RoryQ

What's Elijah Craig 12 year old like / similar to? Saw it lately at a goodish price.

Now I feel like St. Patrick's day is over. Yesterday and the day before were lunchtime until nighttime pub crawls. I'm so hungover my face feels a little numb right now.

Yep.. There was a roughly zero percent chance of me putting together a blog from yesterday. Anything that had moving parts and was breakable was left at home. We got trounced in the rugby by England. To be honest I don't subscribe to the theory that it was worse because it was the English that did it - I think the Welsh were much more annoying winners. Friday was all craft beer. Saturday I stuck to Guinness all day. Today is a day of rest. Tomorrow evening, Tuesday and Wednesday ... Back at it for some more of the same.

ChrisvK - I think most people find their shoulder press is the slowest thing to progress - that's where fractional plates come in handy (presuming you're referring to something that vein when you mention shoulder strength). It's great that you're enjoying your training. That first phase of strength training where you're seeing big gains in a comparatively short space of time is awesome. I'm about a month into GVT and pretty happy with it. Feeling quite wiped after the upper body days, very little assistance work getting done. I'm getting in 2-3 sessions a week, alternating between upper and lower body.

@dcostello - I'm looking forward to that one. Sometimes I think Whedon can be a bit up his own ass and too focused on his pet issues... But on the other hand, I really liked Firefly, a lot of Buffy etc. He's a creative guy. Watched Tropa de Elite (sp?) / Elite Squad again during the week. Awesome.

Well, reviewing progress:- Finished my backpiece with Ching, which is grand. I'll probably still get tattooed by Chris Smith in Chicago in June, but for the moment there's no sign of Chad Koeplinger coming back to Ireland. I've had my mind on bringing my sleeves down for a bit, but that's gone on the back burner a little because I've ended up booking in to be tattooed by Tomo at Yellow Blaze in November. That's super-exciting and hopefully we're going to do something fairly epic - still ironing out the details. Anyway, I'm more or less saving for that now and will see about the sleeves either afterwards or in 2013.

It's St. Patrick's Weekend. The All-Ireland Beerfest is on. Ireland play England in the Rugby on Saturday. One of my oldest friends is flying in, and I'm off work. That, my friends, is what we call a PERFECT STORM. 'All your beer are belong to us'.

Drank Trouble Brewing 'Dark Arts' porter last night. It's the opposite of a normally Irish stout - malty not dry. Not sure how I feel about the Harry Potter name.

He's a good tattooer. I think I've met him a couple of times when I was in Deluxe. Big beard?

Ardbeg Shop Ardbeg Double Barrel This is the one I mentioned above - it appears I've been missing a few 'zeros' when I read the price in the store (it's in a protective glass cabinet). Or else there's a hell of a deal to be had downstairs.

I think one of the better inexpensive bourbons is 'Rebel Yell'? Not tried it, though. I think that's a Tesco one. BTW I mainly use bourbon for Old Fashioneds as well ... Possibly not the purest use for them. If I'm drinking something neat or with a little water I'm more likely to reach for the Scotch. If you are into bitters you should check out The Bitter Truth offerings ... creole bitters, celery bitters, chocolate bitters... Some interesting stuff.

There's a $1700 dollar bottle of Arbeg in the off-licence downstairs from our appartment. It comes in a special 'gun case', a log-book for noting measures and dates (to keep track of your ridiculously expensive whisky, I guess) with a pair of silver drinking cups.... If I won the lottery....

Maker's Mark : A good 'go to' bourbon ... Boring, but sadly my favourite at the moment. Woodford Reserve : Doesn't do it for me, actually a little TOO refined. Buffalo Trace : Viscious, satisfying. Four Roses : Grand, but I was a bit underwhelmed the one time I tried it. Must revisit it. Haven't gotten around to Bulleit in many years so that's possibly next on my list. I've seen the Elijah Craig too - looks interesting. It's Tennesse sour mash, AFAIK, as opposed to bourbon, but some of Jack Daniels' more expensive offerings are pretty good - I think the Silver select? Jim Murray picks out the good ones in his guides. This sounds disgusting, but I want to try out some of the cheap Bourbon from Lidl and Aldi. Some of their whiskeys they stock here are actually brewed by really good Irish distillers like Cooley. They're cheap but they're not nasty. I gather that in the US there are regulations governing the distilling of bourbon now which are supposed to mean that even the 'bad' bourbons out there aren't supposed to be that bad, in terms of the distilling process, time spent etc.

