Thomil's Random Ramblings

So, I had dinner with a close friend of mine a few weeks ago. The conversation was lengthy, heartfelt, and inevitably irreverent, even if the food was nothing special. Anyway, the conversation eventually turned to mobile phones and how lucky we’d been to experience them first taking hold in our last years of school. This gave me the chance to finally deliver a joke that I’d been holding on to for nearly twenty years, namely that those first phones were the only devices where men competed to see who had the smallest. Borderline puerile humour aside, that joke also got me thinking. Or was that the beer? Anyway, for most of the time that I’ve owned laptops or tablets, I’ve tended to gravitate toward the more compact ones on the market. My netbook, the Aspire One 110L from Acer, the EeePad Slider from Asus, my 11” MacBook Air, or even more recent devices such as the Microsoft Surface Go 2 or the 6 th Generation iPad mini have all been on the smaller side of the market. Granted, this was p...

You know, when I started blogging, I imagined writing about the latest gadgets, visits to some of the most remarkable places on this planet, or profound insights gained from an interesting life. And yet, here I am, thirteen years later, writing about bottles. Yeah… Anyway, questionable life choices aside, the topic at hand actually makes quite a lot of sense. No, really, hear me out before you call the men with the straitjackets. You see, when I first moved to Ireland, all the way back in 2012, one of the more jarring differences that I noticed between Ireland and Germany was the cavalier manner in which the locals here in Cork discarded bottles and cans all over the place. Back in Germany, I’d long since gotten used to the local Pfand return system for bottles and cans. I never really understood why such a system wasn’t in place here in Ireland. After all, it worked in Germany, and while it hadn’t eliminated the issue of bottle littering, it had certainly reduced it. Well, it has take...