Thomil's Random Ramblings

You know, I haven’t done one of those off-the-cuff blog posts in a while, you know, ones where I just write what I think without delusions of grandeur or pseudo-profound insights. So I figured why not make this post one of them? That’s why I originally started blogging all those many years ago anyway. If there’s one thing that I’ve noticed over the ten years that I’ve run both this blog and my German blog, it’s the inexorable rise of comment scammers.  I first noticed them a few years ago, after my trip to Dubai back in 2016, which is hardly surprising given that my Dubai trip report is still one of the most successful article series on my blog five years later. I’ll be the first to admit that I originally kept a few of the less obnoxious examples of these things around on my blog in order to drive up interaction and hopefully also make my blog more attractive to the Google algorithm. I’ve since taken a more hard-line approach to them, deleting them whenever I see them pop up in m...

Red Bull. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they sure know how to put up a show. At least that’s what the PR teams from the Austria based sugar water manufacturers would like us to believe. Red Bull Air Race, Project Stratus, or whatever other stunt the guys from Fuschl am See try to cook up, they look amazing. So when the announcement came that the Red Bull Soapbox Race would be coming to Cork, the excitement was palpable throughout the city. After all, it would be the first world-class event in Cork since the Bruce Springsteen concert in Parc ui Chaoimh back in 2014. Sandwiched in between the Ocean to City Race on Saturday and the Cork City marathon on Bank Holiday Monday, it promised to be one hell of a weekend in June. Well, the Ocean to City Race, opening event of the 2016 Cork Harbour Festival delivered all that and more. Fun, some great sporting achievements, and most of all, a good view of the action. It really left me feeling excited for the Red Bull event the coming day. That event, how...