourse, it wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked. The road to Kilcullen, the busdriver told me, was snowed in and icy and, as the road into the village is at an angle, he was afraid that he would not be able drive his bus out again if he drove down the hill. So, I got off the bus NEAR Kilcullen and fortunately there was someone else getting off there, who told me that the village was about 5 minutes in THAT direction. After shuffling across the icy road like a penguin for about 10 minutes with 2 heavy bags full of beer, I reached what looked like a village. Well, a gas station, a pub and a Centra shop. Having apparently arrived at the correct destination, I made another call and informed Meagan (the girl who was throwing the party) that I had arrived in Kilcullen. She then said “are you in front of a gas station called Frazers?” Yes. “Good to your left is a pub called the Hide Out. Go in there, order a beer and wait.”
By now I had the idea I had ended up in some cold war spy movie but going into a pub is always a good plan in my book, so I walked in, ordered a beer and sat there, slowly getting the feeling back into my fingers and toes. And sure enough, 20 minutes later, a Landrover pulled up outside the pub, my friends poured out, and 15 minutes later we were on our way to the house. As it turned out, my friend works for the owner of a golf course hotel in Wicklow and also lives there on the hotel premises.

And so, instead of spending my Christmas with my family in the suburbs of Edinburgh, I ended up spending my Christmas in a 5 star hotel in Wicklow with 5 Australian girls.

Despite the disappointment of not being able to get to Scotland, I had an excellent time. We ate a lot, drank a lot, built fires and even found a Christmas tree in a barn when we were out collecting fire wood.

So I would like to extend a BIG thank you to Meagan, Kylie, Renae, Sally and Beth for taking me in over Christmas and for being great company during a Christmas weekend that would otherwise have been rather bleak.

Cheers!

Happy New Year

Just a quick post from me on the last day of the year.

This year has been really weird for me. I had the trip of a lifetime by going to Australia, got stuck in Slovakia due to the Icelandic volcano(which was fun), saw one of my best friends get married in the city where I was born and graduated from a pretty tough college course. Ofcourse, this all stands in the shade of the one event that brought a Black Cloud over 2010: my mother died. It is not until a couple of months after one of your parents dies, that you realise that a tiny part of yourself has died with them. It’s hard to explain, but that’s how it is. Despite this, I will keep a positive view of the future and have all kinds of exciting plans for 2011. I have incorporated them in my New Year’s resolutions, and my resolutions are the following:

1. 1. Visit 5 different states in the USA. I have 3 trips to America planned for this year, Los Angeles in February, Las Vegas in June or July and New York in September. That’s 3 states to begin with and as New York is in an area with lots of states in a relatively small area, I should be able to score there.

2. 2. Visit 5 different Irish counties I have never been to before. When I moved to Ireland, 4 years ago next week, I planned to visit all 32 counties in 2 or 3 years time. Well, that didn’t exactly work out as planned, because 4 years on I am still in single figures. Go see your country, Dude.

3. 3. Visit 3 new countries. I planned to visit 5 new countries this year. I got to 4, which I consider pretty good. I want to add at least 3 new ones this year. Candidates are Wales, Spain and Portugal, among others.

4. 4. Move. I have been living in this house in Dublin5 for nearly 4 years now and I feel it is time to move on. I want to live in the city centre, close to everything and want to be able to walk home from the pub rather than making for the last bus or taking a taxi.

So, those are my objectives for 2011. And with that, I wish you all a very happy 2011 and hope you all have a blast in the new year.

Cheers!

Lennard

New Year’s resolutions and the Lennard diet.

With the holiday season rapidly approaching, I thought I would talk to you about New Year's resolutions.

Last year in December, I got somewhat annoyed by some colleagues who were whining about their New Year’s resolutions and how they were so not looking forward at all to their umpteenth attempt to lose weight, drink less or save more money in the bank. This led me to observe that the reason that most people fail in realising their resolutions is because they always pick stuff like giving up smoking or drinking while they don’t want to, losing an unrealistic amount of weight or no longer eating candy or fatty food things they like.

In general, they pick things that make you feel miserable.

Being the editor of the department newsletter, I instantly smelled an interesting story in their misery and decided to draft an article about the most original New Year’s resolutions in our department. As you might have guessed, the bulk load of the replies I received involved giving up eating, drinking or pleasure altogether. I did however receive 3 interesting and original ideas that I deemed worthy of publication.

