Category: Humour

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

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Humour

Diary Of A Slightly-Madman

Ahascaragh, east Galway, which has little if anything to do with the rest of the post

I wonder just how much more of this I can take.

Since I arrived back from Germany I’ve been house-minding out in the country, with only one of those things for company. You know, hairy things. Eat animals. Don’t talk much. Cats, that’s it. My language skills are slipping away here. When your only interlocutor doesn’t care whether you’re saying “You’re a kitty aren’t you yes you are!” or “Bacon bacon bacon bacon sandwich, going to make a sandwich of you now”, your language patterns become increasingly random.

Ahascaragh water garden. Still very little to do with the article

Comfortable lemon.

Cats make peculiar companions, but they are warm and furry so it’s easy to forget this. Until you find yourself, out shopping, having to choose between something that comes in a clumping and a non-clumping form. Little good comes in a choice between clumping and non-clumping.

But lord knows how disconnected I would have gotten without having the cat to take care of. It needs to be feed regularly even if I don’t. I’m already living like one of those cognitive science lab experiments. The weather has been pretty crap but it’s not at all cold, so on days when I don’t leave the house I entirely eschew clothing. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it feels great. As long as I don’t pass a mirror. This isn’t nudism any more than walking around with nothing on under your clothes is. (Though I do like to refer to that practice as “cryptonudism”.) Effectively I am wearing a house. I like it, it’s very roomy in the crotch. And everywhere else.

My sleeping too has grown unconventional, drifting from the usual eight hours at a time to two separate “watches” of four hours, leading me to suspect that this is actually more natural. At least, for abnormal people. What I mean is, it’s quite natural for a significant proportion of the population to pass the night… differently. Would it not make sense, for humans or human ancestors sleeping in vulnerable groups, to have an innate variation in their sleeping patterns so that they’re never all asleep at once?

So if you ever ask again what I’m doing awake in the middle of the night, I’ll be forced to tell the truth. I’m protecting you, you ungrateful bastard. From leopards.

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Cosmography Humour Politics

The Frankfurt Mission 1 – Knock Out

What’s Obi Wan doing in there?

Only now can the story be told – because since I got back I’ve been too shagged. How did I become involved with the Ballyhea Burn The Bank Bondholders band? I have to be honest, I am not altogether sure. It sounded like a wild thing to do. It was a noble cause. It would mean spending time with one of my favouritest people. I had some time, flights were cheap, what the hell.

Our journey begins as it ends – in Knock. Knock is one of the world’s weirdest little airports. It has a runway long enough for 747s, but it is miles and miles away from anywhere almost anyone would want to go. The nearest cities are Galway, Limerick and Derry, but the closest of them is an hour away and they all have their own airports anyway.

Knock was the brainchild not of a planner or politician, but of a priest – who thought that the site of a minor and, it has to be said, suspect apparition could become a major destination for pilgrims, if there were only an airport to bring them. But the maxim “If you build it they will come” applies poorly to superfluous infrastructure. Knock had to wait for a new miracle and a new prophet – Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, who knew how to put unwanted airports to good use. So from Knock, an hour away from Galway, we can fly to Hahn, two hours away from Frankfurt. It’s a very useful service – and not only for us, as we were to find.

Knock though is well worth visiting for itself, if you enjoy mocking people’s beliefs. Perhaps I can find a better way to put that… It’s fascinating, because it displays religion at its most incredible. The town of Knock is more or less a religious strip mall, selling objects of veneration in boxes of a dozen beside charming isn’t-drunkenness-funny souvenirs. It’s hard to imagine how anyone’s faith could survive a pilgrimage here.

I would swear that religious art has just got more dumb-looking in recent decades. These figures seem actually to have concussion, the features weirdly cartoonish and toy-like. The 3D pictures of animals are… unexplained. Virgin Marys now come in Standard and Luminous. I resisted the desire to buy a luminous one.

I do not know what a Happy Death Cross is, or how it differs from the usual sad death type of crucifix. We speculate that if you look close, Jesus has a big smile.

So we tear ourselves away from the anthropology just in time to meet up with the Ballyhea folks at the airport, and board our flight. Though not before paying an extra €10, for Knock is a toll airport.

Aboard then, and of course the first thing that greets you is Ryanair’s extraordinary panoply of warnings, right in front of your face. They know that the usual safety cards are often damaged or taken as souvenirs (seriously, I have a friend who collects them), so to save a few cents every flight Ryanair plaster them to the back of the seat in front of you. You spend your entire journey being constantly reminded of the things that can go wrong with a plane.

