What is a “Twink”?

This question recently came up on a list I’m on, and one person was tickled enough by it that he suggested I “publish” it.  By your command, edited for blogability…

It’s shorthand for “Twinkie&rdquo — which we all know is golden sponge cake with cream filling, light and fluffy and full of preservatives and pretty much nutrition free, but (to some people) oh so yummy.

Ergo, a “twink&rdquo is light and fluffy and full of cream (and often blond, and usually gay), without a lot of substance to him, but (to some people) oh so yummy.  A male airhead, like, you know?  (And I’m sure that somewhere, female twinks are referenced, too.  Probably letter-shifted to “twynks”.)

It used to be almost always a derogatory term, but these days, I gather it’s a mark of pride for some boys.  (It’s still a negative term in my book, though.  I never use it as a favorable reference.)

Ireland: Dublin (part 3)

7:17 pm, Dublin (at the hotel)

The Irish Stew was mediocre – underseasoned and soupy – but the side salad, a mix of green salad and slaw, was pretty good. And the bread & butter pudding with hot custard was quite yummy.

I’ve taken over 120 video snippets so far on the trip, amounting to 20 MB of space, somewhere around 90 minutes of video, I suspect, ranging from 3-4 seconds up to 8 minutes. I’m going to be editing this stuff forever! (Actually, I’ll try to do minimal editing, just chopping useless seconds from the start and end. I’ll stitch a bunch of the short pieces together into longer bits, with interstitial headings, probably ending up mostly 30 second to 2 minutes each, which will make for better YouTube viewing and will keep me from embedding 100 videos in my blog.)

Ireland: Killarney to Mallow to Dublin, and in Dublin (part 3)

10:11 pm, Dublin (at the hotel)

Wandered down to the Liffey and hit Forbidden Planet.  Came back with a dozen miscellaneous back issue from their overstock bin at 25 cents each, and a copy of Justice League Legends, reprinting part of “The Lightning Saga” and a couple issues of Justice, including a new cover for my anal-retentive Legion collection.

If you don’t want to know details of my sexual escapades, just skip the next paragraph.

I hooked up with a Dublin guy early in the evening via Manhunt. (He’s actually from “the north”; don’t know if that means Belfast/Northern Ireland or not.) Ended up as and interesting encounter: he asked me to put on some of my leather – I only brought a vest and some boots, to keep the weight down – and that plus a nice fat dick made him want me to fuck him.  No problem. Except that he’d never been fucked before (and hadn’t done much fucking himself, I gather; I guess he was mostly an oral guy). Fat dick + cherry ass = probably quite he memorable time for him.  (Moreso because of the piercing. I only have the 6-gauge curved barbell in, so nothing nearly so dramatic as if the 2-gauge ring were in, but still, multiple new sensations for him!) Did he like it? Not sure; he had some definite pain, and he didn’t know what he should be feeling (and I could barely tell him, it’s been 18 years since I was in that place), but he stuck with it like a trooper and eventually decided he just needed to jam himself on down. (First time I’ve deflowered a guy, to my knowledge. He took it easier than some have, though!)

After that, I headed back into Temple Bar – past the actual Temple Bar, in fact and had dinner at a Chinese fast food place (duck in plum sauce) and then a Nutella and ice cream crepe and coffee for dessert.  On the way back, stopped in the Temple Bar Trading Co. shop, or the side that was open, which was all Guinness stuff.  Mugs, chocolates, refrigerator magnets, sure.  Soccer balls, rugby balls, t-shirt, okay.  Soft-boiled egg cups? Slippers?  Underwear?  Oy! (Or is that “Oi!”?)

My mother observed that she wasn’t picking up the Irish accent as readily as she has with other accents on past trips.  Me either, and that surprised me at first, although I’ve noticed it creeping in more the last couple days.  I suspect it’s because we’ve had three of us to reinforce each other’s American speech modes. Now that I’m on my own, I’ll be picking it up much faster, I’m sure.

I’ll be heading out to the pubs in a bit.

Ireland: Killarney to Mallow to Dublin, and in Dublin (part 1)

12:25 pm, Killarney to Dublin (on the train)

Yesterday’s trip took us toward Cork, to Blarney Castle (and the Blarney Stone), probably the most famous tourist attraction in Ireland.  We drove toward Cork, then took the scenic route on the north side of Inishcarra reservoir, then into Blarney, where we had lunch.

