Categories
Humour

My Twitter Hobby – #ExtendedProverbs

A mother plays the guitar while her two daught...
Children should be seen and not herded onto trucks

A house divided against itself cannot stand Christmas.

Brevity is the soul of wit generally speaking.

If music be the food of love, play on this pork piccolo.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive on time.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved a tall Swedish woman.

A cat may look at a king cobra, albeit briefly.

It’s no use locking the stable door after the horse has bolted it.

Too many cooks spoil the broth; ideally, broth should contain no cooks at all.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away but attracts fruitbats.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks except ‘play dead’.

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration, three percent error.

It takes a thief to catch a thief disease.

Life begins at forty, according to new sentencing guidelines.

Flattery will get you nowhere, sexyboots.

It is better to give than to receive anal.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys to do your bidding. Cool.

Actions speak louder than words, especially if that action is ‘yelling’.

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, which is half the fun of fugu fish.

Spare the rod and spoil the child, if the child requires major spine surgery.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, but the unjust have your umbrella.

Children should be seen and not herded onto trucks.

There are none so blind as those that will not see, nor deaf as will not hear, nor anosmic as will not smell.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is no defence in a sexual harassment case.

A drowning man will clutch at a straw, but throw him a lifebelt you bastards it’s not funny.

All’s fair in love and war and Grand Theft Auto.

Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, it gets jealous.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure, so ask strange men to help you bury your junk.

The boy is father to the man in parts of West Virginia.

 

Categories
Humour Technology

The Guardian Monster

London Underground roundel logo
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Oh the Guardian, that normally well-regarded major UK newspaper, has had a ****ing brilliant idea. You see, if you read a story in the online version of the paper, you can share it on Facebook using their app.

Actually if you are logged into Facebook – even in another browser window you’ve forgotten is still open – it automatically posts the article you’re reading. It does say when you install it that the app will share what you read, but I don’t think the casual user will immediately realise this means “without even asking”. I certainly bloody didn’t.

So at long last, the Guardian has managed to fully automate the process of having someone reading over your shoulder. In this way online readers all over the world can partake of the authentic crowded London tube experience.

But that’s not even the worst part. The link it posts doesn’t actually go to the article, it – yes – offers to install the app. So you accept because you want to read the story. All your friends will then see what you’ve read and install the app so they can read it, which will tell all their friends what they’ve read… This thing is going to spread exactly like a virus.

Indeed the figures seem to be bearing that out. Two weeks ago, after being out only a month, they had their millionth install. At that rate we have about one week left to enjoy Facebook before it collapses under the sheer weight of Guardian links.

Categories
Humour Politics

Psychodrachma

Photo of a young Hoagy Carmichael, published b...
My name is Bond. Collapsing Bond

I woke up this morning with just one thought in my head: As James Bond does most of his work outside his home country, he should apply for an International Licence to Kill.

The subconscious mind is weird, yet annoyingly trivial.

Anyway, the G20. Thought this is basically just another of those international showcase conferences where everyone makes the right noises and little of real substance is done, it did act as a deadline for the EU leaders to have their house looking pretty. Like a station mass, if you will. So they – Sarkozy in particular, as host – were not well pleased when Greece crapped on the doorstep. Batting the EU leaders’ kind offer back with a referendum threat has sent the markets into turmoil once more, just when Sarkozy and Merkel wanted to impress the world with their authoritative grip on the situation. It makes them look helpless and incompetent, so naturally they are enraged. It is now all right therefore to talk openly about dumping Greece unceremoniously out of the euro.

Greece will probably not hold the referendum – there is severe doubt that Papandreou could win the parliamentary vote necessary to hold one anyway – but I am making plans in case the opposite manifests, and it returns to its own currency. It’s a nice place to live. It has weather and wine, as well as all the olives and history you can eat. And when its currency is free to float again it will float ever downwards, as their relaxed taxation chases after their optimistic expenditure. So if I move there, but live on what I’m making here, I’m going to be relatively wealthy – increasingly so indeed. I’ll hardly need to work at all.

So that’s my retirement sorted. Unless Ireland leaves the euro too, in which case I’m buggered.

Categories
Humour Politics

Three Billion Between The Couch Cushions

Nuclear weapon test Mike (yield 10.4 Mt) on En...
You can't tell me that's not pretty

What’s three billion here or there?

Well… On the whole I think it’s better over here. If no one minds. Can I help you search for any more loose change? Whatever help you need, just ask. I’m not an accountant, but I could hardly be less competent than the shower you seem to have now.

