Poofs and sport

By our celebrity guest writer, Jeremy Clackston.

With the exception of figure skating and modern Premiership football, being a tip-toe-boy is still frowned upon in the macho world of sport.
This is largely down to communal showers and drinking habits. You don't want some fruit checking you out after the match and then ordering a pina colada in the bar later, when you only asked for a pint of ale when it was his round.
Do you, Gareth Thomas? No you don't.
Oops lads! Here comes Gareth. Bums to the wall! Ha ha ha!  I'm totally secure in my sexual identity, so wedging my head between other men's sweaty arses, voluntarily, every Saturday afternoon, doesn't bother me at all.

Burma Star Lunch

Awkward.
We didn't really know where to sit.
I felt uncomfortable in my suit.
I looked at Granda.
A small old man in his medals and scuffed shoes.
"Ahhhhh!", he smiled, and sat down.
It was all right.
We met an old friend of his, called Jimmy.
It was all right.
I'm glad I went.

Here goes!

Okay. Let's start with the jacket. I have seen more aesthetically pleasing things coming out of the arse of a dog with diarrhea.
And now. To the main course of his hair.
It's like...
It's like...
It's like a fight between an American wrestler and the sex fantasy of Jeremy Clarkson and Gary Glitter's love child. It is obscene beyond words.
The next guy just looks like a poof who defected from Phil Collins, and the last guy, well the last guy looks like a load of guys who girls wanted to go out with when you were sixteen, and just made you think, "If that's how much of a wanker you have to look like to get a girlfriend, I will happily embrace celibacy."

Yes. Haircuts.

We all tried to grow our hair long in those days. But we were hindered by parents and school rules. What was Def Leppard's excuse?
They had the worst poodle mullets the world has ever seen. Angus Young sometimes had his hair quite short, sometimes outrageously long for a middle-aged man. But it always looked good, and he never, NEVER, wore a white leather jacket and a pair of his sister's leggings.
He might have looked a bit odd in a school uniform, but it worked. Not like this...

I mean, where to even start here!

Let's start with the text and get that out of the way. This font was designed by a fourteen year old dungeons and dragons fanatic who had just been bought his first set square. There is not a single thing about it that doesn't scream, " Sh*t heavy metal band from Sheffield."

Okay now, from left to right.

The first guy is not too bad, when compared to the others. At least he isn't trying to look "sultry". The clenched fist and the fact that he is on the periphery of the photo suggest that he probably is secretly longing to leave the band and get a proper job.

The next guy just looks like a jerk. He is trying to disguise this by affecting the wearing of a hat. But it's not working. His face is all, look at how metal I am. Yeah, like aluminium, maybe.

Next. This may take a while. In fact I think I have to go and have a little lie down before even undertaking this task.

And why are there so many bloody musicals on TV?

Is Christmas not meant to be over?

Open your eyes. Time to wake up. Enough is enough is enough is enough.

Now.
There was a time, and we can be forgiven for it now, because it was in the eighties, and we didn't know any better.
But there was a time when we didn't realise that Def Leppard were Sh*t.
But we all do realise that now, don't we?
If not, let me remind you of the sh*tness that they are.
They did a song called "Armageddon It", which contains the lines, " Armageddon It? Yes I'm getting it."
This is only the tip of the iceberg of their adolecent Peurility or Peurilness or whatever you want to call it.
I will come to the trousers later, because I have so much to get through. In fact, when I come to think of it, I could have written my University dissertation on how sh*t Def Leppard were, without using any more reference material other than my own knowledge of how sh*t they actually were.
The sh*tness of the music pretty much speaks for itself, so let's move along to the haircuts.

Hi Iris! Cheerio, you Cretin.

Iris Robinson, who described herself as an abomination in the face of God (hang on, is that right? Well have you looked at her? It must be right.) has stood down as an MP. The pressure of getting everything for free while doing nothing but making the people of Northern Ireland look like a bunch of pitch-fork waving, witch-hunting hicks from the dark ages has obviously become too much for her.
So goodbye, Iris. Feck off to whatever hole in the ground you crawled out of, and tell that illiterate Dalek of a husband of yours to feck off too. And get a haircut.

Where did the gold go?

Thinking of the Nativity again, this question is troubling me. Presumably the gift of gold, offered to a king, would have consisted of a substantial amount. It would have been the equivalent of winning the lottery today. So where did it go? Joseph seems to have continued to work as normal as a carpenter, and there is no indication of Jesus' family being particularly wealthy. There is no mention of what they did with it.
It would make a good story, I think. Especially if told from the point of view of Joseph, because he is stangely unrepresented in the Bible. Not much more than a walk on part, really.
Strange.

I just remembered

That guy was called Alan Shearer, I think
Imagine being called Alan Shearer and being no good at football.

Poetry? Poetry is it, sonny Jim. Jimmy me lad? You're sixteen. It's about time you started to knuckle down and think about what you're going to do with the rest of your life!

A poem.
( in the free-form style. It doesn't rhyme or anything.)

He's probably dead by now.

I knew this boy at school when we were about nine.
He was really, really fat.
He was no good at football.
But I was friends with him anyway.
Because we were both good at art.
He's probably dead by now.

Wouldn't it be Great if Ireland Won the World Cup?

Wouldn't it be Great if Ireland Won the World Cup?
I mean, it is unlikely. But think how happy everyone would be if they did. Everyone loves Ireland. Think if they won the World Cup. Think about how happy everyone would be. Especially if they beat England in the final. Think how happy everyone would be.
Think if they won the World Cup.
Beat Brazil in the semi-final with a goal scored by some guy who plays for Crusaders, and then went on to destroy England with a hat-trick of goals from a guy who used to play for Distillery.
Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal!.........Irelandio!
Clement Atlee, Winston Churchill, Maggie Thatcher. Are you watching? Because your boys took a hell of a beating tonight!
Not likely to happen though.
The problem is this. And I don't want to blind you with football jargon here, but even when we had Geordie Best, what we lacked was "strength in depth".
There was not enough "pin-point-passing" in the middle third of the "park". Not enough movement "off the ball". Nay, not enough "incisive attacking into the penalty area". Not nearly enough kicking someone in the balls and then saying,"Come on ref, I never f***ing touched him!"

Nativity Play

The scene opens on a sparsely populated church.
Enter Mary and Joseph. Mary is heavily pregnant, which considering that she is only eight years old, pretty much confirms that girls are reaching puberty earlier and earlier.
Joseph's age is more difficult to discern, as he has wig tied around his face with a piece of string, forming a realistic approximation of a long beard. He has a tea-towel on his head, as was the fashion in Galilee in those days.
Mary: Oh, Joseph, I am so tired. Is it much further to Bethlehem?
Joseph: No. Here we are now.
Joseph walks up to a door and knocks on it.
The door opens.
Enter Inn-keeper.
Joseph: Hello. Have you got a room for the night?
Inn-keeper: No. I'm afraid we're fully booked, what with Christmas and everything.
Pause for audience laughter.
Joseph: My wife is with child. Is there nowhere we can stay?
Inn-keeper: You could try the Hilton.
Joseph: A bit out of our league, price-wise.
Inn-keeper: Well, I'll tell you what. There's a stable out the back. You could stay there. I won't charge you for it, and there's all the hay you can eat. I'll send the porter round to get your bags.
Joseph: Okay.

Meanwhile, in the hills above Bethlehem, shepherds were watching their flocks by night. They were attired in the usual tea-towel on head, stripey dress that their Mum used to wear in the Seventies (cross-dressing was more acceptable back in those days) and a crudely constructed crook whose chief component seems to be copious amounts of hastily painted masking tape wrapped around a stick.

Then the Angel of the Lord appears.
Enter Angel of the Lord, wearing a big white shirt of her Dad's that comes down to her knees, and a halo made out of a coat hanger with a bit of tinsel wrapped around it. The Angel of the Lord looks not unlike Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North, having her arms stretched out.
The shepherds give Oscar-winning performances of covering their eyes and looking "sore afraid".
Now, I have never understood that bit of the Bible. Maybe it is a mis-translation. How could they be sore afraid? Were they so afraid that it actually caused them physical pain?
Anyway.
The Angel of the Lord: Fear...not...for I bring you...glad tidings...of great joy...   ... ..."
The Angel of the Lord looks about uncertainly. Then another voice rings out, in a stage whisper.
Prompter: For today is born...
The Angel of the Lord: For today is born to you a Saviour... who is Christ the Lord... you will find him...in a stable...lying in a manger."
The shepherds said to each other, "Shall we go and see this great thing that has happened?" And they all agreed that they should. And they would take with them a toy lamb with a zip on it that you could keep your pyjamas inside, to honour the new King.

Also at this time, there were wise men from the East (Newtownards Road or somewhere). They were decked out in their Ma's best curtains, and crowns fashioned from the finest board of card sprayed with the gold paint of Halfords.
And they brought gifts of gold, Frankenstein, and a mirror.
They were guided by a dream not to go back to Herod, so they went home by another way. They took the Larne Stranraer ferry, and yea verily, I say unto thee, they did declare that Larne was the best place they had ever seen. So they stayed there and did raiseth up their families in that town.
And from that day hence, all the world acklowledges that the wisest men in all Christendom are born in Larne.