Blarney Castle has large grounds, the castle ruins, a “rock close” (a garden path through some large boulders), and a manor house built a couple hundred years ago.  There are several stops and viewpoints around the grounds, explaining various history bits, including a cave with alleged tunnels to Cork, Kerry, and the lake; the dungeon, likely castle well, and kennel; the lake, where valuable gold plate was said to be tossed to keep it from the hands of the British (the lake was drained in the 1800s, but no sign of the plate was ever found); the lookout tower, and so forth.

Perhaps the most striking aspect was how small the castle actually was. A basement and an entry room; rooms for the Earl, his daughters, and the priest; a “family room”; a banquet hall; a kitchen no larger than my own; and a couple garderobes (privies).  That’s it.  Presumably any guards and staff were housed outside the castle, but the image of one housing dozens of people inside is completely blown away.

Being there in February, the manor house was closed to tours, the rock close was technically closed as they were building a new boardwalk for it, but by going up the exit steps, I was able to get in and see all I wanted to.  In truth, there probably should have been a reduced entry free, since perhaps 1/3 of the site was unavailable. On the other hand, one of the guidebooks showed the line to kiss the Blarney Stone in spring or summer, with people lined up solid all around the battlements and around the banquet hall below. In contrast, while I was in the castle proper, there were maybe a dozen others in there as well, such that I could go to any part and linger or backtrack as desired.  And since Mom and Grandma couldn’t negotiate much in terms of steps well, and were getting a bit worn down by all the driving, I don’t think we would have done much more there if it were available.

And yes, I did kiss the Blarney Stone.  With that added gift of eloquence, now you’ll never get me to shut up.

We returned via Mallow and Rathmore, then stopped at the Lidl (closer to a Fred Meyer, perhaps, than anything else in the Northwest; grocery store plus some other stuff) to get the making for dinner. I made pork chops, quiche lorraine (okay, baked a pre-made one of those), and beets, plus strawberry trifle cups for dessert.

Friday morning came a bit earlier, as I made oatmeal and scrambled eggs with bacon (ham) and bits of pork chops I had salvaged the night before, pre-cooking. And then a scramble (heh) to the train. The ticket to Dublin was €33 ($50, about the same as a ticket from Portland to Vancouver BC, maybe), purchased from the Irish Rail website; purchased at the station, it would have been €62!

The more I’ve travelled in recent years, the bigger a fan I’ve become of using public transportation — the El in Chicago, busses and subway in New York — but cross-country rail is a whole different level. But it’s been an enjoyable trip — except for the persistent rattle in something above the window next to me.  The cars are clean and modern, with little tables and even a food service cart coming through the aisle. (It’s also a faster trip than by car, I think, with only two stop between Mallow and Dublin.) Miles and miles of green Irish countryside going by, nothing much to see.

We should be in Dublin in 30-40 minutes, I think, and then I’ll catch a cab or bus to Lynam’s hotel on O’Connell Street, where I’ll be for the next couple nights. I’m going to try to start shifting my schedule back around the clock, staying up late tonight, sleeping late tomorrow, and staying up late and probably sleeping very little on Saturday night, so that I’ll knock out on the plane to Amsterdam and then back to Seattle. I’m scheduled back in Seattle at 2:30 pm. The aim being, then to wake up the equivalent of late morning on Sunday (like I usually would) and being back to something close to my usual weekend schedule, minimizing the jetlag coming back. We’ll see.

I’ve got the starts of a couple play sessions for this evening set up already, although how well they’ll play through remains to be seen.  (As is always the case with such.)  Being “fresh meat” in Dublin will probably help boost them to working, of course.  First one will likely be 6:30 pm or so.  A lot will depend on Internet access at the hotel or close by.

Ireland: Killarney, Tralee, and the Dingle Peninsula (part 2)

11:45 pm, Killarney (at the kitchen table)

It was very windy and rainy all day.  The most dramatic part of the day’s trip was the drive over Connor Pass, down into Dingle.  Very rocky, and only one lane for a couple miles, which included a very tight squeeze past a van coming down in the other direction; now I know the meaning of “wide spot in the road”!  Probably a good thing that there was no visibility off the side of the road due to major fog/clouds, so we couldn’t see what were avoiding falling off into.

