Category: Humour

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

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Humour Politics

This – This – Will Fix The Economy

Estate agents insist that property prices in Dublin have stabilised. I remember the first time they said that, back in 2007. And they’ve stabilized regularly ever since.

But you can’t exactly disagree. In a way, house prices are always stable. A house is always worth… about a house. A person can eat a lot or a little food, own a hundred cars or none, but houses tend to stabilise somewhere around the level of one per every two adults. Because try as you might, you can’t live in much more than one house at a time. Logically then, housing ought to be one of the most stable commodities on the market. It’s actually the rest of the economy that has been vigorously swung around this anchor point. During the housing boom, wages may have gone up on paper, but in house-buying terms they plunged through the floor.

Which gives me an idea… We need a new currency, right? The euro, well, it’s lovely and all. I like the colours, and the handy map on the back. But the thing is, we just can’t really afford it. Using the euro is like having a currency on the gold standard when the world is desperately short of gold. You can’t have a functional economy when the standard unit of exchange is hen’s teeth.

And what do we have plenty of? Why, houses! Too many houses, not enough euro banknotes. Think about it.

Of course you can’t put houses in your wallet or bring them to the shops. There will still have to be tokens. But the base currency unit should be fixed to the value of the standard house – say the sort of small two-bedroom starter home that was produced like popcorn during the boom. Notes should be denominated in fractions of a house. That way, the price of a home can never run away from you. Save up 1,000 of the new thousandth-of-a-house notes, and you can exchange them for one standard house at your nearest branch of NAMA.

It won’t stop people charging more than the standard house price of course, for bigger residences in better locations. But the existence of a perfectly adequate house at a fixed price – well, a price that money is fixed to – should act as a powerful stabilising influence. You’ll be able to look at a property ad and say “Well it’s a good house. But is it really worth two houses?”

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Humour Politics

Complete This Sentence

Ooh! Ooh! We got our report card! The IMF has checked out what we’re doing with all the money they lent us. Let’s start with a choice quote:

At around 40 percent of GDP, the cumulative cost of supporting the financial sector accounts for half of the sharp increase in net public debt in recent years.

That’s probably as close to saying “Basically they’d be OK if they weren’t a pit prop for Europe’s collapsing banking industry” as the IMF can allow itself to get.

On the bright side, people have finally been jailed over the billions that were ripped off the nation. Some of the bankers, right? Well no, some of the borrowers in fact. But it’s a start.

(Actually when I saw the headline “Sean Quinn’s son and nephew jailed for three months“, I assumed it was one person. Ours is not to question what goes on within a family.)

Sadly though the jail term is not for social larceny, but merely contempt of court. Which reminds me… Now cases are ongoing I probably need to scatter the word “allegedly” liberally through the following. But it seems that the Quinn family, having invested well but not wisely in the failed Anglo-Irish Bank, attempted to hide their assets from their creditors. Which, since the state has taken ownership of this mess, is us the taxpayers.

Allegedly.

There was a stupid debate on the radio today, where a loyal follower of the Quinn camp came on to argue that the family was being persecuted. It’s too late to act like innocent dupes of the big bad bank though, when you’ve been caught trying to hide your money down the back of Russia.

It was a big bad bank however (allegedly, allegedly…), and the other recent good news from the fiduciary front is that Anglo’s erstwhile financial director has been charged with sixteen fraud offences. Sixteen. Imagine, a banker could actually go to jail.

But for how long? A friend of mine did an interesting calculation. A few months ago, someone received a six-year sentence for not paying VAT on the garlic he imported. Don’t say that’s harsh until you see some of the garlic we get in the shops; you’ll agree that hanging is too good for them. The penalty was so severe because the tax he evaded came to €1.6 million. Which establishes that sentences are proportional to how much you rip off the State. Interesting…

Six years for 1.6 million – that’s 3.75 years for each million off-ripped. Anglo’s greedy machinations cost the exchequer €47 billion (€30.6 billion + interest). So if his punishment is to be kept in line, he’ll have to go away for… 175,250 years.

Not to despair though. What with prison overcrowding he’ll probably be out in just a few thousand.

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Humour Politics

Public-Private Folly

If they were all like this I wouldn’t mind so much

Word reaches me that the government is finally planning some stimulus spending. Well good – but how? I seem to remember that we’re kind of broke. We owe all the tax we’ll take during my lifespan fifteen times over or something. I forget the exact figure.

