Just Shut The Hell Up And Drive.

Nothing can dampen the good humour you have enjoyed from a delightful evening of friends, pints and capes (!)quicker than a racist mouthpiece of a cab driver. I am a mild-mannered person- no really- I do not like confrontations, but fuck me, I had little choice last night but to tell my driver to shut up and drive.

What a cliché he was! Direct from central casting. We live in a country where a corrupt shower of crooks and dingbats has brought the economy to its knees and somehow this is the fault of the non nationals? This was AFTER he gleefully informed me about a ‘fucker’ from Ballymun who hadn’t worked in 20 years with 6 kids whom Cabbie seemed to think ought to be shot in the face. Maybe so, but if some shyster is milking the system then the system is clearly fucked up and there is bog all I can do about it late on  Monday night. ‘Strikes!’ says he, ‘That shower have little to be striking about.’

Quite. But I can’t do much about that EITHER.

One of the ladies made a VERY excellent point last night, that the Henry hand ball which so crushed the nation, opened the floodgates for a lot of tools to indulge themselves in racist xenophobic language. Shit hits the fan? Blame the foreigner. How convenient, how disgusting, how very fucking Irish of us. Whinge whinge, blame everyone else. It’s bollocks, the rot rises from within. Be brave, look in the mirror, assign blame squarely where it should be, and if you hear somebody else talking shite let them know that you DON”T appreciate it and you WON’T be perpetrating the
rose-tinted celtic dream of how fabulous we are as a nation.

Dear Jennifer Lopez

Stop, just stop.

Flooding

It has been raining for weeks here in Ireland. I’ve never witnessed anything like it and reports are saying this is the worst rain we’ve had in 40 years.
Every morning I wake in darkness and hear the patter of rain on the roof or lashing against the windows. It seems relentless. But then it rains a lot here, we should be used to it, prepared for it. But of course we are anything but. Cork, Galway and Tipperary have all been hit with serious flooding.
I feel so sorry for them. Ican barely cope when the internet goes down for an hour. Looking at the photos of people queuing up to get enough water to drink is shocking to me. Poor people- apparently 40% of homes in Cork are without water or electricity. Could you imagine how upsetting it is to have your home flooded a few weeks before Christmas? to have your furniture and floors destroyed? To be without running water and electricity for days on end? Horrible.

Why did the ESB release so much water from the dam on Friday if they knew flooding was a likely outcome?
Why are so many homes being built on flood plains?
What on Earth can be done to ensure this does not happen again?
Is this a result of climate change and if so what preventions can we as a country take?

My thought are with the people worst affected.

What an odd question.

Buying foundation earlier. Distracted and a bit blown about having been at the recyling bins in the middle of a gale.

‘Is your hair really real?’ The gal working behind counter asks.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it is.’

She nods, rings up my purchase and hands me my change. We say our good byes.

How very odd.

Mothers! Know your place. Hint, it is with your baby- at ALL times.

Urgh, this is an ‘I read the Daily Wail so you don’t the have to’ post.

I don’t fully understand my obsession with the Daily Wail. I know it’s pure muck, I know it’s ALWAYS written to be obnoxious, it has that polished shit Liz Jones writing for it, it is a xenophobic anti-women anti-liberal, anti-person rag of the highest order. Yet I seem unable to resist reading the blasted thing- online, but still.

Another reason I hate the wail is that it makes me defend people who I care little or nothing about. I can’t understand it. Wayne Shrek Rooney and his wife Coleen? I mean COME ON!

Yet defend her I must, because that blasted rag has for the second time in a fortnight berated her for daring to leave her home. Why? Because she is a mother now, and mother’s cease to be people with interest by default. Good mothers are selfless creatures who stay with their babies 24/7 and should not be seen until that child starts college. Then she can relax a bit, have a drink and pull on the twinset and pearls for yearly Christmas photos.

Article can be read here.

 

‘it came as something of a surprise to see the 23-year-old out again with Wayne, 23, in tow to watch the pop superstar, this time in Manchester.

Clearly, the WAG who has earned millions from her own lucrative career, alongside her millionaire footballer husband, is not keen to let new motherhood slow her down.’