And I ask you, if you didn’t know all the safety drills already, would you really be able to work them out from this? What the hell is that guy doing with the yellow vest – the hula? And look at the first panel of “Exit B Overwings”, the bottom row of the right side. The whole point of doing this in pictures is so you don’t need to read English to understand the drill. But without that caption, the picture seems to say “If you look out the window and see fire, stay in the plane”. That’s really only good advice if you’re flying through a fire.

Gotta say, plane wings are lovely things.

When we boarded though, someone noticed a thing that took us all by surprise. Among our fellow-passengers was one of the people we were hoping to meet in Frankfurt – Doctor Patrick Honohan, the governor of Ireland’s Central Bank, on his way to the very meeting we were going to picket. This, I admit, was troubling. Were we so broke that our Central Bank Governor had to fly Ryanair? It seems almost shameful. Of course to his credit, Honahan had recently turned down a pay rise in the hope, naive as it might seem, of business and public sector leaders following suit. So perhaps this was another example of economy.

Or perhaps he’d just wanted a quick pray.

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Humour

Champing At The Bit

Passengers leaving Ryanair jet
“But… But this is where we left from!”

This is weird. I’m going to sunny Germany tomorrow, but I’m sitting here with nothing to do. For once I packed well in advance. This is as unlike me as it is possible to imagine, and must basically have happened by accident.

So tomorrow we’re driving to Knock, which should take about an hour, flying with Ryanair to Frankfurt, which should take two hours, and then getting from there to where Frankfurt actually is, which will be the longest leg of the whole trip. You know the usual way.

English: Night view of the euro monument (euro...
Oh look, it’s breaking up!

Hahn airport – “Frankfurt-Hahn“, as Ryanair have the nads to call it – is actually nearer Luxembourg. The tickets were fantastically cheap though, it must be said. We are going to Frankfurt basically because we can afford to. Oh, there will be some research and meetings and stuff. This is the home of the European Central Bank, the institution that is handling our currency in such a profoundly wrong-headed way, so there is much to learn. Perhaps we will even have a little protest. I plan to stand opposite the ECB with my arms folded, frowning really hard.

I’ve been planning this trip for a few weeks though, you think I found time to refresh my German? Did I hell. But then, do I need to now? My phone can speak German for me. Even the free Google Translate is very good – though bear in mind that to use an online translation service you have to pay for data at roaming rates. Right now I’m just getting it to say things like “How many cars may I eat?”, “This shop sells millions of ducklings in a box”, and let’s not forget that old favourite, “My wombat is constipated”.

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Humour

The Sinking Guinness Bubble – Explained!

Guinness drinkers are puzzled about something. OK, after a few they’re puzzled about many things, but the one that gets you even before you start drinking the black stuff is that the bubbles in it appear to rise… downwards. This is not the standard behaviour of bubbles.

You might think that this has something to do with the unusual, possibly supernatural, properties of the famous Irish beer. But no. Scientists have finally torn their attention away from trivialities to explain exactly what is going on here, and it has less to do with the liquid itself than with the glass. Not the special Guinness “tulip” either, but any beer glass just so long as it has the typical tapering shape.

You can read the actual scientific paper here (PDF) if you don’t mind looking at maths, or MIT’s excellent non-technical account. But if you want a loose and more inaccurate explanation which has the merit of being simple enough to tell someone in the pub while they wait for their pint to settle, read on!

GuinnessPint
Other Irish stouts are also available

Like other beers or fizzy drinks, bubbles form in stout as gas forced in under pressure escapes after the pressure is released. They’re significantly less dense than the liquid of course, and therefore float to the surface – exerting a little drag on the liquid as they do. Now that drag would have no effect in a straight-sided container. All the liquid would feel an equal upward pull, so it would be in balance and none of it could move. But in the slope-sided glass things are different.

This is the crucial bit: There are always fewer bubbles directly above the sloped sides than there are directly above the flat bottom. Therefore there is less upward pull near the sides, more in the centre. This creates an imbalance – the centre goes up, and the liquid at the sides is pulled downwards to take its place at the bottom of the glass. Similar to the convection that occurs when you heat fluids, a “rolling” motion is set up.

Bubbles still want to go up at the sides of course, but the liquid is being pulled down faster than they can rise through it. The net result therefore is that they are visibly dragged downwards. And as we know Guinness is pretty opaque stuff, so though there are actually far more upward-moving bubbles at the centre, we only see the downward-moving ones just inside the wall.

The solution is simple and convincing then: The bubbles at the outside sink because of a circulating motion caused by the bubbles on the inside rising. Next perhaps mathematicians can explain why people drink the stuff when it tastes like wet cardboard.

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Humour Politics

Fruit Fabrics And The Austerity Agenda

You’ll regret it!

Well I hope not of course. I hope I was wrong, and the greater cuts we’re now committed to don’t further hurt the poor and stall the economy. But… It’s hard to see how they won’t.

