- The Kildare Chilling Co. facility was destroyed in a fire on Saturday afternoon. Both Breaking News.ieIndependent.ie say the fire broke out at the Chillen factory on the old Dublin road at around 4 o’ clock. I can only assume the report was phoned in by a true local. Anyway, it’s a sad loss - The Chillin’and was a major employer in Kildare Town.

- Breaking News.ie are also reporting that a man landed his helicopter on the roof of a car park in Athlone as he wanted to have keys cut at a nearby shopping centre. Smart comments please.

- Oh! Before I forget: Eolaí’s sale of paintings ends in one or two days. When I say one or two it’s because one day + time difference between here and Kansas = almost two days in Kansas time. I think. My head hurts. Ah, look, just go on over there and pick up the last of the bargains.

- Remember I told you about the trouble I was having convincing An Post that I don’t have a TV?

This was it:Load embedded post, "Blank stares"

And how they should stop wasting everybody’s time sending me reminders to buy a TV licence? Well wonder of wonders they do believe me. They wrote to say they did. However, their computer system doesn’t so I am to get reminders indefinitely. But the human says I can just ignore them.

- MacDara is blogging as often as he can on the unfolding situation in Beruit. I’m relying on MacD for news of what could become a civil war in one of the world’s most beautiful countries. Independent.ie seem more interested in reporting soccer results.

• Breakingnews.ie ran a piece yesterday that mentions 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Atonement. It explores the life of writer Briony Tallis and looks at her character at three ages – 13, 18 and 77 – with separate actresses for each part. You would kind of expect that, wouldn’t you? Saoirse, with a life-long interest in acting, played the part of the young fledgling writer. Life-long? She’s only a child for fcuk sake! But thanks for letting me know she doesn’t play the 77-year-old - I’d been cheering on the granny until now.

• In other mejia: The Sunday Times reports on a study by the American Journal of Public Health that finds intelligent people are at higher risk of suffering from alcohol problems as they tend to have more stressful careers. I dropped into my local yesterday to be met with hoards of half-pissed t-shirts ranting on about their team’s success/being cheated by the referee - teams they have never seen other than on TV - and thought about inviting the folks from the American Journal to take a second look. It made me smile.

• Smiling wasn’t difficult as the weather this weekend put me in good humour anyway. Saturday was a balmy 15° with sunshine. (4.5 hours of sunshine to be exact). It was like spring. Every bird I seen had a sledgehammer in its beak. Off to erect a planning permission sign I reckon. Spring is definitely in the air. With the birds. Time for new beginnings. Over the next while a new category will appear on the blog: Poetry Middle. (I can’t fit it in a corner). All poetry will be plain and simple and in Hiberno-English and Irish. None of that Aosdána convoluted claptrap. And there’ll be no mention of young Nepalese boys.

• As a taster, and seeing as Saint Vaseline’s day is this week:

                Roses is red, violets is blue
                Some poems rhyme
                But this one doesn’t
                So it doesn’t

• Ah Christmas! Don’t you just love it? Grandad bemoans the fact that Christmas isn’t as it used be. At least it is still the season of robberies and road deaths. That’ll never change.

• Although the latest campaign by the Road Safety Authority might make a difference. In an innovative move they will be running TV ads - gory ones as you’d expect - but this time they’ll be factual accounts voiced-over by the those affected or their bereaved families. Two things are bugging me: Firstly, this is not innovative. The Ray D’Arcy Show did this on radio a couple of years back. The station aired them for free, Cawley Nea Advertising produced them for free and the RSA, well they said that’s all very lovely lads, but didn’t help at all. Secondly, on the launch day the ads were shown during Coronation Street and Fair City. Com’on lads! Is that your target audience? Auld ones who watch crappy soaps?

• Maybe the €15m collected in speeding fines this year will pay for the campaign. You know the ones I’m on about - the €80 a pop fines the Gardaí dish out on the carriageways and motorways where fewest accidents happen. Not the ones they hand out on the minor roads where most fatalities occur. Hold on a minute. What am I saying? They don’t police those roads. Silly me. Checkpoints on those roads wouldn’t pay. Maybe in lives saved it would but not financially and that’s what matters isn’t it.

• Which brings us on very nicely to robbery. The local bookies was robbed at Stanley-knife point at 17:40 Monday last. The local rag reports the man was wearing a hoodie (standard issue for robbers as I understand), 5th 8in tall (yes robbers still come in imperial sizes), around 20 years and spoke with a “local accent”. The last bit required some detective work on the part of the three brave unarmed uniforms that arrived at the scene 20minutes later and stood around outside until the three brave, presumably armed, plain-clothes arrived - apparently the two young female staff consider a Dublin accent to be the local one.

• Fekin ejit of a robber anyway. He must be an apprentice. Who’d bother holding up a bookies at that time of the day in winter when the racing is long over and the takings in the floor safe. He’ll never make the big time like this guy, and will never be as good as this guy.

• On a totally different note, I just now discovered a young lady called Laura Marling. I know, I know, I’m slow. Anyway, back to notes - Ms Marling has has them in abundance. Check out the video for New Romantic. It is the best I’ve seen in a long time. In fact, the best ever - I can say that - it’s my blog.

