Category: Humour

Funny. Or meant to be funny. Or about funny.

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Humour

Rain, Poetry, Good Times

Rainbow at Flat Lake
OK So The Sun Shone Once. But Just This Once

We’ve passed through the village of Drung and are now approaching Tang. For directions someone could have told us to follow the sound of falling cutlery. On our way back from the Flat Lake Festival, where people from all around the country bring their smoothest lakes for comparison. Though I told someone I was going to the Sloped Lake Festival. Where are they having that she asked. Up a hill.

OK, it’s a literary and music fest. A strange-sounding combination, but it works because it’s in a very big field. Headliners included novelists John Banville and Pat McCabe and journalist Robert Fisk, and on the music side Fred and Jinx Lennon. Except there weren’t any headliners because it was all equal billing; those are just some you might recognise. There were pals there too, including physical theatre duo The Gombeens, Niceol Blue whose band I mentioned last month, and her partner Órla the improvisational actress.

Sadly, due to circumstances beyond our control, we could only stay for one afternoon. Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, it rained steadily and absolutely throughout. Everyone we met – and the place turned out to be full of people we knew – seemed eager to tell us that the day before had been so hot they could barely move. Just what you want to hear when your hat has soaked through and you’re up to your ankles in slippery muck. Nevertheless we had a great time. If the atmosphere was so good in the rain, in the sun it must have been very nearly frightening. Definitely one to earmark for next year.

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Humour

The Back of Beyond, And Beyond

County Monaghan
Monaghan - Even Some People From There Have Never Heard Of It

I was rushing for this bus so there wasn’t time to look twice but I could swear that as I passed a shop I caught a glance of tanks full of fish on the floor, and people sitting on benches with their bare feet in the tanks. Funny, I thought. I never took all that much acid.

Bu that’s a thing now, isn’t it? Supposedly the tiny mouths of very small fish are meant to clean you better than scrubbing or using a soap. Better in what way exactly, I am unclear. More erotically I would think. But perhaps that’s just me.

There’s the Shannon. Just leaving Connacht now and entering Leinster, next stop Dublin. By tonight though we’ll be in Ulster – in the tiny and pretty much unknown town of Ballybay, County Monaghan. By this circuitous route we plan to reach a little literary and music festival tomorrow. But God knows.

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Humour

Without Comment

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Humour Politics

Obama In Ireland

G-A-A! G-A-A!

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Humour Politics

Delicious


Government Wants Historic Building

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Humour

Coke Ads, Life

The Two Infallible Powers - The Pope Bovril
God I love this mad old advert

Imagine that. The 125th anniversary of Coca Cola. We tend to think of that brand as symbolic of the modern world. It’s strange to remember that it’s a weird holdout from the Victorian era, like Bovril or Beecham‘s Powders. Perhaps this means it actually is an excellent product. We’ll never really know – how can you possibly separate the actual drink from its image and its history?

Hmm. Maybe there is a way. Apparently Osama bin Laden and his cohorts were fond of the stuff. If someone so vehemently opposed to everything the product is associated with still enjoys it, then surely the only explanation is that it is an objectively good beverage.

Well OK, it might also mean that Bin Laden was deeply conflicted and/or hypocritical. But still, you can’t help feeling that Coca Cola missed an opportunity for the most amazing celebrity endorsement ever.

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Humour

Filler Text

Wow. I haven’t been this exhausted since I climbed Croagh Patrick. Yes that was only two weeks ago, but if it wasn’t for that I’d’ve been able to say “I haven’t been this exhausted for years”. Damn that mountain.

One brief break to eat aside, I repaired computers for more than 24 hours straight. I think in the end I got nine previously defunct machines up and whirring. Is that some sort of record?

The one drawback is, I may die.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

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Humour Politics

Keep The Profit, Share The Blame

We All PartiedSo the Nyberg report into our banking industry says that borrowers as well as lenders were to blame for the crisis. Fair enough I suppose. After all, it’s not like the banks lent money to people who didn’t ask for it.

Oh wait. They did.

A tramp living in a sherry bottle could borrow money in that market. Hell, they offered a ‘pre-approved’ loan to me. While many borrowed foolishly or even greedily, the greater part of the blame must surely fall on the professionals. Your bank was traditionally expected to advise you on your financial interests. It was not supposed to push debt on you, take your indebtedness and repackage it as an asset, use that to raise money, declare this a profit and pay themselves enormous bonuses. A basic trust was broken there. Not to mention a law of thermodynamics.