The idea is “off-balance-sheet” investment, as they call it. By this they mean spending that involves as little actual cash as possible. Fine, but I think they might have called it something that sounds less like crooked accounting. It’s not crooked of course. It just means stuff like privatising state assets and awarding public licenses. You know, completely above-board, transparent things like that. And in particular, the “Public-Private Partnership” or PPP, which means getting contractors to do something for private profit that the state normally does for the public good.

Toll roads, in other words. I mean I’m sure there are other possible PPPs apart from toll roads. But none spring to mind.

And one of the biggest such partnership plans touches close to my home: The Gort-Tuam motorway. Yes, you read me right. Those are the words I actually wrote down there. A motorway, from Gort to Tuam. We have built a lot of decent roads in this country in the last decade or so, and I’m sure they all stimulated a great deal of economic activity. We needed them, they were a good investment. But you see what’s happened now, don’t you?

We’ve run out of places to build motorways to.

What puzzles me is how the private partners can hope to make a return on a new faster route between two such non-urgent points. I can only think of one way: They build the motorway over the existing road, giving people who actually have to get from Gort to Tuam (poor benighted souls) little choice except to pay. This is a worrying precedent. If it continues, free roads all over the country will be paved over with new pay-roads; in some cases, right up to our doors (perhaps). This will have the effect of transferring immense amounts of money from the general population to a few wealthy investors, but apparently that is what governments are for now.

When you think about it though, these roads don’t have to make a profit. They don’t have to be completed even. All they have to do is create economic activity. You realise what that is, don’t you. We’ve had it before, during the Famine. Landlords who believed that free food created what the rich like to call a “moral hazard” gave their starving tenants pointless tasks to perform. Sometimes they’d build a mad monument to nothing, a tower in a valley maybe, a brand new ruin. Sometimes, it would be a road.

This is a whole new class of folly: Faster, wider, vastly more pointless. A Famine Freeway, if you will.

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Humour

Home Of The Angry Bird

We encountered some genuine Finnish angry birds – gulls who dived at us to protect the chick here. Actual angry birds not shown due to copyright restrictions.

You know, before I got here I’d forgotten Angry Birds was a Finnish invention. There’s no forgetting after though – the merchandising is incredible. There are Angry Birds toys, Angry Birds sweets, Angry Birds drinks. There doesn’t seem to be a feature film or a cartoon series yet but that can only be a matter of time, the thing is practically a cartoon series already. They’re used to promote other products too of course. I upgraded a friend’s phone to the newest version of Symbian (more of that anon) almost purely so that she could get Angry Birds on it.

I have to hand it to makers Rovio for designing so brilliantly addictive a game – at one point me, my friend, and her daughter were all playing it at once – but I can’t help feeling that a lot of this is not so much merchandising as taking-advantage-of-childrenising. “l like playing Angry Birds therefore I want an Angry Birds drink” is the impulsive, associational desire of a mind that isn’t fully developed.

Yes OK I bought one. But that was research.

The drink was all right; a lot more fun though were the sweets, because they come in the shapes of the various bird types and you can mime their characteristic trajectories as they fly into your mouth.

To amuse the kids, I mean.

Expect Angry Birds Sweets in a shop near you soon. And then an improved version with more flavors. And then a version with different laws of physics.

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Cosmography Humour

Steaming Man

I stepped out of the sauna, onto the big rock this little cottage is built on, and walked a few yards along the wooden gangway through the reeds that leads to the jetty where we’d tied up the rowing boat. I stood there a while, admiring the coloured fringe of the post-sunset sky. In the cool evening air a delicate mist was rising. Off me, I realised.

The sauna’s effect of course. But I prefer to imagine it’s because of all the manly stuff I did today. Chopping woods and rowing boats and toting bails, that sort of thing. Worked so hard, didn’t need no durn sauna. Steam-cleaned mahself.

Fending off deadly predators too. Mosquitos. Don’t laugh, the mosquito is the most dangerous wild animal in Africa. They aren’t the most dangerous wild animal here, no, but I think that’s rather beside the point.

Perhaps though the hardest task today was taking my turn at looking after two girls, both under seven. It becomes even greater a challenge when your vocabulary in their language does not include such useful phrases as “Put it down”, “Stop doing that she doesn’t like it”, “Does your mother normally let you play with those?” and “Where the hell are you going now?” So far my Finnish extends not much further than yes, thank you, and good; a polite and positive vocabulary, but one that has little application in these circumstances.

I just have to learn to say no.

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Humour

The Road To Finland 2

Dammit, I can’t sleep. The hot sun won’t stop streaming in through the window. What sort of lake-strewn, tree-befuzzed hell have I arrived in?