This is the word of the Lord.

Prize quiz

Here.
Here now. Here.
Here is something I've just noticed, here, now.
If anyone at all is even reading this drivel, have you noticed the alliteration in that last post? Like when Seamus Heaney or someone said, "and spit the pips" in one of his poems.
My English teacher, who was a pretty good guy, and considered himself radical, in that he rarely washed, or changed his clothes, or shaved, or wrote poetry that didn't contain the c word, seemed to like alliteration.
We liked him because he was a poet, and he could swear for poetical effect. He didn't just use the F word because he had hit himself on the thumb with a hammer. When he used it, it was art.
As in, "So you can see there boys, how the poet is trying to convey the anguish of his loss by...Lucas! stop f***ing about at the back of the class there, and pay attention!"
"Sorry, sir."
But, anyway. The "spit the pips" thing. It is great alliteration, those spitty p sounds. As our teacher pointed out to us. As he put it, "I mean, listen to it, boys. The pips are practically coming out of his mouth like guided f***ing missiles!"
It is a great alliteration.
But.
Apparently, alliteration, technically, only refers to vowel sounds. I'm not sure if I am totally right about this, but I think there is a seperate word for consonants which have the same effect. For example, "an apple all appealling", would be an alliteration, whereas, "like a devil's sick of sin", there is a different term for that. I can't remember what the term is. Maybe I am mistaken, but if not, please remind me, because English was about the only useful subject I learned at school and I would like to know what that word is, for an alliteration of consonants.
A pickled pepper picked by Peter Piper goes to the winner.

A good feeling

Warning! The link in this post will take you to sickeningly dated Eighties music, which may have the effect, if you work in an open plan office, to cause everyone to jump up and, despite not having rehearsed it at all, dance in a perfectly choreographed routine involving people doing the splits in mid-air, and perhaps someone in roller boots and leg warmers.

I woke up this morning at seven o'clock as usual. It was a miserable day. It wasn't even a day. It still looked like the middle of the night. I couldn't see it of course, as the curtains were closed. But I could hear it. The wind was battering rain against the window with alarming ferocity. It was cold too. Even the cat didn't seem to want to get up. She just raised her head when she saw me stir, and looked at me and then put her head back down again, as if to say, "Yeah. Just go back to sleep. I never did understand why you humans find the need for all this running about first thing in the morning. Just go back to sleep. You can feed me later."
I thought, "Maybe I could just lie here for a while. Listen to the radio alarm clock. Absorb some of the fat cat's warmth.." Then I woke up and it was eight o'clock. Oh no. Late for work. I jumped up in a panic, fed the cat, put the kettle on, then decided I had no time for tea, and headed for the shower. I was half-way down the hall when it came to me. "Hold on. Today is Tuesday. I don't work on a Tuesday."
What a good feeling. I don't think I've ever had that before!
I did once go to work on New Year's Eve, only to find nobody there and the building all locked up. I waited around for half an hour or so until it became apparent that no-one was coming. Although I felt a bit stupid, it was good.
But not as good as this.
I didn't even have to change out of my Jimmy Jammy Jim Jams. I put on my slippers and dressing gown and prepared copious quantities of tea and toast while observing through the window, with a certain amount of Schadenfreude, the miserable malcontents struggling through the weather on their way to work.
The cat meaowed a thoughtful meaow that seemed to say, "Let's have another round of breakfast, and then go back to bed for a while."
"Good idea, Lucy. What would you like? Tea and toast, or cat food?"
"Tea and toast."
"Really?"
"No. Only joking. Cat food please."

Decorations

I never put my Christmas decorations up this early. But when I got home from work today, someone had had another idea.

This little chap had somehow got into the house, and was happily perched on the curtain rail, observing the lazy cat (who took no interest).
I thought maybe he could stay. A kind of living Christmas decoration. But then he flew against the window a few times, obviously anxious and perplexed that he couldn't escape.
My windows only have a small opening part at the top. So when I opened them he couldn't work it out, and just kept banging against the glass. Thinking he might hurt himself, I devised a plan.
I sprinkled some bread crumbs on the frame by the open part of the window. Sure enough, he went to investigate, and after a quick snack, realised how to get out.
Mind you, with the weather being as it is tonight, I wouldn't be surprised if he wanted back in again.

Art galleries and their owners

Have you noticed how art gallery owners often bear an uncanny resemblance to their art gallery?
No. Of course you haven't. This was a stupid subject to try to write about. How could an art gallery owner possibly look like an art gallery? It makes no sense at all. What was I thinking?
Sorry. Just forget it.
I'll speak to you tomorrow.

Fiction

So there we were. It seemed strange. It seemed like only a few days ago they were putting us through our basic training; telling us how to use a rifle. Not a gun. A rifle. They emphasised that so much. " It's not a gun. It's a rifle!"
That doesn't seem to matter so much right now, although they seemed to think it was really important at the time.
I'm lying behind a bush, and Tommy, my best mate from basic training is lying about ten feet to my left.
I know he's been hit. I know he's probably dead or badly injured. I want to go to him, but I'm scared. I can't see the enemy at the top of the hill, but they can obviously see us.
"Tommy."
"Tommy?"
"Tommy. Can you hear me? Are you all right?"
I move a little towards him. A shot rings out, and I swear it nearly gets me. I crawl back behind the bush.
Then a lot of shots rain down around the bush. They know where I am hiding.
To my shame, I crawl away down the hill, leaving Tommy to die alone with his rifle, not a gun.

When I went to Heaven

I was quite surprised that they let me in at all.
Once, when I was quite poor, I used to steal things from shops.
Just cheese and packets of bacon and stuff like that. They didn't have CCTV back in those days, so as long as you were careful, you could get away with it easily enough.
So I got into heaven, and the first person I met was Hitler.
I went to God, and I said, "What the hell is he doing here?"
God said, " He met the criteria."
"He met the criteria? That man tried to wipe out Jews and Gypsies and homos, and black people, and he wasn't very nice."
"He was just trying to look after his peoples' interests. He was a good shepherd."
"A good shepherd? He was a very bad person! And I don't think he deserves to be here. Speaking of which, where is my Dad?"
"He's in the other place."
"The other place? You mean Hell?"
"Yes."
"My Dad is in Hell? My Dad was a really nice man. Why does he have to go to Hell, and Hitler gets to come here? Hitler doesn't even play golf, and my Dad would love the great courses you have here."
"They are good, aren't they?"
"I don't know, because I don't play the game myself, but aren't we kind of getting off the point here?"
"What point is that?"
"The point is, Hitler is here, and my Dad is in Hell. It doesn't seem fair, somehow."
"Well, let me tell you all about it." says God.
"Around 1978, I was developing a new creature. I had been working on it for ages. It was an insect. My eye-sight isn't what it used to be, but I managed to get the legs and everything assembled. This insect was going to change the world. It would have cancelled out all the effects of global warming, which people hadn't really started to think about back then."
"But you had?"
"Of course I had, for My sake. I'm God!"
"So where do my Dad and Hitler come into this?"
"Well. The insect seemed to survive best in a wet, temperate climate, so I chose to trial it in Northern Ireland."
"Go on."
Well, I implanted them, a male and a female, on the kitchen floor of 11 Doagh Road, thinking they will breed, and save the planet. Sexual reproduction among animals was one of my finer inventions, wouldn't you agree?"
"Chance would be a fine thing. But go on."
"Your Dad, while walking across the kitchen to put the kettle on one Saturday afternoon, stepped on both of them, killing them instantly."
"Well, that was hardly his fault. Could you not just have made another two?"
"No. I had lost the blue-prints."
"So my Dad is in Hell for that, and Hitler is here in Heaven?"
"Afraid so."

Ugly guys and nice girls. What's going on?

  " A table for two, please."

You see this all the time. I don't understand it completely. I do understand it partly. She's nice looking. He's got a lot of money.

But, there must be guys with lots of money who aren't fat and repulsive. And there must be girls who would rather pay for their own dinner in exchange for going out with a man who doesn't drive a Porsche Mid-Life-Crisis GTX, and looks vaguely like what is considered attractive, rather than a large, over-bearing, self-confident slug in a suit.

I don't understand it. I suppose I am just going to be a victim of natural selection.

I don't mind. I never really had much of an urge to breed, anyway.

A bit of action would be nice once in a while, though.

It's been a while.

If only you had to go through this whole song and dance routine every time you wanted a cigarette, I would have quit years ago.

I think we have a fight on our hands!

Girls vs Cigarettes!

Well, let's see the opponents as they step into the the ring here.

The girl looks quite appealing, there.

She certainly does, but the cigarettes have the readily available advantage though.

That's certainly true. You don't have to risk making a total dick of yourself when you try to connect with a packet of cigarettes.

No, you don't. You rarely get laughed at and made to feel like an idiot when you saunter up to the tobacconist and casually say, "Can you give me a packet of cigarettes?"