Too late I know, but it’s worth listening to Paul Krugman‘s argument that austerity is being cheered on by people with an agenda. Said agenda being, to free the rich from the burden of the poor. Some of you will have seen him nail the point on Jeremy Paxman’s BBC show last Wednesday. Though clearly, not enough of you.

Somehow, the mayhem wreaked by unfettered capitalism in the last decade or so gets turned into an excuse to destroy the welfare state. What is the logical justification for that? Because they can, apparently.

All right, enough of the sad. Today started dull but became amazingly hot. I found myself without suitable attire, so I bought some shorts in TK Maxx. I usually try to just buy from charity shops, but there were none nearby and this seemed the next best thing.

I love the label. Whoever wrote this is bored with their job and spends the day trying to sneak in fruit and veg references. Look:

  • “Dries faster due to the higher proportion of polyester yams.”
  • “Is fabric washed and peached for extra softness and comfort.”

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Humour Politics

Reasons To Vote Yes

Moody, Standard and Poor

There are good and bad arguments in favour of the fiscal compact. Well, better and worse anyway. But one stands out as being truly, shockingly, jaw-droppingly appalling: We should vote Yes because it will improve our credit rating. As if Standard and Poor and Moody and Mean don’t have enough influence.

It’s probably quite true of course; being a nice obedient populace is something they give bonus points for, no doubt. But it makes me think, why stop at voting? There’s loads more we could do to make ourselves look better credit-wise.

  • Stop holding those nasty unpredictable votes altogether. A country run by committee – especially a committee of appointed, imported technocrats – will be far more predictable than any democracy. Markets like that.
  • Execute the old. Seriously, think what that would save. And others who are a burden on the public finances too, like the mentally and the physically disabled. Or to use the more acceptable modern term, the economically disabled.
  • As is universally acknowledged, lenders only want to lend to you when you don’t actually need the money. Therefore we should repudiate all our debts. Including of course debts the government owes to citizens, such as pension and welfare commitments.

I only scratch the surface here I’m sure. There’s no end to what we could borrow, as long as we forget why.

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Humour

Robin Hood Reversal

Trail of Robin Hood

So today Ireland gives away another €2.5 billion to the creditors of our failed banks.

But I shouldn’t say “give away”, as if it wasn’t earned. This money is a reward! It’s what we give to investors for making decisions that destroyed our economy. They bet that a property market can keep rising until every building is worth an infinite amount of money. The banks they invested in, quite naturally, went bust. We own these banks now, and we’ll all be working extra-hard for the rest of our lives to pay for those decisions. Though on the bright side we will be able to afford less health care, so our lives will be shorter.

All just to make sure that no matter how mindlessly, droolingly, shit-flingingly stupid the decisions they make, the richest people stay that way.

Let’s face it, we’re slaves.

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Humour

Android Finds: Keep That Screen On

One thing that bugs me about Android is its eagerness to turn the screen off. Yes of course it’s a good idea for battery saving. But it’s less good for, say, reading. You can set the screen timeout delay for a maximum ten minutes, but sometimes even that’s not enough.

Especially when driving. Not that I read a lot while driving, you understand, but I do like to use the Maps app. Sure, that will keep the screen on when you use the navigation function, but to do that you need to enter a destination. What about when you don’t have a destination?

All right, not everyone is as weird as me. But sometimes I like to just drive around in places I don’t know. For example, today I decided to find how far south I could drive along the shores of Lough Corrib before impassable bog forced me back onto the main road¹. I’ve been wondering for years, but it’s the sort of thing you never find time to do in your adult life – until you get a day so hot that spending it driving around with all your windows open actually seems like the sensible thing to do. So I wanted a moving map, to make sure I was sticking to the shores and/or heading south, and I wanted to be able to read it at a glance, not be always unlocking the screen. But I had no destination to enter.

So I pulled over, searched Google Play, and found Screen On, a simple app from Greek company PinApps that lists all the other ones installed and offers the option of keeping the screen on while any of them is running. Lovely. And it has a couple of other cute features too – it can also keep the screen on while you’re taking a call. That sounds like a good idea, I’m frequently annoyed by the delay between ending a conversation and being able to hang up. I’ve yet to decide how well it works in practice though.

Better still, there’s an option to keep the screen going while charging. This was an available behaviour I opted into on my Nokia N900, because it kept the screen on whenever I was using the phone in bed or in the car. Some caveats though: Screens have finite lives, and I believe this is particularly true of OLEDs. Also, one as big as that of the Galaxy Note draws a formidable amount of power. If you leave it burning overnight, particularly if you have other stuff running too or if you’re not using a charger capable of the recommended 1Amp, you may find it hasn’t finished charging by morning! For these reasons, you should remember to manually switch the screen off by touching the power button.