The first one that was both original and (probably) manageable, came from one of my Italian colleagues. He stated that the parents of his Japanese girlfriend had invited him over to Japan, in order to meet him and show him their beautiful country. As a result of this, and because he wanted to be polite, he had decided to learn how to speak Japanese, or at least get the basics down so he could say things like ‘Thank you’, ‘enjoy your meal’ and express other basic pleasantries. I often saw him walking around the office with a Japanese phrase book under his arm during his breaks or watched him mimic Japanese phrases that he was listening to on his iPod. Unfortunately, he left the company in June, before he went to Japan and before he could confidently report on the progress of his resolution. I guess we’ll never hear the end of that story, because besides leaving the company, he also left Ireland and moved to France.

The second New Year’s resolution was even more original and, in fact, was so original that I had never heard anyone come up with it before. This colleague of mine, a German girl, was pretty annoyed by the fact that water in Ireland is free. That’s right, you can leave your tap running 24 hours a day here on the Emerald Isle and it will not cost you a penny. This colleague stated that it was stupid that people here in the rich west would get free water while people in poor countries in Asia and Africa more often than not don’t have any drinking water at all. She therefore decided that she would set an amount she used to pay every month for her water bill in Germany and donate that to a charity that specialises in building wells in Africa in order to provide people with clean drinking water. She kept her promise and donated money to her chosen charity every month until she, too, left the company and moved back to Germany and her waterbills in October. A very original resolution for sure.

The third and final person whose New Year’s resolutions I published, was me. Not because I thought that I was so much more original than the others (though I was) but because apart from the two above, mine was the only one that did not involve quiting, giving up or cutting down on the pleasures of life. My first resolution was to visit 5 countries I had never visited before. I had an awesome time pursueing this resolution and even though I only got to 4 new countries, I am not sorry for failing this one. I had an awesome year when it comes to travelling and, in case you were taking notes, my new countries were Slovakia, Austria, Hong Kong and Australia. I will take this year’s fifth country over to next year.

My second resolution, as you might have guessed, involved my favorite pub, The Woolshed. I eat there 3 or 4 times a week. Not because I am too lazy to cook, but because I am there around diner time anyway from Friday to Monday, I really like the food and, well, with the prices of groceries here in Dublin being as high as they are, eating in a pub is only 1 or 2 euros more expensive than cooking your own food. Somewhere around Christmas, one of the bar staff joked that I had probably eaten every pizza on the menu. This stuck in my mind and I came up with the idea of eating everything on the menu over the next year. Now this may not sound like a very daunting task if you’re thinking of your average pub menu, but let me walk you through the Woolshed menu.

The Woolshed menu contains 54 items. I won’t bore you with a complete listing of everything on it, but there are 10 different pizzas, 12 items listed as ‘starters/snacks/beerfood’ (among these are chicken wings, sausages, spring rolls, chicken goujons and fries) 4 different snack platters (that, as you may have guessed, mainly consist of increasingly bigger combinations of the aforementioned snacks and beerfood) 9 sandwiches (including wraps), 7 main courses, a bunch of different hamburgers, some assorted ‘others’, 4 deserts and 3 salads.

If you take the 54 items on the menu and divide that by, say, 3 times a week that I eat there, you would assume that I would have finished my project somewhere in May. Ofcourse, it was never that easy. Some things I like so much that I have eaten them many times(pizzas come to mind). Other items were less likely to get picked on a regular basis (salads for example).If I had simply worked down the menu from item 1 to item 54, I would have encountered big dishes at points where I was not very hungry and small dishes at times that I felt that I could eat a cow and then some. So I had to pick my way through the menu, picking dishes I felt like eating at the time, while keeping an eye on the menu to ensure progress throughout the year and to make sure that I did not finish off certain categories while other categories were left untouched. To that end, I printed out the menu and put it on the wall above my desk in my bedroom. Another issue that I had to guard, was that certain items are simply to big to eat on your own. I would have to organise friends to help me eat them in order to mark them off the list. The nachos platter for example, is too big to eat on your own. And even though the menu states that the Chili nachos platter feeds 1-2 people, you can easily feed 3 adults with it. Fortunately, my sister and brother in law dropped by for my birthday and I was able to convince them to order the chili nachos to share, which was not too difficult because my sister loves those nachos. The Big Platter posed the biggest challenge. Marked on the menu as being enough for 3-5 people, this is the biggest dish on the menu and I knew I had to organise well to get this monster pile of fried food out of the way. I was thinking of a reason to invite people and celebrate something, so I could order the item and mark it off the list. As it turned out, it did not take any organising at all. On a random Saturday in early summer, I found myself surrounded by 4 friends (coincidentally all the people I had planned to invite for eating this) who were all hungry but could not quite decide on what to order. A Wile E. Coyote-style lightbulb appeared above my head and I suggested we order the Big Platter so that we would all have enough to eat without anyone having to decide on a particular dish. My plan was happily accepted by all and so I got to mark the dish I had expected to be the biggest problem in the project off the list without any effort.