It certainly is never an experience that I have experienced, in my experience, that when trying to buy a packet of cigarettes, that the tobacconist says, "Get lost, you loser!"

Whereas girls often do that.

They do. In my experienced opinion, that is an experience I have experienced in a number of experiences.

Quite.

So here they come. She walks out into the middle of the ring.

"Have you got a light?"

"Yeah. Sure.

So, do you come here often?"

Oh, disaster! What was he thinking there?

Totally predictable. You're never going to penetrate a well-honed defense with those sort of schoolboy tactics.

And she's walked off. She's walked off!

"Your hair looks nice!"

It's too little too late. You have to admire his tenacity, but really, it's no contest, and he's gone for the easy option. He's left with no choice but to go off to the shop to buy some cigarettes and get a taxi.

What a shame.

I'm not that fussed about my tea

Tea is the best drink in the world. I love it. I love it whether it is weak or strong, or in between. I don't even mind it without milk.
But some people are really fussy about the consistency of their tea. Usually people who like very strong tea.
You make them a cup of tea and they say, "I'm not drinking this cat's pish."
Here are some other things people who are fussy about their tea are fussy about.
Guinness. They will complain about it to the point where they will often send it back, sometimes even taking it upon themselves to give the publican an impromptu lesson in how to do his job properly. I am not that fussy. I have drunk Guinness in Malaysia, so I know how bad it can be. I have also drunk Guinness in Mulligan's in Dublin, so I know how good it can be. But mostly it doesn't bother me that much.
Steak. People who like their tea "well done" tend to like their steak just about barely cooked. Again, I am not that fussed. Other than bland mediumly cooked steak, I can appreciate it in all its forms. Sometimes chewing endlessly on the blackened sole of an old boot can be very enjoyable and tasty.
Clothes. Sometimes it is necessary to be well turned out. I understand that. But fussy tea people appear not to grasp the definition of "casual". Aesthetics is okay for art. Pretty much the whole point of it if you ask me. But not really important when it comes to clothes. When I went away to art college, my Mum gave me an iron. She might as well have given me a harpoon gun.
Girlfriends. Some people insist on only going out with conventionally good-looking girls.. We are getting into aesthetics again here. Now, I like good-looking girls. Most men do. But I once went out with a girl who, when I first met her, I didn't find very attractive. But we got on really well and and over a period of time I seemed to "learn" to like how she looked.
Right. I'm making the tea. Do you want some?
How do you take it?

Night out

I actually had a night out on Friday. They are a brilliant idea. Here is how they work.
Instead of going home after work, you say, "Okay", when someone says, "Do you want to go for a pint?"
So you go to a pub and order drinks, and despite the fact that after about two minutes you have spent more money than you normally spend on food in a week, it is actually quite enjoyable. Then more people arrive and you decide to order food, which costs more than what you spend on drink in a week.
Then you drink some more and then you go home.
And the cat is annoyed, so you feed her. And then you go to bed. And you feel happy, because you have just done something enjoyable, and it didn't cost that much, really (although that is partly because someone else paid for everyone's dinner, as it appears that we are too old now for that, everyone chipping in, thing).
Anyway, you should try it sometime.
Today I was at a craft fair. I think craft fairs are ironically named. Because they are so unfair!
Here are a collection of people who have obviously invested a lot of time and effort into making fairly professional-standard things that look pretty nice, and obviously involve a bit of skill to make. They are also unique, in that you can't walk into any old shop and buy the same thing.
And in shuffle a load of brick-faced ingrates, who drink their free cup of tea and turn their nose up at everything despite the fact that it is practically for nothing. Then they go to the local shopping centre and buy a coffee for £3 and spend their money on mass produced garbage.
Meanwhile, I have heard there is a show now on TV that is a sort of art version of x factor.
I haven't seen it, but I understand it follows the same format. A bunch of people with no discernable aptitude for it come on and get slagged off by another bunch of people with no discernable aptitude for it.
I heard that one of the judges on this show is Tracey Emmin. A woman who smokes a lot of cigarettes, drinks a lot of vodka, wets her bed, and then presents it as art.
Sounds brilliant. When is it on again?
I just feel sorry for the poor crafters.

Two Pound Coins

I only talk about this because today I was given four of them. I bought a sandwich for £1.99 and as if it isn't bad enough that I was given four two pound coins in my change, when I opened the sandwich, the bread was wet. I didn't buy it from one of those gourmet places, it was just a shop. But considering that I could have made a better sandwich myself in about ten seconds, for £1.99 you at least expect the bread not to be the slimey consistency and colour of someone's flesh who has just been dredged out of a lake by police frog-men after about two months.
So I am walking about with a pocketful of coinage that is comparable to carrying a packet of digestive biscuits made of metal.
The inclination is to just spend them as quickly as possible. Offload a bit of weight.
They are strange, the two pound coins. Why? Those of you older enough to remember, or those of you of a Scottish persuasion, may remember the One Pound note. I liked One Pound notes. I think we should bring them back, and scrap 1p and 2p coins altogether while we are at it. They are a complete waste of time and they are ugly and stupid too. Particularly the 2p coin. Why is it so big? It's bigger than a 5p, a 10p and a 20p. That makes no logical sense. You can't use either of them in vending machines, and at any given time about half of them are out of circulation, either languishing in jars in people's bedrooms or down the back of sofas, or dropped in the street, where they are deemed so worthless that not only do the people who drop them not feel it is worth the effort of stooping to pick them up, even the most desperate beggars seem to ignore them. The city streets are not paved with gold, they are paved with 1p and 2p coins that nobody wants.
But I am getting off the point. When they had One Pound notes, there was never felt a need to have Two Pound notes. We think decimally. You have units, and then things work in increments of ten. Hence one pound, ten pounds, twenty pounds and so on. Five pounds seems okay, as if you are buying something slightly more than a pound, but a lot less than ten pounds, they make sense.
Years ago you used to be able to withdraw five pounds from a cash machine, but that is by the by.
But having something the size of a Wagon Wheel that is only worth two pounds, and is for some reason, despised by bus drivers (and vending machines, by the way) seems to me like folly.
Here is another thing about the Two Pound coin that I bet you haven't noticed. Its design is flawed.
On the opposite side from the Queen's head is a graphic of nineteen cog wheels arranged in a circle. Now presuming that the cogs are supposed to turn each other, an odd number of cogs would not work. Each cog turns the one next to it, so in engineering terms this arrangement wouldn't work.

Worms

Thread worms, to be specific. So called because they are thin and thread-like.
I'm not sure how you get them, but I did in the summer of 1985. We were on holiday in Cornwall at the time. Me, my Mum and Dad, and my sisters (my brother was too grown up to go on holiday with his "totally boring parents" at that age.)
It was a nice enough holiday. We were staying in a pretty fancy hotel. I played tennis against my Dad in the daytime, and at night I wandered into Newquay and forlornly tried to meet a girl.
Then I noticed that my bottom was really itchy all the time.
Then I went for a poo and noticed that there were some white, thread-like objects moving about in my deposits.
I thought, "That doesn't look right."
So as Bob Geldof was saving Africa, and Phil Collins was flying across the Atlantic in a helicopter with a cheap suit and a receding hair-line, I was sitting in the bar of a nice hotel saying to my Mum, "I think I've got worms."
She said, "Don't worry."
And she got me some tablets the next day, and that was the end of that.

No-one here but us chickens

Now, this is strange.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0hTtsqiFCc
It's really hard to know what to say.

