The Lung Brothers

Obits and Pieces: Nº. 5 Lluis Rivera’s Barber Shop

2012-01-29T20:04:00.001+01:00

Forgive me for returning to this old chestnut but we bloggers are an emotional sort and when I saw that Lluis had shut up shop, I was so crestfallen that quill had to be set to parchment or at the very least, cursor to doc.

Sr. Rivera’s was where I first went to get my hair cut when I arrived in Barcelona almost half a lifetime ago and I continued to give it patronage throughout the next decade. In fact, the very few times for circumstantial reasons that I had to get sheared somewhere else, it always felt like a betrayal. You see, apart from being my barber and an impeccable gentleman, Don Lluis was also my unofficial professor of Catalan, philosophy, folklore and etiquette.

Once every five weeks or so I would make my pilgrimage to Carrer Llibreteria, a very picturesque medieval street tucked away behind the cathedral and if I was lucky, there’d be a few people waiting and I could sit back and enjoy the banter. There was very little that was fancy or modern about the place, simple white tile on the walls, sturdy wooden shelves and seats and maybe a propane heater in winter.

Lluis never wore the standard white uniform of the barber nor an apron, just a plain shirt open at the neck and a pair of slacks. At first, he used to always have an unlit cigar butt stuck in the corner of his mouth but eventually gave that up. I always suspected that it was the same cigar and that he’s since had it stuffed and mounted in a glass case in his home. He also had the habit of snipping his scissors in the air between cuts, a tick that would have seemed menacingly Sweeney Toddish had it been anybody else but Lluis.

The man knew my scalp like a seasoned cartographer and was never fazed by the double crown or the cable-like consistency of my follicles. He’d casually slice through clumps of the unruly fibers, converting my shaggy mop into a neat and dapper piece of topiary. The fact that I liked my hair short was always appreciated. Once a Canadian backpacker with a shoulder-length bob popped his head in the door and asked for a trim. Lluis (with a little translation help from yours truly) gently directed the lad down the street to his competition. He then looked at me in the mirror, shrugged and said “Aquet no era client meu.” – basically “That wasn’t a customer for me.” Slight disapproval in his tone but ever vulgar, always respectful.

The atmosphere in the establishment could best be described as ‘traditional male’. Honestly, if there was a woman present, she was usually a mother accompanying a kid waiting for a trim. Quite often the majority of people sitting in the shop wouldn’t even be customers. Many of the old lads who lived in the neighbourhood would just drift in and sit down for a chat, probably getting a break from their wives. And when I say ‘male’, I don’t mean sexist. The conversations ranged from football, politics, local gossip, weather, bloody tourists to (of course) women, with each man taking his turn to hold court with his opinions but always with an air of dignity. Lluis who was the unofficial chairman of any debate, wouldn’t have allowed any crude talk in his place of work. I have a huge fondness for listening to elderly men imparting the wisdom of the experience that they have accumulated over their lifetimes. That’s not to say I believe or agree with all of it. It’s often bollocks but fun to listen to nonetheless. I still remember Lluis gazing melancholically out of his shop window onto the narrow streets of the Gothic Quarter and saying “This isn’t a real neighbourhood anymore it’s a theme park for tourists.” It’s a line I have stolen and used myself on many occasions.

Please don’t get the impression however that Don Lluis was a dusty old dinosaur. Like all true gentlemen, he could rise to the occasion and surprise you when you least expected. During my first summer here I was visited by the “Chicas Alegres", a couple of Irish girls who were going to crash for a week and ended up staying for the whole summer. And when I say a couple, I mean a couple. V and S were what Lung the Elder and I referred to as “aw-lesbians” because when you told a guy that they were gay, he would inevitably go “Aawww!” Both of them were pretty damn cute.

Now S had a head of hair that most girls would give their hind teeth for. Pitch black and silky, it fell in perfect ringlets to her slim shoulders. So it came as a surprise to everyone when she decided to get rid of it and actively seek a buzz cut. When they inquired as to where I usually went to get cropped, I was a little hesitant to point them towards Lluis’ shop. It was hard to envisage these two pale exotic creatures with their black platform sandals and dog collars, walking through the front door to the withering stare of the proprietor. It turned out that I had underestimated all three of them.

On returning to the apartment, both girls were all smiles and compliments about Lluis. He had apparently greeted them with mild surprise but zero hostility and this turned into a wide welcome when they mentioned that they were friends of mine. When V (who spoke Spanish) explained what they were there for, Lluis balked and touching S’s glossy curls with reverence, begged them not to do it. But V was nothing if not persuasive and after a little bit of gentle egging on, he set to work with the electric clippers wincing a little with every stroke. However, by the end of the exercise, Lluis was tilting his head to one side and saying “Actually that’s not half bad.” My admiration for the man grew even more.

I imagine that he’s happily retired now and hopefully has found somewhere of his own to sit and chat about nothing in particular. The sad thing is that his old shop is now one of those innumerable tacky souvenir stalls where a Pakistani shopkeeper will sell you a brightly colored Mexican hat, an injection- molded plastic torro or a knock-off Leo Messi football shirt, all made in China, all at exorbitant prices.

Lluis would have really hated that although I could never imagine him being in any way coarse about it.

So I salute you Lluis Rivera, for your likes will not be seen again.

Screwing Up the Republican Primaries, for Fun and Profit.

2012-01-24T16:37:00.001+01:00

Well it looks like there is a very tiny possibility that Newt Gingrich will be running for president…….and if you’re wondering what that rustling noise is, it’s a nervous team of Republican spin doctors putting on their Kevlar suits.

Anti-Social Media

2012-01-09T11:32:00.001+01:00

I dislike the idea of social media for the following reasons:

- A person who obsessively follows other individuals around spying on their personal lives is called a ‘stalker’. A person who obsessively wants others to spy into their personal lives is a ‘stalkee’. Just two sides of the same type of degenerate.

- I am very fortunate to still have some very dear friends from my school days. We freely chose to keep in touch. Many have visited and I have been delighted by their company. There were however quite a lot of guys at school who I didn’t really care for. These chaps may well be going through their mid-life crises as we speak and I am not at all keen on the idea that they be privy to the fact that I live in Barcelona. The possibility that a fatter, balder, recently divorced version of some shithead I never liked calling up my family back in Dublin and demanding my address is not one I intend to court. It pays to be invisible to all but those who matter. Thus the anonymous blog.

- The simple fact is that refusal often offends. A few months ago, I foolishly signed up for one of these professional social networks and now my personal e-mail account is getting flooded with requests from work contacts. I do take my job as seriously as the next man, but when I arrive home that’s that. There’s a change of bosses and office duty is replaced by domestic duty. I have not ‘friended’ or ‘colleagued’ or ‘merged’ or ‘whateverthefuckitscalled’ with any of these contact requests and now I worry that they might be feeling a bit rebuffed. This in turn might be detrimental to the professional side of things. What a mistake. Time to check if one can get linked-the-Hell-out.

- I like being completely alone and hate to be interrupted, especially when doing absolutely nothing. Aren’t those little quiet corners of the day just magical? Those rare, brief periods when you have nothing to do, no obligations to fulfil when you can just read a magazine, do a crossword puzzle, spew out a blog post or fritter it away in any way you choose. An hour is indeed a wonderful thing to waste. Then your mobile phone goes off and the spell is broken. That perfidious jingle represents an obligation to answer which in turn represents an obligation to converse which usually leads to some other obligation, - “let’s meet up!” – “Don’t forget to do the shopping!” – “Get out, get out, the house is on fire!” What a drag. I managed to live without a mobile phone right up to the birth of my kid. Oh happy days. If someone skypes me one more time while I’m halfway through a life-or-death game of Mahjong Titan, I might just throw my laptop out the window.

- My birthday is rapidly approaching and my lifelong ambition to become a curmudgeonly old fart is finally coming to fruition. “In my day we didn’t need no internets or phase-books, if ye wanted to make friends ye just got pissed down the pub. I don’t want a shop front window on me life! So bugger off all of you or I’ll set me dog on you!”

Life Imitates Art

2012-01-04T17:27:00.003+01:00

There’s an amusing little rhyme that my father taught me when I was but a lad and I have already loyally passed it onto my own 6-year old son.
It goes something like this:

Little Johnny bought a gun,
Shot his Daddy just for fun,
Now, said Mummy,
That’s not funny,
Bullets cost a lot of money.

The wisdom of these words was demonstrated a few days ago while myself and Nic were playing in his room. For some reason, he started shoving me in the back with his feet and instead of giving him the satisfaction of knowing he was bugging me*, I pretended he was giving me a nice massage. He told me not to be silly, massages are done with hands. I corrected him and told him that in some countries, the masseur actually walks on the back of his client.

This was all the provocation he needed and within no time, I was face down on his bed and he was stomping on my back in his besocked feet and laughing like a rabid chimp* on a trampoline while I lay there (only half) pretending to be in agony.

With all the racket, my wife came in and told Nic to stop at once, he might damage the bed.

Now let me remind you that directly under my son’s leaping feet were thirty three of my vertebrae, my sternum and a ribcage containing sundry vital organs, yet my wife’s first reaction was to worry about the wellbeing of the bed underneath.

So it’s true – Mummies do know how expensive bullets are.

(*My son is an interesting hybrid – half cherub, half thug)

Observations Garnered from the Christmas Gifts Recieved from my Inlaws.

2012-01-04T15:48:00.001+01:00

All men’s cosmetic products are made to smell like expensive upholstery.

Quote from a Gay Stalinist

2012-01-04T15:44:00.003+01:00

"A single orphan is a tragedy.
A million orphans is .......A MUSICAL!"

I Take My Hat Off to You, Sir.

2011-07-23T13:49:00.003+02:00

It is a rare thing indeed that I bring myself to pay any sort of compliment to a politician and a much rarer thing yet to an Irish politician. But extraordinary events require extraordinary commentary.

When I read in the press about the Irish premier (or Taoiseach to his mates) tearing the Vatican a new asshole, I was left stunned with admiration. Now let’s be clear, this ass-tearing has been a long time coming and when you hear about the case at hand, it’s hard not to clench your fists.

It has to do with two cases of child abuse that had taken place in a small diocese near Cork called Cloyne and which were being investigated by the National Board for Safeguarding Children. The local Bishop, John Magee was not only being uncooperative with the investigators but it also came to light that he had not being implementing the self-regulating procedures against abuse that had been put into place by the bishops of Ireland in 1996.

Thanks mostly to the NBforSC, the work of some diligent journalists and despite the threat of court action by the diocese, the report which showed the total neglect and mismanagement of child abuse cases came to light. The scandal finally forced Magee to resign in 2010. To his credit, the Archbishop of Dublin did protest about a ‘cabal’ in the Irish Catholic church who were determined to impede any advances in child abuse investigation.

Then to make things worse, the head of the Holy See Press Office, Federico Lombardi waded in saying it was very “strange to see the Vatican criticized so heavily” and that the bishops’ letter was only a “study document”. And that I believe is when our Taoiseach finally lost his rag.

Before the previous election, the ruling party which had been more or less the dominant Irish political party since our independence, was always associated with the old boys’ network. Conservative opportunists, they were in bed with the wealthy elite, the church and the judiciary in a way that proved to be very unhealthy for the nation. To their credit, they did position Ireland in such a way as to make it very attractive for foreign investment. However as the country began to benefit from this new wealth, they did bugger all to reign in all their speculating buddies in the construction and banking industries resulting in an even bigger credit-fueled feeding frenzy than was already happening in the rest of the world. The bubble that formed and then burst and from which the country will be reeling for the next couple of decades, is what lost them the last elections and ushered in Mr. Kenny’s coalition government.

Curiously enough, when Kenny was in opposition he was seen as being a weak, bland wishy-washy character who didn’t hassle the ruling government nearly as much as he should have. So when he was elected as Taoiseach, most people considered him little more than a stopgap, a lesser evil than what had gone before.

Surprisingly, the current administration has successfully negotiated more favorable repayment terms for the crippling EU bailout to Ireland. And now this speech, which basically makes it clear to the Vatican that Ireland is a sovereign state and that the rights of the citizens are above the interests of any religious entity. You know? Like a real, proper country. Let’s be clear, there is now way in hell that the previous administration would have taken this position because they thrived on the archaic and stale status quo that had kept the country in the dark ages for so long.

Another interesting point is that Kenny emphasized that he is a practicing Catholic and that this was not an attack on the church but on those individuals who were letting down the church and its members. He also took aim at the state’s failure to monitor, prevent and punish these crimes.

Another surprising and hopeful sign is that Kenny’s popularity ratings have gone up since the speech was made. Maybe there is hope for that country yet.

I still can’t believe my ears when I hear this.

Are You Overly Influenced by Current Affairs? A Quiz.

2011-05-19T15:35:00.027+02:00

Name the following:

1. An animal who thought himself an invincible giant, but who just turned out to be a big ape who grabs women against their will up New York skyscrapers, causes a public furore and ends up falling to his doom.

2. A huge figure sent over from France at great expense and who got stuck out on a small island just off Manhattan.

3. A highly poisonous horny frog.

4. An over-confident Gallic leader who found out the hard way that if you try to repeat your conquests everywhere, there will always be a country that will catch you out.

5. An activity that used to be more-or-less tolerated but is now condemned worldwide and about which the French were a little slow in changing their habits.

Now if your answer to all of the above was the "Dominique Strauss-Kahn Scandal", then the answer to the quiz's title is a resounding YES.

Putting the Club Back into Football.

2011-05-01T11:38:00.007+02:00

It's highly possible that the two teams that will meet in the final of the European Champions League will be Barcelona FC and Manchester United. It is therefore highly possible that the defender Carles Puyol will be marking the striker Wayne Rooney.

Which makes me think of a certain film:

Context is Everything.

2011-04-25T12:41:00.002+02:00

A while ago I was at an evening do and was chatting to this bloke who, when not boring people shitless in his leisure time, was obviously some kind of hyper-professional shark. He had this really irritating habit of conversational oneupmanship where for example, if you mentioned that you drove an Audi, he'd immediately cut in and tell you that he drove a Merc. It reminded me a lot of the school playground and the old "my-daddy's-bigger-than-your-daddy" debate.

It then struck me that there are many, many positive words for people who are competitive within a competitive context (i.e. sport, work etc.): Ambitious, driven, aspiring, energetic, keen, enterprising, go-getter and so on.

But strangely there is only one word for a person who is competitive in a non-competitive context: Dick.

Well I See by the Old Calendar on the Wall......

2011-04-13T16:07:00.002+02:00

..that today is the feast day of Saint Hermenegild.

So be sure to congratulate all your friends named Hermenegild!

I Realise that It's Been Said Before but...

2011-03-04T14:13:00.002+01:00

....Micheal Martin the new leader of Fianna Fail, the Irish political party that was justifiably crucified in the recent elections, is a dead ringer for Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. Uncanny.

Seriously though.....

2011-01-31T15:08:00.002+01:00

...doesn't Malcolm Gladwell look like he was designed by Dr. Seuss?

Seeing as it’s Christmas I’ve Decided to Hire an Assassin

2010-12-24T12:31:00.002+01:00

It will be a multiple contract to rub out the following scumbags of whom I’ve heard so much:

Noel (make sure he’s the First)

Round John Virgin (just whack the fat guy, don’t touch the mother or child)

Crispin Even (dump his body in the snow)

Dec D. Halls (hang him from a rafter)

Pierre Tree (send a piece of him to his true love as a warning)

Mary Leon High (to be thrown from a church steeple)

Ms. Elle Toe (she was given the kiss of death a long time ago)

Harold Angel Singh (got too big for his boots, figured he was the newborn king)

Gisela Ying (there’s six of them, whack ‘em all)

Hal A. Luya (he knows something, make him sing first)

Frank N. Cents (that’ll teach the stinker)

Holly and Ivy (make it look like a lesbian suicide pact)

Swearwordplay

2010-12-19T15:45:00.001+01:00

I've just thought of the perfect name for any new drug they invent to treat Tourette's Syndrome:

Ibuprofane.

What Goes Around.....

2010-12-01T11:09:00.005+01:00

Two housewives meet while hanging out laundry on the roof terrace of their block of flats on the outskirts of Warsaw.

The year is 2012.

Z: How’s it goin’, Ludmila. I didn’t know you were up here.

L: Ah Jayses howeya, Zofia. What’s new?

Z: God, don’t talk to me. Yesterday was Aleksy’s bleedin’ confirmation and I swear the stress of it nearly killed me.

L: Aleksy’s confirmation? Go away with you, he’s not that old yet, is he?

Z: Jaysus I know. Doesn’t time fly? Anyway, wait till I tell you. We were all runnin’ round gettin’ ready to head off to the mass and just when things were getting’ reeeal hectic, doesn’t a feckin’ water pipe only burst.

L: Ah, it didn’t!

Z: I’m tellin’ ya. Water all over the kitchen floor and the bleedin’ thing gushing like a geezer from under the sink.

L: Ah you poor thing. So, whatja do?

Z: Well you know my Pawel’s feck all use with the DIY so we had to call a plumber.

L: God, isn’t that awful expensive?

Z: Well, that’s what I thought but then the fellah from the agency came over and you’d never guess what? He was one of them new Irish plumbers.

L: Ah that new crowd. I’m not too sure about them. I mean it was alright at the beginning but there are thousands of them over here now. Soon the streets’ll be filled wi' them beggin’ and clogging up the footpaths.

Z: Ah but they’re different from the Romanians. Ireland used to have a decent education system and quite a few of them are well trained.

L: Yeah but by their own backward standards. Poland’s a modern democratic country not some tinpot state run by corrupt tyrants. We do things differently here.

Z: Well this fellah had the pipe fixed in no time, he was very polite and charged half the price of a Polish plumber. His Polish wasn’t much good but at least he was tryin’.

L: Really? Well I suppose it must seem like a lot of money to them. You’ll have to give me his name in case we need a job done.

Z: Oh Jaysus Ludmila, he told me his name but I couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t even pronounce it when he told me.

L: Well there you go! They're over here now, you’d think they’d change their gobbldigook names for something a bit more normal. It’s called ‘integration’. We should send the half of them home.

Z: Ah God love them Ludmila. The poor things have had it hard. And sure their kids will be Polish when they grow up.

L: Yeah but you know my brother-in-law, Stanislaw. Well he’s an electrician and he says that them Irish are driving the price of labour down and ruining it for the local tradesmen. And my friend Alicja lives next door to an Irish family and says they have ‘two’ cars. How many Polish families d’you know who can’t afford two cars, eh? We should feck them out of the EU, that way they couldn’t come over here so easily.

Z: Ah don’t be so hard on them. They’re just trying to put food on the table. And it could be worse. At least they’re white.

L: Yeah, s’pose so.

Z: And catholic.

L: Yeah.

Z: Yeah.

Mid-Life Crisis? What Mid-Life Crisis?

2010-11-02T23:00:00.002+01:00

A couple of years ago, under the mounting peer pressure of a sports freak from work, I gave in and signed myself up for this new- fangled piece of fitness lunacy called a triathlon. Now don’t go getting all overcome with admiration or anything, I’m not talking about a ‘proper’ triathlon. Although they occur simultaneously, I shall certainly not be taking part in the Barcelona Olympic Triathlon (Dear sweet Jesus no!) or the Barcelona Sprint Triathlon (Heaven forbid!). No, I shall be doing the dilettantes’ Super Sprint Triathlon, a pathetic 45-minute waddle that could probably be completed by a relatively buoyant pensioner with a spry nurse and a greased-up Zimmer frame.

Last week was my third time to enter into this madness and as a mark of my relief of still being alive, I thought it would be nice to go over what the whole thing entails.

Someone once defined a classical book as something you don’t enjoy reading, but do enjoy having read. This, it seems, could also be said of most feats of athletic endurance. We all enjoy recounting and embellishing our accomplishments after the deed is done and thanks to some sort of masochistic amnesia, we might even look forward to taking part in the next event. But the moment the starting gun goes off and we actually start doing the damn thing, the only thoughts that go through our heads are “Holy shit, now I remember what this is like! It’s horrible and painful and goes on forever. Why the hell did I sign up? Am I fucking insane?” Naturally, these thoughts will have once again disappeared by the time you’re quaffing beers that evening and while trading anecdotes of the day, you’re actually planning your strategy for next year. What silly creatures we humans are.

THE SWIM
The swim is where the whole business begins. 300 fools in neoprene line up on a beach and on the starter’s command, sprint into the beckoning waves like lemmings on speed. Well, make that 299 fools in neoprene. There is one mick moron who would rather swim in a tutu and a summer bonnet than to don one of those pussy prophylactics. I did have the last laugh in last year’s event all the same. There were huge waves and the only way to efficiently get by them was to pummel through them, which I did with 200-pound ease. However, with their highly buoyant suits, the neopreeners were all driven backwards like so many bobbing corks. Oh how I chortled.

The fun begins when everyone arrives at the first buoy and has to turn left. As you can imagine, with having 300 highly competitive jocks being funneled into one point, the kicking, shoving and elbowing would make a Sicilian knife-fight look sporting. Once you get past that first bend, things get a fair bit easier.

Or at least they should. Swimming is my strong suit and I can knock out a mile in a pool without so much as breaking a sweat. So why is it then that I get so knackered so quickly when swimming in the open sea? We only do a quarter of a mile but I nearly always feel my arms getting heavy half-way through and usually have to break into a breast stroke on the home straight. Still, I usually end up being among the first bunch to hit the beach, hyperventilating and having those Saving Private Ryan flashbacks. The children in the crowd are usually a bit disconcerted to witness a battalion of X-men tottering up on the sand accompanied by what appears to be a wheezing speedo-clad manatee walking on his hind legs.