Maybe it’s time to look more closely at the Department of Finance. While Ministers and Taoisigh must bear primary responsibility, the Department was the enabler of their problem. Could they be, you know, not actually very good? If they can just stumble across three billion here, how can we be sure that another few haven’t fallen through the cracks over the years?

Or maybe we could just forget about that for now and emphasise the upside. It’s three billion we didn’t know we had, the repayments we’re making on our children are already scheduled, so the obvious thing to do is get some real value out of it – with a big treat to cheer us all up.

As it should happen, today is the anniversary of the first hydrogen bomb – “For those times when ordinary nuclear weapons just aren’t enough”. Fifty-nine years they’ve been around, isn’t it high time we had one? And maybe a nice missile to show it in.

Then we’ll see how the bailout renegotiations go.

Categories
Cosmography Humour

Tim Minchin Live In Galway

Darkside (Tim Minchin album)
Yipee

You know this wouldn’t be a bad lecture orĀ TED talk, on the necessity of critical thinking. Dammit, it would make a pretty timely address to the United Nations too. Imagine that – a guy with a piano on the floor of the General Assembly.

But it’s none of these. It’s a comedy show – and a brilliant one.

Tim MinchinĀ is a stand-up. It’s just that most of his routines rhyme and scan andĀ are set to great music. It’s almost excessive in its wonderfulness, yet unlike other ostensibly clever comedians we could name Ricky Gervais, it’s not about him being clever. It’s about reality, honesty, and where we fail at them.

But it is clever. What did we do before we had comedy this smart? We were laughing at mud and funny-shaped pebbles. More than clever though, it is wise. Insightful, humanistic, brave stuff that takes a stand against a world full of willful ignorance. Is there an audience for that? Well 400 people in a venue in Ireland just gleefully applauded a song with the chorus “F*** the m*********ing Pope”.

And that’s two nights in a row, downstairs in the Radisson as part of the Bulmers Pear Galway Comedy Festival. Which took me aback. I thought I was into something a little bit obscure here, yet even way out west, in a country where Minchin has, to my knowledge,Ā never even been on terrestrial TV, an enthusiastic capacity crowd gave him a standing ovation.

There’s hope for our species yet.

Categories
Cosmography Humour

Diary Of A Frightened Man 5 – The Zone

Picture the scene. I’m doing a practice run with my driving instructor. I am a cat-bag of nerves, slopping adrenaline, making error after error. The lessons of the preceding ten months, the intense practice I’d done in the last weeks and days, are coming to nothing. I was forgetting to signal, forgetting my mirrors when stopping and turning, riding the clutch, coasting… The inattentive habits I’d worked like hell to eradicate were all back, all at once.

Nerves were making everything seem to happen too fast to control. Who can possibly look in a mirror, make the correct signal, look in another mirror, depress a clutch pedal, let up an accelerator, select the right gear, apply a little brake, let up the clutch pedal gently but not too slowly, steer, look in every possible direction for hazards, and pay attention to where you’re going all in the correct order and in such quick succession that you’re actually doing several of them at once? Ridiculous. It can’t be done. And that’s just one corner.

Then the heavens open. And not in the good way where divine providence looks down and beams me out of there. That I could’ve used. As in torrential rain. Torrential by Irish standards remember; a country where we say it’s fine if it’s only raining a bit. Some of you live places where weather like this would constitute a national emergency. Visibility was suddenly non-existent, the heater struggled to keep the windows demisted but succeeded only in making the car unbearable, conditions became hazardous and continued into ludicrous. I am dispirited. It’s not enough that I’m driving like a brain-damaged chicken, I now have to ford a flooded road to even reach the test centre.

I think to myself, I did not pick a good day to book a driving test.

So what happened next was quite weird. But it is what often happens in these situations. You could call it correct fear. Suddenly the adrenal glands stop being an impediment and start doing their job of maintaining my balance on the tightrope of concentration. All the hours of practice come back to me now. Instead of everything happening at once, there seems to be time to do it all. It’s… almost boring. Intense yet slow, like a black and white film. I’m no longer desperately worried about my driving test, because I’m doing my driving test. I’m in The Zone – one of those rare times when you live completely in the present.And in the present, there’s time for everything.

It was not perfect however. I made one mistake so bad that as soon as we were through the tester started giving me a hard time about it. My heart sank. And then it began to dawn on me that if I’d failed, he wouldn’t be bothering to give me a hard time about one mistake.

I am a driver now.

Categories
Humour

Diary Of A Frightened Man 4

Drove Road.
I think I'm lost

Sorry no blog post today. Instead I drove. And drove and drove and drove and drove and drove. Tomorrow is the test. I am just in bed now, entering into a state of profound preparatory relaxation. Ha.