Lice

Have I talked about them yet? No?
Well let me tell you all about it.
I was living in Newtown in Sydney at the time.
Let me start from the beginning, because the background story is important.
I had had a bad run of luck trying to find work in Brisbane. I got to Sydney in what is probably a world record time for hitch-hiking (I don't know what it is. I have always just been lucky when it comes to hitching. Everybody just seems to stop and give me a lift. I must have an inoffensive face or something.)
So, at first I was living with Chris, my Mum's cousin, who lived in Sydney at that time. Despite the fact that we had never met, and really only had a vague notion of each others' existence, when I phoned, he agreed to put me up in his house. He came to collect me.
"Where are you?"
"I'm standing out the front of Sydney Opera House."
Good choice. If you're in Sydney, and someone wants to know where in Sydney you are, saying that you are standing outside the Opera House is pretty unambiguous.
"Er... what do you look like?"
"Oh. I have a blue rucksack and I look like I have just hitch-hiked from Brisbane in less than two days. I look like I have been dragged through a hedge backwards, basically."
"Okay. I'll see you in about half an hour."
Chris and his wife were really nice, considering that they were trying to sell their house at the time, the last thing they probably wanted was some dishevelled looking hippy crashing at their place.
They fed me and gave me a place to stay for a few weeks. They even made me a cake for my birthday, which was nice. But I knew I had to get out of there at some stage, and that meant finding a job.
I went to the jobcentre every day, but had little luck. Then one day, when my bank balance was 82 cents, I went in and saw a job for a fork-lift truck driver. "Must have experience" it said.
I thought, "How hard can it be?"
I applied. The woman at the desk said, "They're looking for people to start straight away. Can you go to an interview today?"
"Yes" , I said , "where is it?"
"It's in Botany."
That was quite a distance away.
I said, " I only have 82 cents."
She looked pityingly at me and said, "That's all right mate, if you are going to a job, we can issue you with free bus tickets."
She gave me the tickets and the details of the job and who I was to ask for when I got to the interview.
I got off the bus, and it was still quite a long walk through a big industrial estate to get to the place.
When I got there someone pointed to an office and I went over and knocked on the door.
When I went inside there was a very friendly sort of guy with a German accent.
"Ah. So you are here about the job?" he said.
"Yes. The jobcentre sent me."
"Can you start tomorrow?"
"Yes. What time?"
"Seven o'clock. You get six hundred dollars a week, and you can do as much overtime as you want. We are very busy at the moment."
"Are you telling me that I've got the job?"
"Yes.Yes. Do you want it?"
"Yes. I'll see you in the morning."
Well, that morning came. There was a very big Australian kind of guy who had obviously been assigned to show me the ropes. When he heard my name was Michael, he immediately started refering to me as "Mick".
It was seven in the morning, and he had a cup of coffee in his hand.
"Right, Mick. We've got a palette of scrap parts here. We need to take them out the back and dump them in the skip."
He perched himself on the edge of the palette, coffee in hand, and indicated that I should drive on.
Now fork-lifts aren't that complicated, so I managed to get us going. But then we had to turn round a corner in the warehouse.
The thing that is different between a fork-lift and, say, a car, is that fork-lifts steer with their rear wheels. This means that they turn very sharply when you turn the steering wheel. So when we got to this corner, I turned the wheel. The truck did a sort of a piroette, the guy flew off, and his coffee went everywhere.
As he picked himself up and brushed himself down, I was thinking, " This is it. They're going to sack me now."
He said, "Flamin' hell Mick! I think we're going to have to keep you off the fork-lifts until you've learned to drive them!"
So I was fine. They didn't sack me, and I pretty quickly got the hang of the fork-lifts.
There was a guy from England working there. He was on a similar sort of working visa that I was, and he told me he was living in a backpackers hostel in Newtown, and if I was looking for somewhere to live, why not come round and have a look.
So I went round and it was full of English and American and European people, a lot of nurses, and a lot of people just like me. So it seemed nice, and I thanked Chris and his wife for putting me up, and I packed my rucksack and moved in.
It was forty dollars a week.
There was a great crowd of people there and we all went to a pub called the Marborough that was just round the corner. We even arranged a 1960s party on a boat that sailed around Sydney harbour one Saturday night. Another night, for no particular reason, we all went to the Marlborough dressed in togas.
One day, though, I noticed I was itchy in the downstairs area.
I went to the toilet for a self-examination, and noticed what looked like some tiny red scabs. Eugh!
I sort of picked one of them off, and it fell on the tiles. I looked at it. It was wriggling. It was really, really small but it definitely had a lot of legs that were wriggling. I was mortified. What am I suppossed to do about this?
Later that night, in the Marlborough, I said to Barry, who was from Crossmaglen, but his family had moved to London when he was two, so he had a Cockney accent (which must have gone down well in Crossmaglen),
"Barry?"
"What, mate?"
"I've got a problem."
"Do you need to borrow some money?"
"No. It's not that sort of problem."
"Well, what is it, mate?"
"I've got critters living in my pants."
"Have you been with a Doris?"
"A what?"
" A bird. A girl. Have you been with a girl?"
"No. Honestly I haven't. If I had I would tell you. I think I picked them up from the bed at the hostel."
"Not surprised, mate. It's bloody disgusting that place."
"Well what should I do?"
"Go to the chemist, mate. Now, ask to speak to the chemist, not one of the silly wee girls." His words, not mine. "He should sort you out with some cream."
I wasn't sure. I thought, "I've got health insurance, I might as well go to a doctor."
So I phoned in sick to work and went to a nearby surgery.
"G'day mate, what can I do for you?"
"I was wondering if I could see the doctor."
She leaned forward, put her elbow on the desk and her hand on her chin and said, "I could just listen to you all day."
"What?"
"That accent. I love it. Irish, right?"
"Yeah, em could I just..."
"Go on, say something else."
" Top of the morning to you?"
"Brilliant! Take a seat mate. The doctor will see you in a minute."
When I went in and told him the problem, he examined me briefly and then asked some rather personal questions. He seemed quite disappionted when I answered "No" to all of them.
"I think I might have picked them up off the bed at the hostel. It doesn't look that clean."
"Well", he said in a superior sort of way as he scribbled out a prescription.
I thought, "Yeah, well if I was doctor I could probably afford to stay at the Hilton."
I went to the chemist and they gave me two things. A bottle of what can only be described as slime, which was for my hair. And a bottle of white cream, for my body. I had to apply it each evening for three days. The instructions said that you had to apply it and not wash it off. You were also supposed to allow it to dry for a couple of hours before putting your clothes on again.
"Great", I thought. "I am living in a shared dorm room, and I have to walk about naked for two hours for three nights in a row."
Luckily, everyone went out to the Marlborough every night, so as soon as they had gone, I stripped off and applied the cream. "Ha ha!" I thought, "they won't be back for at least two hours."
About ten minutes later I noticed a rather unpleasant sensation, not unlike severe sunburn. About another ten minutes later, I swear, I felt like someone had just set me on fire. It was agony. After about an hour it seemed to subside a bit, so I applied the slime to my hair and then went to bed. For three nights I got away with this. All it would have taken was for someone to decide not to go to the Marlborough one of those nights and I don't know what I would have done.
Still, I didn't get away with it altogether. The day after I had been to the doctor, I returned to work. The big Australian guy saw me and said, "G'day Mick. Good to see you back. I heard you were crook."
I was standing there with my slimey hair.
"Yeah, I just had to go to the doctor. A skin infection."
"Yeah. Bloody lice, was it, mate?"

Fleas

Have I written about fleas yet? No? Are you sitting comfortably? Because the mere mention of the word "fleas" starts me itching and scratching. Anyway, I will begin.
It all started one day, as most things do. I was sitting watching TV after work, when I felt a tickly feeling on my forearm. Rather than just scratch it, I looked down and there it was. I had never seen a flea before, but for some reason I just knew that's what it was. They are strange, unpleasant looking creatures and they move quite awkwardly when they are "walking". Their back legs are long, which makes their bodies lean forward at an angle. But when they jump! They can really jump.
I slapped this one, but it didn't die. When I took my hand away it was there, relatively uninjured looking. And then it jumped.
I sprang up too, and began to look around. They are very small and difficult to see. Then I looked down the front of my shirt, and there they were. Several of them, grazing like miniature cows on my chest..
The first thing I did was have a bath. "I'll drown them", I thought. A good deep bath later, I inspected the tub for bodies. There were none. I didn't understand why. Maybe they abandoned ship when they saw I was about to sink.
Second, I struggled with the reluctant cat, got her into her carrier and drove to the vet thinking "Great, now the car will be infested too."
The vet said that fleas are hard to see on a black cat, so she combed the cat saying "You can usually see their faeces." Nice.
Right enough, there were some tiny flakes on the vet's table. The cat was issued with some pills. I wasn't issued with anything if I remember rightly. I think the story is that fleas don't actually live on people that readily, especially if you wash regularly. Also, I imagine the fact that they have to work out how to get inside your clothes before they can feed might put some of them off.
But they just jump on, drink some of your blood, and jump off again. An interesting thing about fleas is that they can't see very well. They can, though, detect carbon dioxide, which all animals breathe out. When they detect carbon dioxide, they basically just jump in the general direction of it until they hit something biteable.
The vet did sell me a spray to kill the ones loitering with intent around the flat (and now, the car). It cost £20. Everything at the vet seems to cost at least £20.
It didn't work. I went to a pet shop and bought another, similar spray, this time for about £15.
That didn't work either. So I went back and bought a big tub of what looked like Shake and Vac. That night I thew this stuff over absolutely everything. Skirting boards, under the cushions on the chairs, my bed, the cat's various sleeping places, everywhere. My cat sort of has access to the whole flat, so every room had to be done. And about four machine-loads of laundry. The cat was put out. I had a bath, and went to work (I worked nights at the time).
When I came home in the morning, the scene was like a miniature version of the Battle of the Somme. There were tiny bodies everywhere. I vacuumed the whole place, and deposited the vacuum cleaner bag in a plastic bag which I then deposited in the bin (someone else's bin, who lived several doors away, if truth be told).
The next few days were a paranoid nightmare. Is that an itch on my leg? Is that cat scratching herself? Is this a flea I see before me, its head towards my hand? Come let me clutch thee. I have thee not, yet I see thee still.
That sort of thing.
But they were dead. They were gone. There was probably a big article on flea television 6 o'clock news about it. "We're getting reports of a massacre in Northern Ireland. The death toll is yet to be confirmed, but our man who lives on a dog in the area says it could run into the tens of thousands. No group has yet claimed responsibility, but humans are strongly suspected. However, unconfirmed reports that he forgot to do his car offer the opportunity for future insurgency."
Thankfully that never happened. They never came back.