THE CYCLE

So you’ve made it to the beach, you then run up a concrete ramp while being cheered/jeered by the spectators, you cross a walkway and descend into a race track in the middle of which is a sea of bicycles mounted on racks. One of those bikes is yours and you have to trot around trying to figure out what sort of fucked up Dewey classification system they’ve used before you can find it. You then pop on a T-shirt, a helmet and a pair of running shoes and run your bike out of the enclosure and onto the open road where a new and different flavor of pain awaits you.

The route is mercifully flat and I usually do pretty well considering what I’m riding. It’s a beat up second-hand mountain bike that looks like a piece of scaffolding with two tractor wheels nailed to it. I couldn’t look less cool if I had a shopping basket hanging off the handlebars. A lot of the more ‘serious’ or wealthier competitors cycle those carbon fiber road razors that probably weigh less than the chain on my bike. So even though I pass quite a few of the normal riders on the route, every now and then one of those high-tech racers will whizz by Tron-like, just to remind me not to get above my station.

So after a 10km tour of the Barcelona business district, we all arrive back to the track and once again run around looking for the right place to park the bikes. It’s a bit like those Discovery channel documentaries where the all penguins get back to the beach after weeks of fishing and then wander around in their thousands each one looking for its own particular chick to regurgitate on.

THE RUN
So you finally park the bike, grab a small bottle of water and set off at a trot. And you’re foolishly thinking ‘Hey, my legs are nicely warmed up now so this run should be a synch’. But you soon realize that your cycling muscles and your running muscles have never formally met and this brief introduction is enough to reveal that they don’t have an awful lot in common. So you flat-footedly waddle out of the enclosure like Chaplin desperately looking for a restroom and set off for your mile and a half of agony.

Again, under normal circumstances I could cover 2.5 km without a bother. But on the back of the previous exertions, that short distance seems to stretch to eternity and by the time I get to the finish line, my damp and crimson visage would put you in mind of someone who fell asleep in a sauna. And as always, there are those couple of minutes of sanity where your brain is repeating those sage words ‘Never again! Never again!’ And as always it doesn’t last.

Now those voices in my head are telling me to do the mid-level triathlon next year. Can’t you hear them?

Scientific Studies

2010-10-19T15:08:00.011+02:00

As a qualified labcoat wearer who occasionally reads the newspaper, I feel it is time to carry out some serious research into the durability of certain items that seem astoundingly impervious to decay. The assay in question should be executed by a legitimate and reputable scientific institution and would involve isolating and monitoring the following subjects:

The Radium-226 Isotope

The Happy Meal

The Body of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes

Helen Mirren’s Sex Appeal

Newt Gingrich’s Dark Soul

Let us see which of these seemingly eternal entities lasts the longest.

Hollywood Prescience

2010-09-26T22:38:00.004+02:00

Today I was going over some of Lung Brother archives and came across this post from January, 2006 where we pitched some ideas/predictions about feasible Hollywood productions. Now four and a half years later it amazes me how many times we hit paydirt on the predictions.

I count four: Beowulf, One Million Years BC, The A-Team and the series V.

Incredible.

This can only mean one of two things.

1. Either Lung the Elder and I are creative geniuses and should be over in L.A. pitching our ideas like whores and raking in the cash hand over fist.

2. Or Hollywood studios are just a bunch stale production farms with all the creative enterprise of widget factories and whose sole function is to churn out the same cookie-cutter multiplex fodder that we the public gladly slurp up like drooling lobotomized cattle.

Mmm. I’m kinda torn between the two.

What do you reckon?

Political Correctness in a Nutshell.

2010-09-26T16:27:00.001+02:00

God forgive me but this is too good not to repeat.

A couple of weeks ago Greg came over for dinner and the conversation got onto films that we‘d all recently seen. Greg had just seen (and highly recommended) the movie Precious. But it was the American tone of his beautiful summary that I wished I’d caught on video.

“Basically it’s about this horrible, fat, ugly black women……(gasps and puts had over mouth) … Oh excuse me, I meant African American.”

To our amazement, he was completely non-plussed by our laughter. So he actually wasn’t being ironic. I took pity on the lad and explained.

“That’s fine Greg, I’m sure the poor girl would much prefer to be called a horrible, fat, ugly African American than called a horrible, fat, ugly black women coz you know, the term ‘black’ can sometimes come off as offensive.”

Political correctness in a nutshell.

When Life Impersonates Hollywood.

2010-07-13T12:48:00.003+02:00

OK so imagine you are Iker Casillas, the captain of the Spanish side that has just won the World Cup. You are already overcome with emotion and then they put you into an interview with the gorgeous television reporter Sara Carbonero….who also happens to be your girlfriend. What do you reckon would happen ….?

Some bastards have too much good luck.

Couldn't Resist....

2010-07-12T14:56:00.002+02:00

The Neo Testament

2010-07-01T09:07:00.002+02:00

Q: Wherefore blog?

A: Because it pisses off all the right people.

I've been having a bit of fun scripting this new babyblog.
Hope you enjoy it.

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº 10 Ian Paisley and Boss Nass.

2010-05-19T10:56:00.005+02:00

The secret to their authority? Jowls Baby, jowls.

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº 9 Michael D. Higgins and Jabba's Blue Elephant

2010-05-18T21:56:00.001+02:00

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº 8: The Green Party and the Jedi Council.

2010-05-09T21:09:00.005+02:00

Yeah, the Jedi Council were a bunch of freaks who were feck all use in preventing the Dark Side from taking over too.

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº 7: Gerry Adams and an Ewok.

2010-05-09T18:45:00.002+02:00

We sholl continyee the armed struggle against the Ampire and their nosty stormtraypers.

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº. 6 Theobald Wolfe Tone and Chancellor Palpatine.

2010-05-09T18:04:00.003+02:00

Though they probably won't name a trad band after the Evil Emperor.

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº. 5 Eamon de Valera and Jar Jar Binks.

2010-05-09T17:54:00.008+02:00

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº. 4: Charlie Haughey and Watto.

2010-05-08T16:35:00.003+02:00

Wow, spooky.

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº.3: Iris Robinson and Darth Maul

2010-05-08T16:24:00.006+02:00

It's the eyes, it's the eyes!

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº. 2: Mary Harney and (obviously) Jabba the Hutt

2010-05-08T16:19:00.007+02:00

A bit unfair to Jabba, really.

The peculiar Resemblance between Certain Irish Politicians and Characters from the Star Wars Saga. Nº.1: Brian Cowan and a Gamorrean Guard

2010-05-08T16:05:00.004+02:00

Uncanny, isn't it?

Pipsqueekonomics

2010-04-27T17:04:00.004+02:00

The other day I was watching my 4-year old son playing with his friends in the local park and had the privilage to witness a very curious form of behavior that I could probably use as the basis for a sociology thesis.

Nic is an incorrigible magpie and will grab at anything that catches his eye. It's a habit that drives CS crazy as she's quite the cleanliness Mum. So, the series of events went like this:

- Nic spies a cigarette butt, picks it up and starts examining it with utter fascination.
- His friend looks on and noticing Nic's interest, immediately makes a grab for it.
- Nic resists and this makes the friend insist even more until the two are practically wrestling over it.
- Other friends gather round like hungry jackals and hover there, hoping against hope that the precious item might fly out during the scuffle and they can make off with it.
- At no point does it occur to any of them that (a) it is actually just a filthy squashed cigarette butt and (b) this being a park in Spain, there are probably dozens more lying on the ground within a few feet of them.
- The fact that Nic and his friend want this thing means that THEY want it too.

This can only mean one of two things:

Either children are born with the deep economic understanding of stock market traders and possess an innate appreciation of what defines true value i.e. that which other people are prepared to pay.

Or stock market traders are trained to act like a bunch of petulant children who fight jealously over a bunch of crap which as often as not, has no intrinsic value whatsoever.

Obits and Pieces Nº 4: La Pilarica

2010-04-18T00:25:00.002+02:00

Well this little series is beginning to feel a bit tired and samey so I've decided to let it go. However, it would be a crime to kiss the endeavour goodbye without mentioning one more old haunt, as it is perhaps the establishment that most belongs here.

If you ever happen to be tooling around the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona on some backstreet safari, you might come across a beautiful little square called Plaça Sant Just. You've done well, there are three gems on this square that are worth consideration, the church, a top-notch restaurant (L'Academia) and a rather classy cocktail bar (The Ginger). But if you take the narrow street that leads from the square to the larger Sant Jaume Street, you might spot a disheveled, shuttered barfront topped with an upsidedown sign. Now to save you from doing a handstand and making yourselves a laughably easy mark for the local pickpockets, I can tell you now that PILARICA is the word that stands inverted before you.*

Many seasons have come and gone since the Pilarica drained its last keg and left its modestly-sized but ferociously loyal clientele with nothing more than a few fuzzy warm memories and a bruise on the heart. The gang never quite recovered from the Diaspora that followed its demise and although we did occasionally invite eachother to parties and the like, we eventually drifted apart.

The bar itself was unashamedly 'guiri' and about the size of a postage stamp. Guiri by the way, is a derogative Spanish word for foreigner and to be fair, the Pilarica was usually replete with anglophones. Occasionally we would condescend to share the evening with a native but if he couldn't speak the lingo and/or keep up with the banter and wit, he generally got bored and eventually ended up shagging off in a huff. Most of us were English teachers and got paid to pander to students all day. Damned if we were going to make an effort to talk to a local in our precious leisure time, unless of course she was seriously cute.

In its heyday, walking into the Pilarica was a bit like walking into a sitcom. The same crowd was always there and to coin a phrase, everybody knew your name. We did read like a quirky character checklist too. There was the intellectual bore, the brash loud American, the unstable coke-sniffer, the Israeli guy who probably worked for Mossad and the busty flirtatious vixen who half-enticed, half-terrified all the men.

Two very amiable English blokes ran the gaff but never at the same time - there wasn't enough room behind the bar. One of them was Andy, a guy who was far too English and nice for his own good, although this did bestow on him a wonderfully shy and self-effacing sense of humour. At the end of an evening when you handed over the pittance that you owed him for the deluge of beer that you'd guzzled, he'd actually apologize. If you left a tip, he'd stare at it with feigned awe and say "Oooh, there'll be meat in my soup tonight!" One of those joke that fortunately becomes a comforting ritual before it stops being funny. Someone once said that the English don't have soul; they have understatement - go figure.

The venue even had a special influence on my personal life. I was frequenting it just about the same time that CS and I started going out. Now I certainly wouldn't say that CS was a bit of a control freak because she might catch wind of it and then my life wouldn't be worth living. So I wouldn't say that. At all. Never. Ever. But having (not) said that, it is true that for her, this bar was the other woman. We weren't living together at the time so, much to her chagrin, she didn't always know where I was. Whenever she found out that I'd been at the Pilarica, she'd fly into a bizarre jealous rage. The strange thing is, she knew I didn't go there to cruise women - it was the bar itself that was the focus of her fury.

So in the end, I figured that immunization was the only solution and began inviting CS to the bar in small doses. Of course, within a couple of weeks, she was enjoying herself there more than I ever did and was far more popular.

The place really was damn small all the same. I kid you not when I say that you never had to lose the train of a conversation for having to go for a piddle because you could hear every word that was being said (and drunken inhibition allowing, could often make a contribution yourself) from the confines of the solitary bog.

The Pilarica was also a regular touchstone for the people who crewed the luxary yachts that dropped by Barcelona quite frequently. A more fascinating bunch of tax-dodgers you'll never meet. They'd come in for several nights in a row, cut loose and then disappear for several months only to return with stories of fables far-off lands and the latest wannabe top model their millionaire bosses were shagging. For some reason, it was always the chefs who talked biggest and drank hardest. I reckon it was because they didn't have to appear spritely on the deck the next morning. Anyway, I usually just sat patiently and listened. It's never wise to piss off a rambling dipso who knows how to use sharp knives.

Eventually though, the neighbours started complaining about the noise and Andy began having health problems. Finally the night came along where Andy had to padlock the shutter for the last time and among Barcelona's vast constellation of drinking holes, one very tiny but intensly bright star faded out. It truly was like losing a dear friend.

So I salute you Pilarica, for your likes will never be seen again.

* Oh tragedy upon tragedy. Since beginning this diatribe, I have been down the street where the ruins of the old Pilarica once proudly stood. What I found was far more depressing than a sad shut-up old bar. They've opened up a poncey wine bar on that sacred site, a pox upon them. Not having a Molotov cocktail handy, I had to settle for spitting on the ground and incanting a Gypsy curse. May they suffer for their sacrilege!

Obits and Pieces Nº. 3: The Salam Sandwich Bar.

2009-11-20T18:46:00.003+01:00

As mentioned previously, my intention with this series is to pay homage to all those wonderfully grungy dives that the Elder and I used to frequent during our first heady years in Barcelona and which tragically no longer exist.

Without overstretching a metaphor it could be said that cities often resemble cheeses, in that it’s usually the little bits of stinky mould that give them their real flavour. By removing these fetid little corners, the city runs the risk of converting itself from a pungent Stilton (say Naples) to a bland and processed Edam. (Stockholm for instance)

This analogy is particularly apt as today I shall be writing about none other than the long-deceased Salam sandwich bar, a gorgeous little eatery which plied its trade with a lot more emphasis on soul than sanitation.

The bar was located on the Gothic Quarter’s Carrer Ample, which literally translates to Broad Street. This either means that the Catalans have a very curious sense of irony or that streets in the middle ages were mind-buggeringly narrow. My vague knowledge of local history and my comprehensive knowledge of local Catalans leave me in no doubt of the latter. You could just about cross the street by drunkenly falling over, I know, I’ve tried.

Why the name ‘Salam’? I just assumed it had something to do with the ethnicity of the previous owners combined with the laziness of the current ones. The sign’s obvious age and gaping holes served to strengthen this theory. It stood on a corner with glass running all round and just enough room inside for a right-angled bar and a barrage of surrounding high stools. Viewing the scene at night, it resembled something Edward Hopper might have painted while suffering from salmonella poisoning.

Stepping inside, you were struck by the wonderful smells of all the wrong food groups. There were usually a few specimens of the local unwashed fauna perched on stools and serving as an appreciative audience to Jorge and Maria, the married couple who ran the joint.

Now lets be honest here, Jorge and Maria were nobody’s idea of Brangelina. I imagine that they would be about as welcome in a modelling agency as they would at a weightwatchers convention. Yet there they were, flirting shamelessly with each other and with the punters, cracking anecdotes and making the whole experience so much more than simply grabbing a sandwich and a beer. Lung the Elder once commented while watching the two of them playfully teasing each other, that he bet the two of them went home every night and fucked like bunnies. This mental image was perhaps the only thing in that bar (among many other worthy contenders) that ever came close to putting me off one of Jorge’s divine culinary creations.

The other contenders in question were the general lack of spotlessness (read: filth), the cat which was allowed to stroll along the bar to greet customers while stepping gingerly over their besandwiched plates and of course the cockroaches. Oh yes, there were indeed roaches and big feckers too. When you pointed one out scuttling across a shelf to Jorge, he would just shrug and say “He ain’t bothering me, is he bothering you?” To his credit, I never once saw Jorge whack a roach with his cooking spatula, although it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

And yet all of these peripheral distractions were overlooked by the regular clientele for one very good reason. To call Jorge a sandwich maker would be like calling Da Vinci a doodler. Jorge was a sandwich artiste. Almost all the bready treats scrawled on the bar’s blackboard menu were of his own invention and every customer had his or her favourite. Mine was the ‘Gótico’ and to this day I can still taste it on my age-hardened palette. If I close my eyes and let my taste buds wander back through the fog of time, I recall the fried onions, the escabeche beef and cheese, lots and lots of cheese. A veritable A-fucking-bundance of cheese.

Bringing one of these triple-deck cholesterol bombs to life was never a rushed process for Jorge. That sage artisan took his time, his hands moving so speedily and skilfully it would make a sushi chef weep, only pausing occasionally to point his massive chopping knife at you to drive home a punchline or to coquettishly pretend to stab Maria in the back while winking at us. You were usually on your second beer by the time the oozing piece of toasted paradise was served to you. If you were smart, at that moment you’d quit kidding yourself about your gorging threshold and order a second one immediately.

Maria was a whole different kettle of fish. In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious that she suffered from some sort of bipolar disorder and was ruled by whichever way the serotonin tide was flowing on any particular day. When she was up, there was nobody like her. The wicked eye twinkle, rapid fire wit and brazen playfulness would leave any professional television presenter in the shade. But sweet Jesus when she was down, she was scary. She’d slump behind the bar with an expression of pure malice on her mug, staring daggers at everyone, chain smoking and poisoning any attempt a jovial conversation with nasty, nasty throwaway remarks. Sometimes you didn’t know whether to order a beer or call an exorcist.

Sadly, the lease eventually ran out and Jorge and Maria set up shop in another part of town. Although the new place was bigger and probably brought in more income, it didn’t have a kitchen and Jorge never got around to setting up a work station. We visited a couple of times but in the end it was just another bar in a red light district with fluorescent lights, Formica and an echo so we eventually let it go.

I bumped into a dishevelled-looking Jorge in the street about a year and a half ago. He and Maria had just broken up and because it was her name on the bar contract, he’d lost everything. According to him, Maria had been hitting the bottle and getting more and more erratic in her behaviour. It was just one side of the story but having been acquainted with both of them for years, I was inclined to give Jorge the benefit of the doubt. He was living in his mother’s place and scouting around for a new place to set up his own snack bar. That was the last time I ever met him.

I often wonder if some time in the future, while strolling down some pokey street unawares, I’ll be ambushed by the familiar smell of grime and melted cheese issuing from a pokey café. And through the vapour and grot-clouded windows, I might even catch the glint of a huge chopping knife as the chubby proprietor, gesticulating wildly, regales his customers with his inexhaustible supply of corny anecdotes.

That would be nice.

So I salute you Salam sandwich bar, for your likes will not be seen again.

Next instalment: The Pilarica.

Obits and Pieces Nº. 2 – Chez Popov.

2009-10-22T17:14:00.005+02:00

As mentioned previously, my intention with this series is to pay homage to all those wonderfully grungy dives that the Elder and I used to frequent during our first heady years in Barcelona and which tragically no longer exist.

Within the cannon of Spanish-nightlife jargon, one often comes across the word ‘El After’. This little bon mot refers to those bars that remain open long after the standard bars (which already stay open pretty late) have pulled their shutters.

Now to refer to Chez Popov as an ‘After’ would be doing it an injustice. Chez Popov was the last-resort oasis that would welcome you with open tentacles when all other watering holes had dried up and you were too drunk to know better. Chez Popov only began to hit full swing when the street-cleaning machines were hitting the streets. Chez Popov was in essence the ‘After’s After’.

Please note that any difficulty I may have in describing the place is not due to a lack of expressive ability on my part but more down to the fact that when there, I was never, ever even remotely sober. So pray, cut an old drunk some slack.

The bar was located down a litter-strewn, urine-marinated back lane which ran parallel to the Ramblas. One would never guess while sitting during daylight hours in the charming and civilized Café de L’Opera that right behind your bar, another far seedier one sat waiting for night to fall.

So you’re on the streets of the Raval in the wee hours of a Sunday morning after having been slung out of some overcrowded drinking pit. You’re enjoying the oxygen-rich night air, working very hard in the field of optical focus and trying desperately not to have your pockets picked by the local North African entrepreneurs. What to you do? Well heck, you decide to have one for the road, don’t you? This is because you are a moron.

So you tramp back across the Ramblas trying not to slip on the recently hosed paving tiles, pass McDonalds with its characteristic McDonalds' stench, swing a left through the piles of cardboard boxes and suspicious looking puddles. You toss a mental coin in your head as to whether this new stench is worse than the previous one. And finally you arrive at the gigantic wooden door with the proprietor standing outside vetting all those who enter.

A little man with the bitter face of a bulldog licking piss off a nettle, he stares at everyone who arrives with total and utter hostility as if they’d all been dipped in shit and then sent to rob him. He still lets them all in though. You often wonder what he’s looking for with this little checkpoint routine. I mean, if he’s letting every drugged up, drunken lowlife inside the kip, what exactly would it take to get refused at the door?

You enter. The place (if beer-doused memory serves me well) looks a little like an Andalucian tapas restaurant, whitewashed walls with some decorative tiles, wooden benches and stairs, black cast-iron lighting fixtures. Breathing the air in Chez Popov challenges any preconceived notion you may have had about human sweat being exclusively a liquid.

El Diabolico comes over and gruffly takes your order. Poor guy. He may be a wonderfully warm human being when you get to know him but everybody calls him El Diabolico because he has the most evil face you’ve ever seen. It’s quite impressive really. Imagine what the actor Dan Hedaya would look like after knocking back a draught of Dr. Jekyll’s potion.

The moment you take the first slug of your beer you realise what an idiot you are. You have passed the peak of your buzz and this beer is not going to get you any drunker, just woozier. Chatting with your friends has become an effort so you look for some other distraction. As always, there is the video jukebox in the corner, as always there is you fiddling clumsily in your pockets for some change and like on every other visit to Chez P, you observe yourself punching in the same damn code. You sit back on your bench, ignore your friends and wait for the bright and glaring primary colours of Kylie Minogue’s, Confide In Me to appear.