But I am… almost confident. I feel I’m a far safer driver than last time. I’m a lot clearer about what you’re supposed to do with a car. But there’s still the worry that in one moment of inattention I could make a simple error and blow the whole thing.

One such error of course would be to sleep late and fail to turn up. So… Wish me luck.

Categories
Humour

Diary Of A Frightened Man 3

I passed! I passed my driving test! Well OK, it was just another practice run, but I practise-passed! After two abysmal practice-fails, that’s the best news I’ve had all week. I can’t describe how I feel.

Well actually I can. Tired. I feel very… tired.

I guess it’s relief. Fear of failure has been driving me for the last few days. Now it’s been alleviated a little, I’m as limp as a grounded weather balloon. Some coffee needed here I think. Also breakfast.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

I took a long walk around the town of Tuam, shaking the nuts and bolts out of my skeletomuscular system. Had a coffee and a water and a croissant with bacon and cream cheese, and finally felt… still wrecked. But taut, springy. Like after a good workout. Then more driving practice for another two or three hours. Good, but not quite attaining the relentlessness of the day before.

The danger now is that, even on this exceedingly flimsy evidence, I’ll become overconfident again. My skills are still… marginal, to put it nicely. Passing the test is going to be hard. The more I do this, the more it becomes clear that driving well is a juggling act, an exhausting task that requires absolute full-on concentration for a protracted period. And though in time juggling can become second nature, that time is not generally “By next Monday”.

And I’ve got to produce that concentration while trying to make it look like it’s already easy. The proverbial swan – serene on the surface, kicking like a bastard below. So the next few days are going to be… like this I suppose. Exhausting. I want to be able to drive right, I am determined, I believe I can do it. But I wonder if determination and belief can really galvanise me in the same way that staring failure in the face did.

There is something to be said for fear.

Categories
Humour Politics

The Truth About The Truth About Dana

Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, New...
Didn't really feel like putting up a picture of Dana. Here are some pretty rocks instead

Dana Rosemary Scallon, religious recording artist, Irish Presidential candidate and, er, American citizen, showed signs of distress in Wednesday’s TV debate and has said that “a vile and false allegation” about her family is “about to surface”.

W, as they say, TF?

Maybe it’s a fantastically complicated ruse to make herself look like a victim. It seems like the only chance she has now. A victim of what? Government, perhaps. The forces of secularism. But I’m guessing the media. She seems like the sort of person to blame the media for things. Which is fair enough I guess. It was the media after all that told everyone she has taken a vow of allegiance to the United States of America, something she seemed perfectly content not to tell us before becoming our President.

And as – in my own little way – the media, I’d like to point out to the US authorities that by running for the Presidency of another country, she is presumably breaking that oath. Last public figure to do that got assassinated with a drone, I mention in passing.

Speculation is rife of course. But I’m puzzled not so much about what the dark secret is, as by how there can be a false allegation known only to her and the… alleger? alligator? I mean, someone surely can’t be sending her anonymous mail to say “Do what I tell you, or I’m going to make up some shit about your mother.” A false allegation would be hurtful, yes, but a secret false allegation just doesn’t make any sense. Furthermore, it makes no sense to tell us about the existence of it.

The only conclusion I can draw is that, whatever it is, it’s probably true.

Categories
Humour

Diary Of A Frightened Man 2

Stop Sign
Don't you just hate all this needless ambiguity?

More frightened than ever now, because I just took a mock driving test. Not great. If it had been a real test, I would have failed. Three or four times.

On the bright side, it was the same thing each time – so really that’s only one error! A minor visual acuity problem, called “Stop-sign blindness”. I just need to remember that when STOP is written in big nasty official-looking letters on a bright red metal octagon fixed up a pole, it is not a suggestion. You be stopped. You put on the handbrake. You write “Me stopped now” in the fog inside your windscreen. OK, maybe that is unnecessary. But the main thing is, you’re definitely stopped.

And then you go again, often immediately.

My other problem is the brakes. I’m scared of brakes – scared I’ll stall if I brake while travelling. Which is unrealistic, but nevertheless I am. So first I tend to rely too heavily on engine braking, moving down a gear when it’s really not necessary, and when I do use the brakes I instinctively depress the clutch as well to prevent stalling, thereby blowing the engine braking. Or I simultaneously change down and then keep the clutch depressed but forget to brake, so instead of smoothly decelerating to a halt I just keep rolling forwards. So then I hit the brakes, let the clutch up, and then stall. Or I just get confused.

Sounds like I’m in a bad way? Not at all. Yesterday I did those things too, but I didn’t know I did them. So I’m making progress. Real progress.

Help.