The Ireland France Football debacle, again

I heard something on the radio today that sounded like a good idea.
Someone suggested that Thierry Henri should be banned for a number of games when they go to the World Cup Finals, but France should not be allowed to replace him, and have to play those games with ten rather than eleven players.
That sounded like a good idea to me, although it is a shame that such measures need to be considered now that cheating in sport has become so common-place.
I don't know a lot about it, but I understand that golf still takes a poor view of cheaters. You will get thrown out of your club and banned for life, and will probably find it difficult to join another one, if you get caught doing it.
I personally don't understand why you would want to cheat at a game. I like to play chess. What pleasure would I get from cheating at it? (and on the internet, apparently you can cheat, by going to sites that tell you what Gary Kaspirov would do in your situation, then going back to your online game and copying the moves he would use).
Cheating at Monopoly is, of course, okay. Practically compulsory, in fact, because it gets so bloody boring after about three hours.

I just have to point out that there is a strong difference between cheating and stealing.
Stealing is an art.
Speaking of stealing and art, I used to occasionally visit these people who were a friend of a friend when I was a student. They had a Picasso hanging on the back of their toilet door. Not a print. A real Picasso. Not a major work or anything, just a little sketch. But it was a real Picasso. They stole it from the City Art Gallery.
They lived just around the corner from me, so every time I needed a poo, I made an excuse to call round and visit them, just so I could look at it.

Thierry Henri

I think, seeing as he likes using his hands so much, he should be forced to play rugby. Just him on his own, against the whole Ireland team.
That should be his punishment.

Violent teachers

Hello,
I am posting today from an Apple Mac. So what!
I am in work. There is a book in my office that dates from 1961. It is called "Ordinary Level Mathematics, with answers".
It is the "with answers" part that reminded me of something.
When I went to school it was still generally accepted that teachers could maintain discipline by using physical violence.
Some chose not to, some seemed not to need to. But some of them seemed to positively relish it.
One day in Maths class we were doing an exercise from a text book, which, like the one I have just described, had answers in the back.
I can't remember exactly the wording of the question, but it had something to do with multiplying a number by "the number of pages in this book". So I turned to the back of the book to look at the final page number. The teacher saw me doing this and he picked me up violently by the ear and said," Looking up the answers in the back of the book, are we?"
Rather than allow me to explain, he just lifted me up higher, so that I had to stand on my chair, and then he just humiliated me in front of the whole class.

Clothes

I find that a lot of my clothes have paint on them. Now that's not a deiberate thing. It is just a thing that happens. I suppose you could call it an ocupational hazard. I don't deliberately daube paint on myself, it just happpens from time to time in the course of my work.
But a lot of my clothes have a certain amount of paint on them. And I often walk about from day to day wearing these clothes. And I am aware that some people probably look at me and think, "That man is wearing clothed that are covered in paint."
But so what?
It's not a really big deal, is it?
I paint. It gets on your clothes from time to time. There's not much you can do about it.
Obviously if I have to go to a posh do, or a wedding or some such event, I try to hoke out something that doesn't have paint on it (and I do keep a couple of outfits expressly for this purpose, suits and the like, ties and so on.)
But other than that does it really doesn't matter if there is a bit of paint on your clothes, does it?
Does it?
Because if you think it really does, then... then... then I will just have to strongly disagree with you about that.

Banks

Sorry, but I just saw an advert on TV by Halifax. Is this not the Halifax of HBOS fame? The wan... I mean bankers who the government just paid off to the tune of £50 billion because they lined thier pockets and screwed us all, and now they want to screw us all again?
The jist of the advert was that banks are really nice and they give you loads of things.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration? I didn't mean to do that. Please. Continue... Oh you had finished? Well. Allow me to retort.
You aren't a happy friendly organisation with my best interests at heart. You are a greedy, morally corrupt gang of thieves, and instead of wasting my tax money that you have been bailed out with , by me, to make slick and disingenuous TV adverts, you should be crawling on your pin-striped knees and begging my forgiveness.
And I will rain down upon thee with great vengeance, and FURIOUS anger.
And you will know my name is The Lord, when I lay my vengeance upon thee!"

Rant complete.
I feel a little bit better now, you know?
It's good to just get that out of your system from time to time.
I wonder what that irritating little man Howard is doing now?

Right

Right. I know. I have posted already today.
But Deal or no deal. What is the deal?
You've got an insufferably irritating man, whose attempts to grow a beard are questionable to say the least, and he's wearing what looks like his wife's blouse.
He officiates over what appears to to be nothing more than a glorified guessing game, and people watch this?
And people watch this.

Litter issues

I have a cat. That doesn't mean I'm gay, and it doesn't mean I'm a crazy old lady. Plenty of people have cats. It's perfectly normal.
Now, I normally buy Tesco Value cat litter. The cat seems happy enough crapping on it, and I'm happy enough as it doesn't cost too much.
But for the last couple of weeks it has been "Out of Stock", leaving me with the option of buying "Tesco Finest", or going elsewhere.
Now, and I know I have a bad habit of starting too many sentences with that word, I am not really the kind of person who thinks £3.99 is really a reasonable outlay for something that my cat is just going to poo on.
So I went elsewhere. The wonderful shopping experience that is Lidl.
Here's the deal. You go in and there are several Russians and Lithuanians frantically stocking the shelves with the most bizarre array of seemingly pointless products. One week they are selling jodphurs, riding hats and boots, the next it is deep sea diving gear and socket sets.
I found some cat litter, which seemed reasonably priced, although by the writing on the packet, it was obviously intended for the Turkish market.
I went to the till and waited. And waited. Eventually a rather aggressive looking Polish woman put down the foot spas she was arranging on a shelf, and rather irritably deigned to serve me.
I got the stuff home and put it in the cat's tray. She duly jumped in and carried out her business.
The next day she was crying and whining. I thought, "She must be hungry."
So I gave her some food. But that wasn't it. Now, cats are quite clever. If she's hungry and she is whining, I say, "What do you want?" and she runs into the kitchen and looks mournfully at the empty food bowl. Message received and understood.
But on this occassion she ran out to the balcony where her litter tray sits, and I swear she practically pointed at it, with a look of utter disgust on her face.
This litter from Lidl has the great quality that when the cat pees on it, it solidifies. Like cement. So when she needed a poo, and tried to bury her doings, as cats, very clean animals, try to do, she couldn't break through the surface. I had to use, and I exaggerate not here people, a hammer and chisel to extricate the stuff from the tray. It eventually came away in one solid rectangular lump. It resembled a brick, albeit a very smelly brick.
I deposited it in the bin with a resounding "Thump!"
If you would like to build an impromptu wall that stinks of cat pee...
Otherwise, no.

My brother and electrical things

Okay. I know I am posting too many times today. Over-active synapses on a Sunday.
But that might mean I can have tomorrow off, right?
Anyway, strike while the metal is hot and all. This just came to me.

My brother comes home every once in a while. Now he's a nice guy and all. I like him. And he seems pretty competent in his job and everything.
But every time he comes home, he manages to screw up some piece of electronic equipment in a way that no technician or engineer can seem to repair.
"I don't know. You'll just have to throw it away and buy a new one" they invariably say.
Last time it was my Mum's computer. She hasn't been able to connect to the internet for weeks.
So I went up and looked at it tonight.
Right enough it wasn't working. So I had a look in the back. Everything seemed Okay. So I just pulled out a couple of cables and stuck them back in again. Hey presto! Internet working again!
I don't know what it is with my brother. I mean the guy has a highly reponsible job. I don't want to worry you frequent fliers, but his job involves practically running an airport. Can you imagine him wandering into the air-traffic control tower and saying, "What  does this button do?"

Christmas

If the phrase "camp as Christmas" means anything.
Well, Merry Christmas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYT2aWavXlc
Contains sound.

Just to remind people

The time of posting on this site is wrong. I've gone into the settings and tried to fix it. To no avail.
Just in case you are worrying that I am some kind of weird insomniac.
It is currently about half nine in the morning, but the web log thinks it is the middle of the night for some reason.

The way shops used to be, and still should be, in my opinion

Carrying on from that last post, there was a hardware shop I went to a few years ago. It is still there, and hopefully still operating in the same fashion.
I went in to buy some nails.
"What size?", says the man behind the counter, who is wearing one of those long buff coloured coats.
"About so big", I indicate to him.
He brings out a big box. "Would these do?"
"Yes. Perfect."
"How many handfuls?"
"Em. Two should be enough."
He scoops up a couple of handfuls of nails, puts them in a paper bag, thinks for a second or two and says,"50p."

All multi-taskers to the check-outs

It's all going smoothly enough. Beep... Beep.. Beep.
And then you want to buy an onion.
And the entire system breaks down.
And they have to call a supervisor, who comes over and scrutinises the onion and talks into a head-set and rushes off with it to get advice from above. And I am thinking, "Look, could you not have just taken a wild guess? I would be prepared to give you 15p for it, if that sounds reasonable."
Ten minutes later the "supervisor" comes back with the onion and says, " 13p."
Beep!

