Category: Humour

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

Categories
Humour Politics Technology

No Banks, Thanks

What are banks for now, anyway? A while ago you would have said they were in the business of lending money, but now they’re so in debt themselves they can’t afford to.¹ When we were innocent we were told that they were for keeping our money safe, but there was a woman on the radio this morning whose bank – ‘Permanent’ TSB – allowed someone to set up a direct debit that withdrew the maximum amount from her account each day until it was emptied. Yet they had the audacity to tell her that policing the account was not their responsibility. In other words it is up to us to protect our savings. Apparently, now from the banks themselves.

I don’t want to have an account with any of these bastards, but I am forced to – and they are forced to make money from me. Money they can then blow on unfinished luxury gated communities in Romania. They are clearly useless overfed pigs of organisations, and rationalizing them into a duopoly is hardly going to improve the situation.

You know what is going to replace banks in this country? Not NAMA, not state-run ones, not foreign banks either. Phone companies. O2 now offer a service which is essentially a debit card you can use internationally; something the banks, with their rather half-arsed Laser system, failed to provide. I can go into one of O2’s shops – probably more numerous than banks these days – and put cash onto that card instantly. (You can transfer from a bank account too, but you don’t have to.)

Meanwhile, there are other systems that allow purchases made over your phone to be added to your phone bill, and are therefore new alternatives to credit cards. As phones are becoming all-purpose electronic devices, it is pretty obvious that they are going to be our wallets. And the lovely thing about this is that our fat, useless, greedy banks will be entirely bypassed.

 

  1. The government is actually talking about turning NAMA into a lender, on the (perhaps flawed…) logic that if it does one thing our commercial banks have disastrously failed to do – manage assets – it can do the others as well.
Categories
Humour Politics

I Finally Come To My Census

Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (right) and Padawan O...
Twats

Still trying to fill in that damn form. My problem is that a cousin and her boyfriend were visiting, and I’m not sure if they left before or after midnight. Maybe I should compromise by putting them down as one person of indeterminate gender who is related to me by both blood and marriage, but that might give a whole wrong impression about our village.

It strikes me that as a lot of these forms will have been filled en famille, many people will have come out to their parents last night as non-Catholics. I hope that went well. Incidentally, the form is actually a handy tool to help you decide whether you’re an atheist or an agnostic¹. If you happily ticked “no religion”, you’re an atheist. If you left the question unanswered, you’re an agnostic.

If you wrote “Jedi”, you’re a twat.

Another one I hope people take care over is the Internet access question. Please, don’t put down “broadband” if the only connection you can avail of is 3G mobile. Though I love the portability of it, such an unreliable connection is in no way broadband. Could you imagine running a Web server over that? Preposterous. Don’t help the government pretend that net access in this country is anything like adequate.

 

  1. Actually I think it is logically possible to be both an agnostic and an atheist, but maybe we’ll get into that some other time.

 

Categories
Humour

Traffic Circles For The Kill

water
Image by flikr via Flickr

When your mother is on the phone discussing her sister’s medical condition, “jelly-like” is not a phrase you want to overhear.

But anyway, today was my first official driving lesson. I did well – for my first lesson. Unfortunately in my head I was ready to pass. Dammit there is so much crap you have to learn to do – and you have to do your learning while travelling at speed. I lurched in the space of an hour from being fairly confident behind a wheel to feeling like a monkey astronaut. I mean it’s crazy; you’re sailing along while turning a wheel in a circular motion, moving your feet up and down, and looking into mirrors. I’m dizzy just thinking about it.

Oh, that turned out to be what was wrong with my mother’s sister – dizzy spells. It was her legs that felt like jelly. Cool; I have an actual giddy aunt.

Categories
Humour Politics

Banks Fail Stress Test, Told To Take ‘Me Time’

Brendan and his monks' ship is carried by a gi...
The blog software automatically suggests illustrations, and sometimes I just go with the most inexplicable thing it comes up with. I mean, a boat on a fish. What the hell does that have to do with bank stress testing?

So the reason they won’t burn the foreign banks that over-served the Irish industry is the hope that they’ll lend us more in the future. Isn’t that a lot like alcoholics always making sure to pay the bar tab, even as the children go hungry? Credit is what we got too much of.

But to cheer us up, we are to get two ‘universal pillar’ banks. I do like that; we should have more financial institutions that sound like they’re out of pre-Christian mythology. A Department of the Great Sky Serpent, maybe a Unicorn Interest Rate. In fact it sounds a lot better than the names we have for them now, BoI and ABBoI. The new banks should actually be called Universal Pillar 1 and Universal Pillar 2. No wait, Alpha and Omega. “I save with Universal Pillar Omega.” Surely that will restore confidence in the Irish banking sector.

But I don’t really get the idea behind stress-testing the banks. They are already dysfunctional, loss-making, unable to keep their doors open without State and ECB constantly pumping in raw cash. In what way exactly could that get worse?