You are amazed at the video director’s skill in being able to reactivate the libido of what is essentially an alcohol-saturated sack of skin and flesh. You can imagine yourself long into the future, a frail 92-year old, not too many marbles left to lose, half-abandoned in a remote old-folks home. And in some televised (or pod-ized or whatever the technology will be then) tribute to the nineties, that video once again pops up on the screen. You’d like to think that, despite your diminished constitution and meagre mental fortitude, the video will still work its old magic and get the sap flowing in your twig-like frame. The nurses will not believe their eyes when they notice that the image isn’t the only thing that’s popping up.

The rest of the evening is a blur and you only half remember the walk home. You of course, realise what an utter spa you were to have tried to squeeze more out of the night and swear never to return to that armpit. I honestly rarely enjoyed my time in that damn bar but now that it’s gone, I really miss knowing it’s there.

So I salute you Chez Popov, for your likes will not be seen again.

Next instalment - The Salam Sandwich Bar

Obits and Pieces Nº. 1 – The Guitar Bar.

2009-09-02T16:12:00.008+02:00

As mentioned previously, my intention with this series is to pay homage to all those wonderfully grungy dives that the Elder and I used to frequent during our first heady years in Barcelona and which tragically no longer exist.

The first instalment will deal with the most recent of these to close its doors to the world and the taste of tragedy is therefore still fresh on our palettes. We don’t even know what the dive was really called or if it even had a name, we just refered to it as the Guitar Bar and with good reason.

It stood (or rather slouched) on the Rambla Prat in Gracia, right in front of the Bosque cinema. The façade was so discrete that it bordered on urban camouflage and you would have passed it without a glance, lest you were specifically looking for a tatty pit for casual music. The windows were covered from the inside with a bizarre collage of glossy photos which had long since turned light blue with age.

One entered the establishment by descending several stone stairs into a semi-lit space in which everything seemed to be charmingly tinted in sepia. Charming that is until you realized that the tone came mostly from filth and the years. If my memory serves me right, the floors were checkered with black and white tiles, there were crates of empty bottles in the corner and the walls were the colour of a chain smoker’s fingers.

Ancient photos and newspaper articles of blues artists would stare in around you as you took a seat. The table tops were chipped marble and no two wobbley chairs ever matched. Behind the bar, there was one of those lovely old floor-to-ceiling brown coolers where the bottles were stored behind little door hatches. Just imagine a mortuary refrigerator from the 50s made out of teak.

An upright piano, which we assumed was broken, stood perpendicular to a wall and upon it rested a disorderly pile of magazines from days gone by. I kid you not, we once found a MAD magazine from 1974 there. For some reason I decided against stuffing it into my jacket pocket – one should never commit sacrilege in so glorious a temple.

The proprietors were an elderly couple. I don’t remember her well but he was an old shaggy bear with a beard and bushy mop of hair which grew whiter with the passing years. He quietly sat at a small table beside the bar and always seemed to be writing in some sort of ledger. You had to rouse him from his scribbling in order to ask for a couple of bottles of Estrella and if the fancy took you, a guitar.

And THAT was the most spectacular feature of the bar. As you walked in it was impossible not to notice the slew of guitars hanging by their necks from the ceiling like a gaggle of throttled geese. Upon receiving the order, the owner would lazily return with a couple of opened medianas and then apathetically reach up and pluck an instrument from this inverted forest of frets. If you were lucky, the thing would have a full compliment of strings and all you needed was to spend ten minutes tuning the bejesus out of it.

Usually you were not alone in the bar and someone else would be knocking out a tune at another table. If your musical tastes coincided, you would end up joining this stranger in a laid-back jamming session. Names were rarely exchanged and the acoustic strumming and plucking was never so loud as to stifle conversation. All in all, it was a very difficult place in which to feel in any way stressed.

So I salute you Guitar Bar, for your likes will not be seen again.

Next installment – Chez Popov

H1N1 – The Boogie Nights Solution.

2009-08-31T16:51:00.005+02:00

I was musing the other day on all this international hubbub about transmitting the swine flu.

It seems that in social situations, we can no longer even shake hands let alone exchange a couple of chaste bisous on each cheek. It's an outrage. The physical vocabulary of both formal and casual greetings has been completely obliterated by this naughty little bug and we are now left to stand face-to-face with acquaintances and awkwardly wave at each other like complete wallies.

Or maybe not……

I vote that we bring back the hip bump, but as a social greeting instead of an afro-haired seventies disco move. I mean, it’d have to be a pretty hardened virus to be able to pass through a layer of Lois bell-bottomed jeans and Mork-and-Mindy embossed y-fronts to infect some poor acrylic-shirted bystander. Just walk up to the individual that you intend to greet, say ‘Pleased to meet you Your Majesty’ then both of you raise your arms high in the air, put your right feet forward and gently bop the sides of your respective tushes together. Perfectly safe.

And just think how natural Obama would look doing with say, Angela Merkel at a G8 summit. In fact the opening day of the summit would probably look something like a bunch of foxy-suited dudes celebrating Jimmy Carter’s election at a Donna Summer concert.

So listen up you World Health Organisation cats, it’s time you jive turkeys got hep to the grooviest pandemic prevention technique that ever freaked under a disco ball.

The HIP BUMP GREETING.
I mean for God’s sake, the Masons have been doing it for years!

Can you dig it, good buddies?

Misty Porter-Coloured Memories

2009-07-31T12:21:00.004+02:00

I am not by nature sentimental and in general, the sentimentality of others gives me a royal pain in the chunk. There is however one exception to this inert rule. Places - any place where I have enjoyed a pleasant experience and retained a good memory, immediately becomes a soft spot in this otherwise icy heart.

A few weeks ago my sage old barber made a comment which rang so true that it almost brought a tear to my eye. He said that the problem with the old historic quarter of Barcelona is that it’s no longer a genuine neighbourhood but instead has become a theme park.

True indeed. The world discovered Barcelona during the 1992 Olympics and has since been sending its tired, rich and huddled tourists yearning to breathe in the storied pomp of the Catalan capital. Which is all well and good, the benefits to the economic well-being of the city are obvious. It’s backstreets are cleaner, safer and don’t smell (quite) as bad as before.

The problem is that any environment will inevitably adapt to its market and the centre of Barcelona seems to have lost too much of its character to the travellers’-cheque brigade. Where once there hailed dingy smoke-filled cafés full of ugly griping locals, you’ll now find a spanking new Irish pub or fusion-food restaurant. And what really chafes is that most of these johnny-come-lately establishments are done up in a pseudo-authentic way to give the impression that they’ve always been there.

A huge proportion of the wonderfully grimy hangouts that we used to frequent when we first arrived in the city many moons ago, no longer exist and that really cuts me up. OK fair enough, one of the reasons is because it makes me feel old but there is more to my chagrin than the vanity of a grumpy middle-aged fogy. These places were truly unique and you always knew that anything could happen from the moment you crossed their thresholds.

So as a homage to these delightful, defunct dives, I’ve decided to do a series called ‘Obits and Pieces’ where they will be deservingly honoured. Of course some of the old haunts still exist but it wouldn’t really be fitting to include them in the series. Partly because they don’t qualify but mainly because as a cynical old fart, I truly believe in the wise adage that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead nor well of the living.

So if you're reading this, go to Hell.

Getting Old.

2009-07-21T09:14:00.001+02:00

Doesn’t the expression ‘INFORMATION SUPER HIGHWAY’ just seem so damn quaint now?

The Parenting Taliban

2009-07-09T11:20:00.003+02:00

The wife (CS) and I used to be good friends with another couple, lets call them Ricardo and Nieves.

Now Ricardo and Nieves were great fun to be with, we even holidayed with them a couple of times and I never recall there being any tension. Ric was the consumate gentleman and Nieves, although a bit of a diva, had a razor wit that kept any boredom well and truly at bay. But then sadly….

….kids came along.

Now let me be quite clear about this, CS and I love and adore wee Nic and would do anything for him. If I have one priority in my life, it’s that he grows up to be happy, healthy, safe and loved. Nonetheless, we have tried to maintain another aspect to our existence …. It’s called a life.

We always try to put aside a little time for ourselves as a couple, we try to maintain friends who are not part of the parent cabal, we read broadly and can hold fourth on topics of conversation unrelated to children and we don’t fret about every little thing that Nic says, feels, does, eats or shits.

Kids are resilient, adaptable, devious, fun-loving little buggers that happen to be made of rubber. They need to be fed, loved, exercised and educated, not wrapped in cotton wool. As a result of this philosophy, Nic is turning out to be an affectionate little thug and I have very few worries about his future.

Ricardo and Nieves have two kids and a third has just arrived. Ricardo and Nieves read paranoid articles about parenting and talk about little else. Ricardo and Nieves’ friends are now almost all parents. Ricardo and Nieves have become food neurotics and will only feed their kids some sort of virgin soy extract due to the horrible things that cows’ milk does to the human body. They have held vicious protests at their kids’ school in the past due to the fact that the lunches there consisted of normal food. Ricardo and Nieves almost never leave their kids out of their sight and carry them around in a contraption attached to a bicycle. In short, a long time ago Ricardo and Nieves began to tocar nuestros cojones.

But the best was yet to come.

Last week their third child, Vanesa was born. I shall translate the text message we received from Ricardo verbatim.

Vanesa was born on the 1st of July at home in the bath and breast fed for the first time right there while the umbilical chord was still pulsing with the blood that was both hers and Nieves’. In this way, they were united as one until the chord ceased to softly beat, all taking place before this humbled father. This was the process which inscribed Vanesa into her new life. A true welcome.
Ricardo.

What’s with the fucking gore? A simple - ‘Vanesa born 1st of July. Mother and daughter doing well.’ - would have sufficed perfectly.

It’s amazing the way having kids can turn normal people into David Cronenberg.

UPDATE:

We found out on the sly that Nieves had to go to hospital later on the night of the birth anyway, due to complications. I feel really bad about this but BWAAAHHAAHHAHAHHHAHAHHA!

You Utter, Utter Bastille.

2009-07-08T17:38:00.001+02:00

Although our cousins across the pond have already celebrated their joyous Independence day, we must not forget that in less than a week the Fete National de France shall occur and with much aplomb. Yes indeed, we are now on the eve of le quatorze julliet which nobly commemorates the storming of the king’s Bastille prison.

So let us toast this milestone of Gallic bravery which marked the end of feudalism in central Europe, put pay to the ancien regime, laid the seed for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and bestowed value upon each and every citizen from the lowest pauper to the most revered city bureaucrat. A day that has immortalized the cry which rings in the ears of every soul that craves freedom: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

So please accept this humble homage to modern France.

Idea to Make a Million Nº. 163

2009-03-19T17:24:00.000+01:00

While musing on the current economic crisis and the stagnation of the housing market, it occurred to me that there still might be a way to make a killing in property. I remember that a block away from our old apartment there used to be a flat for rent above a nightclub. If my memory serves me, it took over two years to find someone who was prepared to put up with the racket.

So here’s my idea in a nutshell:

A Real Estate Agency Exclusively for the Deaf

First of all, you go house hunting anywhere near an airport, train station, sawmill, Formula 1 racetrack or military firing ground. These residencies are usually pretty cheap anyway but in the current economic climate you should be able to pick them up for a song.

You then advertise in any magazines, associations or social groups for deaf people that you can find. I reckon you could offer the apartments for a fraction of the market price and still make a nice juicy mark up.

So the big question is – what to call this new enterprise? Here are a few of my own personal suggestions:

Bedlam & Din ltd.

Cacophony 21

Boom Housing plc.

Eardrum Brokers and Sons

Pandemonium Properties Inc.

Urban Hubbub

Def & Mute-ual

Rumpus Rooms Ltd.

Any other ideas for names?

My Feelings on the Presidential Inauguration.

2009-01-20T17:55:00.000+01:00

So, the economy’s on the verge of collapse, a chunk of the population will probably be left on the street over the next few years while the banks use their billion-dollar handout to save their own asses, the auto industry is heading for a brick wall, there’s a couple of quagmire wars to squirm out of, the country’s international credibility is in the shitter, the constitution has been left like a Swiss cheese by the previous administration, a big change has been promised and someone’s going to have to deliver before the People’s patience runs out…the future is decidedly bleak.

So what should we do?

LETS HAVE A BIG PARTY AND FEEL GOOD ABOUT OURSELVES FOR A WHILE!

Does mere relief justify such a feeling of jubilance? I’m afraid Mr. President, the hangover will begin on January 21st and is going to last for the next four years.

Legacy

2008-07-25T10:59:00.000+02:00

I sometimes think that the greatest achievement of Dick Cheney after 8 years in the Whitehouse is the way he managed to change the term ‘Oversight Committee’ to ‘Overlook Committee’.

Nice one, Dick.

Father Ted Found Alive!!!

2008-07-22T09:06:00.007+02:00

...and committing genocide in Serbia!

That Dermot Morgan. What a card!

Smug Shots

2008-07-16T17:55:00.011+02:00

Wonderful word SMUG.

Just four little letters and yet conveys so much. There must be equivalent words in other languages but I doubt that any of them could coin such a nuanced idea with such little effort.

The other day I was reading an article about mapping the human genome and there was a photo of Craig Venter. And Craig Venter was looking smug. Because Craig Venter always looks smug. He just has one of those faces. It emits smugness to a point that you just want to put a boot into it. Bless him, he can’t help it.

Then I got to thinking what other public figures have that smug look. Now I’m not talking about those ‘proud’ or ‘arrogant’ or ‘massive ego’ looks. No, it has to be that superior, self satisfied shit-eating grin that you just know belies some deep seated insecurity.

So, I’ll throw a few examples of what I currently consider to be the smuggest mugs to grace our magazine covers and television screens and see if you lot can add with a few more to the line up:

Craig Venter

Nicholas Sarkozy

Matthew McConaughey

Hillary Clinton

Bono

Michael Schumacher

Mike Myers

Richard Branson

Sting

and of course Tom Cruise

Now look at all these photos very carefully. Do you notice anything? Exactly the same expression in all of their eyes. Twenty-one carrat, uncut smugness. I'm not kidding, look again.

So what other celebs would you classify as prize smug bastards?

Occupational Hazards

2008-07-07T16:55:00.001+02:00

A bit of embarrassment while out dining with a friend JM and his wife IM this weekend. IM had left her job at an optician’s about six month previously and set up on her own. She was still on good terms with her old boss and was flattered to find out that he was having a lot of trouble finding someone to replace her.

They did find one guy to take her place and for a while things seemed to be going peachy. However there was a catch. This dude was schizophrenic, which wasn’t a problem while he was on his meds. Sadly he had a history of periodically going off his pills and it didn’t take long before he started skipping while at the optician’s.

At this point the sick bastard that is my imagination took over and I started giggling uncontrollably in the restaurant. People were staring and my friends had to inquire as to the source of such amusement.

‘Oh come on. A schizophrenic optician?
“WHY ARE YOU STARING AT ME! STOP STARING AT ME! THE EYES, AAAAGH, THE EYES!”’

Yeah, I know. I’ll burn in Hell.

So what other occupations can you think of that might have some comic potential for schizos?

Ideas to Make a Million Nº. 745(b)

2008-07-04T13:04:00.000+02:00

Wii Foreplay.

That is all.

La Sala X

2008-05-11T17:12:00.000+02:00

Many years ago I did a 4-month stint in Madrid doing a bit of work experience in the headquarters of one of Spain’s most monolithic corporations. Happy days. I managed to land a room in an apartment in fairly central part of the old town sharing with three other lads. The four of us were very different both physically and in personality. When we were gathered of an evening in the kitchen talking the usual bollocks that young men talk, I couldn’t help but think that my life had taken on a certain sitcom quality. Apparently I was the stabilizing force in the group because after I left there were blazing rows, accusations of theft and eventually one of them buggered off without paying the month and a half’s rent he owed.

It was a fine time, my job was fairly laid back - I was more or less used to translate the department’s technical documentation. Most evenings were spent on the town and I can testify from firsthand experience that Madrid leaves Barcelona in the dust when it comes to nightlife. Nevertheless, every Monday I had to drag myself out of bed bright and early and haul my unwieldy corpse into a suit and onto packed metro train just to sit in my cubicle and try to appear awake.

One of the few things that cheered me up on these painful mornings was the fact that we lived a couple of doors down from an erotic cinema. They changed their double bill every Sunday evening so the next day I could pass by the front door and admire the fresh new titles. It was an experience that not only brightened up the morning, but also hugely enriched the quality and quantity of my colloquial Spanish.

Who thinks up the titles for porn films? It’s quite a challenge really considering the limited amount of subject matter in your average skin flick. It should be witty and saucy but not too obvious. Modesty aside, I reckon that I wouldn’t be too bad at it. So let’s open the floor to our half dozen readers. Can you think up or remember the best title to a porn flick. And I’ll get the ball rolling so to speak:

“Saving Ryan’s Privates”

Go on then. Top that.

Spanish Elections for Dummies

2008-03-07T14:13:00.003+01:00

This Sunday the fine Kingdom of Spain will be electing this next government and since Latin politics are so darn entertaining, I thought I’d give a brief refresher course on the whole gig. In layman’s terms you understand. If you want an in-depth, well researched article about this Iberian electoral clash, get up off your arse and go buy the Economist.

In order to appreciate this face-off to the fullest, one would really need a bit of background.

Crash Course in Recent Spanish Political History:

1975 – Franco Dies. (Yippee!)

The whole country stands around nonchalantly whistling because nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen. The Generalisimo had been grooming another military strongman to succeed him but a couple of years earlier ETA had had the presence of mind to assassinate the poor bugger with a landmine in Madrid. (The blast was so strong that it blew this guy’s chauffeur driven limo over a four-storey building and into the patio on the other side. He has since gained the nickname the ‘grasshopper’).

Franco had also been grooming the young prince Juan Carlos to take over as the figurehead of the nation. But what the Caudillo didn’t figure on was that even a cousin-marrying Bourbon could see that the writing was on the wall for a totalitarian state in modern Europe. Nonetheless, the liberals and intellectuals had to usher in democracy very slowly and gently over several years, making sure not to upset the old guard too much. This period is known as the ‘transition’. The only big hiccup was that failed military coup in 1981 when some colonel tried to take over the country. You might remember the footage of the fascist little prick shooting his pistol in the air in the Madrid parliament. But the coup petered out and the tin pot Napoleon went to jail, ha-fucking-ha.

OK where was I? Oh yeah. There was an interim government for a few years lead by a rather dashing moderate conservative called Suarez. Then in their first democratic elections in 1982, the Spanish voiced their backlash against right wing tyranny by voting in the socialists lead by one Felipe Gonzalez. At this time Spain, after more than 40 years of dictatorship, was frankly a backward shit hole. So it had nowhere to go but up and life for the average Dago began to improve.

Politically Shooting Oneself in the Foot – A Spanish Pastime

The problem was that political parties who stay in power for too long tend to stagnate. Granted this is something an average Italian wouldn’t understand as their governments tend to last about as long as an episode of Friends but we’re talking about Spain here. After 14 years leading the country, the socialist party was beset by scandals – political favours, bribes and even a secret branch of the police who went about furtively bumping off supposed members of ETA. (A third of the victims were innocent – cases of mistaken identity – but hey shucks nobody’s perfect!) This era of corruption became known as ‘felipismo’. Go figure.

So in 1996, the lefties lost the elections to the conservatives who were lead by a repulsive moustacheod dwarf named Aznar. Imagine a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Gollum. I suppose it was a good thing to shuffle the establishment around a little, but did they have to hang around for ‘two’ terms? I could never understand that vile little man’s popularity.

The seeds of the conservative’s downfall were sown in their second term. It should be mentioned that the party always tried to project the image of being tough on ETA and all forms of domestic terrorism. Aznar had also become a world class ass-kisser to that Whitehouse simpleton Bush and quasi-Tory whore Blair. So when these two fools decided to enter into an Iraqi war that had the word ‘quagmire’ written on it in big red neon letters, Aznar their faithful puppy dog, dutifully followed. He did this, I might add, against the wishes of 90% of the Spanish population.

Tragedy

On the morning of the 11th of March, 2004, four days before the Spanish general elections, ten backpack bombs ripped through four crowded trains belonging to the Madrid local rail service. The wagons, made from tough carbon fibre, burst open like tin cans scattering the belongings and limbs of those trapped inside all round the trackside. In all 191 people were killed and the whole country sent into a state of shock. It was the biggest terrorist attack ever committed on Spanish soil. I marched, along with a million others, through the streets of Barcelona in support of the victims and the people of Madrid. To see these Catalans, who usually do nothing but bitch about the nation’s capital, carrying banners stating ‘We Are All From Madrid’, was quite moving to say the least.

Before all this happened the conservatives were actually favourites to win the elections but now they were in a bit of bind. If the bombs were planted by ETA they were in the clear, seeing that they had always come down hard on the Basques. However, if radical Islamists were involved then the electorate might blame them for getting the country into a war that nobody wanted and that probably made Spain a legitimate target for Al Qaeda. So it was vital, in the run up to voting, that people suspect the Basque nationalists or at least harbour doubts about the Islamic connection.

However, something was not right with the ETA theory. No warning? A highly coordinated attack by an organization with its logistical branch in tatters? An act of mindless butchery whose only objective was a maximum body count? ETA denying responsibility? No false licence plates used? Detonators never before used by ETA? There was a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the authors of this outrage were new to Spain.