Christmas

Well, Christmas is coming, and with it, the prospect of spending lots of money just to re-assure people that you love them.
Why not show someone that you love them, by spending lots of money on a painting by me?
I can paint just about anything.
I was recently in negotiations with the Pope about re-painting the Sistene Chapel.
He wanted it all done in magnolia with a purple floral border just below the dado rail. But I talked him out of it.
I said, "Look, your Popeiness, people aren't going to queue for three hours to look at that.
What you want is terracotta, with a few stencils. Some ivy, maybe."
"Stencils?", he said. "I hope that Banksy character isn't going to be involved."
"No", I said.
"Because we can't be having that. Disgusting some of the stuff he does."
"Yes your Popieness, I am led to beleive that he is a Presbyterian."
"Well that explains it!"
"So I can call round with some swatches later on. There is a nice colour called "Midnight Autumn Dawn Rising Bunny Rabbits." You might like that."
"Yeah, whatever. Anything would be better than that tacky Michelangelo wallpaper we have at the moment."
"Okay. I'll go to B&Q and see what they've got."
"You do that Michael."
"You'll have to pay for the scaffolding hire, of course."
"Ule? Ule Bryner? Has he not been dead for years? How is he going to pay?"
"He left me a lot of money in his will."
"Oh. That's all right then."
The Pope is so gullible. You could paint gold yellow and sell it to him as string.

Well that's today's post out of the way fairly early in the day.

Seriously though, BUY A PAINTING.
You know it makes some kind of sense.

The cat who wouldn't use his tray

They were smitten,
When they saw this kitten.
They picked him out and took him home, making one stop,
To buy him food, a bowl and a bed at the pet shop.
As well as some litter and a tray,
I should remember to also say.

They got him home and they set him free.
The first thing he did was have a pee.
Right upon the kitchen floor,
A smell not easy to ignore.
As if that wasn't quite enough,
He did a lot of other stuff.

For example, he liked to poo,
In someone's slipper, boot or shoe.
At first they didn't really mind,
They thought," He'll settle in with time."
They tried to set him on the grit,
To see if he'd get used to it.

But this fussy little kitty,
Found the litter was too gritty.
He found it harsh on his posterior,
and that it was much inferior,
To a carpet, or rug, or bed,
So he chose to use those instead.

The people soon got quite frustrated,
With the mess the cat created.
They couldn't understand the way,
He just refused to use his tray.
And they got sick of finding traces,
Of toilet business in strange places.

One day they'd had enough of it,
They thought it really was unfit,
To have a cat that wouldn't stay,
And have a poo upon his tray.
They agreed one fateful day
The cat would have to go away.

And, so early the next very morning,
Without food and without warning,
They put the cat into the car,
And drove away, they went quite far.
They threw the cat out by a field.
They drove away and felt relieved.


Hello. This is the first draft for a thing I might turn into a little illustrated book, primaraly for my Mum as a Christmas present, but ultimately I think it could make a nice little book for children, as it will have a moral at the end about how pets are a responsibility you take on, regardless of their "idiosyncrasies."
It needs a couple more verses. I was thinking, the cat finds its way home (because I have heard cats can do this) and the people feel really guilty and eventually they learn to get along because the people realise the cat just didn't like the particular kind of litter they were buying, or something like that. And they all live happily ever after.

The illustrations might look a bit like this...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaeldunnartist/2336644065/


Sorry I can't post the picture here, as other than the original, it only exists on Flickr, and they don't even let you steal images of your own work off their site. Fascists!

Also, sorry I haven't finished it tonight, but I feel I need to sleep on it before coming up with the ending.
Then I need to edit it a bit, probably. Rhyming things were never my strong point.

Old people and school children on buses

First of all, I'm not blaming them. It's not like they were petitioning and protesting about it, but I suspect that the bus company's decision to let them all on for free is the reason why the rest of us have to pay ludicrous fares.
I mention this because when I was coming home from work today, the bus driver, who was one of those smart arse types who obviously thinks driving a bus is a really big deal, said the fare to where I was going was more than the money I had given him. Unless the fares have gone up again since this morning, he was wrong. But I was contemplating this, and I noticed that it seems that about half the people who use the bus aren't paying for it. I also noticed that a good few of them are obviously using the bus to get to and from work (unless the shops are now giving out briefcases instead of carrier bags). And I wouldn't be surprised if most of them earn more money than I do. And another thing. It's not just the buses around the city they can get for free. They could conceivably, if they wanted to, sail back and forward on the train between Belfast and Dublin all day long for nothing.
And as if this isn't bad enough, there are these signs beside the front couple of rows of seats that ask you to give them up to old people!

Late

Posting really late today and can't really think of much to say. Not that I think many people are reading it, as there are not any comments. COMMENTS, folks, I want comments.
There are several possible options for today's post. Here they are...
Tramps.
Optional extras on cars.
Russian Suprematist art, with a particular focus on Kasimir Malevich.
Hot-dogs.
Well I could talk about tramps, I suppose. An interesting enough subject. Tramps are exclusively men, as far as I know. When you see one, you will immediately notice that they have nothing but the clothes they are standing up in. Women of this ilk, on the other hand, invariably have a lot of seemingly worthless things they have collected in a shopping trolley, or just in a number of bags. Hence the name, "Bag ladies".
Now, I have noticed that there is a clear distinction between genuine tramps, and those people you see on the street drinking unfashionable brands of lager and begging for change.
Tramps, proper tramps, rarely beg for money. And they don't seem to be inspired in their lifestyle by drinking.
There is something quite perplexing about them. It is as if they have just chosen to live that way out of choice. Like they have just decided that the way most people live, in a house, possibly with a job and a change of clothes every now and then, just isn't the way they want to go. If you ever meet a genuine tramp, you will find it is virtually impossible to engage them in any kind of conversation. Unlike street drinkers, real tramps have very little interest in other people. They just wander about a lot, and occassionally eat stuff out of bins. But they don't beg. They seem to be above that in some way.
I would need to do some research to go further with this, but I could probably do this quite easily, as my Mother often comments that I look like a tramp.
So. Optional extras on cars.
Like extra and unnecessary lights, alloy wheels, stainless steel exhaust pipes. Those sorts of things.
No real need for them in my opinion.
Moving right along then, to Russian Suprematist art, with a focus on Kasimir Malevich.
Malevich was a feisty sort of character. He actually started a physical fight with another artist at the opening of a show they were exhibiting in, just because they disagreed with each other about what sort of paintings looked nice. Considering that the First World War was going on at the time, you would think if they wanted to fight, they would have just joined the army.
Anyway, don't confuse Suprematism with supremacism. Supremacism is where you think you are better than someone because you have a pale complexion. Suprematism is where you think you are better than someone because you just draw monochrome rectangles and try to pass it off as art, instead of trying to actually draw something. I think the Suprematists had a particular problem with the Cubists at one point.
Hot-dogs!
The history of hot-dogs is a very interesting one.
You would consider the hot-dog to be a very American affair. But consider this. America is a nation of all-comer immigrants, and the "dog" varies a great deal across the States. In some places it is fried and served with onions and ketchup. I other areas it is boiled, and ketchup or onions would be considered sacrilege. In other places they grill it and serve with a kind of mustard that isn't really mustard at all.
There is a good book about hot-dogs (well it isn't exclusively about hot-dogs, but the guy in it sells hot-dogs).
It is called, "A Confederacy of Dunces."
I can't remember the author's name, but there is quite a sad story behind it.
He tried to get it published for years, unsucessfully. Then he committed suicide. His Mother subsequently approached a lot of publishers and eventually it got published, and it is now considered to be a pretty good book.
I enjoyed it anyway.

Memories of tea

Isn't it strange how our sense of smell, the most subtle and ethereal of our senses, can evoke the most vivid memories?
I just had such an experience a few minutes ago in Tesco's.
You'll never guess what I was buying. No, not beer! Soap and light bulbs. And cat food, obviously.
The soap bar had become so small that I felt slightly ridiculous trying to wash myself with it. I felt like Gulliver or something. And light bulbs. Well, you always forget to buy those.
I am sure you are positively gripped by the minutiae of my domestic life, so I will get to the point.
When I went to pay for my soap and light bulbs and cat food, the woman at the till must have been wearing a perfume that I haven't smelt since 1991.
I was living in Liverpool at the time. I was about to start an Art Foundation course there. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to move into my bed-sit a week before the course started. But it turned out not to be such a good idea, because there was basically nothing to do. I was living in a city where I didn't know anybody. As college hadn't started, I didn't have much opportunity to make friends. So I just familiarised myself with the neighbourhood, went to a few art galleries in the city, wandered around the shops and so on. But after a couple of days I got a bit bored, and I was feeling a bit lonely too.
Then someone knocked on my door one day. It was a girl and her boyfriend who lived across the hall. They invited me over to their room for a cup of tea.
They looked a bit hippy-ish, like the kind of people you would associate with the Glastonbury Festival. That might be why they approached me, because I looked a bit hippy-ish myself in those days.
So I went over, and while I noticed their room was a lot smaller than mine, it was really nice. They had Indian-style wall hangings and rag rugs on the floor, and she made a big pot of tea, with a tea-cosy and everything, while he put on a record (remember them?) by "Gong". They loved their tea! We drank about a gallon of the stuff and chatted away.
Now, at first I was a bit wary. I thought, "Sometime soon they are going to try to sell me some heroin."
But they didn't.
They were just nice people who invited their new neighbour over to drink endless cups of tea and listen to obscure records.
I thought, "Hooray! I have friends now (and an appreciation of strange Sixties underground music)."
So there you are. I just remembered that because that girl must have worn the same perfume as the woman on the till at Tesco's.
So, if some slightly lonely looking, slightly hippy-ish person moves in across the hall from you, invite them round for a big pot of tea.
They will probably appreciate it.

