Hungarian tourist board faces fake shark accusation

Dad brought a page of the Budapest Times back from Hungary for me to read. Couldn’t help posting it. Ireland definitely needs more reporters like this.

Montenegro shark “Hungarian ruse”

Hungarian Tourist Board operatives have been dressing up as sharks and patrolling seaside resorts in Montenegro in an effort to encourage tourists to holiday at Lake Balaton, the Montenegrin government alleged last week.

Sharks have been sighted off the coast of the popular holiday destination over the last few weeks, leading in one case to a lifeguard - who witnesses say looked a lot like Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff except in tighter shorts - frantically ordering people out of the water. However, government spokesman Slobodan Mladic claimed the “sharks” were nothing of the sort.

Something fishy in the wate

“We have credible information that Zsolt Zoltán, a local employee of the Hungarian Tourist Board and well-known agitator for affordable weekend breaks at Lake Balaton, is responsible,” said Mladic. “We believe he has in fact fashioned a shark fin using empty cereal boxes, sticky-backed plastic and some model aircraft paint, strapped it to his back and taken to snorkelling around the beaches. He is clearly trying to scare people into holidaying in Hungary.”

Mladic produced records showing that Zoltán had rented out all three Jaws movies from the local video store in the week preceding the first shark sighting. “This clearly proves that Zoltán was researching how to fake a shark attack,” said Mladic. “I’m not sure which Jaws film it was in – probably the first one, as the other two were rubbish and I fell asleep during them – but I distinctly remember a scene where a teenager pretends to be a shark to frighten some large-breasted girls into having sex with him.”

“I think he then gets his leg bitten off, but I suppose that’s not relevant,” Mladic continued.

Zoltán denied the allegations, saying that he did not have to go to such lengths to attract people to Balaton: “With its crystal-clear waters, top-class accommodation, wonderful food and copious amounts of women in tiny thongs, Balaton is clearly a holiday destination that needs no promotion. Just look at the beautiful pictures in this free flyer.”

Zoltán just a pervert, not agent

Zoltán did admit to renting out the Jaws trilogy, but said that he simply got a perverse kick out of watching monsters kill people in increasingly gratuitous, pointless and bloody ways.

“I also rented out Friday the Thirteenth last week, but that doesn’t mean I’m planning on donning a hockey mask and brutally butchering holidaymakers with various sharp implements in an attempt to create a mass exodus from the shabby, poor quality Montenegrin resorts to the paradise that is Balaton,” he said. “Having said that, there is a good deal on chainsaws down at the local DIY store.”

Original article at the Budapest Times

Limerick OpenCoffeeClub

Just back from the Limerick OpenCoffeeClub meetup in the Absolute Hotel. Had a great time, met loadsa cool folks, got away with a nifty TouristR t-shirt and saw the work of a marketing team who have not been to Limerick recently:

All in the same day!

We hung around in the bar initially as people trickled in. Patrick and I got chatting to some of the other early attendees. Met lots of fellow EI-haters (always fun!) and also spent lots of time with the TouristR crowd. Conor, Jan and Juanita are making a really cool site. They also have a mascot for their site called TR who’s reminiscent of the reddit alien and changes for every country. Lovable little feller.

After a while we went into the Brainbox room, and talked about Auctomatic and our experiences in the valley. It was cool giving the chat to all the Limerick OCC attendees, but the awesome thing was Conn O’Muineachain streamed it live to Ustream.tv (link).

Once or twice people posted questions for us on the live Ustream chat. I could feel the head inflating!

We also got to chat about Smalltalk, Seaside, and how incredible they are for building web applications. Hopefully we may have sparked some interest in the subject. Who knows, maybe Limerick might evolve into the first big Seaside hub - three more converts and Limerick will have the largest concentration of seaside developers in the world!

Patrick managed to make it through the whole chat without hating on Rails too much. You could say Auctomatic has a love-hate relationship with Rails - I love it, Patrick hates it. I think he suffered some deep emotional trauma from an RDBMS in his earlier years and still hasn’t gotten over it. I like Rails for being able to write my code in TextMate instead of a VM (and not having to end lines with semicolons like certain other languages who shall remain nameless). As Harj said: “I want to be able to type rails foo and make it seem like I’ve done lots of work”.

Afterwards, we hung out in the cafe. It was cool to be able to drink smoothies talk to lots of people who I’d previously only known from their twitters!

In other news, I’ve just gotten my provisional license so hopefully I’ll be able to drive to the next Limerick OCC meeting in two weeks time!