Categories
Humour

Stunned By Technology

Actress Audrey Munson (center) in role as arti...
Oh Hell I'm tired, let's just have some porn

Oh God. Been playing with this thing¹ all day long, and most of the night. Got less than four hours’ sleep. Excuse me please if I’m writing little and making sense even less.

Did you see there’s going to be a new Agatha Christie film? What makes this one different is that the woman playing Jane Marple is in her thirties rather than her sixties. Perhaps we’re going to be treated to the first Miss Marple nude scene.

There’s a phrase I never thought I’d be saying.

Ha! Poor cat. That must’ve been a shock. Since the weather got warm, I’ve been opening the window in the attic room where I sleep. She’s taken to coming up here and using it as her cat flap. She hops onto the bed first, then leaps through.

It was cold tonight.

From now on, I will always recognise the sound of a cat attempting to jump through a closed window.

 

  1. The new phone.
Categories
Humour Politics

Michael Lowry Is A Corrupt Politician

Esat Digifone logo
"Jesus But Didn't We Make Some Money"

There, it felt good to say that. Of course he is far from alone, it almost seems unfair to single him out, but because of our wealth-favouring libel laws it’s not often you can actually come out and name one of the bastards.

Today I can, because a judicial body, the Moriarty Tribunal, says it is beyond doubt that Michael Lowry, when Fine Gael minister for transport, energy and communications, gave “substantive information to Denis O’Brien, of significant value and assistance to him in securing the licence”.

The licence they speak of was for the country’s second GSM mobile phone network in 1996, the biggest contract ever awarded by the State to a private company. Denis O’Brien’s Esat consortium won, even though by proper procedures their bid would have come third. In a transaction which the Tribunal concludes was not unrelated, Minister Lowry was given a huge wad of cash. And when that licence was later sold to British multinational BT, Denis O’Brien made more money than you will ever even be shown a picture of.

Lowry CartoonInterestingly, while the Tribunal’s report calls this “a cynical and venal abuse of office”, it doesn’t actually call the act corrupt. I refuse to be so mealy-mouthed. If he cynically and venally abused office, if he received money in consideration for bending the rules to favour the giver, then Michael Lowry is as crooked as a snake with stomach cramps.

Moriarty does use the word corrupt with reference to an unrelated deal between Lowry and another tycoon, Ben Dunne (most famous for giving an unexplained million or two to former Taoiseach C. J. Haughey). Dunne reacted with outrage, saying that if they wanted to call him corrupt then they should put him in jail.

Denis O’Brien likes to emphasise how much money the State has wasted on trying to catch him. The Irish Times puts the final costs of the Moriarty Tribunal at over €100,000,000, though O’Brien has set up his own site to lie about and exaggerate the figure. It’s even got a picture of the gates of Dublin Castle on it, so it gives the impression of being official. That’s how crap the man is.

He is right though. As is Ben Dunne. The money spent on the Tribunal has been wasted. It will remain wasted until he and his fellow corrupt and corrupting businessmen are safely behind bars, along with the politicians they paid for.

Categories
Cosmography Humour

Paddywackery – or, How Comics Changed My Life

The local shop I mentioned is a goldmine. Today I found that they sell a thing called paddywack. As a dog food. What the…?

It turns out the original meaning of “paddywack” is the large ligament that runs down the back of a grazing animal’s neck. The word is from the Old English paxwax, meaning something like “hair grow”. Because longer hair grows along the neck ridge of some animals, perhaps? By being highly elastic, this ligament makes it easier for the beast to raise its head. When dried, it makes a chewy treat for dogs.

So a whole other meaning for a word I thought of merely as a mild ethnic slur – that at least was my impression since childhood, when a strip of the same name in the British Comic Cheeky Weekly used to encourage readers to send in their Irish jokes. The whole comic indeed was packed with race and gender stereotype gags – and what’s worse, pointlessly awful puns. Such were the 1970s; vertiginous now to see that stuff again.

I didn’t find most of this funny even as a child. And yet, I liked the comic. It had a vivacity you didn’t see before, it messed with conventions and introduced elements of metafiction. Each issue had a single framing story, with characters commenting on the other strips, even moving in and out of them. And I guess it helped that it featured a sexy crossing guard called Lily Pop; I was getting to that sort of age. If Barry Cryer had written a kids’ comic – albeit on a bad day – it might have come out something like this.

Now that I look this stuff up I’m reminded that Cheeky Weekly had an even weirder progenitor, Krazy comic. I don’t think most of the strips in Krazy worked really. As the name suggests it was self-consciously way-out and wacky, and kids are quite sensitive to straining for effect. What compensated were the interstitial gags packed into it – comments between panels or as background graffiti, flick-book animations in corners. It was aiming I think to be something like a junior Mad magazine.