Offside

Okay. I said this would need a seperate post all of its own, so here it is.
I'm sorry to bang on about football so much, it's not like I'm even that into it. I suppose when men can't think of anything to talk about, it is the default setting they revert to.
I knew a guy when I was working at the Royal Mail who could talk about football non-stop for an entire shift. On the nights when I was working with him, by the end of it, I couldn't work out what I wanted to do more. Kill him, or just kill myself.
But anyway. The offside rule.
Now it seems to me that they have to go in one of two directions regarding this rule, because the way it is administered at the moment is unsatisfactory.
You can be offside as long as you aren't interfering with children.
No, that's not it. You can be offside as long as you aren't interfering with play.
Well, that seems like a pretty subjective thing. Like, hmm? is it art? Or is it just some idiot throwing a load of paint about the place?
Football needs rules, in a way that art doesn't. Art is all about people breaking boundaries and exploring new territory.
Football is a game.
So here are my proposals for the offside rule.

1. Scrap it altogether.
2. Arm linesmen with pistols and they can shoot dead anyone they deem to be offside.

It's a travesty of injustice!

I am no fan of Manchester United. But did you see that game today?
For most of it they basically cancelled each other out. I don't think there was even one serious shot at goal.
Then, a Manchester United player takes the ball off a Chelsea player (quite fairly, in my opinion) and the Chelsea player jumps up in the air like a ballerina, spins around a few times and lands on the ground like someone who just fell from 20 000 feet without a parachute.
The referee gives a free kick. From which Chelsea score. Now, let's get this out of the way first. A guy who was approximately seven miles offside stuck his foot out at the ball as it went in the net. Now, he didn't make contact with it, but does that mean he wasn't interfering with play?
Of course he was. If you saw the game, you can clearly see that he must have distracted the goalie, and that, in my opinion, is interfering with play (don't get me started on the offside rule, that would take a whole post on its own).
Besides, I hate Chelsea even more than Manchester United. They are a new money team. Chelsea belong in the bottom half of the league table. They always have. And now you get kids running around in Chelsea shirts saying that is the team they support.
So they support some billionaire Russian gangster? Fair enough.
But I particularly hate Didier (big girl's blouse) Drogba. So I was gratified to see that after someone's boot lightly impacted on his chest today and after five minutes of Oscar-winning hystrionics (rolling about on the ground, holding his face and crying like a baby) when he eventually got up, the ref presented him with a yellow card for his performance.
Surely that kind of blatant cheating warrants a red card.

On a lighter note

Fight!
It's Alanis Morrisette against Sheryl Crow.
Now let's just look at the statistics as the contestants are limbering up and getting into the ring.
Crow, there, she has the height and range advantage, but also crucially when her boyfriend dumps her she doesn't go off and write three insufferable albums of man-hating bile. She just goes and has a beer in a bar facing a big car-wash.
Morrissette. Well she has a pretty big chin, which will be an easy target for Crow, but she does seem to have a lot of feminist angst inside her, which she will no doubt be champing at the bit to unleash on the "overtly attractive to men and she knows it" Crow.
So here we go!
Round one. A cagey affair.  A lot of circling about, but not much happening.
Round two. Crow has Morrisette against the ropes and is beating her mercilessly with a bottle of Bud!
Round three. Morrisette finds out that Crow is now going out with her ex-boyfriend. She goes ballistic! Crow can only do her best to defend herself under the relentless whining and inability to just get over it that Morrisette rains down upon her.
The lyrics are just beyond belief!
Round four.  There's been a development! A guy who says his name is William ( but I'm sure it's Bill, or Billy, or Mac, or Buddy ) has jumped into the ring and panelled Morrisette!
She goes down like a sack of spuds.
And it's all over!
Morrisette is lying there bleeding, saying, "I told you all men are essentially disfunctional, violent people who have no ability to express their emotional turmoil in any other way than to resort to physical violence."
Crow is kissing William ( or Bill, or Billy, or Mac, or Buddy ) and they are off to a bar that faces a big car-wash, to celebrate.

Rememberance Day

Shame on Google, who this Rememberance Sunday choose to honour the Muppets in their logo, rather than those who gave their lives in war. Maybe they are waiting for the eleventh of November for that.
Anyway, today  for some reason this poem came into my head. I learned it at school and have never forgotten it. I think it is because it illustrates how we, who have never experienced war, can never understand it in the way that they, who have, can.
It is by Siegfried Sassoon.

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!’

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home’,
And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Chess (again)

I really am getting better! I kicked a couple of peoples' arses tonight on chess.com who were rated higher than me, without even trying that hard. And I had had a couple of beers in me too.
Check-mate!
So you can stick that in your your fire-place and try to light it!
Hooray!

Singing Soldiers

What next?
Now don't get me wrong.
I support the troops out there as much as any ex-vegetarian pacificist, wishy-washy liberal pinko lefty.
But the cynic in me has to say, " Singing soldiers?"
"What the hell is going on?"
It's a war. Not some bloody talentless-show.
I don't want to see, never mind buy a record by, three blokes dressed in camouflage trousers who can sing a bit, making dicks of themselves.
Maybe I'm just bitter, as I am currently the manager of a band called "Road-Side Bomb", and I am having trouble getting them gigs anywhere for some reason. But I just think that three slightly portly service-men, regardless of their good intentions, warbling on about whatever it is they are warbling on about, is a less than dignified way to honour our troops who have sacrificed their arms, legs, and increasingly, their lives, in what seems to me to me to be a very hostile and unpleasant environment.
I just think our service personnel deserve a  bit better than some reality TV show style band.
That's just what I think.

Adverts!

You can have adverts on this thing! And if enough people click on them you can earn money.
Now I doubt if enough people would read this and click on adverts to make me enough to become a man of leisure, but I wonder if I did sign up for it, what sort of adverts would they put on my site?
Apparently they match up the content of your site to the kind of advertisers who would be appropriate.
Interesting. Who would advertise with me? Larne Tourist Board, maybe?
I might try it just to see what, if anything, happens.
But not tonight. It's been a long day, I'm tired, and it's a school night. I'm going to go to bed.
Well, maybe a quick game of internet chess first, as it's still quite early.
I am getting better. You should have seen this check-mate I executed the other day. Bam! It just came out of nowhere. And against a guy who was rated a lot higher than me.
If any of my readers ( if I have any readers ) play chess, I am called mickydredd on the site http://www.chess.com/

Cat worry

I must confess to a terrible thing. Although it has turned out not to be so terrible in the end, so it doesn't really matter.
A few days ago my cat came home in the morning ( because she does go out. I think she is working on the night-shift somewhere, probably as a cat food taster, if how fat she is is anything to go by ) and I noticed she was limping quite badly. I thought, "Oh, no Lucy. Don't have a broken leg. Please don't have a broken leg!"
You see, I used to have another cat, Lolly. Strangely enough on that occassion it was me who came home in the morning, because I was working on the night-shift at the time. Anyway I don't know how it happened. She was only a little kitten at the time. But her leg was sticking out at an unnatural angle, and I'm not a vet, but I took one look at it and thought, "That leg is broken." So I carefully got her into the cat-carrier and took her to someone who was a vet. She told me the leg was broken and charged me £300 ( not just for telling me that, she fixed the broken leg too. ) On top of the vet fees, I had to buy a cage to keep her in ( the cat, not the vet! ), to stop her from moving about too much while she was recovering. I can't remember how much that cost, but I think it was quite expensive. I've still got it, actually, so if anybody wants a three foot by two foot by two foot cage, I've got one. Just in case you ever have a cat or a small dog with a broken leg, or you need somewhere to keep your gimp.
Anyway I was going to take Lucy to the vet, and then I thought, "Wait a minute. If it cost £300 to fix a little kitten's broken leg, how much will it cost for a big fat fully grown cat?"
So I didn't take her. Shame on me.
But luckily, it appears her leg wasn't broken after all. She just has a sore paw, and seems to be recovering nicely.
Just before you think this story has a happy ending, about a week after I had settled up all the bills with the vet for Lolly, I went to visit my sister in Edinburgh. I left the cats with my Mum and Dad while I was away.
Mum let them out into the garden and Lolly ran away never to be seen again.