But wait, let’s start at the beginning. Or at least, where I finished. Yesterday, in Café Wa, in Galway…

The best part of a journey is not to travel hopefully or to arrive, but the moment that comes just a little after you set out. I mean the one when it hits you that it’s too late now to worry if you have all the right underwear and cables, there’s no point in once again checking your ticket and passport. That ship has, perhaps literally, sailed. Finally you sigh and stretch and let the vehicle carry you.

The worst part conversely is the one before departure, when searching through pockets to confirm the presence of items you know are there is still a live option. And that’s the stage I’ve reached. Essentially I’m writing this to keep my hands busy.

I would have been on a bus to Dublin now but for a last-minute change of plan. My flight leaves at the unthinkable hour of 7:40 a.m., meaning they expect me to check in at 5:40 – about the time I’m usually going to bed. If that sounds convenient to you, consider that I’m the sort of person who can’t sleep until they’re too tired to stay awake. This means that I have to do the hardest part – actually making sure I get on the plane – when I’m at my least conscious.

My idea was to go to Dublin this evening, stay awake till about 5, get up an hour before that and head to the airport. There was a flaw to this plan. At the bus station though I found that they run all night. New plan then: instead of trying and probably failing to sleep in Dublin – our much worse, falling to wake up – I would leave here at about 2 a.m. on a bus straight to the airport, arriving refreshed and in good time!

Only one possible drawback to this brilliant scheme – It leaves me with hours before my bus, and absolutely nothing left to do.

I wonder if I have an even number of socks.

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Humour Politics

It's The Economy That's Stupid

Abie Philbin Bowman made a good point at the gig yesterday. Once, people believed in a mysterious, invisible force. They didn’t understand it, they could hardly even describe it, but they credited it with vast power, claimed it controlled just about every aspect of the world, and declared that whatever it wanted to happen was what must happen. They called it “God”.

Now, they call it “the economy”.

It’s so true. Nobody really understands the economy. We can’t even define it – is it the sum total of human transactions, or just the sum total of human transactions that involve things you can count? But nevertheless we positively invite it to take control of our lives. As someone else said, the problem with calling economics the “dismal science” is not that people think it’s dismal, but that people think it’s science. At best, it might aspire to being a branch of psychology. Yet people actually try to run the world according to its self-defeating prophecies.

A concept tossed around a lot in current economics is “competitiveness”, which sounds like it has to be a simple, positive good. Got to be lean and fit to make it in this world, don’tcha? It seems almost synonymous with efficiency. But when you look at it more closely you realise that there are a lot of assumptions involved here. “Competitive” is sometimes used as a synonym for “cheap”. When it comes to wage costs, it seems competitive always means cheap.

Competitiveness is at heart a sports metaphor, so let us imagine economic activity as a game like soccer or rugby. We – as a country – have to get out there and be competitive. Cool. Let’s go get ’em! We’ll show them who… costs less. We’ll give it 110% all the way through the first half, and right through the second, and on through the third, and… Hold on, three halves? When does this game end actually?

It doesn’t. We’ve taken the concept of competitiveness from sport, but overlooked the fact that a game is a brief interlude of peak performance. You can’t live your whole life like that. That would be, well, a desperate struggle. If democracy and civilisation exist for any reason at all, surely it is to free us from desperate struggle. And yet struggle is precisely what they’re telling us we need.

So it turns out that, like a lot of words used in economics, “competitiveness” translates most accurately as “whatever makes most money for the people who already have most money”.

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Cosmography Humour

Come To The Comedy Show

First I march in Germany, now I’ve helped organise an anti-capitalist comedy gig. I’ll be living in an Occupy tent next. If there are any left. As a cartoonist and columnist, I always felt that having political opinions was the day job and my spare time was my own. These days though I don’t know what the hell is happening.

Anyway, this looks like it’s going to be an excellent show. More than a show really, a kind of event. A tour of free gigs powered only by goodwill, cutting out the middle-oligarchy. Demonstrating that the way we’ve been doing things is not the only way.

3:00 this afternoon, at Kelly’s on Bridge St. It’s a great venue for comedy, they’re great comics, it’ll be a great gig. See you there I hope.

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Humour Politics

Free Comedy Gigs Versus The Banking Industry!

In or near Galway? Doing anything on Sunday afternoon? Like free entertainment? Enjoy comedy?

Good. Those are all nice things.

Wait, yeah. There’s a free comedy gig in Kelly’s Bar in Bridge Street at 3:00pm Sunday. Comics Abie Philbin Bowman and Aidan Killian are touring the country in protest against the bank bailout. You’ve got to do something.

