The People Must Have a Voice!

Just found out from a loyal friend that our comments box was programmed for limited access. You had to register with blogger in order to vent your bile at us.
Our apologies, we had no idea. The last thing we wanted was to be elitist.

So, be assured that the comments access thingy has been disarmed (stop me if I’m getting too technical for you) and democracy has been restored. Anyone and their grandmother can now post blurbs directly. We look forward to hearing from you.

So come on then, go nuts.

And comment like the wind!

Dirty Old Men Need Love Too....

Right, time to break the rules and chat about work. Just want to see if all this hullabaloo about the risk of bloggers getting fired is all it’s cracked up to be.

As mentioned before, both Lung the Elder and I are teckies, but perhaps the nature of our technical expertise was not fully explained.

I am in point of fact a chemist. Not the friendly-pharmacy-on-the-corner type of chemist but more the in-league-with-the-Hoofed-One type. As such, I naturally spend most of my working week throwing rocks at solar panels, blinding laboratory rats and putting dioxins into baby food. Hey, it’s a living, whadayagonnado.

This week I was touring some of the charming industrial wastelands around Barcelona pedalling my company’s wares to dubious manufacturing firms. Accompanying me was Rodrigo, a representative of one of our US suppliers. Now Rodrigo is a really nice guy, full of energy and enthusiasm for the job. That’s fine for one day but after several days of his loud professional euphoria, I began to feel like I was trapped in an elevator with a hyperactive mariachi.

Our last meeting was on Thursday in a rusty outdated warehouse plant that had probably reached its zenith of productivity when I was in nursery school. Our meeting was in the office of the plant manager, a cosmetically challenged 60-year old with bad teeth and an oily comb-over who squinted at us suspiciously over his bifocals as if we were about to grab his desk calendar and run off with it.

The plant manager’s computer was on a desk behind him and from where I was sitting the screen was just in my line of view to the right of his head. Now the creepy thing is that the screen saver consisted of a flashing series of photos of a very, very young Anna Kournikova. Anna Kournikova stretching to return a service with her little tennis skirt flapping upwards. Anna Kournikova wincing after missing a shot. Anna Kournikova modelling summer wear. etc.

This made the whole interview very off-putting. I spent the whole time trying not to look over this guy’s shoulder, but shit, it was the last appointment of the day and I was pretty knackered and thus vulnerable to distraction from flashing images and let’s be honest, nubile Russian maidens. It was also difficult to look at this guy straight in the face. Not just because it was the type of face that only a mother could love, but because he might have guessed from my expression what I was thinking, which was basically ‘YOU FILTHY OLD BUGGER YOU'.

Fortunately, at these meetings I can usually let Rogrigo drone on while I phase out and let my mind go awandering. I began to ponder on how unforgiving society is of elderly men’s carnal appetites. Nothing would be more natural than a pimply adolescent ogling over a poster of Britney Spears in his bedroom but when we see a pensioner glancing admirably at a pretty young girl in the park our automatic reaction is a shake of the head and a tut tut.

It seems a little unfair. Most of us hope to reach a ripe old age someday and it would be nice to think that we can still appreciate an attractive member of the opposite sex with a certain amount of impunity. So right there and then I consciously decided not to judge this old geezer for his little bit of office decoration. It would also have been highly hypocritical considering I was gawking at it so much myself. Let yee be the ones to cast the first stone for I shall not condemn him..........

............even though the geriatric old pervert refused to buy anything from us.

Don't mind me. I'm just projecting...

Ah, sweet Sunday.

CS like any good Spanish girl, goes to her parent’s house for lunch every Sunday. I accompany her once every three Sundays or so. Just enough to be a dutiful son-in-law but not enough for me to feel as though I’m taking advantage of her mother’s superlative cooking.

And there is the added bonus of having the flat to myself for a few hours. Oh, the bliss.

What I do during these placid afternoons can be categorised into three sections, doing something uninterrupted, doing absolutely nothing uninterrupted and watching a flick that CS would never in a million years want to sit through. Today I had planned to indulge in the third of these activities and had pre-emptively rented ‘Open Till Dawn’ for the whole weekend. (never seen it, strangely enough)

Then tragedy struck.