Ah yes, ‘eyebrows raised’ as Coleen goes to a concert with her husband, leaving her new child at home with its grandparents, what a weapon. Bring forth the sack cloth of motherly shame! Unleash the hounds of concerned disapproval. Concerts! How very dare she.

 

The comments are even better.

“Now then… What would l rather do?

Gaze at my beautiful new born baby? or

Gaze at someone on stage. ?

My baby wins every time.

- Lucy, UK, 19/11/2009 13:02

 

Its great that they have close family around to help out and great to get a couple of hours out but a shame that she obviously isn’t offering her baby the very best in life by breast feeding.

- jemima, surrey, 19/11/2009 13:04

See that! Total strangers get to judge Coleen on her mothering skills and what she should do with her own body. And it’s okay, she’s a mother now, what right does she have to take a few hours off to watch a concert, doesn’t she know her baby is only a hop and a skip away from lying under a bridge with a needle in his arm because of her behaviour. Why isn’t she gazing? Why isn’t she feeding? Why is she OUTSIDE!!?

The whole thing is bollocks of course. Idiot Jemima has obviously never heard of a breast pump or -shock horror- realised that not every mother breast-feeds ( boo-hiss). And while babies are quite interesting and funny to ‘gaze’ at, your average parent does actually exist in the real world where they interact with other people and have other interests. Newborns sleep at a lot, it’s unlikely the baby will be traumatized by its parents attending a concert, or even two. In fact I’m pretty sure the kid won’t remember. My real hope is that the good readers of the wail make it through baby Kai’s formative years with such ease. After all, their opinions are so valuable. Without them to judge a young woman based on entirely nothing where would the wail be?

Priests are men first.

I listened with growing amazement yesterday to the kerfuffle over a priest who upon falling in love with a woman, stood up before his congregation and announced he was leaving the priesthood for her.

This resulted in a flurry of calls to radio stations and some rather ugly comments on Boards.ie.

But over all the general consensus was a positive one. HIs congregation applauded his decision and vowed to stand by their man.

‘We want to keep him’ One old lady was quoted as saying.

“The Church has lost a good, kind, generous man. He was loving and caring and he did a lot of good for a lot of people,” said one woman.

Well that’s dandy missus, and I dare say he has.  I  do feel for the man and agree his was a brave stance that he had clearly thought about, but like puppies, priests are not just for Christmas, Easter, funerals, weddings and christenings. They are a servant of Rome, and as such much adhere to the rules of the Vatican. In other words no rumpy, no ladies and no sex.
It’s an antiquated system and rife for abuse. Priests are men first and foremost, with bodily desires and wants. It always struck me as ridiculous that fully functioning men should remain celibate and hardly in keeping with the go forth ad multiply ethos of the bible, which is full of rumpy. I believe it was preferred in part to keep us womanly jezebels from gaining any of the lucre the church is so fond of. No family, no heirs, not coughing up when the priest dies.
Whatever the original reason, thems the rules. And while it is quite right of him to leave a business/organisation he no longer believes in, it is not aok with him remaining on as a priest.
No really. His loss will mean the church scrambling around to find a replacement and they are getting thinner and fewer on the ground. Eventually-hopefully- the CC will die a death in this country. I would like to see it pop its clogs in my lifetime, but that is unlikely to happen. Still I like stories like this one, it heartwarming that a human remembered he is just that in time for him to act as one.

A question about morphing.

Exactly when did Jeff Bridges morph into Kriss Kristofferson?

And in text speak.

OHG!( Irish for OMG) Xtly wn ded J.Bridges mph nto Krx Krsoferson L8rs bish, WTF?

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/crazyheart/

New word of the Year. Unfriend.

A new word had been added to the lexicon. Unfriend: to remove a friend from your social networking site.

You can now unfriend a person. I, unfortunately, was listening to the radio when I learned this. The girl who reported it said something ‘Wow, so what word do you think they can use to say the opposite of that? Friend?’

‘Sure,’ the unfemale presenter said, ‘ if you can unfriend someone, you can surely friend them.’

‘The word befriend already exists, god damn your eyes.’ I said aloud, feeling tireder than I have ever felt before.

