Dave Jackson

3-1 for everton. Good stuff. They’ve still got a perfect record for matches I’ve attended. And now to start drinking for serious.

2 goals for the everton. Good start.

Wine on tap! This place is hard core.

Two points in, at the second pub. Thinking of food. Still trending in a worrying direction.

In Liverpool for the football today. 9:30 first pint. Could be messy.

For reasons that I won’t go into here (because I don’t know what they are) Northern Ireland banks are allowed to print their own money, which are exchangeable at par for UK pounds:

Apparently in 2004 back when banks buying other banks seemed like a good idea, a Danish bank by the name of Danske Bank purchased Northern Bank. Which leads to a slight odd proposition, that of a foreign bank having the right to print UK £ notes. But they were still called Northern Bank, and so I guess people reconciled themselves to that dissonance. However recently plans have been announced to rebrand Northern Bank to Danske Bank. And I heard on the radio that they are going to withdraw their Northern Bank notes, and are currently in negotiations with the Treasury to start printing Danske bank notes. Which I think we can all agree is weird, to be paying for things in the UK with a Danske bank note. I hope their made of lego (Danske is a Danish bank apparently).

An interesting addendum to this story. In 2004 the IRA (unconfirmed) robbed £26.5 million from the main Northern Bank branch in Belfast, which is still the largest bank robbery in UK and Irish history. However about half of that was in unused Northern Bank notes (plastic notes apparently, like they have in Australia), so the bank simply never used those issued those notes as currency, leaving the robbers with £10 million in the equivalent of fancy monopoly money. The bank robbery is still unsolved.

Ella was trying her hardest to get us to go the the ‘Summer Park’ this past weekend. The only catch was that we had no idea where this park was, or what was in it. She just knows that she’s been there, and it is magical. Here is a video of me trying to figure out what park she’s talking about:

As you can see, we had limited success. There are no panda bears in Northern Ireland. So we went to Streamdale open farm, which has no panda bears, bears, or penguins, but does have some mice. And ice cream. So she was happy in the end.

One for the good news department for me, but bad news department for horses. I won the office sweep for the Grand National over the weekend, turning my £3 investment into a whopping £17.50. Woohoo! It was the closest ever finish with the winner, Neptune Collanges, winning by only an inch or two. Very exciting.

But two horses died in the race, including the odds-on favourite Synchronised (which I also had in the pool). So that’s not good. The race is pretty mental, forty horses all racing at the same time, jumping over large fences, racing four miles. This year only 15 of the starting 40 horses managed to finish the race with their rider still on board (it’s pretty common for riderless horses to just carry on racing once they’ve ditched their passenger). This year’s deaths were no freak accident either, two horses died last year, and more or less a horse has died every other year before that. So as exciting as it is for the spectators, it’s probably even more exciting for the horses, just not in a good way.

Still, I made £14.50 off it so let’s call the whole thing a wash.

What the hell? Iceland is considering adopting the Loonie as their currency? Madness. Are they going to back their Loonies with Sigur Ros’s back catalog?