To call what the conservatives did cynical would be like calling Watergate a trivial faux-pas. There is ample evidence that while the police were finding more and more proof of Islamist involvement, these ministers were making knowingly misleading calls to national newspapers telling them that there were ‘indications’ that ETA was implicated. The Spanish police were not helping, following up on clues in such a rapid and efficient manner. CCTV pictures were shown where the bombers boarded the trains, the mobile phone that was supposed to detonate one of the unexploded bombs was being traced, a small van was found in the car park of one of the stations with bomb making equipment inside and with a cassette of the Koran in its tape deck but the governing party kept insisting on ETA's guilt. This sinister strategy backfired and cost them the election.

The majority of the Spanish electorate, still reeling from such a recent tragedy, saw through the conservative’s ploy and took to the streets to express their fury and disgust. The voter turnout was huge. People flew home in planes just to vote in rage. The socialists comfortably won the day and formed a coalition government. Since then, more evidence has emerged and a month later an Islamic terrorist cell associated with the train bombings blew itself up in a besieged apartment instead of letting itself be captured by the police. Nonetheless, there are still factions of the conservative party who are churning out conspiracy theories involving the Basques, the socialist party and even the Moroccan secret service. Some of them are quite amusing.

Big Sunday.

So who are the players in the Sunday election?

The Socialists – PSOE
Their leader and current prime minister is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero which is a bit of a mouthful so I think I’ll call him by his nickname ‘Bambi’. You see he’s an unassuming, skinny, gangly guy with big eyes and a sweet Mr. Bean kind of smile. And when you see him giving a speech at a huge political meeting, you can actually imagine him doing the oratorical equivalent of slipping around on a frozen pond with Thumper. It’s a testament to the sorry state the conservatives that Bambi has actually won the two pre-election debates.

He seems like a decent enough guy, as shown by the way he handled Chavez in the ‘Why don’t you shut up!’ incident, and although his government hasn’t exactly been stellar, they haven’t screwed things up either. In fact that could probably be their party's electoral slogan ‘Four More years of Not Fucking Things Up!’.

The Conservatives - PP
Their candidate is Mariano Rajoy, successor to Aznar and according to his followers, theft victim of the last election. The big problem with Rajoy is that he’s got all the charisma of an autistic undertaker. He was a boring, stiff and grumpy looking minister under Aznar and no matter how hard his image consultants try to paint a relaxed confident veneer over his persona, the mildew keeps seeping through. He is your girlfriend’s cranky disapproving father when you were a teenager, he’s the stone-faced ticket collector on the train, he’s a headmaster in a brown corduroy jacket.

I mean it’s not like Bambi is this grand Rooseveltian statesman. For Christ’s sake he’s a socialist and he can’t even form a proper fist. At the end of party conventions, he raises his hand and it looks like he’s holding onto an invisible helium balloon. He is definitely beatable. But with the Undertaker at the helm, I don’t see the PP rallying at the last minute and clawing their way back into power.

The other problem are the tactics used by the conservatives. They are still sore about 2004 and frothing at the mouth to get back on top. As a result of this, their strategy has been to viciously criticize absolutely everything that the government does. They blame the government for a slight economic downturn (even though it has affected all of Europe), they blame the government for the rise in unemployment (although employment has also risen considerably), they blame the government for negotiating with ETA (without proof that this actually happened), they blame the government for greenhouse gasses, for the hunger in Africa, for the fact that it sometimes rains on weekends, for the existence of the bogyman, for the varicose veins in pensioners, for the fact that Spain has never won the world cup etc. I reckon that the electorate has gotten a bit tired of this constant haranguing.

Other parties:
If the Spanish Civil War taught us one thing it is that by their very nature, the right is united and the left is fragmented into various shades of left. One must also consider that Spain is a nation of distinct regions, each with a very autonomous political system and culture. Some of these regions’ nationalist parties can play a decisive role in the nations direction.

So in a nutshell, the minor parties consist of the greens, a couple of parties further to the left of the socialists and a handful of regional hard-hitters. This is important as coalitions are the norm.

Anyway, I’m putting my money on the status quo. A narrow socialist win and a new coalition. Plus ça change.

We’ll see on Monday.

Take your bets, ladies and gentlemen!

What a Difference a Decade Makes

2008-03-02T15:51:00.001+01:00

Once again, this post has been marinating in the cesspool of my hindbrain over the past two weeks until I could find a moment to commit it to text.

The party.

Ah yes, the party.

As mentioned in the previous post our first big February bash occurred ten years ago to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. It was curious to contrast that event with the party of a few of weeks ago. I found the most striking points of comparison were the following:

TEN years ago, a lot more people showed up than were invited. Because naturally, a lot of the people we invited wanted to bring friends along. And very welcome they were, the more the rowdier.
THIS time round a lot fewer people showed up than were invited because some had the flu, some of them had kids who had the flu, some of them had had a tough a week and couldn’t summon the energy to walk out their front door for a bit of weekend leisure and some of them obviously couldn’t handle the stairs with their Zimmer frames.

TEN years ago we had just enough booze to keep the thronging masses at bay and the guests were smart enough to bring along the cheapest booze they could buy. So by the end of the night, the diehard guests were hitting the Andoran counterfit gin, the DYK (pronounced ‘dick’) whiskey and the Moscatel wine that the gay couple had brought along while others were licking the bottom of the Sucker Punch bowl. (ref: previous post)
THIS time round, we were shocked to welcome punters at the front door with bottles of Bombay gin and decent Rioja Crianza wines stuck under their arms. And even more shocking, most of this quality hooch wasn’t even touched! I think we ended up making a net profit with regards to quantity of booze and certainly with regard to quality. Our bodega overfloweth. We could probably throw another two parties with the alcoholic procceds of this one.

TEN years ago, I was young, fit as a fiddle and had only begun going out with my new girlfriend and yet I didn’t notice any woman paying particular interest to me at the February bash.
I am now a slightly overweight, married forty year old with a nipper back in the fold and was pleasantly amazed to discover a couple of the lady guests shamelessly flirting with me. Now let me be clear, this was the highlight of the party for me, getting my dusty old ego shoeshined. Unfortunately it also confirmed that as old as I’ll ever get, I will never understand how women’s minds work let alone their libidos.

TEN years ago the neighbours (who were all invited) were shocked at how much noise we made.
THIS time round the neighbours (who were also all invited) were shocked at how little noise we made.

TEN years ago, it took us half a day to clear up the flat and cart all the empties down to the dumpster.
THIS time round, it took us an hour because a few of our more responsible guests collected and brought down bags of empties before heading home.

And finally…

TEN years ago I would have been really pissed off to have hosted such a mellow, well ordered party.
THIS time round, I’m kind of relieved and grateful.

Sucker Punch

2008-02-07T11:01:00.000+01:00

This Saturday we will be throwing a rather sizable bash at our top-floor Barcelona apartment. It’s a shame you can’t come. I began these February festivities ten years ago to celebrate my then thirtieth birthday (which actually falls in January but we won’t go into that).

The mathematically astute among you will no doubt have perceived that I have just reached the ripe old age of forty. So this year the celebrations will be a little special, this being my official coming-of-aged party.

That being said, we’re not planning anything out of the ordinary. Our stalwart belief in tradition would not allow it. Our party supplies will be limited to the essentials - big bowls of unflavoured crisps, nuts and olives – a fridge filled to the brim, a veritable sarcophagus of beer cans – ice flung into the bath to be used as an subsidiary cooling point – spirits and mixers strewn over a covered table and eighty to a hundred people invited to attend the proceedings. We always prefer to throw wholesale parties with an emphasis on bulk rather than customized. I consider my guests less as a kaleidoscope of quality individuals and more in terms of biomass.

And of course, no Lung bash would be complete without the compulsory tub of sangria. Ah sangria, the cruellest joke that the Spanish ever played on the rest of the world, (the Inquisition and Conquista not withstanding). It was probably invented in the late sixties and I can just imaging how:

“Hey José, these jodidos German and British tourists are drinking my bodega dry! Now I will have to go buy some more wine from my neighbour Ramón. And that hijo de puta charges me two cents per litre. Look how he screws me, that Billy goat, I shit on his ancestors!”

“No problem Jorge. You can easily dilute your own wine with the water that you wash your fruit with, and then dump in a bunch of ice, some anti-freeze and sugar to disguise the foul taste. Then you just tell these estupido tourists that it’s a traditional punch our forefathers drank to celebrate cutting the throats of Moors. For this reason it is called ‘blood’ or ‘Sangria’.”

So here are the ingredients to my trademark February sangria:

Three or four Tetrabriks of Don S. red wine. Ah yes, Don S., fuel to a generation of street tramps, penniless teenagers and frustrated housewives. To call it cooking wine is to do it too much justice. Even cooking wine usually comes in bottles. Actually come to think of it, calling it wine might be doing it too much justice.

Three or four Tetrabriks of supermarket brand fruit juice. My favourite is the ‘Mixed Tropical Fruit’ juice because you just know they swept the floor of the fruit factory at the end of a shift and threw the contents into the press while the next crowd were clocking in.

Empty the contents of said Tetrabriks into a plastic basin (remembering to remove your dirty laundry first). Add a fist full of sugar, a squidge of lemon juice, a flummox of ice, a few drops of nail polish remover and a scatter of cloves. (Curiously, in Spanish the word for cloves is the same as the word for nails. So if you don’t have one, you can always use the other.)

Stir the contents of the plastic basin with a tire iron.

Serve into polystyrene cups with a common ladle. (If you don't own a ladle, a chipped teacup will do nicely)

I call this drink my ‘Sucker Punch’ for the following reason:
We usually ask our guests to contribute some extra booze to the event. So the idea is that some of the lesser intelligent, more lily-livered of them (designated drivers, anorexics, Spanish etc.) will bring some tasty beer along and then dive into the sangria, wrongly assuming that it’s a more harmless alternative to their fresh pilsner. Their offering is therefore free to be imbibed by a more deserving guest or more importantly, by me.

SUCKERS!

Twenty Things that You Never Wanted to Know about Chemistry.

2008-02-03T22:15:00.000+01:00

1. The cleaner the lab coat, the less the sense of humour of the wearer. (so to answer to your next question ‘Yes - CSI is full of shit’)

2. The more the piece of laboratory equipment looks like a washing machine, the more it costs. (NMR, electron microscopes, Plasma spectroscopy,..etc)

3. You "can" judge a book by its cover. The prettiness of a chemical corporation’s catalogue is directly proportional to how sinister the nature of its activities . They tend to compensate for their evil ways with publicity.
For example if there is a paper manufacturing company that has a simple aerial photo of their factory on the cover of their catalogue, then you can rest assured that they are probably just what they claim to be i.e. a company that manufactures paper.
However, if you see a catalogue with a photo of waterfalls, a mother holding a baby or a family having a picnic in a field of sunflowers then you can pretty much conclude that this company puts dioxins into baby food or experiments on pandas.

4. The presidents of nearly all large German chemical conglomerates look like child molesters. I’m not kidding. Check it out. It must be something to do with the blond moustaches and the devious smiles but I personally wouldn’t let one of them within half a mile of a playground.

5. Unlike architects, writers, computer programmers, engineers or librarians, chemists don’t usually have friends who are chemists outside of their workplace. Because let’s face it, who the hell wants to be friends with a friggin’ chemist. “Hey Mike, lets get together tonight for a few brewskies and chat about surface catalysts for ketone synthesis”. “Hell yeah! That’d totally raaawk.”

6. Any chemist worth his/her salt should be able to cook. The processes are almost identical even if the smells are not.

7. All chemists above 5-foot ten have a stoop.

8. A lot of high level chemists have a chip on their shoulder about the fact that quantum physics and genetics are the sexy, trendy sciences that are getting all the media attention at the moment. I’ve heard stories of photos of Craig Venter being stuck on dartboards in University staffrooms.

9. The chemistry departments of almost all universities are usually housed in the ugliest building on campus. Something resembling a high rise prefab or an inverted bunker. The obvious thinking behind this is that the college shouldn’t spend a lot of money and effort on a beautiful and expensive building when there is a fair chance that it might accidentally explode some day.

10. Surprisingly, the hardest thing to find in a large laboratory is a small glass rod to stir the shit in your beaker.

11. BAKELITE’S MAKING A COMEBACK, MAAAN! MARK MY WORDS YE HEATHENS. Ehem...I beg your pardon.

12. You know those ignorant philistines out there who think that the most useful application for helium is to make your voice sound like a smurf’s?
Well, they’re actually right.

13. It is not generally known that in 1997 after extensive research into Mexican food, IUPAC reclassified the term ‘Noble Gas’ as an oxymoron.

14. You know in the film ‘Blade’ when Wesley Snipes makes Stephen Dorff explode by injecting him with a solution of the chelating agent EDTA? Well that was frigging cool, that was.

15. Don’t even bother asking a chemistry student if he knows how to make LSD. I can guarantee you that the book was borrowed from the university library in 1967 and never returned.

16. Chemists and cordroy. Don’t ask me why.

17. That ‘hide-the-metalic-sodium-in-the-swimming-costume’ gag stops being funny after the third or fourth time.

18. Primo Levy is the chemists’ Jim Morrison.

19. (To be rapped)
Beaker and Bunsen Honeydew.
It’s funny coz it’s so true. (Motherfucker)

20. There was a girl in my college year who could fill a 50ml pipette with her mouth in eight seconds flat. Boy was ‘she’ popular.

Bah Humbug!

2007-12-24T14:30:00.000+01:00

I woke up this morning with a slight case of the snuffles, the suggestion of a hangover lurking behind the eyes and decided to hate humanity for the day. It happens every now and then and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to everyone. Just let yourselves go for a twelve-hour period and actively despise the six and a half billion people who infest this blue turd of a planet. Purge all those bad feelings in one mighty catharsis and tomorrow you can get back to being your sweet altruistic selves, refreshed, with batteries charged and ready for the season of good will.

Of course to be a proper misanthrope one must remember to hate absolutely everyone, otherwise there’s always that risk of slipping into vulgar racism. Nonetheless, today I decided to pick out some of my all time favourites and hold a kind of beauty competition of pet peeves in my head. The candidates were limited to Europe as I’ve lived and travelled almost exclusively on this continent. There is also the added advantage that Europe is not exactly lacking when it comes to odious stereotypes.

So I made a mental list which included telesales executives from London, North African pickpockets, Rangers supporters, loud American tourists ... etc. But in the end, there had to be one winner. So here in reverse order are the people I most love to loathe:

Bronze medal:
Taxi Drivers Everywhere.
Do you ever have that urge to get short changed by a right wing fanatic with BO? Then just dial up your local cab service anywhere in the world. Why is it that I have such a natural aversion to taxi drivers? I suppose I’ve always assumed that they’re going to try and rip us off and so often they’ve proved me right.

Silver medal:
Anyone in Vienna who Deals with the General Public.
It took a couple of days of our holiday to realize that the Viennese person on the street can be quite nice and will usually try to help you if you’re lost. But the moment you step into a hotel, museum, gallery or restaurant and the staff suss that you don’t speak perfect German, you will be treated like something the cat coughed up. I’m not joking, this happened ‘every’ time without fail during our stay.
Now, under other circumstances you don’t mind this sort of thing happening occasionally while travelling abroad. For instance, getting the obnoxious treatment from a French waiter isn’t so bad because you half expect it, it’s done with a bit of arrogant flair and it only represents a small part of the holiday experience. But when an entire service industry of a capital city seems to be sneering at you from day one, it does begin to grate on the nerves somewhat.
On the last day, I finally lost my rag with the receptionist at the hostel and sarcastically complimented her on her country’s fine culture “I mean isn’t it amazing how everybody in Germany speaks Austrian as well. And goodness me, just look how many sensational brands of car your country manufactures.” I walked out before she had time to react feeling such a wonderful sense of relief.

Gold Medal:
Old Bourgeois Parisian Ladies.
Ah yes. The posh old dears from the city of lights. There will always be a dank little black spot in my heart reserved for this fetid species of humanity. But why choose them as the ‘haine du jour’ when there are probably more nefarious characters at large?
Well it wasn’t the fact that they would skip queues, park wherever they liked, let their little doggies shit all over the city without even entertaining the thought of cleaning up the mess, push their way onto metro trains before letting anyone off, argue for half an hour over a penny, practically shove you out of the way when you offered your seat on a bus with not even a hint of a ‘Merci’, make all the other customers wait while they abuse the waiter/bank teller/cashier/mechanic or bitch out loud about immigrants.

No - the reason that old Parisian ladies get to top the podium of chagrin is their pure and unadulterated hypocrisy. When they were not being obnoxiously rude to everyone around them, they were complaining about the rudeness of others. These bitter hags dressed in furs, with their Hermes handbags and polished high heels would gather in mid-morning groups in the cafés while their husbands (if still alive) were probably somewhere banging the secretary. Then, when comfortably seated, all they would launch into their whine-fest in those tired condescending voices about everyone else. “Oh, the young people today have no manners, the young women have no style, the immigrants don’t know how to behave in a civilised country, the traffic is so bad that I can’t park my Mercedes anywhere anymore, you just can’t find good service these days, I had to fire my Colombian maid for staining the silver, it was such an ordeal for me.”

After living in the sixteenth arrondissement for almost a year, these arrogant old biddies eventually wore me down and I developed what could best be described as a cultural allergy. For this reason I honour them with this award.

While writing this diatribe, I was reminded of a brilliant scientific theory put forth by one of the great Irish satirists, Mr. Flann O’ Brien. In his novel ‘The Third Policeman” O’ Brien describes the peculiar anxiety of a policeman who spends most of his day on his bicycle. The copper has the strange sensation that, through the constant friction, the molecules from the bike were passing into his backside and that his own molecules were likewise being transferred into the saddle. The result of this was that over the years, the saddle had gotten softer and more flesh-like while the policeman’s rump had gotten harder and more leathery. The constable was terrified that he would eventually turn into his bicycle and vice versa.

Pray, scoff not at this wonderful theory as it could explain a lot of the above.

Just think about it. With what is a taxi driver in physical contact for hours at a time, sufficiently long enough for a sizable exchange of molecules? Why the taxi itself. So logically, after a few years the taxi driver begins to look slightly dented, starts to stink of smoke, piss and stale leather and has a tendency to growl when he’s not well oiled.

Same question for the old Parisian biddies. If you’ve ever been to Paris, you’ll no doubt have observed that this breed of urban dame is never, ever seen on the street without her fur coat. Animal rights be buggered, anybody who gets between a mature Parisienne and her mink is likely to have their eyes clawed out by perfectly varnished fingernails. However, if you look even closer, you’ll notice that after a few years most of these furs begin to look faded, wrinkled and should you examine the eyes of the dead vermin up close, you are quite likely to see the onset of glaucoma. The reason for this is that the animal’s carcass has absorbed too many of its owner’s molecules and it is therefore beginning to resemble her. Likewise, over the years the old French lady begins to take on the aspect and behaviour of a vile and vicious little rodent.

I haven’t figured out exactly where this theory fits in to the Viennese service industry yet. One can only suppose that as a job requirement, these people have to take a poker out of the freezer every morning before going to work and shove it where the delightful Austrian sun doesn’t shine.......

.......actually now that I think of it, that would also explain where yodelling came from.

A Seasonal Verse for my Chums Back in the Auld Sod.

2007-12-18T12:16:00.001+01:00

KITCHMAS

The Yuletide's in and by the fire,
Our toasty toes are toasting,
I'm sending this to wish you well,
And save the cost of posting.

I've got a little news to tell,
You'll all be glad to hear,
That just to spite the airlines,
I'm staying put this year.

So of all the Christmas visitors,
You'll be happy not to see,
Upon the list feel free to stick,
Bin Laden, Twink and me.

And open presents, gorge and quaff,
With extra fun and cheer,
Knowing you wont have to see,
My ugly face this year.

When down the pub, on Krimbo Eve,
United shoulder to shoulder,
All drunk and sentimental,
And feeling one year older.

Spare a thought for me while staring,
Into the celtic night,
And thank Christ I'm not around to talk,
The usual ex-pat shite.

And on the stands on Boxing Day,
All freezing mud and dirt,
Think of me and whimper,
While losing all your shirts.

And ponder me when crossing arms,
The last day of December,
I hope for you it is a night,
Worth trying to remember.

I'll celebtate here, all on my todd,
For in foreign soil I'm stuck,
With cava, turron and chorizo,
And all that dago muck.

But it's not the same without your mates,
Despite the latin sun,
So I'll raise my glass to my dearest friend,
Whashisface, him, yer one.

As it's the time of year when one is free,
To peddle shameless tack,
I'm sending you the kitchest card,
Please don't send it back.

A HAPPY BLOODY CHRISTMAS TO YIS ALL.

I Had a Funny Dream the Other Night.

2007-12-02T18:04:00.000+01:00

I dreamt of meeting a famous Greek in a Dublin pub of an evening.

There I was at the bar, enjoying the first pint of the night when I noticed the strange old fellah propped up beside me. He seemed to be wrapped in a white towel with coloured food stains down the front and was finishing a large glass of pale liquid that smelt vaguely of rat urine. It took me a while to suss who he was but eventually the penny dropped.

“Aristotle, star graduate of Plato’s Academia, tutor to Alexander the Great and father of modern scientific thinking, look at the state of you. What’s the story? For a minute there I thought you were that mangy slob Socrates.”

“Ah, don’t talk to me about that pikey old Athenian Nancy and enough cheek out of you. You don’t know the day I’ve had. Listen, you wouldn’t have the price of a glass of Retsina on you, would ya? I spent all my loose change on bus fare."

What could I do? He was after all the originator of logical thought, so I spotted him a refill of the rancid yellow nectar and noticed how the gesture made him warm to me.