Friend was a perfectly a good noun, now we have verbed it good and proper. We did the reverse with disconnect, it was a verb, now it is a noun, we can- if we’re utter and total wankers- see a disconnect between things.

For the rest of the day I am going to unlisten to the radio.

Catherine Nevin, Black Widow or Victim of miscarriage of Justice?

I opened the paper on saturday and over eggs and potato farls I read an interesting article on Catherine Nevin.

If you don’t know who she is, Catherine is the ex-landlady of Jack White’s pub, window of the murdered Tom Nevin and stylish much hated figure of fun for the tabloids. She, who graced the newspapers carrying a single red rose at Tom’s funeral, was involved in a huge court case back in 1996.

“After 42 days of hearings and one of the longest deliberations in legal history, Mrs Nevin was found guilty of the murder of her husband Tom at their Co Wicklow pub, Jack White’s Inn, in 1996. She was also found guilty of soliciting three men to murder him.”

Now I know Catherine Nevin, I often had a drink in Jack White’s back in the day. I used to go to there for the traditional New Year’s day hunt. She gave me soup and coffee once in the middle of a snow storm and refused to charge me for it. I knew Tom a little as well, and as likeable and flighty as I found her, I found him dour, straight, and dull as dishwater, a man who liked to read the paper down in the bar, while Catherine flitted about the lounge having the craic.

My personal likes and dislikes are not important though. I have long contended that her conviction was unsafe, and felt she was judged harshly on her looks, her theatrics and well, people just did not like her. The tabloids whipped up a ridiculous frenzy around her, describing her clothing in slavish detail, her hair, what she was reading, her nail varnish and so on, it was relentless and daily. She was composed,  icily blonde,  a sure fired killer, and the sainted Tom, stood no chance against such a tethered diva.

Except…well where was the evidence? There was no evidence. There was no murderer for one, no admission of guilt, no weapon found, the men who spoke against her were dubious characters, and NOW it transpires, the state kept vital information about the witnesses from the jury.

‘Nevin’s guilty verdict was ultimately based on the evidence of three men – William McClean, John Jones and Gerard Heapes – who said they were solicited by Mrs Nevin to kill her husband. The jury was told that in order to reach a guilty verdict on a count of murder, they must first reach a guilty verdict on one or all of the solicitation charges. Without evidence of solicitation, there could be no murder conviction.’

Solicitation is not murder, buying a weapon is not murder, talking about murder is not murder. Thinking about murder is not murder. There is either evidence of murder or there is not. You cannot jail a person because you dislike them or find them cold. You cannot jail a person for life based on nary a scrap of physical evidence. You cannot jail someone based on a thought crime. None of the three men who gave evidence at Catherine’s trial were jailed for Tom’s murder, so who killed him? Was it one of those three? No? Then who? Because it was not by Catherine’s hand he died, even if and I say -if-, she was behind his death.

Catherine Nevin may very well have ordered the death of her husband, she may have plotted his demise on more than one occasion, but that does NOT prove she was behind his death on the day he died. The case did not prove its case and I would be very surprised if her conviction was not over turned.

Things that make me go ooooooo STOP THAT!

Ginger pixie, with shoes tied no doubt.

Happy ginger day to you, at last the end of my week off. Weeks off are confusing things and ought to be avoided unless you need to leave your home in order to work. Then you should look forward to weeks off, I hear.

The title of today’s post is in reference to the paramour, my beloved, my much adored other half. He has a bad habit see, one that makes every last nerve I have vibrate with anxiety. I have oft complained to him about this habit, but that seems to amuse him and that of course annoys me further. I will now attempt reverse psychology on him by ignoring the thing he does, even if secretly I am diggin’ my nails into my palm.

The bloody man insists on walking about the place with his laces open. For those of you who had Gammas who liked to be the bearer of bad tidings, this means he will trip over them, fall and break his front teeth and I don’t need to tell you how much that squiks me the hell out.

I don’t understand it, he’s an intelligent sort. Why would he do such a thing? Why not tie them? Does he want to be toothless? I can see it happening see the blood spilling from his mouth, his teeth shattereed like a jagged mirror. It makes me twitch.

Untied laces while walking about, I am very much against them.  Have a good Gingerday and I hope you have tied your laces.