• I see the folks over at blogger.com, and they are not evil as we all know, have dickied up comments: If you don’t have, or don’t wish to use, a don’t be evil account, or comment anonymously, now all you have to do is enter a nickname. None of the messing from before where you had to type in your name, email and URL. Makes it all very easy doesn’t it. Well not for the next reader who wants to click through to your site. They can’t. Maybe they mean don’t be very evil, but be as evil as you can get away with.

• Another thing I see is that the Swearing Lady has resurfaced over at the Arse End of Ireland. Well she yawned, stretched and rolled over back to sleep. Not that it mattered - the beast awoke solely to poach bloggers for her new project. I volunteered. I wonder will I be considered acerbic enough.

• I seen a lot this week. Yet another thing I seen is Eolaí has revamped Irish KC. His own postings now take pride of place in the (larger) left column while news of events in Kansas City are relegated to a small ads section in the centre. And rightly so now that he’s back home in dear old Ireland. Oh, and there’s new favicons too for Irish KC and American Hell.

• Stats junkies will be interested in an article from the Economist. It’s really aimed at marketeers but for bloggers it throws up some interesting food for thought. Not that throwing up food is something I encourage.

• The latest little worry to crop up in the world of yours truly was when a business partner asked for a cheap and dirty database for his client, a pharmacist. (Read nothing into this, girls - really. Sam, Gayé, the lot of yee, stop it. I’m warning you both - you’ll be barred). It’ll just be used for a few months for a special project. He’ll need to record this, that and the other, and run this and that report. Easy? Yeah, no problem. When do you reckon? Give me a couple of days. Great. Oh, but no mistakes ok - this drug he needs tracked has potentially lethal side-effects. Well no pressure there, eh.

Look, I don’t have anything worthy of a fully fledged post right at the minute so you’re stuck with a Snippet. And yeah, I know I can normally turn trivia into travesty, but I’m not up to it today. It’s wet and miserable out.

• The dog is particularly vociferous this morning. He’s running up and down, barking orders and guarding things. There’s something going on since the early hours over at the neighbour’s place. Building work or mass murder or something. I’m not going to check. It’s raining I told you. Maybe I should check. It’s not like him. He hates the rain and normally takes to his kennel, or huddles under the porch if the tom cat has commandeered it. Ah no, shur who’d be committing mass murder in weather like this. They’d have to be insane.

• I met up with the Butcher and the Barkeep briefly yesterday. Nice kids. Kiwis both. Doing their OE (overseas experience) bit and picked Ireland as their victim. She’s a sheep breeder and he’s a dairy farmer. That explains how she got a job cutting up meat but there’s not much milk served in Irish pubs. Now guess what. It was raining. And cold. They are both soaked and freezing in their T-shirts. How in the name of jayzez could you walk out and forget your coats on a day like this? We don’t have coats. We might need to buy some, you reckon? How the hell could anyone in their right mind come to Ireland and expect to spend 12 months here without a coat is beyond me.

• We had a couple in the local and watched the racing. A few lads arrived in after pheasant shooting. Any joy? asked the barman. Nope. We were out for hours and not a decent cock to be had. We rose a few but they weren’t worth bringing home. Bunch of young ones in here last night complaining about the same thing.

• I just finished a job for a customer and they want to know how many people are looking at their site. Hits or stats to you and me. Now we expected the readership to be pretty much IT illiterate and most pages carry foolproof instructions on where to click and what to do. In fact, one line that read hit C to Close had to be changed to hit the letter C on your keyboard to Close the window. I kid you not. Now here’s the real eye opener: Let’s say the site is called spoons.ie and is for a company that sells spoons. If you enter spoons into google.ie it appears on the first page. But the greatest number of visitors arriving already knew the domain name and yet still used Google to find it - they entered spoons.ie into Google instead of straight into the address bar. I am just amazed. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh.

See what I did there? 12A - Just in case any readers have triskaidekaphobia. I don’t personally, though I do have a fear of the number 19.99. You know when you press €20 on the ATM and it laughs at you saying bugger off, you have insufficient funds. Wouldn’t you think ATM’s with all the cash they have could spare one miserable little cent?

Sam’s back. Actually she back two days but I only noticed now. For those of you new to blogland go check out The Problem Child Bride. Read her back catalogue. You won’t be disappointed. If you are not happy, Lever Brothers will give you your money back.

I can’t find any of those Lever Brothers Surf ads from the nineties with Biddy from Glenroe, but this rip-off of one of them for a programme on RTÉ is even funnier*.

Oh, and the Kav lad is back too. Well, back-ish. He has a new phone though and that’s all that really matters. Newbies are advised to check him out too. Try his Greatest Shits section first and ease yourself in.

Speaking of back - I want my dog back. He’s deserted me for the builders. He never leaves their side. The proof is below. I had a private detective follow him for days. I’ll need all the help I can get in the doggie-divorce court.

*Actually it’s not funny at all unless you are familiar with the original TV ads.