Census Schmensus. What a load of old cobblers.

Are you staggered by the census, no? Me neither. What a load of hooey. If you’re too lazy to read all of it, the Journal did a decent enough break down of it.

 

• There are slightly more women than men living in Ireland (98.1 men for every 100 women). The ratio in 2006 was 100.1 men for every 100 women.
• Divorce is up – the number of divorced people in Ireland has increased by 150.3 per cent since 2002.
• 17 per cent of the population was born outside Ireland – that’s an increase of 25 per cent on 2006.
• Half a million people living in Ireland speak a foreign language at home – the most popular were Polish, followed by French, then Lithuanian and German.
• Over half the total population of Ireland lives in Leinster.
• There was an increase of almost a third from 2006 to 2011 in the number of people who denoted themselves as Travellers on the Census. There is, however, a drop in the number of Travellers living in mobile homes.
• Almost 475,000 households were living in rented accommodation. In 2006, it was 300,000.
• The average weekly rent in Ireland dropped by 1 per cent from 2006 to 2011. Yes, 1 whole per cent.
• 70 per cent of rural households use oil to heat their homes; 52 per cent of urban homes use natural gas; 4 out of 5 of all households use some type of fossil fuel to heat their home.
• There were almost 290,000 homes vacant on Census night. That means that 14.5 per cent of all housing stock in Ireland lies empty. Leitrim and Donegal have the highest stock of vacant properties, at 30 and 29 per cent respectively.
• Nearly 28 per cent of Irish people over the age of 65 live alone. Almost 37 per cent of those over 75 live alone and over 44 per cent of those aged 85 and up live alone. Two thirds of all over 65s who live alone are women.
• However, men are living longer – in the over-70 age group, the number of men is growing faster than the number of women.
• The number of single people over the age of 15 has fallen slightly from 43.1 per cent in 2006 to 41.7 per cent in 2011. There are more single people over the age of 15 living in urban areas than in rural areas. (45 per cent versus 36 per cent)
• People are having fewer children – the average number of children per family in 2006 was 1.41; in 2011, it was 1.38.
• Around 1.77 million people said they could speak some Irish (although only 1 in 3 of 10-19 year olds said they could). But only 1.8 per cent of the population over the age of three said they spoke Irish daily, outside of the school curriculum. In Gaeltacht areas, 35 per cent of people spoke Irish daily outside of school (of the population who actually can speak Irish; of the total population in the Gaeltacht, it is 24 per cent).
• There has been an increase of 45 per cent in people saying they have no religion (that’s 269,800 in 2011 vs 186,300 in 2006) – the age group with the biggest proportion to mark this option was in the 25-29 year old age range. There is also a section marked ‘not stated’ which features 72,900 people – that was 70,300 in 2006.
• There were in fact more people identifying themselves as Roman Catholic in 2011 (3.68m in 2006; 3.86m in 2011). Church of Ireland is the next biggest religion – 129,000 people; with Muslims numbering 49,200 (up from 32,600 in 2006). Louth has the highest proportion of Roman Catholics; the Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown area has the lowest.
• Almost 20,000 Irish people returned to Ireland in the 12 months prior to the Census in April 2011.
• Polish people have overtaken UK nationals as the largest non-Irish group living in Ireland.

 

Does anyone buy that 84% of the country is Catholic or that so many ‘fluent’ Irish speakers abound? Pfft.

I’d have more to say on it but ennui and barely-restrained fury are all I have today to keep me going. Not even a naked Carrot Top could lift my spirits.  I don’t want to burn out.

Have a *-* weekend. Do or do not, there is no try.

Lipotrim, Celebrity Slim, replacement meal shakes a few years on, where are we?

Long time readers will know I abhor meal replacement diets as the nonsense they are. Lipotrim is my particular béte noire, but I hate them all in equal measure.

I believe it was way back in 2007 when I first started banging the drum on Lipotrim. I did a few follow-up post over the years, usually had to put up with dog’s abuse as I did so from irate people who accused me of all sorts, declaring themselves outraged that I, a blogger, should cast such a jaundiced eye on a product that was sold in PHARMACIES! What did I know? Was I a PHARMACIST!?

No, but  you don’t have to have a degree in pharmacology  to understand that replacing meals with a shake, and dropping up to 10 pounds a week is not sustainable, healthy nor in any way shape or form does it get to the root of weight gain/loss. At some stage a person needs to stop drinking the shakes and revert to real food, and if you’ve never learned a thing about nutrition or trigger foods or emotional eating or any of the numerous hosts of reasons a person might put on weight, then that person goes back to square one; fatter, poorer, disillusioned and full of self-hatred due to failure, a failure, I might suggest, was inevitable and one where the poor customer is set up to fail from the outset.

Of COURSE pharmacies are going to defend Lipotrim et all:  it’s their business to sell products to make money; that’s it, that’s their sole reason to exist.

Anyway, apropos all this, it gave me no particular pleasure yesterday to catch a segment on the radio talking about what I was talking about in 2007.

Shall we?