A proportion too has to belong to the institutions overseeing the industry – the regulators of course, but ultimately the Department of Finance. They were astonishingly lax while all this was going on, and we still aren’t being told why. (The role of government was beyond Nyberg’s remit, strangely.)

Do we really need to ask though, when politicians party with and parties are funded by people who were making enormous profits  from all this? The nod and the wink is the Morse code of Irish governance, messages flew back and forth across the wealth-to-power hotline. You’ll go a bit easy there on the regulation. Wouldn’t want to kill the golden goose, or look a gift horse in the mouth, or whatever stupid aphorism they used.

When you get a gift horse as mysteriously generous as this you shouldn’t look it in the mouth, no. You should shove a telescope right up its bum. Nobody rocked the boat because the boat was full of money.

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Humour

God, The Sun!

Toasted Heretic Point Out The Profound Lack of Iberian Influence

At a Spanish café near the Spanish Arch, eating… scrambled eggs. I could have had an omelette but things were already getting out of hand. A tourist had come up to me and asked directions to Galway’s ‘Iberian style’ cathedral. He did mean the modern 60s one, I checked. His guidebook must be Europe On Drugs, I’m not seeing aything remotely Iberian about it. Frankly I don’t think it’s in any consistent taste whatever, except Questionable Irish-American. No seriously, the thing has what to every appearance is a shrine to John F. Kennedy.

Today though is for worshipping that most primal of gods, the sun. The best kept secret about the Irish climate is that it is frequently much better in April than it is in August. At this time of year it either rains or it’s hot. Of course, it can rain a lot… Last Monday we had cloudbursts – of hail, even. Including one right in the middle of my mother’s driving test, which didn’t help.

But this is infinitely preferable in my book to the overcast that can last throughout the ‘summer’ proper. It’s to be expected I suppose in a country that sits in a bowl of Atlantic. The summer sun on that water drives off so much vapour that it blocks the heat and light from us. So infuriating to be cold in mid-July, knowing that just beyond the great grey shell there’s a solar furnace at maximum. Nature can be a curse.

I call it a secret, but someone seems to have been blabbing. It’s thick with tourists around here already. Cúirt is on of course, but you don’t expect literary festivals to bring the horde down on you. Maybe there are more domestic holidaymakers than usual, what with The Economy.

Certainly seemed to be a lot of people out clubbing last night. Even though I picked the quietest route back from Salthill I still had to walk around two broken Bucky bottles. Buckfast tonic wine – the party drink made by monks. Maybe people drink it for the irony. Or possibly the sulphury. Must be something like that anyway; it tastes bloody awful.

Irony, and caffeine. The Bucky in a brown bottle, which for some reason is unique to Ireland, actually contains more caffeine by volume than Red Bull. And remember people dilute Red Bull, by adding vodka to it. So that’s why you see broken bottles everywhere. It’s not the 15% alcohol content that makes people clumsy. It’s the caffeine shakes.

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Cosmography Humour Politics

Good Pope Bad Pope

It’s shaping up to be a bad week all round for major religions, with the US letting its diplomatic mission be used to serve court papers on the Pope. These allege that he was involved in a conspiracy of silence over child abuse, which I think we might fairly say is about as self-evident as his Catholicism. He’ll never stand trial for it of course, but as empty gestures go it’s an impressive one.

It’s been better I suppose for the world’s second most famous head of a religion, the Dalai Lama. (Some describe Buddhism as a philosophy rather than a religion, but anything that claims you can survive death fits my definition.) Then again, is the Dalai Lama really a Buddhist leader? During his visit to Ireland we’ve had everyone from nuns to people who describe themselves as non-religious out to greet him. He is perhaps the figurehead of that fastest-growing denomination in modern society, the Not Into Organised Religion But A Spiritual Sort Of Person; people who want to believe that there is meaning to life, but are reluctant to speculate about what exactly it might be.

Of course, there is nothing vague about Buddhism. Like any religion it presents a blueprint for what it considers to be a well-ordered society. It is a set of rules, and indeed one with great emphasis on discipline. But the 14th DL is himself a likeable, diplomatic type with a reluctance to give offence, so he comes across as preaching little more than niceness. He’s become the Pope of Vague.

He does seem to be a nice person, it is true. And as nice people go, probably the one most likely to spark war between India and China.