This is not a post as such, I just thought I’d draw your attention to an interesting picture of a fountain on the country estate of our disgraced former leader C. J. Haughey. The Abbeville mansion has been valued at €7.5 million – at today’s prices – and was purchased and refurbished with money from sources that have still to be explained. Via Broadsheet.
Category: Humour
Funny. Or meant to be funny. Or about funny.
Categories
More From The Spam Folder
The worst part of running any sort of website with comments is the ****s who think it’s free advertising space. Of course there’s absolutely no point in telling these people what you think of them. But let’s pretend… All genuine spam comments from the last week or so.
“Thanks for the auspicious writeup. It in fact was a leisure account it. Glance advanced to more brought agreeable from you! However, how can we communicate?” – brazil women for marriage
I’m really not sure that we can.
“A person essentially help to make severely posts I might state. This is the first time I frequented your web page and so far? I amazed with the research you made to create this actual publish amazing. Great task!” – Turban
Oh you’re just saying that. Whatever it is you’re saying.
“Never frown, even when you are sad, because you never know who is falling in love with your hermes birkin” – Hermes Borse
Oh my God stop doing that to my handbag.
“It is crucial to set up who will e shi, o . l, es,i rital typo have the proper measurements. This means that you ought to measure you height commencing from the top of your head the many approach” – trendy dresses
Run! The many approach!
“I have not checked in here for a while as I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are great quality so I guess I will add you back to my everyday bloglist. You deserve it my friend 
” – cheap chainsaws for sale
I am so overjoyed that you love me again, cheap chainsaws for sale, that I’m not even banning your IP address. Oh wait I am.
“Very interesting theme, thankyou for posting this kind of topics about poker holdem, surely everyone is agrees with me, you are an fantastic writer, you should continue writing new posts most frequently and keep up the great work… Thanks for all…” poker holdem
It’s not always about you, poker holdem.
“Hello! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any issues with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) related with obesity treatment was hacked and I ended up losing many months of hard work due to no data backup. Do you have any methods to prevent hackers?” – obesity treatment
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No.
“Very soon this site will be famous among all blog visitors, due to it’s fastidious content” – LIESTORESReduced PriceCar accesoriesAccesorios de cocheBest Online ShopLIESTORES your Online ShopCar audiohttp://www.liestores.comDo you want to save money?Ofertas y precios especialesBest Online ShopDo you earn money?Please visit usFree shipmentLIESTORES
Do you mind if I just call you LIESTORESReduced PriceCar?
It’s all right, I don’t need help really. It’s just the only wordplay I could think of. For today was May Day, a feast dedicated to Spring. Except in Ireland where it’s dedicated to Mary, because only the Catholic Church could transform a feast of fecundity into a celebration of sanctified virginity.
Of course before the Christians it was Bealtaine, still by tradition the first day of summer, and we’ve never let the fact that it’s usually raining deflect us from that.
And God it was miserable today. So it made my mind up. I have just now booked my holidays. I’m going to sunny Finland. Seriously. It’ll probably be much warmer than here, come July. I plan a week or so of simple rustic pleasures. Camp on an island, take saunas, get naked, chop wood. Though not in that order.
So I’ve just been through the usual “Ryanair or Aer Lingus” juggling game. The last time I went Finland way I just plumped for Ryanair, unrealising that if I’d gone with Aer Lingus I would have only paid a little more to fly straight in Helsinki where my friend actually lives, as opposed to Tampere, a tiny airport that’s a short bus ride – and then a very long¹ train journey – north.
So this time I gave Aer Lingus serious consideration. Just as well – Ryanair doesn’t fly to Finland anymore. Not directly anyway. You can go there from Stansted. Alternatively, you can fly from Dublin to Tallinn in Estonia, from where it’s a pretty short hop. There may be other ways you could make it, it’s not too easy to figure this out with their site, but taking a two-step trip with Ryanair is out of the question anyway. If the lateness of their first connection causes you to miss the second, they take no responsibility.
They’ve been a great influence on Aer Lingus though. It’s no exaggeration to say that the national airline is often actually the cheaper now. OK, in some respects their service has just plunged to Ryanair’s level, but at least you don’t get the feeling that if you click the wrong thing on their site you’ll lose a kidney. With Ryanair everything you press seems to raise the price, including the back button.
Mind you, there are signs that Aer Lingus might be going that way. It would be easy to get the impression that even after you’ve bought your ticket you still have to pay for your seat! In fact it’s an option to book a seat, but it’s not very obvious that you don’t have to.
I called it the national airline; of course, it’s now 3% less national. Abu Dhabi carrier Etihad just got a bit. We buy their oil, they buy our strategic transport infrastructure. That’s going to end well. And with the country’s finances being in the state they are, speculation is rife that the government will sell off its share. My flight’s not until July; by the time I take it, it may not be with an Irish airline.
- Though this being Finland, very fast and reasonably priced.