First of all, it should be explained that when it comes to visual entertainment, CS and I are the most annoying, condescending guttersnipes that you’re ever likely to meet at a dinner party. When someone asks if we’ve heard the latest gossip about whatever plastic celebrity happens to be in vogue, we just look at them with a withering, superior smile and tell them that aaaaaaactually we don’t own a television. What makes the whole thing worth while is watching to the poor sod realise that he’s made himself looks like a peasant and desperately try to back-pedal his way out of it. It goes something like:

‘Oh, yeah, well good for you....television’s such crap after all.....and..em...I hardly watch it myself....er....wouldn’t own one if it wasn’t for the nature documentaries....and......the news and...... that programme about the arts, whassit called again?.... but it really is 99% garbage...so I usually prefer to read a book when I get home from work.......em...the wine’s good isn’t it?’

Man, we’re going to Hell just for that.

And what make us even more irritating is that if the conversation moves onto film, we get to tell everyone that we don’t go to the cinema much lately because we've got a DVD projector at home. Ha! What a pair of pretentious toadies we are!

Though it has to be said, the projector is pretty cool and it was half the price of a flat screen TV, so the one-upmanship doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. We bought it along with a dirt cheap home cinema just after our flatmate moved out and then converted his room into our own private ‘salon Lumierre’. It’s a triangular room so the DVD went into the closet, the speakers were hung round the ceiling and the gizmo itself got stuck on a shelf in the corner so that the image gets projected onto the hypotenuse wall. CS had just been given a double bed as a gift so that was added to the room and then she had to go and buy a pair of red velvet curtains so we could watch movies during the day. Basically it’s the most pornographic room you’re ever likely to see. All it needs is a mirror on the ceiling and some tacky flanged guitar music to get the Hugh Hefner seal of approval.

Anyway, back to tragic events.

There I was all geared up for the heady cocktail of Tarantino dialogue AND exploding vampires, when to my dismay the DVD refused to load. Upon ejecting the disk, I noticed that it had a clean crack from the centre to the circumference. Damn! So what now? Not only am I going to miss out on Selma Hayek strutting her stuff but they’re going to think that I broke the disk. Mark my words, they’ll try to pin the rap on me.

So in frustration I turned to the Internet to bewail my fate and that’s basically why this post is so long and drab. Sorry.

Hey! LtE informs me that we just got our first comment from a stranger. So shout out to Amanda B. Think of yourself as cutting a virtual ribbon Amanda. Cheers.

The Last Leg....

Another ration of highly intellectual dialogue between Lung the Elder, Manny and myself over three frothy bottles of pub nectar:


M: I’m telling you, guys. The time for making money in IT is over. Biotechnology is the next big earner.

LtY: Yeah, I’ve always figured that somebody should try to cross a chicken with a spider so that everyone at the table can have a drumstick. Although catching the bastard might be a bit of a problem.

LtE: But what if you just end up with a venomous bird?

M: Easy. Go for the military market..

LtE: Of course, if the experiment goes wrong you could sell it to some General or other and if it goes right you could sell it to Colonel Saunders.

LtY: Wow, just think of it. All drumsticks. You could call it the KFC Arachni-Bucket.


And so on and so forth……..Sigh.

Lung the Younger is Unwell

The management regrets to inform you that our star writer, Lung the Younger, is unwell. The rumors concerning the Speak-n-Spell and the sledgehammer are untrue.

He will be taking in the sea air, relaxing breezes, and soothing Veggie-valium shakes at the Jordi Puig Puig recuperation spa and clinic for the next few days.

In his regular spot, the management would like to offer you a dancing chicken:

(How we didn't get nominated for the Bloggies, I'll never know ...)

Eternal Shame of a Spotty Mind

The most embarrassing thing in the UNIVERSE is to make some sort of orthographical error while posting comments on someone else’s blog. It would be nice to be able to say that it’s all the fault of my feckin’ Spanish spellchecker which has an infuriating habit of fiddling with the words even as I type them.

But no.

There is no excuse.

The ugly truth is that I’m the saddest excuse of a semi-literate, dyslexic ignoramus that was ever spat out of the far end of the catholic educational system.

And just to compound the problem, it’s common knowledge that most of the decent blogs are piloted by people who work in either publishing, journalism or publicity. Yes, people who actually know how to SPELL and who love to pounce on cretins like me with their perfect syntax, scathing hot remarks and sabre sharp tongues. Some of them are even professional EDITORS for Christ’s sake. Oh, God.

And it’s all up there forever, my shame, clear as day for them to snipe at and I can’t change anything because it’s not my blog, so…so…

So I run and hide and thank God for the blessed anonymity of the Internet.

But no.

Vain gobshite that I am, I had to link the comment back to my own blog. So they can follow me home. All those EDITORS gathering around my blog like a SWAT team surrounding a hijacked bus. Well don’t think we’re going to make it easy for you. I may not be able to spell but when it comes to ridicule, I can give as good as I take.

….so bring it on!