“So tell me my kind young fellow, when are you from?”

“You mean where.”

“No I mean when.”

“Oh right. I get it. Well I suppose I’d be mostly from the end of the twentieth century. That’d be a little under two and a half thousand years after your stint.”

“Fascinating. And tell me if you please, in this century of yours what was the greatest advancement in civilization. What leap in knowledge most changed the way people lived, from the lowest pauper to the most powerful emperor?”

I thought about it for a moment.

“Well Risto, I suppose it would have to be television.”

“Tele-vision? And pray tell, what is this tele-vision?”

So I tried to give him a concise description of the electronic transmission of sounds and images through cables, airwaves, cathode ray tubes and finally onto the illuminated screens of household boxes. It never actually occurred to me to simply point out the giant flat-screen monstrosity that was showing the match at the back of the bar. But dreams can be illogical like that.

After finishing this description I studied the old man carefully, not sure whether he hadn’t understood me or if he was merely lost in deep thought. Suddenly his face lit up like a fluorescent wart and he sat bolt upright on the stool.

“But, but this is marvellous my friend, simply marvellous! You must have lived in the most enlightened age in history. Why with this tele-vision the most brilliant thinkers of your time would be able to communicate all their deepest meditations to the entire population. Everyone in the nation would naturally become the most knowledgeable philosophers and finest appreciators of art. Existential debate would be the norm in the fish markets, grain mills and iron smiths throughout the land. There would be no need for our old Academia, as instruction and wisdom could be issued through this miraculous tele-vision.

And how democracy must have flourished in your time, with senators and kings being able to issue decrees and explain their decisions directly to the masses. Why, civil unrest would become a thing of the past as would war. After all, what are wars but simple misunderstandings between cultures that get blown out of proportion? But with this tele-vision, all the peoples of the world would understand their common humanity and put aside their weapons and.....”

I sighed and felt that an interruption was called for.

“Listen Risto, sorry to have to break this to you but...”

And I went on to explain reality TV, Paris Hilton, soap operas, advertising, spin doctors, the Bush administration, Iraq and Vietnam, Fox news, daytime talk shows, Ben Stiller, Stock, Aitken and Waterman,...etc. etc.

The rest of the dream is a bit of a blur.

I just remember waking up with a vague feeling of unease and a slight stench of Moussaka vomit on my jammies.

Every Once in a While You Read Something Serious …

2007-11-13T10:49:00.000+01:00

…that makes you laugh at loud at work and almost gets you fired.

During the naughty half hour after lunch before the boss arrives when everyone else is at the coffee machine gossiping, I usually employ the time to catch up on my favourite internet flotsam. This time I was reading a fascinating article about the life of that famous Irish/Australian bush bandit Ned Kelly.

It had to happen. One of those events with near perfect timing. Just as the boss was entering the premises, I read the following paragraph and guffawed so hard that coffee came out of my nose. I tried to pass it off as a gargantuan hiccup but it was obvious he wasn’t having any of it and thought I was laughing at him.

Aw well, just have to be on my best behaviour over the next week or so.

Anyway, here is the offending text. What makes it funny is that it was written as a completely serious piece of biographic journalism. See if you can spot why I laughed:

“It was just two years after John Kelly's death that Ned had his first significant scrapes with the law. His first encounter with the local authorities was not particularly distinguished. At the tender age of 14, he was accused of attacking an itinerant Chinese merchant named Ah Fook. He was charged with assault and was held in jail for ten days, according to documents from the time.”

Now putting yourself in the arresting constable’s shoes and using your keenest powers of deduction, how would you imagine the conversation went between an Irish brigand and a guy named 'Ah Fook' that lead to a fight between them?

Hysterical.

The Hollywood Screenwriter's Strike.

2007-11-05T17:57:00.000+01:00

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD.

An epic screenplay about the Hollywood screenwriter’s heroic struggle against the big studio bosses.

Act I, Scene I

A hazy drinking tavern in some seedy backstreet of Burbank. It is full of murmuring, smoking writer types wearing tweed caps and jackets. The younger ones are sporting knickerbockers and have their white shirts rolled up to the elbows. The there is a palpable tension in the air caused by the heady mix of anger and desperation. Spike O’ Donnell is standing on a chair addressing the discontented rabble.

S.O’D: I am telling you my dear friends, the studio is being on its knees and will break at any moment. We must hold firm and maintain a most dignified unity or we will loose this strike and dishonour our families.

An unruly voice pipes up from the back of the bar. The men turn to see Bugsy Hughes, one foot on a chair, his tweed cap cheekily cocked to one side.

BH: I say, you are being a most silly fellow, Spike O’ Donnell. How am I supposed to honour my family when I cannot even put food in their bellies? This strike is a mug’s game, I am telling you all with sincerity. We should accept the studio’s offer. It is the only way to end this unpleasantness and achieve inner serenity.

A slight murmur of approval issues from the restless mob.

S.O’D: You are a most insolent scoundrel Bugsy Hughes! I know that you are being paid by the studios to come to these meetings and cause trouble. But I have yet to be obtaining the proof. But be assured you naughty rogue, when we do find it, you will be receiving a very sound thrashing indeed.

BH: Ha. The only thrashing we will be seeing in the future is the same thrashing that we are getting every day from the constabulary’s billyclubs at the studio gates. It is no use I am telling you. The studios are owning the mayor and have the chief of police in their pockets. We cannot be winning this battle. We should settle with the bosses!

The crowd, torn by the two sides of the argument, begin yelling amongst themselves and it looks like fisticuffs could start at any minute when a coloured man stands on a table and blows a whistle. The rabble falls into silence and all eyes are on Lance Henderson.

LH: Now you all know me, old Lance. I have been working as a writer in these studios since I was nine years old and you fellows are being like a family to me. I thought I ought to say something now, because seeing as I am a negro chap and the protagonist’s best friend, I will probably have to be tragically dying in his arms within the next couple of scenes. Although my father was a lower caste studio sweeper, he wanted something better for me, his honourable son. So he used his life savings to send me to dignified schools where I received a most illuminating education.
Now when I am looking back at some of the scripts that Spike and I worked on together, I see that we created the most moving dreams for all the wonderful people of the honourable United States of America. We are being more than cogs in the Hollywood machine, we are the very heart and soul of Hollywood. We must honour ourselves and I must honour my noble father. So what do you say dearest colleagues, are we surrendering to the wanton bosses or are we giving Spike one more chance?

All the men in the bar, teary eyed with emotion, cheer Lance’s speech. Bugsy Hughes scowls and sneaks out the back door.

The cheers are cut short buy a young urchin who bursts through the bar doors out of breath.

S.O’D: Why if it isn’t little Billy, Eddy Schwartz’s kid. What is wrong Billy? Tell us please the cause of this most troubling anxiety.

B.S: Ain’t you all heard? The most sinister studio is endeavouring to hire scab labour.

LH: Scab labour? They would not dare to do such a thing. Surely they must know that we would never be letting such mischief-makers past the studio gates.

B.S: But that’s just it. They will not be coming through the gates. The bosses are outsourcing the scriptwriting to some far away land called In-dee-ya.

L.H: Goodness gracious me. That is a most preposterous notion, young fellow. If the screenplays were being written by overseas sub-contactors every jack man would notice immediately.

S.O’.D: Perhaps you are being right Lance, but I still feel that the studios have gone too far this time. Boys, this is it! If the studios are wanting a war, they will jolly well be getting a war! Time to teach them a most severe lesson.

ALL: Hurrah!

The strikers all grab their baseball bats and their crowbars, march out of the bar and towards the line of police guards who are blocking the studio gates.

They eventually line up nose to nose with the brutish cops ………

…. and brake into a charming and ordered dance routine accompanied by an overloud Asian-sounding pop song.

Multiple Combat Winner Gerard Butler Admits to Taking Performance Enhancing Drugs Before the Battle of Thermopylae.

2007-10-28T19:24:00.000+01:00

Butler orders a charge in the epic film 300.

The Epic Movie establishment was thrown into shock this week when it was revealed that Gerard Butler, winner of numerous cinematic battles had been using a form of anabolic steroid known as ‘The Ham’ in his role as King Leonidas during the shoot of the movie ‘300’. Butler’s admission could retroactively cost him his leading roles in the Beowulf and Attila sagas.

Although he had been under investigation for some time by the Anti-Doping branch of the Academy for Dramatic Arts, the Scottish actor had repeatedly denied using uncontrolled substances to achieve his almost superhuman prowess on the set even to the point of filing a lawsuit against Entertainment Weekly for slander.

“It was amazing to watch him slash his way through a dozen Persian Immortals in a single take,” said co-star David Wedham, “then to keep that fighting pace up for three days and still want to dine in Hell at the end of it. It all looked all too good to be true, and sadly, we now know it was. I feel bad for Gerard but above all I feel terrible for the shame that this scandal has brought to the profession. I had read for the Leonidas role too, did you know?”

“It’s a disgrace, they should make an example of him.” an industry spokesperson who preferred to remain anonymous told us, “Back in the old days when you saw Victor Mature going up against the Philistine armies, you knew he wasn’t taking any junk. Things were different back then, the stars were real heroes with a lot of heart as well as muscle. Not the bums that you see in the studios today.”

Yesterday Butler’s agent issued a press release on his behalf. “I deeply regret all the disappointment that this has caused to my family, my associates and the studio. My wish is that, at the very least, this admission might help to put an end to this ever shameful practice which is sadly on the rise in Hollywood today. Above all I hope that my selfish behaviour will not sully the fine reputation of this homo-erotic, eugenics-supporting, racist, semi-fascist, gore-fest of a film.”

Idea to Make Millions Nº. 666.

2007-10-07T16:39:00.000+02:00

I read the other day that the majority of US citizens have no truck at all with the idea of evolution and roughly the same amount believe in a gig called the ‘Rapture’. This involves the theory that the ‘true’ believers (i.e. evangelists) will be beamed up to heaven à la Star Trek sometime before the arrival of the Antichrist. They will thus miss out on the subsequent biblical shit storm.

In fact a lot of these believers are eagerly watching for the prophetic signs that will precede said event using the book of Revelations as their guide. Now let us take a nice deep breath and pause for a moment to consider this situation.............

...........Did you come to the same realization as I did?

HOLY SHIT, A MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION OF THE MOST HEAVILY ARMED NATION ON THE PLANET ARE GLEEFULLY LOOKING FORWARD TO ARMAGEDDON!!!!!

Now, most of you might see this state of affairs as a problematic not to say shit-curdlingly terrifying. However, where you mortals see a problem, I see a golden opportunity.

There exists a series of books called ‘Left Behind’ that is set in a post-Rapture future. It chronicles the misadventures of those poor souls who were not amongst the chosen. That is, the sinners who didn’t get airlifted to Paradise and now have to hang around on Earth waiting for Beelzebub to make an appearance.

The authors of this series of books were indeed a pair of clever buggers. Because in combining science fiction with evangelism, they ended up selling 62 million copies.

Hang on, did I just say SIXTY TWO MILLION COPIES?!

I believe I did.

Hallelujah.

I have seen the light.

I have thus been pondering long and hard, searching my tormented soul to find a similar way to get both my hands into those deep, deep evangelical pockets and I think I’ve come up with the perfect idea. Ladies and gentlemen, very soon you will be amazed to find on the shelves of your local bookshops the brand new Born Again cookbook. But not just any old cookbook folks. Using sensational recipes, this culinary tome will also denounce the heretical theory of evolution. And it will be called (drum roll):

INGREDIENT DESIGN

The premise of this new brand of Gourmet Theology is basically this:

How can one gaze upon and savour a plate full of tomato, mozzarella de buffalo and fresh basil doused in holy virgin olive oil and think that these foodstuffs evolved by mere hazard? I defy you all to experience the divinity of a perfect Caprice Salad then look me in the face and tell me that they entered into existence and were brought together by 'accident'. No dear friends, they could only have been created by a higher order and guided together by a celestial hand. Thus do I refute evolution.

How can one eat sweet corn and butter and honestly not conclude that these ingredients were brought together in holy matrimony through divine intent, how can one accompany cured Manchego cheese with a robust Merlot and not feel the presence of the Godhead? And I defy you all to try a brownie and vanilla ice cream accompanied with a hot espresso and not feel the urge to fall on your knees and praise Him. Anything, and I mean anything served with crispy bacon can only confirm the existence of Yahweh.

Watch out, I hear you cry, the bacon remark may offend some of the more hyper-sensitive or hyper-violent of the middle-eastern religions. Well I feel that it is my ecclesiastical duty to challenge the doctrines of those creeds with one simple question - If God had not meant us to eat piggies then why did he give us mustard?

But there is a darker side to my theory of Ingredient Design. For just as we can name recipes that prove the existence of the Lord, there are also dishes out there that leave no doubt that the Dark One walks among us.

Here in Spain they serve white asparagus with (believe it or not) mayonnaise! When this pallid white-on-white mush is served to you in a restaurant and the water gushes out of the vile vegetable as you cut into it causing the mayonnaise to form lurid floating globs on the plate, a shiver may run down your spine as you realise that this can only be the Devil's work. Up San Sebastian way, they have been known to serve salted-cod omelettes! - I've always had my doubts about the piety of the Basques.

My spies tell me that there are parts of the Netherlands where they eat raw herring with....MUSTARD! This diabolical dish can only mean that when the world draws close to Armageddon and the Rapture is nigh, the Anti-Christ will probably be born somewhere near Utrecht.

So, what do you reckon folks? Am I on to a winner here?

Worst Pun Competition.

2007-10-03T09:40:00.000+02:00

For some godforsaken reason I have gotten into a bad pun series of e-mails with a couple of old friends. It’s actually turned out to be quite entertaining in a face-clawing sort of way. So far I reckon that the absolutely worst offerings have to be:

A lady walked into a bar and asked the barman for a double entendre ……
….so he gave her one.

Two oranges walk into a bar. One turns to the other and says …. ‘Your round’.

Pretty agonizing eh?
So we’re going to open this one to the floor and let both our readers pitch their most original and worst possible puns our way. As a prize, both Lungs will come round to the winners house and beat him/her senseless with wet loofahs. Our largesse knows no bounds.

I've Figured Out the McCann Mystery....

2007-09-27T15:49:00.000+02:00

....the dingo did it.

Don't believe everything you read

2007-09-23T16:21:00.000+02:00

Just saw a headline on Yahoo news "Democrats fail to pass anti-war bill", and I thought, "Man, the Dems can't do anything even when they have a majority of the House and Senate.

So I did something silly, I did my own little Google War, to see how often things get published saying "Democrats fail". Some results:

Google ("Democrats Fail") = 75,100 entries
Google ("Republicans Fail") = 17,800 entries

Liberal mainstream media, indeed ...

Needless to Say, I Didn’t Pronounce It High-Per-Bow-Lay.

2007-09-21T23:01:00.000+02:00

..then the middle-aged American tourist propped his elbow on the tapas bar and began explaining himself to the pretty young Spanish girl. He spoke slowly and loudly even though she had made it quite clear that her English was near perfect.

‘You see I’m from Pasadena in California. That’s where the Rose Bowl is - one of the oldest and biggest stadiums in the country. They play the Bowl Game there which probably the most prestigious college matches of the post-season. In fact, some say it’s the Superbowl of college football. You see in the States we got this thing called the Superbowl which is THE most important sporting event in the world and....’

‘Excuse me’ I interrupted ‘You may not know this but over here they’ve got the Hyperbole which is the biggest, most spectacular, sensational, orgasm-inducing thing in the entire fucking cosmos.’

There was a silence. Neither of them had got the joke for completely different reasons. I picked up my coat and left for another bar. The night was young but life was short.

A Little Bit of Friday Sexism.

2007-09-14T09:11:00.000+02:00

A while ago, a friend of mine who’d recently split up with his better half described her as ‘The Orwellian Girlfriend’.

This, he explained, was because she always wanted to know what he was thinking, because she made him feel like a criminal for wanting sex and because she wouldn’t have rested until she’d turned him against all of his best friends.

I thought this was a fine bit of misogynistic wit, coming as it had from a blubbering mess of a man who’d obviously too much drink on him and was in danger of toppling the barstool upon which he was so precariously perched.
So naturally as a token of my appreciation, I bought him another pint.

Idea to Make Millions Nº. 513

2007-08-29T11:26:00.000+02:00

I’ve never personally consulted any of those on-line dating pages but one would imagine them all to follow a fairly standard format.

An over-flattering photograph of you from eight years ago,
A profile section that allows men to lie about their height/wealth and women to lie about their weight/age,.
A set of silly generic questions that are supposed to let you show your wit and personality without making you seem too smarmy or cocky….blah, blah etc.

And all of this is to be wrapped up in a relatively anonymous package so that the punters don’t have to worry about perverts, stalkers or (heaven forbid) telemarketers finding out where they live.

But is there room for improvement with this format?

Of course there is and that’s where my money making idea comes in.

We live in an age where technology has allowed us to customize everything through interactivity. At the flip of a switch we can chose our music, our TV programs and even have an artificial brain select the type of literature that we might want to order. Surely this direct involvement in personal choice should be carried over to the on-line dating game too, no?

So, what I propose is that we abolish the generic question section of the web site and let the customer decide what he/she is going to ask. These questions, if wisely formulated could immediately separate the wheat from the chaff (or the chav as the case may be) and save so much time for our busy client.

I’m thinking of calling the site dealbreakers.com or cut2thechase.com or letsget2thefuckingpoint.com. As an example, here is a brief selection of the type questions I would ask a potential date before moving on to the next step.

CUSTOMIZED QUESTIONS SECTION:

Does the word ‘niggardly’ offend you? Yes □ No □

Are you against women’s suffrage? Yes □ No □

Will you ask me about my salary on a first date? Yes □ No □

Do you ever, ever wear pink lipstick? Yes □ No □

Have you had any plastic surgery? Yes □ No □

Do you ever phone people even though you have nothing particular to say to them? Yes □ No □

Did you cry when Princess Diana died? Yes □ No □

Do you own any Phil Collins CDs? Yes □ No □

Do you believe that the stars influence our destiny? Yes □ No □

Do you chew and pop gum? Yes □ No □

Do you still keep stuffed animals in your bed? Yes □ No □

Did you like the film Moulin Rouge? Yes □ No □

Do you use the words ‘me’, ‘I’ or 'like' on average > three times per sentence? Yes □ No □

Do you fret about your weight? Yes □ No □

Are you offended by sick humour? Yes □ No □

Do you secretly despise men despite desperately wanting a date? Yes □ No □

You see, these subtle queries would immediately distinguish the type of woman for me through a process of elimination. Because so much of a sniff of a positive answer to any one of them would have me running for the hills like a burning spastic.

So what questions would you ask on your customized questionnaire?

Up Yours James Blunt

2007-08-24T16:16:00.000+02:00

I remember my first day in Barcelona as if it was yesterday.

I had come over after suffering an unpleasant break-up with my girlfriend and had sworn off women forever (as you do). But strolling down the Ramblas on that first sunny afternoon something happened that made my misogynistic streak evaporate like a wisp of smoke.

I was innocently foraging around for a seedy bar in which to get drunk and feel sorry for myself when I looked up and beheld a goddess-like apparition strolling towards me. A moment that knocked the wind clean out of me. There she was, breezing through the thronging masses like a Latin angel. Perhaps it was my imagination but it did seem like the crowd parted before her as threads of gossamer might part before a sweet summer breeze. As if they knew that something so perfect, so delicate should never be accidentally glanced lest it disappear. But like I say, that might have been just my imagination...

And perfect she was. The olive skin, the silky sheen of her straight black hair her eyes so wide and so dark that you could have fallen into them and slumbered forever. I remember the burgundy mini-dress she wore and how she walked with such coquettish confidence. It was as if she knew the effect she was having on the mere mortals surrounding her but refused to acknowledge it. Twenty-three perhaps twenty-four, although poise and style gave her a more mature and worldly air.

She was chatting with friends and through the background bustle of the thoroughfare I could catch snippets of her voice. Rich it was, like Cognac but with the slightest sexy rasp around the edges. A voice that could seduce you with a word, cut you with a quip but could sing lullabies to a baby if the need arose. It felt like somebody was pouring warm honey into my ears.

These sensations flashed through my soul all in a matter of seconds and now we were passing each other. In the periphery of my perception, the whole street seemed to stand still and hold its breath in anticipation of this moment. We locked eyes, she held the gaze for longer than I expected and then moved on. Did I detect the faintest suggestion of a smile? Or are the opaque mists of this old man's memory playing cruel tricks?

I wanted to rush to her. I wanted to tell her that this moment was a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of Nirvana. That we should be together, that we must be together, that to do otherwise would be spitting in the face of destiny. I wanted to grasp the moment and not let this precious jewel slip through my fingers.

But alas I tarried too long and she was gone.

How can I live with my self now?, I thought, as I continued down the picturesque promenade. Uncertainty and hesitation had once again cost me the prize, but this time the prize was a soul mate - perhaps the soul mate because I couldn't imagine that this small planet could possibly be host to another sample of such feminine divinity. How will I go on knowing that I squandered this chance to meet such a unique, such a stunning, such a sensual woma.........

..........Oooooh look, there's another one.

I think I met the first chick at a party a few months later.
Can't be sure though.
She'd put on a few pounds.

Dear Loyal Reader....