Related articles
- Etihad airline takes 3 percent stake in Aer Lingus: (Al Arabiya News) (airportinformer.wordpress.com)
- Aer Lingus profits from cost-cutting work (direcmood.wordpress.com)
Categories
Recommended Stealing
And yesterday was a fine day indeed, as it turned out. I think I met more new people than in the previous year altogether. This is good, this is what I need. One of the reasons you get too dependent in a relationship is that you stop knowing other people. I have restoration work to do on my social life.
First I was at the book launch of a local poet, Thanks for Nothing, Hippies by Sarah Clancy. Nice stuff. Then a meeting of activists against the Fiscal Compact, which was the main inspiration for yesterday’s piece. This was stimulating because I’ve done nothing like it for many years. As a cartoonist, a commentator on events, you try to keep actual political activity at arm’s length. I have never joined a party, association, or union. I’m even pretty reluctant to sign petitions. Being right at the coalface felt like a safari – even a spying mission.
The meeting was addressed by an economist, Professor Terry McDonough, and it was pointed out to me that I had done cartoons for a book he co-authored a decade ago. So I thought to check and, yes, you can buy a book I illustrated on Amazon. Lord knows, there may be more of my work available there. After all I forgot this one completely. It’s nice to be reminded that I do more than I think.
I even found a good review of it – from an anarchist newspaper:
Each section is self-contained, well presented with graphs, charts and cartoons.
How’s that for recognition? Also:
Order, buy, borrow or steal “Mind your own business” then pass it on to fellow workers. Probably the most user friendly handbook on economics/industrial relations in print.
Recommended stealing! There’s no higher praise from anarchists.
Related articles
- B-Doinnng (i.doubt.it)
- Amazon Web Services: 1 Million Hadoop Clusters And Counting (servicesangle.com)
Categories
B-Doinnng
It finally felt like Spring today.
I know, I know. It’s almost over. By Irish reckoning Summer begins on the first of May. Maybe it was the confusing “false start” we had. March warmer than usual, followed by April – often the nicest month of the year – being hellish cold. It discombobulated my internal sundials and anemometers, upset my sidereal clockwork, so I never tripped into Spring mode at all. Until today.
I can’t say why exactly. It was a little warm this morning, to be sure. And after a switch back to Siberia for the afternoon, I noticed that the wind became warmer again in the evening. But it certainly wasn’t a particularly nice day.
Maybe it was people who made it Spring. People were nice. Everyone I met seemed to be in a good mood. They smiled at me, they enjoined me to conversation, they treated me like a friend. Even my friends.
Is it the hat? It must be the hat. No, I’m not wearing a hat. Can’t be that then.
Or indeed anything about the way I was looking, in my Dunne’s Stores hoodie, too-long combat pants rolled up to reveal worn-out Czech foam rubber sandals and narsty pink bandage round my left ankle… Oh yeah, that was another thing. I started the day limping, now I’m cured. A Spring miracle!
Well all right, it was nearly better when I got up this morning. It is four days since I twisted it. The stupidest thing; I’d stood up to find my foot was asleep. As soon as I put weight on it, it just went. And I dropped like a stone, landing heavily right on top of it.
Yes folks, I fell on myself. That’s so clumsy it takes skill.
My ankle hurt like hell, I thought I’d broken it – until I remembered that any time I’d actually broken a bone it had never seemed all that bad. At first… Sprains on the other hand (or foot) always felt worse than they turned out to be. Maybe a breakage releases the body’s bedside-manner hormone, the one that tells you everything will be all right if you just stay still and calm and not flap around. This double shot of steam-pressed adrenaline was telling me to run away immediately from the source of danger, so I must have been basically all right.
And as the source of danger in this instance was basically myself I couldn’t really run away, so I just sat on the floor and swore volubly until I felt a little better. It was mostly just bruised I think. Though weirdly, the bruising is all around the edges of my foot, as if I have a slice of purple going right through it.
Anyway, I’m side-tracking here like crazy. Point is, my foot and my heart and my mind are all feeling well. It was a lovely day. And dammit, who knows, tomorrow might be even better.
Related articles
- Boys will be…forever scraped and bruised (kerrysorganizedchaos.wordpress.com)
- Spring Is In The Air (Even If The Weather Doesn’t Want To Cooperate) (backyardprovence.wordpress.com)
Categories
A Day To Remember
Guess what happened in history today? I mean aside from the sinking of the Titanic.
The birth of Leonardo Da Vinci. And, the opening of the first McDonald’s.
1452: The last man to become both the greatest artist and the greatest scientist of his day was born.
1955: The enterprise that sought to squeeze the most possible cow into the most possible people began.
I propose that the United Nations declare the 15th of April world What The Hell Happened day.