As summer progressed and the World Cup started, my visits increased (though some people will say that that was not really possible) and I found myself going steadily through the menu. But during the World Cup, I found myself faced with a sub-challenge emerging on the side. Because of the World Cup festivities, special theme food that was not on the menu was sold during the matches. For a second I thought about ignoring the theme food and focussing on the regular menu, but quickly discarded this idea and went for the special items too. So apart from working through the 54 item regular menu, I also worked my way through Argentinian meat pasties, Danish Hotdogs, a Brazilian snack that sort of looked like a Scotch egg but tasted completely different and 2 or 3 other items which I don’t really remember at the moment. Oh yeah, I also ate an off-the-menu chili dog on Superbowl night and a really nice chicken curry that was not on the menu but available for a couple of weeks after me and another regular had suggested they put curry on the menu. After the World Cup finished on July 11, I went back to my day to day business and the regular menu. I had by then decided that I wanted to be finished before I went to Australia. With the arrival of September, and only 2 weeks to go until my trip to Australia, I stepped up a gear and had dinner at the Woolshed 5 days a week. With 1 week to go, I decided to go for a final push and finish the project. I had already decided to ‘save’ a pizza until the end so that it would be the last item I marked off the list. On Friday 10 September, I came up with the plan to get rid of all deserts in one go, and instead of a normal dinner, I ordered all deserts and asked for them to be served on 1 big plate. This led to jealous peaks from onlookers (mainly women, I must add) and one cheery ‘You pig’ from a laughing Kiwi bartender.

So there I was, standing at the bar, on Saturday 11 September, with my final menu item on a plate in front of me. I had ordered a Margarita pizza with Parma ham and mushrooms to finish off the project. When I took the final bite of the final slice of pizza, I felt both proud of my achievement of finishing this marathon food project and somewhat weird because there was now, literally, nothing left for me to eat. I ate it all. My declaration that I had done it, and eaten everything on the menu, got me some applause from assorted regulars and some quizzical looks from passers by, but I could now set off for Australia knowing that even if the menu was changed during my absence, the project was safely done and dusted.

I still eat at The Woolshed 3 or 4 times a week and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. And even though it may not mean much to anyone, I am still quite proud of the achievement.

So to round off this story, we come full circle to the start where I was discussing people trying to lose weight. Loads of people try to lose weight by either starving themselves or by subjecting themselves to ridiculous exercise programmes that, deep down, they know they won’t be able to keep up with. As a result of not being able to achieve the projected weight loss or failing to put in many hours of excercise, people get demotivated and the New Years resolution collapses like a house of cards. Your mission is a failure, please try again next year.

The funny thing is, that there is a much easier way. To my surprise, over the last 18 months, I have lost a whopping 29 pounds in weight. Mind you, this was a year and a half in which my diet consisted mainly of things like chicken wings, pizza, hamburgers and other things generally considered to be fattening or unhealthy. On top of that, I washed it all down with about 30 pints of lager a week.

In those 18 months, not once did I feel over-excercised, miserable or demotivated because I could not meet my goals. The secret is that if you don’t have any goals, you can not fail to meet them either. Just check your weight once every 2 or 3 months and be happy with any weight you may have lost.

Interested? Here is what you do in 6 easy steps. I have called it The Lennard Diet ©

- Eat whatever you want and feel like, and eat it whenever you want it.

- Drink whatever you want, but be careful with sugarry soft drinks

- Go to the gym once or twice a week and exercise for about an hour or 75 minutes

- Check your weight once every 2 or 3 months. Weighing yourself every day or week is useless and only works demotivating.

- If you are going somewhere that is less than a 20 minute walk- WALK! You’ll be amazed how much additional exercise you get if you walk to the off license or convenience store down the street rather than taking the car to pick up a bottle of wine or a pack of cigarettes.

- Enjoy life

And with that, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Cheers,

Lennard

(Note from the editor: uploading pictures is not working at the moment, sorry about that)