Interesting to re-read this thread. I don't think I have ever given anyone as open-ended a remit as 'Tattoo whatever you would like to', but I haven't given super-detailed instructions either. I guess, as an early response mentions, a factor is that many of us on the forum are probably likely to be going to particular artists having an idea of what sort of work they appear to like doing and be proficient at. That said, I did think hard about how to approach picking a rough idea for my backpiece, because the potential iconography was so wide and there were a few things I knew I definitley didn't want. Which artist I was going to go with tweaked it slightly... I originally thought about subject matter from a Kuniyoshi or Yoshitoshi print... But then when I decided I wanted to get something from Ching (who's Taiwanese) that didn't seem appropriate any more and I was opting for him because I perceived him to be doing something 'different' from the norm anyway. So I gave him a rough shortlist of 'things I thought were cool' ... I think I mentioned water, birds, windbars, flowers, large-scale buddha heads and strong black and grey contrasts. He picked and chose and mailed me back and suggested a big Guan Yin design - and that was basically it. The representation of Guan Yin was down to him, suggesting a parable involving a 'disciple bird'. I think I ended up with something that he was creatively interested in, and which gave him a fair amount of a free hand... But I had at least staked out some rough parameters. Doing the same thing at the moment via E-mail with another artist - working out a rough ballpark of ideas and hopefully they will be interested in tattooing something in there...

Thanks guys. In future I'll try and only upload or link to smaller sized images, maybe that will avoid the problem.

Congratulations man, that's great news. Best of luck with it all. The business with the panther and the mock attack sounds very funny.

Hi guys- I uploaded a picture of my backpiece and for some reason (presumably because it was a big file) it turned 90 degrees. How can I edit it or turn it the right way up?

He's definitley on my list. If he's back in Ireland soon, as promised, then hopefully...

Here's our man with the 2,900lb leg press, selling his own patented programme- 'Project Dragon'. If you view it, just be aware that those are several minutes of your life you will never get back. In my second week of GVT. So far so good. I expected DOMS, but not as crippling as anticipated. Sleeping like a log.

They took the picture down in the end - I think it was up for about an hour and a half. Possibly never to see the light of day again.

An Irish craft brewery called 8 Degrees just put this picture up on their facebook page, part of a mini-promotional they're doing for an Irish craft brewing festival. 43 minutes up and so far they've got about ten negative comments - women coming out of the woodwork calling them out on sexist marketing, saying it's boring and predictable etc. I have a degree of sympathy with where the women are coming from if I think about it objectively, but the brewery is run by two male australian immigrants - I'm not sure they'll get much satisfaction from them! At the least the models are drinking full pints and not halves....

I see Pabst tallboys are having a moment with the hipsters over here - they're all drinking them in various pop-up restaurants in Dublin right now. I know Pabst are considered old-school but not a 'craft' brewer ... What's it taste like?

@dirbab - really nice, lately I've been digging trad style daggers.... Some re-jigging of my get-tattooed schedule for the rest of the year. I know I am going to be in Japan in November and had been dithering about who to get tattooed by (or whether to get tattooed at all) - too many amazing artists to choose from, really. I ended up opting to try and synch it with my GF's sessions in Yellow Blaze, so I rang the shop yesterday morning and ended up having a chat with Shige. Long story short, I'm going to have a consultation with Tomo and squeeze in something ;).

You'd probably need to stop driving and give up work to do it properly. I think you've have a problem distinguishing yourself from an actual alcoholic after a few days of drinking at breakfast time. Although I guess you'd be nice and thin.