Related articles
- HAPPY 560TH BIRTHDAY LEONARDO DA VINCI!! Born on April 15, 1452 in Vinci, Italy. Da Vinci was a brilliant painter, inventor, musician, engineer, sculptor, architect and scientist. (greatkat.wordpress.com)
- Quote Leonardo da Vinci (manonmona.wordpress.com)
Categories
I’m Tired So Here’s A Few Links
I’m going to have to change my policy of not going to bed until I get a post up, because that is keeping me awake till 6 a.m. every freaking morning. So forgive me if today’s is lower on original content, and higher on pictures of cats. LOLcats it seems are by no means a new phenomenon.
Yes, I need sleep.
Or here’s the good State of Tennessee demonstrating that it’s abstinence-only approach to sex education is really just fear and/or hatred of sex itself. They propose to warn teenagers against holding hands.
Visit this Facebook page! It’s science, but just the funny and weird bits – like this.
That’s it, I’m even out of random stuff drifting around my head. I’ll try to write something that’s actually about something later today.
Categories
On The Road, On The Border
Lying on the floor of a cottage by the sea, theoretically trying to sleep, feeling guilty about how little I’ve written in the last couple of days. It has been a great break though. An adventure in a lot of ways, particularly driving ways. I’m not used to steering by satnav, and kept missing my turning. I have literally no idea where I’ve been. Wandering around the back roads, I think I crossed the border with Northern Ireland about six times. You can tell because the quality of the roads suddenly drops. Not so long since it was the other way around; the British really seemed to stop trying after the peace agreement. I also ended up driving on motorway for the first time, something I wasn’t allowed to do before I passed my test. Shouldn’t have been doing it now either, I was going in the wrong direction.
Had my first flat too! Changing a tyre is quite exciting when you’ve no idea how to do it. The Japanese like puzzles, so they make it interesting. Along with the jack they give you a couple of bits of metal to see what you make of them. As it turns out, one levers off the hubcap, one undoes the wheel nuts, and if you fit them together and revolve them in a really rather surprising way, it turns the jack. All pretty straightforward really; I had it nearly figured out by the time I was finished.
Related articles
- In The Town Of Ballybay (i.doubt.it)
- How far would you follow satnav? (staveleyhead.co.uk)
Well we knew the weather was about to change, so we spent the last fine day on a trip to Connemara, our local semi-wilderness.
View from Ballynahinch Castle. This used to be the home of the Martyns, one of Galway’s ruling families. It’s now a pleasant hotel, as low-key as it is up-market. We stopped for coffee and considered booking a suite for the weekend, but a quick search through our pockets for change failed to produce the necessary €1,260.
The destination really was the journey. Which is just as well because by the time we reached our ostensible objective the weather had given up on us. You’ll just have to imagine what this beach would’ve looked like in the sun.
Sun peeking under the clouds to say ‘bye.
Related articles
- Connemara dreamin’ (overthebridgeandfaraway.wordpress.com)
- Old Postcard Images Of Ireland. (bernadette2012.wordpress.com)
Categories
What A Day
Dropped off the radar again there, sorry. Thanks to some amazing weather for March – I think it reached 20C (68F) today – I’ve been held prisoner in the garden. At least it’s an opportunity to grow a skin. Technically, I don’t have a skin by the time winter ends. More a film.
It’s been a great day too in another sense – former leader Bertie Ahern has resigned from the Fianna Fáil party, on foot of the findings of the tribunal into planning corruption. This is huge, really. If it’s not literally an admission of guilt, it’s at least the admission of guilt he can sue you for calling an admission of guilt.
Too wrecked to go into this right now though, didn’t get any sleep last night to speak of. I’d gone shopping for a phone case online, and naturally I’d noticed small things here and there that would be useful too – a spare battery, a spare charger for the spare battery, a spare spare spare battery charger, so forth. The whole thing had rolled into a pleasant shopping safari, and it was about 4 a.m. by the time I was finally ready to proceed to the checkout. All that remained was to enter my credit card – done – and confirm my shipping address – done – and… Wait.
Of the five things I’d decided to buy, through five different sellers, not one of them would ship to Ireland. Actually it didn’t even tell me this. It just said for each item that there was a problem with my address, so possibly it was five different problems. Messages that vague and unhelpful only qualify as information in the theoretical sense, like yelling in an unknown foreign language. You know that it conveys meaning, but not what or to whom.
So what could I do about it? As mad as it may seem, Amazon.co.uk offers no system for filtering search results by where the seller will ship too. The process of separating the exporters from the non-exporters is essentially trial and error. Which is ludicrous for an online seller, and kept me up until well past dawn. And yet when you go to Amazon from Ireland, they tell you to use Amazon.co.uk. In the end I just bought almost everything elsewhere; a policy I may stick with from now on, at least until the day we finally get an Amazon.ie.
And now it is 4 a.m. all over again. Tomorrow I must go to toil in the fields once more, so farewell.
Related articles
- Ahern quits Fianna Fail rather than face expulsion (independent.co.uk)
- Bertie’s fall from grace (economist.com)
- Ex-Irish PM Bertie Ahern took secret payments, judges say (ctv.ca)