But a great little app that does exactly what I wanted. The only way I would improve it is by having some contextual logic. I’d like it to keep the screen on, when I’m using a certain app, if the phone is on charge. That way there’d be a lot less risk of my flattening the battery through negligence.

Oh the trip? It was a lovely adventure, exploring a maze of boreens that had a nonchalant attitude towards the task of going somewhere. I saw nearby bits of country that I had no idea existed. At one point I drove a quarter of a mile down a narrow lane that just petered out, and so had to reverse all the way back. How often do you get to do that? But the answer to the actual question is that you can hardly get any further south along this shore of the Corrib than I am right here at home. As is fairly obvious from any map.

Afterwards I went to town – by the main road – and bought a big floppy ladies’ straw sun hat I found in a charity shop for a euro. It was quite clear that too much of the sun has been getting through to my brain.

 

  1. The curraghline. Built directly across a spongy bog and therefore liable to constant subsidence and crinkling, it has been described as “Ireland’s straightest and most uneven stretch of road”.
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Cosmography Humour

Sunstruck

Cat is sure that Tree didn’t use to be that colour

Good grief.

I’m being blinded by the light reflecting off my own skin. Thanks to last year’s wholly ineffective summer, I haven’t been struck by the cancer-particle for an age. What melanin I ever possessed is long gone, chopped up for firewood or something. I am now little more than a collection of human organs in a see-through bag.

But le soleil tapait dur, as they say in French lessons. I received more dangerous photons to my surfaces yesterday than I have in the last two years, and I include X-rays in that. So while some areas of me are transparent, others are luminous. First I was at a funeral, and so got basted in sunspit before I was even ready to contemplate the idea. Very few people pause at the graveside to apply sunscreen. Then driving home I had the windows down. Only a 100kph wind was sufficient to refresh me, and it was amazingly relaxing to be basking and buffeted at the same time. A thrillingly sensual experience, like bathing in a hot air jacuzzi. I arrived home scorched.

And now I lie on a lawn, hoping to make my other parts match. I am supposed to be composing my blog here but, though I try to write in a personal way, nearly everything that has happened in the last few days has been so intensely personal, either for me or for someone close to me, that there is little on my mind that I can fairly write about. I am emotionally drained and of little use today. And so I make myself useful.

Inside, ladies of the superior generation are discussing whatever it is they discuss when I’m not there. My mother and one of her sisters, visiting another sister at the house of a cousin who… You know I’m not even sure where I am. I just drive. I am the ferry of aunts. And happily so. In the sun, the world is made of simple things.

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Cosmography Humour

Soccer, Summer, And Fish

It’s more frightened of you than you are of it. You have a knife.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I actually liked soccer, but I hate it. I’ve always hated it. Like so much in childhood, it was something you had to do whether you liked it or not. To add a sadistic twist though, you were expected to enjoy it. It was a treat.

I hated it because I was no good at it. So no good at it. When picking sides, captains would pretend they couldn’t see me. As a child I was breathless, thin, unathletic. But that wasn’t the problem. The reason I was really bad at soccer was that it couldn’t hold my attention. You stood in part of a field. After what seemed like hours, another boy would run past you with a ball. Then your team mates would shout at you. Really, whose side was I on? That of all these angry people calling me names, or the perfectly harmless passer-by? Soccer was long periods of boredom punctuated with confusion and insults. Like school really, except in mud.

But if a nine year old boy comes up to an adult man – a middle-aged one, yet – and asks him to come play soccer, for some damn reason he agrees. Is it because I’ve finally been picked? Maybe, but I think it’s more that I was asked. Not told. Not shoved out in the rain in baggy shorts and stupid clumpy boots. Asked, by a boy who wants to play with me just because he loves playing. Now I can enjoy it.

I’m still no bloody good though.

But not being good at soccer as a child is humiliating, alienating, dispiriting. Not being good at it as an adult is no big deal. The one real danger is that I’ll break my stupid bloody neck trying. Or in this instance, my spine. All right I didn’t actually break it, just bent it a bit. I’m only a tadge debilitated. And hey, it’s a proud masculine sports injury.

I tripped over the ball.

Bruising aside, it was a great day. I was asked out to see the Kinvara Farmers’ Market before it moves from its wonderful location (next month is the last chance to see, go if you can). Got some good fresh veg there, and even fresher fish. So fresh in fact that the thing in the picture above crawled out of it.

This is by no means a sign of bad fish – in fact it proves that it hasn’t been frozen. Such parasitic worms are actually far more common, especially in cod, than most fish-eaters realise. They’re… almost completely harmless, if the fish is cooked. (One reason that cod isn’t used in sushi.) You’ve probably eaten them many times without ill effect.

Except of course for any nausea you may be feeling, now that I’ve told you you’ve been eating worms.

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