We stopped in Dingle for gas and snacks, deciding not to go out on the loop at the tip of the peninsula, figuring that it was so icky, we wouldn’t really enjoy it.  On the way back, we stopped near Inch, where the wind was whipping Dingle Bay (right off the Atlantic) into a frenzy.  We tried to have lunch in Castlemaine, but the pub advertising “Good Food Served Daily” apparently had a different meaning of “Daily” in mind than we did.  We ended up with Fish & Chips at an Irish fast food chain joint called Micko’s in Kilorglin; I also had “curry fries”, fries with a glop of curry gravy on them.  (Pretty good, actually.  Not that far from poutine, I’m sure.)

(“Kil” – “Cill” in the Irish – means “church”.  Nothing to do with a battle site or anything like that.)

I have a couple rules when traveling:

• You can eat at any restaurant, even the lowliest dive or chain restaurant, but you can’t eat at any one (or any chain) twice.
• And you can’t eat at any place that you could eat at when at home.

So no Burger King or Subway, but White Castle and Long John Silver’s (or Micko’s) are fine if you’re from the Northwest.  I make an exception for “necessity foods” like coffee – Starbucks is fine anywhere (although if there a chain like Caribou, I frequent it instead of Starbucks when in Chicago and DC).  I also sometimes make an exception for brunch vs. dinner (in places where there are not a lot of breakfast options), since the meals tend to be so different.

Almost nothing was open in Killarney at 8:30 on a Monday night, and we didn’t want anything horribly fancy.  We ended up at a local Chinese place.  I can’t get Mom and Grandma to do Indian (which is why I went ahead and had the Chicken Curry for lunch yesterday and the Curry Fries today).  At the supermarket, I noticed Uncle Ben’s (apparently the same brand as in the States) has Curry and Korma sauces here.  I wonder if I can get those in Washington?

Other food experiments today were an apple soda called Cidona (not worth trying again) and a Moro bar, chocolate around caramel around a chocolate and crunch (malt?) center (pretty good).

Finally got my e-mail program set up to send and receive.  Good thing, since there were 90 items with the work e-mail on Thursday-Sunday, and 280+ on one work-related list I’m on that I’ll have to wade through in big ass chunks.  I also started posting these blog entries, with retro timestamps to echo when they were written, not when they were uploaded.

Checked out just what “black pudding” is via Wikipedia (blood sausage; blood plus fillers like oatmeal).  I had it a couple days ago and ate it (because one must try things like that when travelling, right?); it was okay, but nothing I’d write home about.  (Oops, too late!)  I also looked up “craic”, a term I’ve seen used by Irish boys on a couple cruise sites.  It’s nothing kinky, seems to mean roughly “fun”  – “I’m a young, craic guy” – and comes from the same root as “crack”, a term we rarely use that way in English any more.

Tomorrow will probably be the Beara Peninsula, I think, or maybe Blarney Castle and other areas near Cork, although my mother has no interest in actually going into Cork or other cities.  If the weather is clear, we might do the Ring of Kerry rather than waiting for later in the week, lest it rain again.

Ireland: Killarney and Kenmare

6:40 pm, Killarney (at the kitchen table)

Today, we drove down to Kenmare, through the Killarney National Park.  We stopped at Lough Leane and walked up to the Torc Waterfall, then travelled further along.  The roads were incredibly narrow and winding, and the speed markings were as high as 100 km/h (60 mph), absolutely ridiculous for those roads; 40 km/h (25 mph) would have been more appropriate.  Later on, we stopped at Ladies View, named for the reaction that Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting had when viewing the Lakes of Killarney from that spot.

Kenmare was a nice little town.  We had lunch and stopped into a linen and lace shop and into two wool shops.  Kenmare is on the Ring of Kerry drive, so we’ll go through there again later in the week.

Driving back, we took what looked on the map to be a lesser road, but we knew it couldn’t be any worse than what we had been on.  Indeed, it was technically longer (length-wise) than the N7 through the park, but only took us half the time due to much easier road.

We stopped at the grocery store again for snacks for tonight and a few other things.  Included in this purchase: Nutella, and honeycomb ice cream.  Never had them before.  (Nutella is chocolate-flavored hazelnut butter, next to the peanut butter; not nearly as flexible as peanut butter due to the cocoa in it.  Honeycomb ice cream is honey flavored with crunchy bits of toffee or seafoam or some such.  Yummy.)

Going to definitely get into town to the Internet café tonight.