And I think this in turn may have been partly inspired by the comic that influenced me the most – Sparky. It was not an outstanding example perhaps, but it had one thing that really got me: the flat-out metafiction of a strip about the people who supposedly created the comic. They were in it… But making it… In it… The contradictions beguiled my mind. My own first comic strip, started I think while I was still 11, was pretty much a straight rip-off of this idea, and it must be at least partly responsible for a lifelong fascination with philosophical concepts like self-referentiality, recursion and nested realities. My mature (?) comic strip work rarely resisted opportunities to tell stories within stories – or indeed, stories within each other. My first long strip, which was also my degree dissertation, took place within a reality that only existed in the mind of God – but within which, God existed.

Come on, I was in college.

Well that turned into an unexpected ramble; from doggy treats to comic theology. It seems though that in the process I’ve accidentally written a response to this lovely blog post by Lisa “SwearyLady” McInerney. Yeah, comics were an important early influence in my life. For me it’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, and The Sparky People.

Categories
Humour

German Cake

Cake Cartoon

Flicking through the channels, I came across Judge Judy saying “Just take out what you can identify as your own hair, Madam.”

I kept going.

So I’m sitting here eating a lovely herren cake, actually German-made. How our little local shop came to stock this I am not at all sure. But it’s one of those great country stores where you can buy anything from bicycle pumps and glue to inner tubes and sulphuric acid. You can tell I’m designing some sort of weapon already, can’t you? I shouldn’t be surprised by anything turning up there.

But it’s the name that bugs me. Herren cake. Correct me if I’m wrong, but herren means “men”. As in Damen und Herren, which is how you formally address toilets. So this is… Men’s cake?

That’s great, I’d like to see that on a shop sign. Men’s Cake. Nothing pink and fancy about this cake, ladies. It’s a man’s cake. From Germany.

Categories
Cosmography Humour

Yes It’s Only A Supermoon

So last night many of you will have seen the biggest moon you ever did see. The “Supermoon” – or perigee-syzygy, to give it its even sillier proper name. Hope you enjoyed it. Despite being sandwiched between lovely days, last night was clouded and rainy here. Sadly I realize that I may not live to see a moon so imperceptibly larger than average as that one. “Almost visibly bigger!” as a FOAF said.

It might have gone largely unremarked, if someone hadn’t speculated that it caused the earthquake and tsunami. This was probably inevitable considering that tsunamis used to be called tidal waves, back when we didn’t know what really caused them. But this is actually quite an interesting idea.

It would be easy to dismiss it with ridicule, what with there being one or two salient differences between liquid water and solid rock. Though it’s enough to leave a very noticeable gap between high and low tide, all the moon’s gravity is really doing is changing the shape of the layer of water that lies on the Earth by the teeniest, tiniest fraction of an iota of a scintilla of a percentage. It’s really a very weak influence.

The Brain, An Owner's Manual - The Moon

But then again – we know the Earth’s crust is a highly complex, unstable system, and we have heard of  the “butterfly effect“, which suggests that small inputs to such systems can lead to vast, unpredictable and – yes – even catastrophic outcomes. So there might be something in it?

Might be. Isn’t though. There’s the small detail that the tsunami happened over a week ago, while the moon was still at a perfectly ordinary distance. Sort of kills the theory, that detail.

The trickier question to answer though is why there isn’t anything in the theory. It doesn’t sound unreasonable. In fact it’s a fine example of an excellent theory that just doesn’t happen to be right. Excellent, because it makes a clear, easily-tested prediction: If the moon’s orbit had any appreciable effect on plate tectonics, there would be a rhythmic pattern to earthquakes. And there isn’t.

If there were, they wouldn’t be so bloody hard to predict.

But why isn’t there…? Well I don’t know. What are asking me for, I’m not a plate tec… nician. But my guess would be that with all that roiling molten rock beneath our feet, with the huge energies of continents weighing billions of tonnes grinding against one another, with the titanic rattling and farting of volcanoes, the moon’s influence is just lost in the mix, drowned by countless stronger forces pushing unpredictably in other directions. Real, yes. But insignificant.

So dwell on that, the next time you stare up into the beautiful night sky. Space may be vast and cold and silent, but hey, you’re standing on a fucking bomb.

Categories
Humour

Random Cartoon

I haven’t done a cartoon in a few days. I guess it’s mainly because it’s hard to get a lot of gags out of a tsunami and incipient nuclear meltdown. That crushing of the Libyan uprising wasn’t too inspiring either.

So I’ve decided that when the prevalent events are bitter and sad, or when I’m just in the mood, I might do a gag cartoon instead. Something about nothing.

This one came to me this evening, while I was watching a documentary about Ancient Egyptian engineering.

It has nothing to do with Ancient Egyptian engineering.

But it is very tall.

Which gives me the problem of filling in all this blank space.

 

 

I give up.