Five Things I Learned In Dublin

1. Irish pelican crossings are awesome.  They start off with a laser noise straight out of Buck Rogers, and shift into a repeating burble most reminiscent of giant ants scurrying around in '50s B movies.  There's also a yellow man in-between his two more famous colleagues, though he doesn't really bring anything to the party.
2. If you tell a Dublin folk singer you're from County Durham (which I'm not, but close enough), his first response will be to demand you shut down Sellafield.  I mean, I'm not completely against the idea of invading Cumbria, but...
3. The coming-next-year Guinness Lager Black is terrible, far and away the worst lager I've ever tasted. Saying that, it's still less hideously undrinkable than Guinness itself, so I suppose that's progress.
4. The largest pint glass in the world has a capacity of 14.3 million pints.  Whether one is enraged by the liberties this takes with the English language, or is relieved to have escaped the monumentally ugly phrase "pint-glass shaped glass" is a personal choice.  Either way, said glass has openings every few metres, so it's totally fucking useless independent of linguistic convention.  Damn fine view from the top, though:

5. There is a peacock roaming Dublin zoo that's become a sufficiently permanent fixture to be given a name: Percy. In the early afternoon he can be found among the Humboldt penguins, stealing their food.  I'm not sure all the tail feathers in the world are going to get him laid when he comes at peahens with his stinky fish breath, but ornithological mating rituals are somewhat out of my wheelhouse.