Judge Dredd

Oh, goodness. Where to start? Now, I am not a comic geek or anything, but that film was just on TV.
I read that comic from issue one, in 1977. It was a major part of child culture in those days. And I continued to read it until I was well into my teens. Then I started reading it again in my twenties, using the excuse that I was only looking at it for the quality of the illustration, which I was studying at the time.
But, really. That film.
If I made a list of all the things that were wrong with it, I would be here all day.
But here are a few.

Sylvester Stallone is just about the worst casting choice they could have made (apart from Arnold Schwartzenneger). The only man alive worthy of playing Dredd is Clint.

He keeps taking his helmet off. Now, I don't want to be a comics purist here or anything, but a pretty intrinsic part of Judge Dredd's character is that he never takes his helmet off. He is the Law and the fact that you never get to see his eyes, I think, sort of symbolises the facelessness of the law, the cold, emotionless processes of the justice system.
So they screwed that up.

There are other technical things I could go into, like at one point a guy says he joined up to be a Judge when he was sixteen, when everyone knows that Judges are recruited at a much younger age than that.

See how geeky I am?
Anyone want to come round my house for a game of Warhammer this weekend? I speak fluent Klingon.

Happy Monday!

Can't think of much to post today, so here is some happy Japanese music for a Monday! (although as I am posting this quite late, most of you will probably have to make do with happy Japanese music for a Tuesday. But that's Okay. Because I sometimes find that Tuesday is the most depressing day of the week. You've already been to work yesterday, and yet there is still ages to go 'til the weekend.)
So. Enjoy!
( contains sound, obviously. )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=astKY3mmDVI
I quite fancy the bass player.
I quite fancy all of them, actually.

Funniest sketch

This is the funniest sketch ever, in my opinion. Which maybe gives you some insight into my writings and the way I try to think...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vV3QGagck
Some people might find this just stupid, but the first time I saw it, I literally fell on the floor laughing.
And there's got to be a place in this world for things that make you do that.

There is sound on it, so be warned...
In case you are at work and it will get you in trouble!

Oh no...

Not posted today, and now with the hour being late, I can't think of anything to say!
What to do? Just leave it 'til tomorrow, or try to come up with something off the cuff?
Just something off the cuff, I think.
Okay.
Okay.

Okay.
Even I get writer's block occassionally.
Okay. Here goes.
My brother Mark had to make a speech off the cuff recently, and he told a story about a party that "we" had when our parents were on holiday. Now, I was about sixteen at the time, and Mark was eighteen.
I would just like to say that it wasn't my party. It was all Mark's idea, and I was just implicated in it as his minion.
But now that I think about it, Mark's preparations for the party were short-sighted.
"We'll take all the paintings off the walls and store them somewhere safe." he said.
"Okay. That seems like a good idea.", I said.
"And we'll remove all vases and other breakable items from the party area, and push all the furniture against the walls."
"Okay. That seems like a good idea, too."
Now, I don't know if it was our youthful stupidity, or a natural trusting nature, but for some reason it never seemed to occur to either of us to think...Hmmm? Do you think maybe we should move away that small collection of fine wines that Dad has lovingly built up over the years, or do you think we should just leave them there in full view of everyone? We'll just leave them there in full view of everyone. I mean, what could possibly happen?
I have to say, when Dad got home from holiday, he took it pretty well.

Countdown

Sorry. I don't have much to do today, so I was watching Countdown (which is always a sign that your life isn't going in the right direction).
I haven't seen it in ages, but while the contestants still look like serial killers, the woman who puts the letters up is quite pretty.
I still sort of have the hots for Suzy Dent, though.

And I know

"You can take the boy out of Larne, but you can never take Larne out of the boy."
Before you even say it, Jules.
I AM NOT FROM LARNE!

I'm not from Larne

I'm not from Larne.
Just because I was born there doesn't mean that's where I'm from.
I'm not from Larne.
I am definitely not from Larne.

War

Today I will talk about war.
Or more particularly, war films. Because I have never actually been in a war, despite effectively living in the middle of one for most of my life. But I have never actually been in a war. No-one has ever shot at me or taken me prisoner and slapped me across the face with a pair of leather gloves, shone a bright light in my face, and said, "We have ways of making you talk."
No. None of that.
But can you think of any war film that doesn't ultimately glamorise war? One that doesn't appeal to young men and make them think, " I would like to go and do that."
Because as someone who will hopefully now never have to go and fight in a war, every time I watch a war film, it always sort of leaves me with the feeling that I have missed out on something. Some great life-changing experience, where you got to bond with your buddies and do something really heroic in the process.
Because that seems to me to be the essential central theme of most war films. Some of them try to show the horror of war, but they always focus on some sort of heroic action, which appeals to young men and makes them think, "I would like to do something like that."
Maybe someone should make a war film from the point of view of a child living in a town somewhere, and one day some soldiers come along and just blow his parents' heads off for no good reason. And then, instead of the child going on some mission to avenge the attrocity, he just spends the rest of his life feeling really bad about it, and not understanding why it happened.
Would that make a good film?

Oirish

Hard to know how to follow that last post...
But here goes, because this experience was pretty surreal too.
Oirish pubs abroad.They are generally quite bad. Although there was a trend a few years ago for making the bars that were actually in Ireland look more Oirish. What's the point? You're standing in Ireland right now. There's no need for nostalgia. I felt that they were really false, and you sort of felt like you were on a film set or something when you were in one.


The best one ever, though, was in Perth in Western Australia. A work colleague said I would like it.
"What's it called?" I asked him.
"Fenians"
"What's it called?!"
"Fenians."
I thought " I bet there aren't any pubs IN Ireland called that!"
So we went one Friday after work, because he said they did a good pint of Guinness, and to be fair to them, the Guinness wasn't bad.
But you should have seen the hack of the place. It was like Disneyland Ireland, and there was a band singing rebel songs, and a strange assortment of characters dressed in tweed suits and hats. This was in the summer time. It was easily thirty five degrees outside.
So anyway, I got a pint of Guinness, and then this guy comes up to me and says, "So where are you from?"
"I'm actually from Ireland.", I say.
"Aye. Wherabouts?"
I start to get worried at this point, because he says it in a rather threatening way.
"Em. I'm from Newtownabbey, just outside Belfast. Do you know it?"
He looks scornfully at me and says, " Aye. Rathcoole?" Before I can explain that I don't actually come from Rathcoole, be turns and walks away to the other side of the bar, where he glares menacingly at me.
I couldn't believe it. I was thinking, "I came half way round the world to get away from this sort of thing." Then I notice that he is talking to some of his tweed-clad friends, and they are looking at me too. So I got out of there as quickly as possible.
That's a completely true story. It was twenty one years ago, so I don't know what "Fenians" is like now, or even if it is still there. It might be. It was certainly doing a roaring trade the day I was in there. So if you are ever in Perth, go and have a look. But if anyone asks you where you're from, just pretend you're Australian. Or from the Falls.

Lions

This one is so strange I might delete it right after posting it.
But here goes.
We all love Jackie Fullerton, the iconic commentator on BBC Northern Ireland. But I wonder if he has ever used the phrase, " testicles the size of lions"? In the context of, " Oh, can you believe it? He must have testicles the size of lions to have scored from there!"
Now, considering that he ever said it, which he probably didn't, although if you try doing an impression of him and saying it, it does sound like something he MIGHT say. Does he mean each individual testicle is the size of a lion? Or does he mean the testicles are the same size as a lion's? Or is it just a metaphor that suggests the strength and aggressive attacking ability of a lion?
Who knows? But male lions don't really do much attacking. They leave that up to the wives. So testicles don't really come into it.
But never mind that. A far better thing would be lions the size of testicles. Can you imagine? Tiny little testicle-sized lions. They would make great pets. You could just feed them mice or something. Simply construct a miniature reproduction of the Serengeti on your living room floor, paint some stripes on the mice so that they look like zebra, and let the games begin!
It would be great entertainment. You could invite your neighbours round, offer them nibbles and so on. It would be great!

Just some pictures

I thought I might as well show some of my pictures on this web log. So here I go.

So there you go. I still have the first one if anyone wants to buy it, and I have quite a lot of others. Most of the ones I don't still have the originals of are available as prints.

Cars and films

What are films if they don't have cars in them?
Without meaning to sound like the rectangular-faced car-bore from Top Gear, they are just not very good.
Here are some top films and the cars that were in them.
Bullit: Ford Mustang... and for a bonus point, the car he was chasing was a Dodge Charger
For Your Eyes Only: Yellow Citroen 2CV
Back to the Future: A De Lorean
Pulp Fiction: A Honda Civic
Pulp Fiction Again: A Ford Malibu. Which some movie fans suggest was "keyed" by the character Butch, in revenge for the character Vincent insulting him in an early part of the movie. But that theory is pure conjecture, and, frankly, I think, comes from the minds of people who analyse the film far too deeply.
The Spy Who Loved Me: A Lotus Esprit that can go under-water.
Herbie: A Volkeswagen Beetle, which was partly designed by Hitler, although I don't think he played any part in the design process that gave the car an ability to talk and have an almost human consciousness.
Knight Rider: Technically a TV programme rather than a movie. But the car is a Pontiac Trans-Am, albeit a slightly modified one that talks with an effeminite voice.