2007-07-27T13:35:00.001+02:00

Sorry, I haven't been feeding the blog lately.
Been a bit busy getting married and shit.
I'm supprised that you're still here actually.
Don't get out much do you?
Many friends?
Quick, sign off. I hear your Mum coming up the stairs!
Only kidding.
I see you're out of Clearasil again.
Is that a Dungeon Master's Guide I see on the shelf behind you?
Dungeon Master eh? You must be very proud.
Why is there an odd sock underneath your bed?
Oh I see.
Well at least that way you only wear them out one at a time.
That telescope over there by the window, shouldn't it be pointing up for stargazing?
Oh I see.
Yes, it IS a fine argument in favour of the use of net curtains.
If ever I have a daughter that age, I'll be sure to remind her.
Well, it's probably time I was goin......
Yes indeed, I had noticed the Dr. Who figurines?
Ah, even more after your birthday next week?
Do you mind me asking, how..?
Forty-three?!? My, my I wouldn't have put you over thirty.
Look I really, really have to sign off. There's a ...chicken in the oven .. or somehting.
These little chats are always a pleasure.
Please keep visiting the blog.
It's because of readers like you that I post so often......

Xtreme Friendship

2007-05-13T15:19:00.000+02:00

There is a type of friend that every man should have. That being said, he should only have one because having two would be a living Hell.

When my Dad was in college in the late fifties, he was a tall, stringy, shy guy whose social circle could be described more in terms of quality than quantity. I picture him as a sort of young James Stewart wearing Buddy Holly glasses who didn’t make a whole lot of eye contact with his peers.

One of his few friends was Noel who, although he resembled my father in physique, was very much his antithesis in personality. Noel was a country boy with no qualms about getting in your face and according to my old man, he could be as blunt as a sledgehammer with it. When it came to getting drunk, loosening up and getting into trouble Noel was a kind of Yoda to my dad’s Skywalker.

One time they were getting nicely oiled in a city centre establishment when some working class guy who decided he didn’t care much for the student class, followed Dad into the jacks and tried to pick a fight with him. Well Pop was no brawler and this guy was built like a stevedore, so he backed off and escaped back to his barstool flustered, full-bladdered and shaken. He warned Noel to avoid this guy at all costs to which Noel calmly asked ‘Which guy?’

No sooner had dad pointed him out then Noel was off his stool and striding towards the thug. Dad said that he’ll never forget the expression on the bully’s face when he suddenly found a bony fist stuck under his nose and a level Tipperary voice telling him that if he had a fucking problem, they could fucking settle it right fucking here and right fucking now. It was like watching a Rottweiler being taken off guard by a Doberman and to everyone’s amazement, it was the hulk in the overalls who backed down.

When Noel got back to his place at the bar, flushed with adrenaline, he took a long swig from his stout, slapped my father on the back and said something that my dad will never forget:

‘You know, when you see trouble coming it’s usually best to meet it half way.”

As I’ve said, everyone should have one Noel as a friend. A friend who would embarrass the Hell out of you at a garden party but would probably take a bullet for you on a battle field. A friend who is as likely to save your life as he is to get you both killed. A friend who will call you an arsehole and slap you upside the head, but only when you’re being an arsehole and your head deserves a good upside-slapping. A friend who won’t hesitate to tell you the ugly truth when all your other friends are walking on eggshells.

Curiously, when I’ve talked to others about their versions of Noel, we’ve often found a common thread. The Noels in Ireland usually drink too much, are nearly always a lot more intelligent then they let on, they often have very anti-social political opinions and very politically incorrect ways of expressing them, they usually make your other friends nervous, on at least one occasion you’ll have seen them tell an authority figure to fuck off and they are nearly always disliked by your girlfriend or wife. (but barely tolerated by her if you're lucky)

But whether it be a Begby from Trainspotting, a Randal from Clerks or a Kent from King Lear, you should always hang on to these friends because you never know when someone’s going to plant drugs in your luggage before your holiday to Thailand. And while back home all your other friends are wringing their hands during the lead up to your execution, who will be the loyal lunatic drunkenly abseiling down the inner wall of the Bangkok prison with a map of the local sewers between his teeth (in case you manage to escape together) and a hooker strapped to his back (in case you don’t)?

I have my own version of Noel of course and I chatted over the phone with him a few days ago. We’ll be seeing each other fairly soon, for the first time years and I must confess that I'm really looking forward to it. Because although this guy has gotten me into more scrapes than I can remember, the time spent in his company was never ever dull.

Come over to the Dark Side, Sven.

2007-05-02T16:34:00.000+02:00

“You Catholics are pathetic assholes.’

“What?”

“Sexually repressed wimps all of you.”

I looked up at this blond Neanderthal with incredulity and wondered how the Hell we had gotten onto this subject. I then wondered, drunk as I was, how the hell in a party full of sexy sassy Spanish talent, I’d ended up talking to someone who resembled Dolph Lundgren’s ugly younger brother.

With superhuman effort, I managed to regain some kind of visual focus and noticed that this guy’s lower jaw seemed about two sizes too big for the rest of his face. ‘Fuck’ I thought ‘If this fella could gurn, he’d probably end up with teeth marks on his forehead.’ Funny the things a mind will come up with when pickled.

“So, I suppose you Swedes are a bunch of enlightened gurus when it comes to the act copulation.” I said, bravely defending a religion I didn’t give a shit about, as any good Irishman would.

“It is not that. We just have a healthier attitude, that’s all. For us, sex and nudity is normal, wholesome and is perfectly accepted by our society and our media.”

“Bastard’s got good English, I’ll give him that.” I thought. It then occurred to me that my own English was probably not too hot at that point.

“So for you lot, getting nekked and doing the Nasty is a clean and salutary act, akin to going for a jog or having a slap-up sauna?”

“Exactly.”

“You poor bastards.”

“What?!”

“Oh come on, sex has to be dirty if it’s going to be any fun. You shouldn’t turn it into a horizontal workout. It’ll lose all the morbid interest. Haven’t you never heard that stolen sweets taste better?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Listen Thag, have you ever….”

“Sven.”

“Eh?”

“My name is Sven.”

“Oh sorry. Listen Sven, have you ever thought that being gay today is probably not nearly as much fun as it used to be? Think about it, when homosexuality was still illegal, going out to cruise must have been a mix of heady adventure (excuse the phrase) and thrilling danger. The fact that it was taboo must have heightened the experience incredibly. Now that homosexuality is practically accepted in society, things must be so much duller.”

“Nonsense, you are being very stupid and drunk.”

“Aw don’t be like that Mungo…I mean Sven. Look, just tell me one thing. One thing and I’ll go on my merry way. What - in your magnanimous opinion - would be a Swede’s idea of a dirty weekend?”

“A dirty weekend? And what is this?”

“Ha” I thought “English isn’t so good after all, my fine Aryan Frankenstein”

“You know, any weekend where you decide to slip away quietly to a discrete location so you can be naughty.”

“I have already told you that we do not consider the act of….”

“I’m not talking about nookie necessarily. I’m talking about transgression, doing something that you know you shouldn’t. Something bold that you wouldn’t want others to find out about.”

“But why would we do something that we are ashamed of?”

“Oh God, you’re not making it easy Ug…”

“Sven.”

“Sorry. Sven. Well it seems that the only way you’ll ever understand my question is if I give you an example.

I remember once a long time ago, staying overnight at a bed & breakfast just the far side of Tralee in the west of Ireland. We were on a driving holiday and wanted to see the Dingle peninsula in the morning light. So we got up horrendously early the next day and were tucking into the full Irish cholesterol napalm breakfast when we noticed a strange middle-aged couple in the other corner. They were the only other people in the dining room so their strangeness stood out like a sore thumb.

Firstly, I couldn’t make head nor tail of the language that they were speaking and this irked me terribly coz I’m a bit of a smug tit when it comes to sussing out nationalities. Secondly, although they were doing nothing untoward, their attitude could only be described as ‘acutely furtive’. They would occasionally shoot a glance over their shoulders like startled meerkats and the expressions on their faces resembled that of a pair of twelve-year olds asking for a pack of condoms in a pharmacy.

Later that morning before leaving the Bed & Brekkie, we gave our thanks to the charming woman of the house and I couldn’t resist asking about the mysterious couple in the dining room.

Get this – the language they were speaking was Hebrew and they were a couple of Kibbutz owners from Israel. I was shocked and thrilled. Shocked because I thought a Kibbutz was a type of egalitarian live-in commune and shouldn’t be ‘owned’ by anyone. But the big thrill was that we had actually spotted a pair of Israelis on a dirty weekend. I mean what else could they do to be naughty? Their Kibbutz was probably a sexually liberated, healthy environment with loads of guns so there’d be no novelty in going on a holiday to fuck or shoot something.

Naw. These pair of semitic scallywags travelled to the farthest point of Europe (probably to avoid Mossad surveillance) and got stuck into an 80% pigflesh full-Irish grease orgy. Naughty but very, very nice. I imagine that they probably went to a Mass on Sunday too and giggled all the way through it. What a wonderful way to put a bit of zest back into their marriage. Actually, considering the amount of piggies, booze and casinos we have in Ireland, our tourist board should promote us as the de rigueur destination for sinning holidays to everyone east of the Bospherous. But that (as Hammy Hamster said) is another story.

"So, do you get it now Sven? The buzz of nipping off somewhere to get up to something impish?"

"Yes, I think so."

"So?"

"So, what?"

"So, what do you Swedish rascals get up to when you go off for a dirty weekend?"

"Em. Well, mostly we catch the ferry to Finland. The alcohol on the ferry is cheaper than home so we drink ourselves unconscious and then come straight back to Sweden sprawled over the deck."

"Ehem.."

"Ehem..?"

“You Nordics are pathetic assholes.’

I Don't Know Why I Bother.......

2007-04-26T15:06:00.000+02:00

Once again reality has mocked my puny attempts at satire. Send me off to bed for ever more. (sigh)

Shocking News….!

2007-04-24T15:26:00.000+02:00

British bookies do NOT pay group of bootboys a couple of grand to kick an old pensioner to death. What’s the world coming to Guv’nor?

(There’s a moral in the story. See if you can spot it boys and girls.)

I’d Murder Me in the Morning…

2007-04-13T10:57:00.000+02:00

LtY: Oh Christ not again. Look at Nic. He’s picking up all the crumbs on his toddler table with the tip of his finger.

CS: Yes, isn’t it cute.

LtY: Cute my arse. He’s two years old and he’s a boy. At his age I was outside busily getting mud on my clothes, scuffs on my shoes and scabs on my knees. This is unhealthy obsessive behavior and it’s your fault.

CS: MY fault?

LtY: Yup. Your maternal grandfather was highly obsessive, both your parents say so. AND he was French… I rest my case.

CS: Listen, just because YOU’RE a slob…

LtY: Hey, being a slob is manly…..

(Nic spits a piece of chewed up cheese onto the kitchen floor)

LtY: Ataboy, chip off the old block. (Ruffles Nic’s blond hair)

CS: (Rolls eyes) Right, I’m off to work. Seeing as you’re so proud of your offspring, you can clean that blob of his manliness off the floor before you leave.

LtY: Aw don’t get upset. Look, most parents worry about their children discovering drugs. I on the other hand, am really terrified about when my son finally discovers bubblewrap….

(Sound of front door slamming shut)

A Day in Court at The Hague.

2007-04-01T20:46:00.000+02:00

Prosecuting Attorney: Mr. Neocon, I remind you that you have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and that you will remain under oath until the proceedings have terminated. Are you aware of the charges that have been brought against you?

Mr. Neocon: Yes Ma’am, I am aware of the allegations.

PA: And you plead not guilty to these accusations.

N: That is correct.

PA: It is charged that in March of 2003, you knowingly and wilfully did enter into the home of Ms. Iraq and violate her against her will.

N: Lady, that is a pack of lies, the Iraq chick was up for it. She’d been flirting with me for years. You just ask any of my buddies from the coalition who were there. She was leading me on the whole time.

PA: So you claim that she was actually interested in being invaded by you?

N: Damn straight, Lady.

PA: How can you be so sure she was interested?

N: Listen toots, when you’ve invaded as many countries as I have, you get to know the signals. Know what I’m saying?

PA: And what exactly were the signals that the Ms. Iraq gave you?

N: Well, you know there was that look.

PA: That look?

N: Yeah, you know. That ‘come-hither’ look.

PA: Ehem. Is there anything more ‘concrete’ that you could offer us as an example of one of the victim’s come-on ‘signals’?

DA: Objection Your Honour, ALLEGED victim.

Judge: Objection sustained.

PA: Excuse me Your Honour. Could you give us a more tangible example of the ‘alleged’ victim’s signals?

N: Hell yes, Ma’am. For one thing, she was very provocative. Always going around with that skimpy border security. I swear sometimes it looked like she had no patrols on at all. Looked like you could just walk in there and help yourself.

PA: So you’re implying that she was a tease.

N: You got that right. The chick was always tryin’ to make me jealous by inviting those fancy European weapons inspectors back to her place.

PA: That must have made you angry.

N: Hell no. What, me jealous of a bunch of coiffured euro trash? (No offence Judge) As if. Just put me face to face with one of those faggots on the battlefield and we’ll see who comes out looking fancier.

PA: The alleged victim claims that you tried to get her drunk on the idea of freedom.

N: Hey, I offered her all the freedom that she wanted but it was up to her whether she accepted our guarantees or not. Although the truth is, by the time she invited me back she was heavily under the influence.

PA: She claims that she didn’t swallow a word of it.

N: Well, that’ll be her word against mine. (Smiles)

PA: You say that she ‘invited’ you back to her place?

N: Sure did. Said that she wanted to show me her impressive collection of WMD. She thought I might be interested seeing as I’m such an avid collector myself. And I can tell you, that invitation was well overdue.

PA: Overdue? How so?

N: Well, truth be told, I’m a romantic kinda superpower. Whereas other nations like to jump in with force and passion, I like to play it cool. I had been courting Ms. Iraq for ten years with an importation embargo. You know, softening her up, waiting for her to lower her defences so I could make my move. I wanted it to be special.

PA: Well it is very strange Mr. Neocon because according to the alleged victim, she was in no way interested in you coming back to her place and gave you no signals to that effect. In her version of events, you harassed her for years and then became progressively angrier when she did not respond. She claims that you forced your way in and inflicted irreversible pain and destruction while claiming that you were doing her a favour.

N: That’s a lie! She was gagging for it!

PA: But what about the bruises, the bombings and the scarred landscapes?

N: Some countries LIKE it a bit rough.

PA: Tell me this, if she really consented to this invasion, why is it that her testimony now condemns you?

N: Look Lady. I am what is known as a ‘catch’, you know? Highest GDP in the world. I’ve got style, I’m popular. I did that Marshal Plan thing a few years back. I know I look good. The fact is I could have any country I wanted.
So along comes little Ms. Iraq and practically throws herself at me. And when it’s all over, she thinks I’m going to set up there. And I’m like ‘No way Amiga!’ OK I’ve seen your natural resources and they’re pretty hot but they’re not THAT special and anyway I’m just not ready to settle down to colonize just one country. So then she flips and starts screaming at me to get out. And the next thing I know I’m in the International Courts of Human Rights and I got some lawyer telling me that I ‘violated’ another country.
Well I’ll you something. It’s all a pack of lies and you ain’t got nothing in that briefcase, no piece of proof to tell me otherwise. So unless you got something else to show the jury, I gotta be somewhere else, OK?

The court was adjourned that afternoon and due to lack of evidence, the defendant was released without charges. He was however instructed to pay maintenance costs to Iraq over the next twenty years for the crippled and delinquent child that their unholy union produced.

Idea to Make Millions - Nº. 462(b)

2007-03-25T18:52:00.000+02:00

Not again.

This week while waiting on the platform of my local metro station, I saw yet another poster ad for a new beverage that claimed to be ‘Original Irish’. The label seemed to have been designed to look very, very like one of the major British brands of cider, so the ‘Original’ part was a bit of fucking cheek if you ask me.

I must confess to having never heard of this brand of booze and considering that my student years were mostly spent in the city centre’s public houses licking the puddles off of bar counters at closing time, there are not many brands of local hooch that I haven’t ended up pissing against a urinal wall at some time or other.

So, I suspect that this ‘traditional’ cider was in reality a concept that a marketing manager of one of the major breweries pulled out of his arse about a year or two ago. He then probably pitched it successfully to the greasy board of directors and upon receiving their blessing, went about promoting the venture. Now this is where things start to get right up my nasal passage.

Why is it that every bottle of Irish liquor, every film made on Irish soil, every one of the Irish pubs that have spread themselves over this continent like a rash of acne have to promote themselves as ‘Old Oirish’? Ninety percent of Irish films that I have seen over here portray us as twee, quaint, eccentric village folk in knitted sweaters who, although a little strange to deal with at first, eventually win your heart over with their common decency. Few are the movies about track suited skangers who like nothing better than to steal rented cars off tourists or partake in binge-drinking fights on O’ Connell Street of a Saturday night. Because you see, these would not be Irish films, they would be Irish documentaries.

Ireland is basically a country that has gone from being a religiously oppressed, corrupt, second-world nation to becoming the yuppie capital of Europe in less than a generation. Whereas before, we were begrudging hypocrites, we are now nouveau riche materialists. Most people hadn’t even heard of ‘gazumping’ before 1985 and now it’s our national sport. At no point in time do I ever remember us being Ye Olde Traditional Mystic Islandfolke. That is an image that our foreign pub owners, our local conmen and our tourist board have been promoting ever since the The Quiet Man scored well at the box-office.

But you know what pisses me off even more? That marketing gobshite at the brewery is probably getting paid a six-figure salary to come up with this dross. Now a lesser man might end up bitter at this thought - but not I. As the handful of readers of this blog well know, I pride myself in being forward thinking and idealistic. So instead of begrudging these silly novelties, I decided to come up with an even sleazier one of my own. I would like to proudly present: (drum roll)

O’ HANLON’S ORIGINAL IRISH SAKE
A Mystic Taste of the Country where Tradition was Born.

Traditional Irish Basmati rice, harvested by dray horses from the ancient paddy fields of the Bog of Allen, fermented in sealed currachs, distilled in copper cairns in the age-old ways of our forefathers, matured in caskets of stag hide in secret caves under the Hill of Tara, gently warmed on a glowing turf fire and served in a shaman’s ceramic chalice, we give you the mellow flavour of the original Celtic Sake.

It is said that on the eve of the Battle of Clontarf, Brian Ború called for a cup of warm rice wine from his fairy godmother, Grainne Òg who was also the Good Witch of Ulster (in the north of Ireland). Not wanting to deny her favourite godson his wish, she brandished her shelaliegh thrice to the East and summoned five swans to go on a quest in search of the beverage. The only surviving swan returned just before the fight was to begin carrying a vial of the tepid liquid on its back which it had retrieved from a strange land far away called Tir ni Pon. The moment the small bottle was taken from the swan, it fell dead and turned into a rock or a tree trunk or some other inanimate landmark that can be visited by tourists today. It is believed that on that fateful day, it was the fortitude bestowed by the magical mystery drink that helped Brian Ború defeat the Vikings in battle and go on to become King of all Ireland.

You too can now travel back into the mists of time when you sip upon the smooth, rich elixir that has been brewed by the O’ Hanlon family for generations.

O’Hanlon’s Original Irish Sake is best imbibed at a temperature of 40º C while wearing a thick Arran sweater. (which can be purchased at quality clothing outlets around the country and in all Irish Duty Free Shops)

O’ HANLON’S ORIGINAL IRISH SAKE
Gout de Terrior? Gout de Terrior? Sure why do ye tink they called them feckin’ paddy fields in the first place?

So what do you reckon folks? Could this be my ticket to Easy Street or what?

Rogue Thought No. 314

2007-03-09T18:09:00.000+01:00

If Lung the Younger and myself are of one mind, does that make us a couple of half-wits?

‘Vice President Left Unharmed from a Suicide Bombing at a US Airbase in Afghanistan which Killed 9 Other People’

2007-03-01T10:27:00.000+01:00

Did anyone else out there read this headline and immediately think of the OMEN trilogy?

Economists Without Borders Work with Local Peasants to Build Much Needed Stock Exchange in Remote Himalayan Village

2007-02-18T21:47:00.000+01:00

Billy Harmann was just another Ivy League Business School graduate wondering how to pad out his résumé before applying to the major Wall Street financial houses, when a friend of his put him onto Economists Without Borders. ‘Yeah, it was my buddy Josh Van Hatten IV who got me wise to the EWB. Told me it was pure pro bono gold. Any future job interviewer will automatically see that I’ve earned the necessary altruistic merit badge, but haven’t let it interfere with my single-minded career trajectory. Jeez, it’s almost as good as having a hospital wing named after you. So once I made sure that Josh wasn’t getting any head-hunting commission from the organization, I signed up.’

Economistes Sans Frontiers in an allegedly non-profit NGO that was set up several decades ago as an international entrepreneurial watchdog. Its main objectives are to protest against financial injustices across the globe, be they free market violations, natural or man-made fiscal disasters and to criticize local government inaction when there are bottom-line abuses happening in developing nations. It also works in war zones where it attempts to rehabilitate economic institutions and continually lobbies international organizations to donate emergency capital and wealthcare. Its headquarters are in Geneva, although it also has international emergency offices in the Cayman Islands, Andorra and Dubai.