Stand Up Against the Bankers is a show fuelled not by profit but goodwill; no accommodation has been booked in advance and tour dates are determined in large part by the willingness of a community to host the pair. The audience is invited to attend free of charge and get into the meitheal spirit by supporting however they can. Some will cook them dinner after the show, someone else will put them up in their spare room. Some will throw a few quid into the hat and some will help to publicise the next leg of the tour. Aidan Killian explains:

Touring like this creates a different kind of relationship with the audience. We’re not asking them to buy a ticket in advance. And we better make sure our jokes are damn funny. Otherwise, we’ll end up sleeping in the car, eating nettle soup.

Aidan Killian, a former banker with the once prestigious (now disgraced) Bear Stearns, saw the writing on the wall in 2007 and decided to do something he believed in. He left the job, still carrying a huge mortgage for a house in Florida he has never seen. With his understanding of how banks had cheated the system, Aidan turned the tables and forced the bank to accept their liability for the property. This story forms a key part of his comedy set.

Abie Philbin Bowman took the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe by storm with his debut, “Jesus: The Guantanamo Years”. His one-man comedies have since toured from London’s West End to Hollywood LA to Lahore Pakistan (during a State of Emergency). His jokes have been taken seriously by everyone from the Ku Klux Klan to Al Qaeda.

Abie spent the Celtic Tiger era pursuing his comedy dreams. He couldn’t afford to buy or rent a house, so remained living at home with his parents. He recalls the day the financial crisis broke.

It was awful: people were in negative equity, losing their jobs, facing repossession… At some point, I realised: ‘Hang on. I don’t own a house. So I’m not in negative equity and nobody can outsource my job to China.’ Somehow, I had gone to bed, a textbook loser… and woken up, an economic genius.

The two stand-ups travelled to last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival with solo shows on Ireland’s financial crisis and won rave reviews. They wanted to tour Ireland, but realised the country was broke. Explains Abie:

The financial crisis makes us all feel powerless. Every time we spend money, we’re paying tax, which is used to bail out the banks and pay off the Troika. But the Troika can’t tax barter, or generosity, or laughter.

Admission is free as they say, but please give them some money anyway. Otherwise they may eat all my food.

 

The Galway dates in full:

  • Campbells Tavern, Cloughanover, Headford on Friday June 22nd at 8:30pm
  • The Hop Inn, Athenry on Saturday June 23rd at 8:30pm
  • Kelly’s Bar, Bridge St, Galway on Sunday June 24th at 3pm.
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Humour

Soccer Is Over. Finished. Done

And I’m doing that thing where I upload a completely unrelated picture again. This is a secluded inlet of Lough Corrib.

Is that enough for you now?

It’s time we admitted this; Ireland is not a soccer-playing country. We’re a top nation at rugby, we’re way ahead at boxing, we’re number one in the world at hurling – and second only to Australia at Gaelic football. But at soccer, we are best at losing. Hell, we do better at cricket, a game most Irish people freely admit they neither like nor understand. We like soccer, we’re just – and there is no kind way to put this – really, really very bad at it. We got lucky once in 1990, scraping through to the quarter finals on draws and penalties. That was the best we ever did. It is the best we’ll ever do. We are complete and utter cock at soccer. If I haven’t yet made this clear enough, we are not good at playing the association football. OK?

So we should stop. Nobody makes us enter these international competitions, and we only embarrass ourselves when we do. Like Costa Rica with their army, we should be the first nation on Earth to disband their international team. The world will thank us.

But what about the fans? We are at least a great soccer supporting nation. Though only, and this is weird, on the international level. At the club level we’re hopeless. Top league teams in Ireland find themselves playing matches in front of a man, a dog and a boy. The average Irish fan spends far more on the merchandise of one of the giant English corporate teams than they do on actual, you know, soccer. (And perhaps this is the root of our malaise as a soccer-playing nation but you know what? I don’t care.) Yet when it comes to international games, apparently seasoned fans turn out in hordes. And they can really sing. OK, they only ever seem to sing the bleeding awful faux-traditional Fields Of Athenry, but they do it with gusto.

They could take up following a sport we’re actually decent at of course, but soccer is the great game, when it comes to the game supporting game. If you follow. They will still want to compete at that level.

So I say, why not freelance? Ireland’s greatest export has always been people, but they haven’t always been labourers, or construction workers, or nurses, or bankrupts. Ireland was once famous for her mercenaries. During times of economic downturn when we didn’t have enough war at home, people made a good living in foreign armies. I see the soccer fans fulfilling a similar role, for countries in dire need of some pizazz in their fanbase. Ones with more money than people – Luxembourg, for example. Liechtenstein. Monaco. It could be both lucrative and fun.

And at least they’d have a chance of bloody winning occasionally.

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