Billy was thrown in at the deep end with a two-week crash course in tropical disease treatments, all-weather survival techniques and business modelling for sub-subsistence micro-economies. ‘Within a month there was a team of eleven of us flying out to Kathmandu with the briefings of our field assignments tucked inside our Samsonites. Only two of us had any kind of experience in this type of work, so I can tell you, the nervous tension on board was palpable. And yet despite the butterflies in the stomach, there was a distinct feeling of unity and solidarity aboard. We were all here to do a job, in the name of something that we truly believed in, something that was far greater than any arduous trails that we may face in our endeavours. We were financitarians, and this was our calling.'

After a day and a half’s rickety bus ride into the mountains and a six-hour hike with a mule, Billy and his colleague Brenda Hillard-Schwarz arrived at the village that would be their home for the next six months.

‘Boy, we were expecting something primitive but nothing had prepared us for this! No mahogany tables, no leather swivel chairs and you should have seen their faces when Brenda asked where she could recharge her Mac. This certainly wasn’t going to be a picnic. Fortunately our training had prepared us for this and we managed to obtain the regular use a local farmer’s dung powered generator by threatening to foreclose on his farm. I admit, this was a bluff and might even be interpreted as being somewhat cruel and dishonest, but it was all for the greater good.

A quick market analysis showed that the equity exchange system of the village centred on a weekly livestock-hardware-service retail gathering known locally as the ‘Village Market’. Local shepherds would come down from the surrounding mountains and exchanged their milk and goats for grain or other needed supplies. Although national currency was available in the village, a great deal of business was based on the barter system, (something that made the squeamish Brenda wince). There seemed to be free movement of goods and services alright but where was the capital outlay? Real estate was generally in private hands, inheritance and family gift giving favoured over the more manageable mortgage system. Fortunately, the local urban zoning and planning permit allocation were governed with a refreshing laissez-faire attitude.

And the people! These were a people who had practically nothing but would share everything they owned with you. They would open their houses and allow you to dine with their families. Offer you a bed for the night and volunteer to escort you if you had a difficult journey to make. We would clearly have to stamp out this sinister attitude of festering socialism before our competition based project could have any chance of working.’

‘The big obstacle to progress was the village leader,’ Billy told us, ‘an elderly figure, set in his ways and unwilling to bring the village on line with more advanced western fiscal practices. No matter how much I told him about venture capital, bonds, securities, hedge and mutual funding, he just wouldn’t listen and would always end up storming out of the room waving at us to leave.'

One day however, the village leader’s eldest son (who had also attended the meetings) stayed behind after his father had angrily fled the room. He had a puzzled but curious expression playing on his face. ‘Explain this investment thing to me again.’ he said, ‘Why is it better to have a piece of paper stating that I own a piece of meat than to have the piece of meat itself?’ Exasperated, Billy turned to him and said almost shouting ‘Look it’s quite simple. Give a man a goat and he will eat for a day – teach a man the concept of a goat as a piece of equity and his stock can appreciate forever. Get it!?’ There was a long pause and Billy feared that he had gone too far and offended the young man. But suddenly the face of the leader’s son broke into a broad smile and he shook Billy warmly by the hand. ‘Consider me on board. I’ve just got to run this by a few of my associates to see how it plays, and then I think we can put together a portfolio. Have your girl call my girl and we can do lunch next week. How does Wednesday work for you? Excellent. Later!’ Billy was then left in silence. But it was a serene and joyous silence, because he knew that this was the breakthrough he had been waiting for.

And breakthrough it was, because a week later the old leader’s body was recovered from the valley a thousand feet below. It appeared that he had accidentally stepped off the edge of the village while sleepwalking or at least that was the explanation his son gave to Billy before he walked off whistling loudly. Two weeks later, in a secret ballot, the son was voted as the new village leader and Billy was assigned the post of financial adviser.

‘Without delay, we set to work with the new village council (mostly personal friends of the new village Leader). So much time had been wasted already. At first it was quite an uphill struggle. Most of them were totally illiterate so I really had to improvise with my PowerPoint presentations. Our first priorities were improving the fiscal sanitation and insuring fresh currency supplies. We then set up a central bank in the village’s main square and established a credit system that was easily accessible to the locals. Before this, some of the region's women had to make a fifteen-mile round trip on foot just to borrow money.'

'The new leader (or MD as he now preferred to be called) showed an uncanny ability to think outside of the box and was proactive in practically all of the decision making of the board (as the council preferred to be called). He was always ready to go that extra mile, whether it be a feasibility study on the village’s sweatshop capability or the possibility of turning the council into a series of performance-based affiliate networks.'

'Needless to say, the day we replaced the archaic village market with the stock market, I was so nervous that I could barely sit still. When the trading began in goat futures, there was quite a lot of confusion. The open outcry system didn’t seem to bother the local shepherds as much as the electronic readout system that I'd had delivered the week before. Some of them had never seen moving lights before. Others didn’t understand why they couldn’t bring their animals into the trading hall. Finally though, with the help of the brokers (all of whom were coincidently members of the village council) the ball got rolling and stocks started moving. And the rest as they say is history.'

Three months later when their project time was up and they had to return home, Brenda and Billy said goodbye to their newly made friends, took their mules and headed down the mountain away from the village. Although they were leaving, a part of them would always stay in that small hamlet with those wonderful people. These people who had opened their hearts and minds and let these two westerners build a better life for them based on the global free market.

They stopped and looked back at the village one last time. At the shanty towns that had sprung up along the treacherous mountain’s edge, built by the evicted villagers who had defaulted on their mortgage payments. At the smoke billowing from the goat meat processing plant and the neon sign of the newly built casino. At the sun glinting off the cranes that were busily demolishing a part of the town to build timeshare chalets for the wealthy Kathmandu weekend getaway market. So much had been accomplished in so little time. Billy took Brenda by the hand and they both felt their eyes swell with tears. ‘We’ve actually done it Bren. We have created wealth.’ They glanced once more at the hottubs and satellite dishes on the terraces of the council members’ houses in the upper part of the village. ‘Do you think they’re watching CNBC right now?’ Brenda asked. ‘I sure hope so, Bren. I sure hope so.’

Rogue Thought Nº. 642 – The Oscars.

2007-01-28T14:28:00.000+01:00

At this year’s Oscar ceremony, when the winner of the Best Director Award comes up to collect his statuete and reads that long tedious list of people without whom this wouldn’t have been possible…blah, blah ..etc., wouldn’t it be only fitting for him to give ‘mad props’ to the set designer?

The New Hairdryer for Blonds

2007-01-25T11:11:00.000+01:00

Says it all.

Tagged.

2007-01-04T12:49:00.000+01:00

The prolific and colourful Mr. Davezilla, whose blog can only be described as the Dim Sum of the internet, has kindly tagged me to partake in a little ricochet of prose titled: ‘Five Things You Don’t Know About Me.’ So here goes:

1. I couldn’t resist naming my first pet goldfish ‘Fang’.
2. I can speak Catalan. Well enough to piss off the Spanish and badly enough to piss off the Catalans, which I believe makes me a diplomat.
3. If stranded in the Andes with the Spice Girls, I would eat Ginger Spice first. (Ref: H. Hutton)
4. I was born in Southeast Asia although my parents are too afraid to tell me why.
5. For years, whenever I heard the song ‘Ivory Madonna’ by UB40, I used to think they were singing ‘I’m a Prima Donna’.

Now, in order to spread the love and keep this thing rolling, I am tagging Mateu and Lung the Elder. (Just to prove to everyone that he really exists)

Evolution of Soccer Mom Cars

2006-12-17T18:18:00.001+01:00

1960s – THE HATCHBACK
Hobby car for the bored wifey so that she can maintain her coiffure with weekly visits to the hairdresser. Being able to scoot around and have lunch with her girlfriends also keeps her from hitting the cooking sherry too hard at home.

1970-1980s – THE STATION WAGON
Driven by the patriarch when he’s home but delegated to wife in his absence. Handy rear space for groceries, pet dogs, squealing kids and sex with TV repair man while hubby’s away.

1990-2000s – THE SUV
A sign of things to come. The soccer mom claims to like the SUV because it’s safe, but only for the kids that really count - hers! The kids from inferior cars with whom you collide can easily be hosed of the front bumper when you get home. The higher seating also lends the illusion of empowerment to women who have surrendered their lives to their husband’s salaries.

2010s - The H2 Hummer
Began in the mid-2000s but really took off later when the media somehow convinced the American public that international terrorist organizations were bothering to target ‘nuclear' families. H2 sales strangely coincide with a sudden increase in encyclopedia sales given that most moms have to sit on volumes A-E and F-J just to be able to see over the steering wheel.

2020s - The CUT
Due to an increased obsession with security and progressive decrease in the sexual potency of the American male, Civilian Urban Tanks(CUTs) take the market by storm late in the 2010s.

The trend is begins when the Detroit conglomerates form a strategic alliance with major defense contractors to produce the ‘Abrams FamilyFreedom’. Sales rocket, there are 6-month waiting lists to snap up this streamlined version of the tank that had served the nation so well in past conflicts.

Of course, oversees manufacturers don’t take long to catch on to the trend and within 18 months the Germans have come out with the ‘Panzer KlanKruzer’. The KlanKruzer begins to make some serious inroads into the American market because of its kiddy-friendly sliding doors, elegant European styling and reputation for reliability. However, both manufacturers are knocked sideways a year later when Honda/Nissan bring out their ‘Rolling Rumblebug, a nine-seater Armored Personnel Carrier. At just over three hundred thousand dollars and a thrifty two gallons to the mile, the ‘Roller’ suddenly puts civilian-military hardware within the acquisitive grasp of the average American household. All over the nation moms are donning their Kevlar sweatsuits, putting on their night goggles and reversing their fifty-ton, armor-plated family vehicles out of the driveway to take their little Vanessas and their little Tylers to hockey practice.

The whirlwind success of CUTs is boosted even further in 2018, when a Republican-led congress votes in an adjustment to the second amendment of the United States Constitution giving the people the ‘right to keep and bear heavy artillery’. This is indeed the turning point for tank dealerships across the nation.

Naturally, this new evolution in family-oriented private-use transportation has its detractors. Certain demographics begin protesting that the new vehicles are dangerous, that the reduced driver-visibility from the narrow eye-slit in the front could lead to an increase in highway collisions. That the proliferation of armor-plated vehicles is leading to more aggressive driving habits on out roads. That the tons of reinforced steel that are needed to build a tank along with the gallons and gallons of diesel fuel required to run it, make this form of transport somewhat detrimental to the environment. That they cause more traffic problems, more pollution, more parking problems and accidentally crush more children leaving school than other more ‘city-friendly’ vehicles. Don Huber is the chairman of the Family Association of Civilian Urban Tank Drivers. We asked him what he thought about these criticisms:

"Well, with every advance in highway technology, you’re gonna get some pinko whining about something. Let me tell you, this here country was build on freedom and that means that we’re free to drive our CUTs on the open roads of this great nation and other drivers are free to get out of our way. So, lateral and rear visibility really isn’t that much of an issue. Speaking of which, how am I supposed to be a more aggressive driver when I can only clock a maximum of 47 mph? Tell me that? And as to that other stuff, well Hell, consuming more steel and fuel is exactly what creates more American jobs, so in reality we’re helping the economy. Not like those damn tree huggers with their titchy, lean-burn SUVs. Goddamn it, don’t they know how ridiculous they look?"

SOCCER MOM USER REVIEWS:

Everyone who says that they don’t like CUTs are usually the people who have never driven a tank or can't afford one and they’re basically jealous. I remember when my neighbor Cindy caught sight of our new Panzer convertible in the driveway, well she just had to have one. And boy does it turn heads? Believe me, once you’ve sat behind the steering levers of one of these babies, you’ll never be able to go back to a tyre-vehicle ever again!
Jenny Kovitz - Austin, TX.

As a mother of three, I really appreciate the need for safety on the road. You only have to glance at the rollover resistance on our Abrams RR to see that it beats everything on the market. That cannon-recoil absorption system has been perfectly adapted to prevent whiplash and folded kiddy strollers fit so perfectly the ammunition storage area. I just have to look up and see my baby, Jody, high in the gun turret, strapped into his child safety seat to know he’s way out of harms way. Sure the fuel costs are a little high, but what’s that when compared to the lives of your children? Why our APC is just like another member of the family.
Allison Stone - Jacksonville, FL.

A totally AWESOME ride. Just three words, POWER, POWER and MORE POWER.
Denise Santana - Los Angeles, CA.

Just last week at the mall, another driver started yelling at me for parking my tank too close to her Hummer and that she couldn’t reverse out without scratching her paintwork. I just told her that she was lucky that I didn’t park it on TOP of her puny H2, which I TOTALLY could. That shut her up. I love, love, love my Roller and couldn’t drive anything else. And it’s got the cutest pink cellphone holder on the dashboard too!
Lynne MacCarthy - New York, NY.

We get a whole lot of snow up here in winter and let me tell you those tank tracks maneuver a heck of a lot better than tyres. It’s like having snowchains on all year round! Just a pity that it doesn’t fit in the garage. Hell, we’d need a hanger for that thing!
Debbie Heller - Ann Arbor, MI.

Someone in Central Casting was not Doing Their Job

2006-11-27T15:44:00.000+01:00

Forgive me dear readers, if I put to you what must seem like an obvious question. How, in the name of all that is holy, was Paris Hilton not cast as Lady Penelope in the feature film version of Thunderbirds? They’re dead ringers for God sake!

There can only be one possible explanation.

Ms. Hilton, inexhaustible font of talent though she is, could not match the broad expressive range of the original Lady P.

The delightful Ms. Hilton enjoying the fruitful, jetset lifestyle of a rakish heiress.

Grasshopper: One-and-a-Half Years Old and Already a Tai Chi Master

2006-11-13T11:10:00.000+01:00

Pimping my Effluent.

2006-11-03T17:46:00.000+01:00

Loath though I am to bore our loyal readership with the tedious details of my professional life, I did notice a piece of jargon the other day that might perchance merit a mention.

There’s no pretty way of putting this, I am by trade an industrial chemist.

Curiously enough, despite the pariah status that this position affords, I do actually manage to sleep at night. This is because I deal mainly in the field of waste purification, so I suppose I’m technically one of the good guys. Well, at least that’s about as good as it gets when Greenpeace considers you to be a nefarious minion of the Dark Lord. I also get to crack that wonderful party joke, you know, the one where you tell other guests that you’re ‘in human waste’ and the watch them look down at your shoes. (Yeah. Har, har! Oh, my fucking sides! Sigh.)

Now down to business. As mentioned, the other day I came across a very strange and quite disturbing tendency in the naming of industrial purification units.

For example, in the field air purification, there exists a gizmo that literally washes airflows. Lets say you have an air emission with a serious rotten egg smell and you really don’t want to spew it into the atmosphere. (Stop me if I’m getting too technical here) You basically let the air flow upwards through a packed column while sprinkling water with a little dissolved caustic soda from above. The upwardly moving air meets the downwardly moving spray and the caustic neutralizes the nasty smell. You’re literally giving the air a shower. This nifty piece of equipment is called a ‘Scrubber’. No I’m not kidding. That’s what it’s called. And not just that but it’s full title is a ‘Wet Scrubber’.

Now if this sordid nickname were just a one-off, you’d turn a blind eye to the whole business, wouldn’t you? But what if it’s counterpart were to be given an equally saucy moniker?

You see, a similar set up exists but with the opposite in mind. If you have some wastewater containing an undesirable light organic substance, you sprinkle it from above over the same packed column but this time it’s the upwardly flowing air that removes most of the volatile crap. In this case, it’s the air that cleans the water and not vice versa, but the principal (called mass transfer) is the same. This industrial installation is known as…you’d never guess…. a ‘Stripper’. My friends, I shit you not.

A Wet Scrubber? A Stripper? Come on. Somewhere, there’s got to a geek in a spotless, white labcoat having a good laugh at our expense.

Well as a cutting-edge chemist, I feel it is this blog’s duty to push for every advancement in the field of technical nomenclature. So here are a few suggestions for naming other purification systems that already exist on the market:

Pimp Screen – a simple mesh barrier that eliminates some of the larger solids from the initial wastewaters and who would cut your cracker ass if you so much as looked sideways at one of it’s bitchez.

Floozy Aeration Unit – A simple cascade that allow oxygen from the air into the waste water to lightly oxidize some of the transition metals and let volatiles evaporate. And as you can see from the photo, this installation is absolutely gagging for it.

Coagulation/Flocculation Tramp – Here’s where you add special chemicals which cause the very small particles in the water to clump together so that they will later sink to the bottom of the tank. An absolute trollop and she knows it.

Wanton Clarification Jezebel– This unit allows the clumped solids in question to settle to the bottom of a tank to later be removed and a feisty little minx she is too.

Bare-Faced Filtration Strumpet – Pass the water through filters filled with beds of fine sand or other granular material. Yeah, I’ll bet HER bed could tell a few stories.

Homewrecking Adsorption Hussy – Activated carbon acts like a sponge for dissolved organic material. A filter of this material will leave the water very pure which is the only pure thing about this comely wench.

Disinfection Harlot – At the end of the process you just want to make sure that no pathogenic microbes have made it through the chain. This is usually carried out with chlorine although other options are available. Yeah, give me some of your sweet chlorine baby, you know how I like it.

Distribution Reservoir Stud – Naturally where you store the water after it’s been completely purified from where it is distributed into the network. Coz Pumpin’s da name and pumpin’s da game.

FLOWCHART SHOWING THE LONG LIST OF FALLEN WOMEN INVOLVED IN WASTEWATER TREATMENT

A Golden Opportunity Missed

2006-10-26T15:22:00.000+02:00

You know it’s a real pity that Mark Foley’s Christian name wasn’t Thomas. That way you could have given the act of sending suggestive e-mails to young boys a new name.

You could have called it ‘Tom Folery’.

Update!
There is a Tom Foley after all. He was democratic house speaker in Congress from 1989 to 1995. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any record of him hitting on young staff members.

Damn! So close.

Still, I’m determined to use this pun in some kind of context. Have to dig around in his past a little more. Something’s bound to turn up. He is a Congressman after all. Mmm, there’s something here about a whip……

Scotch Egg Recipe for a Dingo

2006-10-04T15:11:00.000+02:00

Classic Scotch Egg

Australian Bush Version

Ingredients:
- 1 Medium sized 15-month old child.
- 1 bottle of sticky Factor-60 Sunblock.
- 1 beach in northern Spain (preferably with coarse sand)

Instructions:
Strip child naked, apply cream liberally, let loose to roll around on beach and bake over several hours in sun. Garnish with sun hat and serve fresh on a damp towel.

What a Difference a Mountain Range Makes.

2006-10-02T10:21:00.000+02:00

This summer we holidayed in a very pretty rural house in Euskadi, the Basque region of Spain, and then slowly returned home to Barcelona via the French Pyrenees.

I must say, it was very disconcerting to go from a country where you can’t tell if most of the women are lesbians - or if they’re just Basque, to a country where you can’t tell if most of the men are gay - or just French.

Whither Rodriguez

2006-09-29T17:06:00.000+02:00

Given that us Lungs shook off the yoke of our blog a few months ago, you’ll no doubt forgive us for backtracking over the summer a bit.

Watching people on the street is fun.
I do enjoy a spot of people watching.

On those Saturday mornings of my wayward youth after a grueling night on the batter and with a hangover much akin to an unanaesthetized lobotomy, my fragile frame was never capable of much activity. So the only thing to do was find a tranquil café on a busy thoroughfare, order a café con leche about the size of a birdbath, put on sunglasses and contemplate the crowd breezing by. Happily settled in the shade, I would let the idle hours drift by like rudderless barges.

It was even more satisfying to indulge in this activity (or lack thereof) with other Friday night casualties. My flatmate and I would often amuse ourselves by making the cruelest comments possible about whatever poor bystander happened to come into our field of vision. Thus, we would burn off our headaches until the munchies arrived and it was time to go and eat something salty in the local greasy spoon. Ah, but a Saturday morning is a wonderful thing to waste.

Now when it comes to people watching in Spanish cities, there’s no other month that can hold a candle to July. There are two basic reasons for this:

Firstly, it is an undeniable fact that young Spanish women, like exotic hothouse flowers, tend to blossom when exposed to direct sunlight. All those city streets that in winter seemed to flow with sludgy, grey masses of populace are suddenly all abloom with slim, olive-skinned, urban beauties. They burst with vitality, they flirt with the very air that surrounds them and they strut with coquettish confidence because they know. They know that between May and September, they own both the city itself and the summer that enchants it.

Oh yes I am in a long-term, loving relationship and deliriously happy to be so. And though CS has sole ownership of practically all my bodily organs, my eyes are still mine. She herself is not averse to copping an occasional glance at a swarthy hunk, so I’ve never felt too guilty about harmlessly admiring the female fauna that grace our sidewalks with their presence. My intentions are never untoward, you understand. I consider them as nothing more than delightful street decoration. Fleshy bunting if you like.

The second reason to go people watching in July is the very Spanish institution of ‘de Rodriguez’. How can one begin to explain this concept, so ancient, so engrained in the Latin psyche? I suppose the closest English translation would be ‘When the cat’s away ..etc.’ but really it goes far deeper than that.

Like almost everywhere else, the Spanish families of a generation ago consisted of a father who worked, a mother who kept house and children who yelled and screamed on busses. Schools generally went on holiday over July and August and this is when the family got out of town. They would often visit the children’s grandparents out in some backwater village or if they could afford it, a second house on the coast. However, holidays for the working man were usually limited to the single month of August. (Yeah, the whole month. Ain’t it great being a European slacker?)

As a consequence of this difference in vacation time, the family patriarch would stay at home, all on his lonesome for the entire month of July. Now if Pop happened to be the type who enjoyed misbehaving then July gave him all the temptation and license that he needed. This, I have been told, is the origin of the expression ‘de Rodriguez’. And its presence can be felt all over the city. Come the seventh month, sure as eggs is eggs, you can see platoons of guys in their thirties and forties, loosening their ties, jaunting along the city footpaths, trying to suppress the mischievous smiles that play so deviously upon their lips.

But as the month comes to a close, these same guys are realizing that they’re not as young as they used to be. They’re now looking a bit jaded from all the philandering and pine for the only woman who really knows how to take care of them. They begin to miss their dear wives, the women they’d married to take the place of their mothers. These Rodriguez boys also make for damn good people watching. You could almost set your calendar by the changing expressions on their faces.

I do remember spotting one in early July while entering my in-laws’ apartment building. (they live uptown in a relatively shi-shi neighborhood) He was a magnificent specimen, short, a tad pudgy, with slicked-back slightly graying hair and that pinched, sucking-on-a-lemon expression that most wealthy Catalans sport. He was furtively carrying a large suitcase into the neighboring building and with him was the exotic creature that was going to eat him alive over the next couple of weeks. A striking, curvaceous Cuban mulatta with a luminescent plastic handbag was pushing her sunglasses high up on her head with her long painted fingernails and looking around with an air of utter boredom. Including her vertiginously high heels, she was about a foot taller than her sweating partner and stuffed into her leopard-skin hot pants was an ass you could have hit with a tuning fork.

As I watched them, there washed over me a wonderful feeling affection for Spanish culture. I’ve always tried to appreciate Spain in the same way one would appreciate a good cheese. And as any connoisseur will tell you, it’s often the mould in cheese that gives it its flavor and character. All the endearingly pokey little institutions like ‘de Rodriguez’ remind me why I could never live in a city like Stockholm. I require seediness, imperfection and grot, all those things that give a place its sense of humanity.

As long as ‘de Rodriguez’ survives, I know in my heart of hearts that they’ll still be letting bulls kill drunken tourists on the streets of Pamplona, you’ll always be able to cut through state bureaucracy by flirting with the civil servant at the counter, you’ll never have to worry too much about political correctness and sexism will never be out of fashion.

Ah Spain. My Spain. Home of the Babe, land of the Freeloader.

The Shipyard

2006-09-13T15:26:00.000+02:00

Oh yeah, I said, this blogging’s going to be a piece o’ piss. Why once we get the site set up I’m gonna blog every week. Sod that every damn day! Why I reckon ideas will flood into to my fertile cortex at such a rate that nerry an hour shall pass before I feel the urge to wrest a laptop from the nearest commuter and expunge on my views with a vengeance.

I remember Lung the Elder (my technical enabler) looking at me with the distracted expression of a sleep-deprived camel. An expression I now, looking back, recognize as skepticism, thinly-veiled but not unkind. He as a veteran programmer was wise in the ways of the web and probably knew that, as a blog rookie, I would have to learn the hard way.

‘Another beer?’ he said.

‘Beer? Beer?! Do you think I have time to tarry for beer when there is so much to be done. We must away to an internet tavern and work all night to set up this fiendish enterprise. Blogs wait for no man.’

‘Estrella or San Miguel?’

‘Aw go on then, Estrella.’

The next day while at work, Lung the Elder set up the blog in five minutes despite a brutal hangover.

I see that my last post was in June.

This my friends is how ships of fools are built.

Forced Nonchalance

2006-06-19T18:01:00.000+02:00

Lung the Elder is in Paris this weekend reading in cafés, smoking baguettes, putting up with waiter abuse and generally trying to blend in with the locals by being extra-froofy. I warned him before he went that he might experience a certain inexplicable sense of paranoia while breezing down the boulevards. He won’t know why, but something in his Spidey senses will cause him to glance nervously over his shoulder every five minutes or so. The reason for this is very simple but before getting into it, here’s a bit of a prologue…..

After living more then 10 years in Barcelona, both LtE and I like to consider ourselves somewhat of an authority on local pickpockets. Being tall, pale-skinned and having straight white teeth, there is no mistaking that we are ‘guiris’ (a derogatory expression for tourists/foreigners) and thus the legions of cutpurses that roam the Bario Gótico are naturally drawn to us.

Don’t get me wrong, Barcelona is in no way a violent city. I feel far safer here than I would on any London high street at closing time. Nonetheless, I’ve lost count of how often some light-fingered entrepreneur has cast his hook at by back pocket. So far, I’ve yet to lose anything and by now we’ve learned to spot the scallywags before they act. It also helps that they keep using the same old worn-out tricks to distract their prey. Here is a useful rundown of their standard techniques:

ALGERIAN AIKIDO:
A man you’ve never met walks up to you on the street, says hello and extends his hand to shake. If you do choose to shake his hand, he will not let go but instead will smile and ask you where you’re from. It doesn’t matter which country you say, he’ll suddenly start raving about your wonderful national football and start pretending to tackle you with his feet, WITHOUT LETTING GO OF YOUR HAND.

Explanation: In short, he’s keeping your hand from obstructing access to the front and back pockets on the right side of your body, distracting you with the foot play and lifting the wallet with his left hand. This all takes about 5 seconds.

THE HORIZONTAL ACCORDION:
Going up the escalators in the metro the gentleman in front of you suddenly pretends to have dropped something. He opens his arms wide and pushes backward to prevent people from stepping on whatever it is that he has apparently let fall. Naturally, given that you are lined up on moving mechanical stairs, there’s a bit of a crush.

Explanation: There were two or three of them sitting apart inside your metro wagon. One of them singled you out as a suitable mark (usually you’re a tourist with an innocent, bunny-in-the-headlights look on your face) and then discreetly signaled to his pal or pals. Then one of the team gets off the train in front of you and his companion(s) sneak in right behind you just before boarding the escalator. When the crush occurs, the necessary body contact is made and the boys behind help themselves to the contents of your pockets, bags, bodily orifices etc.

THE SAP SMEAR:
Much to my chagrin, I’ve never seen this one live nor has it ever been tried on me. It involves a crowded bus, metro or what have you. The scoundrel who is standing behind you surreptitiously squirts a little toothpaste or some other muck onto the back of your jacket. He then warns you that you’ve got some crap on your shoulder and starts to slap the coat in a noble attempt to help you brush off the offending gunk.

Explanation: Fairly obvious. Like any decent pickpocket his goal is to provoke some sort of casual body contact with his unsuspecting victim. This skilled craftsman is using the helpful slaps to probe every one of your pockets while you like a dunce, are thanking him for his assistance.

It really riles me to see the same thing happening over and over again, especially during the holiday months when ingenuous tourists flock through the streets like herds of gazelles and the predators stalk them from the side alleys like big cats from the long grass. With the polite, naive Japanese leaving their bags hanging on the backs of café chairs and the high-minded Scandinavians flaunting their bulging wallets from buttonless pockets, summer is high season for felonious sleight-of-hand. I have seen teams of these reptilian thugs queue up and take their turns to get on the train at the Passeig de Gracia metro station on the line that runs down to the city beach. Each group waiting patiently for their turn to get on the wagons that are so stuffed with witless beachgoing cattle. Because you know it just wouldn’t do to have two criminal teams working the same train now, would it?

It doesn’t help that Spanish law is completely ineffectual when it comes to petty theft. Every pickpocket knows that getting busted on a Tuesday means being back on the street on Wednesday, sticky fingers ready to resume their happy work and with no threat of a trial for months due to an already saturated judicial system. And given that practically none of these characters have legal ID or residence papers, they can disappear into the cracks of society almost at will. (I realize that the last statement is not very politically correct, but then again, the truth often isn’t. After ten years of living here and dozens of attempts at my wallet, I can honestly say that not one of the offenders was Spanish)

'Why not do something about it yourself?' I hear you cry. Does this Lung have no spine? Believe me, I’ve spoiled a fair share of thefts by warning the docile holidaymakers that their vacation is about to take a turn for the worst, but it’s a dangerous game. Pickpockets do not like civilians messing with their livelihood and they've come after me on more than one occasion. Luckily enough in both cases the delinquents were a pair of titchy rogues and being big, I turned around to them, puffed myself up like a blowfish and tried to look as tough and mean as possible, naturally all the while inwardly soiling myself with fear. Amazingly, it worked. Although trying it a third time might be pushing my luck.

However, what is most incredible is how easy it is to spot these guys after so many years. Of course there are the obvious outward signs - they're usually lean and wear wear light/loose clothing, sneakers and never carry bags in case they have to sprint – often a baseball cap is included in the ensemble to make security camera identification more difficult. And yet it’s not these external clues that give them away, but something that’s much harder to define. It’s not the way they look but the way they look ‘at’ people – a particular expression, a certain body language that sets off alarms in those who get to witness it every day. They are scoping, scanning and sizing up everyone around them with a feline intensity but at the same time straining to appear completely casual. To the experienced eye, a person who is busting a nut trying to blend in with the background actually stands out like a flashing siren. This my friends, is what LtE and I call ‘forced nonchalance’ and it’s the reason why I was so nervous the last time I was in Paris.

You see there are basically two types of people who strongly subscribe to forced nonchalance – Barcelona pickpockets because they’re desperately trying to observe without being observed – and Parisians because …… well ……. because they are pretentious arseholes.

The Incoherent Truth

2006-06-07T17:21:00.000+02:00

Now listen up y’all. It’s very simple. We need to defend ourselves against the TERRISTS. The TERRISTS use airplanes to attack. And airplanes is used to get places by flying over things, right? So, obviously it’s the flyover states what are most at risk. The logic is inexcapab..unescapub..inescapib…well, just darn hard to deny OK?

In second place, them Muslims streamists can’t have nothing to do with pig meat. Can’t eat it, can’t touch it, can’t do dick with it. So, the more pork barrel we spread around the country, the safer we’ll all be. You with me so far?

Thirdly, New York’s already been struck once. Any old fool who knows anything about basic statistics’ll tell ya that the chances of it getting hit again are like … a brazilian-to-one. Am I right or what?

Thirdly, ol’ Bin Aladdin said that he would strike at the very heart of ‘merica. Don’t ya see?! Heart….? Heart-LAND Goddamn it! He was sending a coded message to all his streamists who’s imbedded over here. Clear as the nose on your face. Jeez, keep up with the program, will ya?

Uh where wuz I? Well anyway.. fourthly .. see if you can tell me one thing. How’s Bin Ladle gonna know that the people he’s killing is all God-fearing Christians, huh? Why the streets of New York is crawling with every type of heathen you could imagine. He goes and drops a bomb over there and he’d prob’ly be killing mostly his own. What with all them taxi drivers and the like.. Naw, he’s fixing to send his Terrists to where we got our Sunday schools and we all know what states I’m talking about ….damn straight.

I’m telling ya amigos, Bush’s got it all figured out. I just wish he was here having a few brewskis with us now so he could tell y’all how right I am. I for one, will be sleeping sounder in my trailer tonight knowing that he’s on the job.

Anyways move over, I gotta go bleed the lizard. Anybody want another Bud? Jeez, how many did we have? I can barely stand up…..

Well, Fuck me Pink and Call me Rosie….

2006-05-30T10:45:00.000+02:00

So, quite a little hiatus, eh?

Actually have a nice juicy alibi this time round. None of your ‘the-dog-ate-my-homework’ excuses of an excuse. Oh no, brace yourselves, this one’s a beaut.

A few months back our apartment was broken into. The cheeky scamps busted our door open with a hydraulic jack, came in and had themselves a delightful little ransack. They were obviously looking for small highly-priced items and I am thrilled to announce, got bugger all for their trouble. A clunky digital camera which was already embarrassingly out of date, a fake Rolex that a pal brought me back from China as a joke and if my calculations serve me well, about eleven euros and twenty cents in loose change.

Boy they must have been seriously pissed off. All their sexy Rififi house breaking antics and they end up with the contents of the bottom of a birdcage. Well in case you’re reading this my fine purloining friends, here’s a little message for you. –

‘I shit in the milk upon which you were suckled by your crack whore mothers. You are no more than fetid puddles of puss upon the jaded sidewalk of life and will hopefully some day meet your unsavoury demise at the business end of a security guard’s Doberman Pincer. If you ever set foot in my house again, I will joyfully give you the funfair ride of your pestilent little lives starting out from our fourth-floor balcony and terminating on the spiked railings beneath. A grizzly end indeed, only to be offset by the coroner’s mirth upon discovering what seems to be a hydraulic jack shoved profoundly into one of your orifices with a fake Rolex wrapped round it.’

Ah, I feel so much better. Thank you for letting me share.

Then within a month, just when we thought that our quota of bad karma had been amply filled, the office on the first floor of our building had itself a wee fire. And get this, it’s a production company, so there were reels and reels of nice flammable nitrate-based film to join in the fun. The firemen said it was like trying to stamp out a Roman Candle on a pogo stick.

It was a miracle that the building wasn’t gutted. Nonetheless, the smoke and flames did crawl up a narrow shaft and all the apartments above, including ours, were seriously smoke damaged. Now there’s wood soot and there’s coal soot and there’s turf soot and if you’ve ever sent your child up a chimney to clean it, you’ll know that these are fairly inoffensive dark powdery substances. However, the greasy pitch black film that burned plastic leaves over everything has to be seen to be believed. It is truly heartbreaking to walk into your home to be met by the toxic stench of incinerated PVC and to be unable to take off your coat for the lack of anywhere to put it.

So we spent the past two months sleeping rough in cardboard boxes under a motorway bridge, drinking rainwater and licking the lichen off the concrete to sustain ourselves. I tried to earn a little extra cash as a qualified chemist by standing on the side of the motorway holding a ‘WILL TITRATE FOR FOOD’ sign but to no avail. At night we all sat around a glowing Romanian, warming our hands and hoping, praying that the bastards would finish cleaning and repainting our flat so that we could return to the life that we once knew.......

OK. OK. That’s bullshit, I’m lying.
It was actually much, much worse than that.
We spent those two months at my in-laws’.

So, that’s it. A break-in and a house fire all in the space of a month. Not bad, eh?

Lung the Elder says that we were two horsemen short of an apocalypse.

The Naked Truth

2006-04-20T10:51:00.000+02:00

During my university years I remember chatting to a medical student friend about those people that you meet at parties who immediately try to take advantage of your field of expertise to score some free professional advice. It must be really annoying for doctors, software programmers, builders and investment bankers (although they deserve no sympathy) when some tedious moron harasses you over a gin and tonic about some trivial diagnosis that they want you to make on the spot.

My friend said that it happened to him constantly for years but that finally he stumbled onto the perfect solution. I say stumbled because he unwittingly blurted it out while drunkenly chatting up some tasty Doris at a New Years Eve party. Of course, once he let is slip that he was a sawbones, her face lit up like a Vegas casino and she came out with the inevitable:

‘I’ve had this reoccurring pain here in my side over the past month and a half. What do you think it might be?’

It was the combination of alcohol, horniness and exasperation that let to his epiphany. After staring at her blankly for several seconds he said:

‘Mmm, don’t like the look of those symptoms. Could be a number of things, some of them quite serious. Why don’t you nip upstairs Love and take your cloths off. I’ll be up in a sec to make a proper examination.’

Of course she immediately backpedalled:

‘Oh no no. It’s quite alright. I’m sure it’s nothing really.’

At first my friend was peeved at failing to talk the sumptuous filly out of her dress but later he thrilled at the long-term benefits of what he’d discovered and has been using the same technique to shut pedantic arseholes up at parties ever since.

Well, a couple of years ago I was at a party enjoying the soothing effects of a few Blackbushes coursing through my veins when I mentioned to a lass that chemistry was my ‘bag’. To my chagrin, she started asking me about some paint in her garage that had inexplicably changed colour over night and what she should do about it. Remembering the sage advice of my dear friend years before, I gave her a somber professional look while rubbing my chin.

‘Mmm, tricky. Why don’t you nip upstairs Love, get your kit off and I’ll look into it?’

And you’ll never guess. It worked! Stopped the conversation dead in it’s tracks. In fact she didn’t even bother me for the rest of the evening. Nor did any of her friends. He was a genius that mate of mine.

Now, I wonder would it work on a Jehovah’s Witness?

Fear of a Green Planet

2006-04-03T17:43:00.000+02:00

Thank Christ Saint Patrick’s Day is over and at a safe distance. Being Irish and living abroad, the festival of our honoured patron saint makes me want to shrivel up like a well salted slug. Curiously, almost every other Irish ex-pat that I have ever known feels the same way.

I don’t know why, but every time I think that there is someone in Kansas, Melbourne or fucking Budapest who is at some point of time on the 17th of March dressed as an oversized Leprechaun and a couple of hours away from spewing green gastric juices onto a sticky overcrowded pub floor, it makes me want to cringe into a ball of embarrassment and roll under my bed.

How to explain this sensation? If you can imagine how American feels when he sees Rambo dubbed into Spanish or watches a report about bible belt TV evangelism while in a foreign hotel. An Englishman when he sees football hooligans destroying a stadium abroad or realises how much the world loves Benny Hill. The Italian watching a Hollywood mafia movie. The Frenchman, seeing a film where a shot of the Eiffel Tower and some tacky accordion music indicate that the location has moved to Paris. The Australian every time Fosters puts out an ad showing a sheep shearer with corks hanging from his hat.

These things just make you want to go out and grab the world by the lapels, put a bullhorn into its face and shout:

‘Look, just to set the record straight. This is NOT us. It is a corny, kitsch, stereotyped image that either represents a tiny part of our culture or doesn’t exist at all. It has been hijacked by the media, the advertising and marketing industries and now we’re stuck with it. It is mostly used to sell beer, breakfast cereals and sucker tourists into coming here. If you visit our country you are unlikely to see any of it and will probably end up very disappointed. Not to say that there aren’t some cool things about our country, but this ain’t them. Got it?’

If you are Irish and live abroad, you basically do one of three things on St. Patrick’s Day:

1. Stay at home with a rented DVD and a delivered pizza.
2. Get drunk enough to overcome your embarrassment.
3. Try and get laid on the novelty of being a real, home-grown Mick.

Over the years, I have attempted all three with varying degrees of success and humiliation.

Anyway, according to the history books he was a Frog, wasn’t he?

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity

2006-03-23T18:21:00.000+01:00

I am now going to commit the cardinal sin for a blogger and write about working life. Names will be omitted or changed to protect the innocent. Oh bugger, lets be honest, to protect me. Going and getting myself dooced out of a job with a nine-month baby back in the fold would probably not be such a bright idea.

My boss, gentleman that he is, also happens to be the company’s founder. As such, he plumps neatly into the category of entrepreneur. The one curious thing that I’ve found about nearly all entrepreneurs is how they can be so easily described by one simple phrase - ‘People who are easier to admire than like.’ That might be just the begrudging Mick in me talking but still, they are the type of people that make you want to shout – ‘I see all that you have achieved and I take my hat off to you Sir - but PLEASE do not sit beside me on this airplane fore I know that you are going to bore me shitless for hours with your homespun wisdom and personal philosophy in life!’.

Sr. G on the other hand, seems to be the exception. He is well read, soft spoken, has a decent sense of humour and seems to have a paternal kind of fondness for all his employees and this, in my humble opinion, puts him well above the rest of his ilk. His decency as a human being was well tested last week when one of his employees opened his big, fat mouth and made a wisecrack in front of the whole company that should have left him flipping burgers for the rest of his working life.

About six months ago our company contracted a representative in one of those smallish west African nations that is currently in a state of relative peace. The local rep., who is doing a fine job, recently asked us for some kind of giveaway merchandise to promote our company amongst his potential punters in the region. After thinking it over our boss decided upon a box full of baseball caps with our company name and logo proudly displayed on the front.

A week after the caps were sent off, we were all chatting at the coffee machine with Sr. G pontificating on the wisdom of choosing a cheap but practical piece of merchandise with a high exposure factor when muggns here pipes up with an alternative point of view.

‘When you think of it, most west African nations are either on the point of civil unrest or have a neighbouring country at civil war. So can’t you just see it, in a couple of months time, Newsweek magazine does a special about child soldiers around the world and on the cover, a photo of an ten-year old west African boy on a dusty road wearing a combat jacket and carrying an oversized AK47. Perched on his head is a pretty blue baseball cap and if we look a little closer, we can easily make out a company logo and name. Free publicity associating our company with child exploitation, now THAT is what I call a high exposure factor.’

Everybody laughs out loud including the Boss and then there’s one of those rare and magical comic moments. As the possibility of this actually happening slowly starts to sink in, Sr. G’s smile begins to fade. It takes a full ten seconds. He then turns and gives me the type of look that Jack Palance gives Billy Crystal in City Slickers. I’m sure he came close to saying ‘I shit bigger n’ you’, but he was already hurrying back to his office to try and cancel the delivery. What a lark.

So anyway I digress. Did you want a large fries with that order?

Rogue Thought for March

2006-03-15T10:22:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I thought of the perfect name for a petite Chinese porn star:

Mousey Tongue

Just Because You're Paraniod ...

2006-03-09T15:09:00.000+01:00

As for this whole flap about Dubai Ports World taking over US ports ... I find it rather suspicious that Republican congressmen are beating up the president over this. Surely they are doing it to improve their re-election chances in November.

But why is Bush defending the deal? It seems like a contrived stance to give the Republican congressmen an issue on which they can differ with Bush, while playing to the anti-Muslim sentiment in middle America. Yes, that's right, I think it's all a smokescreen to stop Bush's unpopularity from loosening the Republican stranglehold on the Congress ...