Chair of the Irish Heart Foundation, Dr Donal O’Shea, warned the public about “shortcuts” on the road to weight loss: “If we have learnt anything over the last decade in weight management it is that, for most people, slow weight loss is the only way to lose weight successfully and keep it off.”

He welcomed the fact that pharmacists were becoming “more and more active” as health care deliverers – but warned against promoting meal replacement products, saying that by doing so, some pharmacists could be “encouraging a cycle of failure in people attempting to manage their weight”.

He particularly singled out Lipotrim as an example, which he felt pharmacies ought not to be promoting.

He said

In my clinical practice I have seen people with real health problems resulting from very low calorie approaches, such as meal replacement products. I cannot say it enough, quick fixes do not work.

My message to the public is to understand that there is no such thing as a shortcut to weight loss. Weight loss takes time, and the real key to success is to understand and accept this fact.”

Of course some fellow Rory O’Donnell from the pharmacies side was brought forth to give their side, which was pretty poor I felt,

O’Donnell insisted every pharmacist’s “primary concern” was the wellbeing of his or her patients. “It is too flippant to claim that pharmacists are promoting meal replacement products without taking into account the impact on their patients.”

“Pharmacists are ideally placed to advise the public and to provide them with information in finding solutions to obesity. Obesity is a major problem in our society and the pharmacy sector continuously supports and promotes sensible weight loss,”

Naturally, charging 70/80 euros a week for some shakes is all about the ‘patients’. Naturally, watching those same patients fail time and time again on these replacement diets is in their best interests. Naturally, putting up posters and life-size cardboard models of skinny woman with a tape measure around their weight, promoting the next expensive fad diet is all about health and responsible health care promotion.

Naturally, I am skeptical.

Amongst the dog’s abuse I received from irate users of meal-replacement shakes, I suggested that instead of shooting the messenger (me) they ought to pop back a year later and tell us how they were getting on with the various diets, was the weight still off and so forth.  No one took me up on it. The people I did know who tried replacement-meal diets gained back all the weight and then some, for the  reasons I mentioned earlier.

You don’t actually need to be a medically -rained doctor to understand why Lipotrim is the abject failure it is. Sustainable weight loss is not down to one thing, but rather a combination of things. It takes time and mental adjustments, as well physical adjustments to lose weight, and more importantly, keep it off. It’s a life changing process, it’s about good days and bad days, about understanding the fuel we use to run our bodies, it’s about emotion and will and aging and exercise and… well, lots of things. It is certainly not about replacing food with foul-tasting, costly slurm that makes you miserable, tired and with thinning hair.

I would NEVER be cutting to someone who is trying to lose weight, ever. This is not an attack on people but on a faceless industry. As with psychics and all woo-peddlers, I reserve my hatred for the money-grabbing charlatans who prey openly on people at a weak ebb. The diet industry is a billion dollar/euro industry, it did not get that rich by helping people, it needs the repeat business. It is a leech, a pilot fish of misery. Don’t buy into it; let them go to the devil.

Lipotrim. I am STILL against it, in 2012.

A feral cat problem

Question: What can I do get rid of/ keep away a feral tom cat who arrives at my house everyday?

 

For months now a black tom cat we have nick-named Bob, has arrived at out house, usually looking for food. We don’t feed him per se, but there is always dry food available to our cats and Bob thinks nothing of entering the hosue to scoff their wet food when the humour takes him. This has to stop. He stinks to the high heavens and  as he is ballsy enough to enter the house, he thinks of it as his. For those of you who have never had to deal with a tomcat, they spray their ‘territory’ to let other cats know they’re in the vicinity. Unfortunately for us, Bob includes our home as part of his ‘vicinity’ and I’m heartily sick of him and his reeking eye-watering spray.

Of course our two remaining cats are afraid of him, whihc is understandable as they are not intact males and have not had to fight for anything more pressing than a warm lap for years. The Marklar and Bob got into a hell of a scuffle on Saturday after Bob broke into my office where the Marklar was asleep in my chair. This is a problem, it means we can’t even leave the office doors open to let some air through the house without Bob using the opportunity to come in a help himself (he spent a night asleep in the office a few weeks back when he hid at lock-up time). The Bigger of the Cats, toothless and too old to be deaing with this kind of nonsense, has taken to spending more and more time on my bookcase, rather than lying sprawled in the garden in the sun, which he likes to do. It’s not fair on either of my two cats.

Short of catching Bob and carting him off to Diamond Marks to have his balls removed, is there any way of keeping this cat out and away from our property?

I’m going to close my AIB account and here’s why. Also, the household charge, are you paying it?

I’ve held an AIB account since 1996, indeed I have long-held a fondness for AIB since a drunk manager and his equally drunk assistant manager, took one look at me, and, without any reason or financial history with them, decided to loan me the shortfall I needed to buy my first home many many moons ago.  Back then you could ring this particular branch of AIB on any given day, talk to the assistant manager, Paddy ( I shit you not) and arrange, over the phone now, a quick overdraft. They were magnificent people to deal with.

Of course that branch closed down, as did many others and it became more practical over time to go with a building society and that’s where I stand today, but I kept that AIB account and stick a few quid in it now and then, aiming to some day pay off the albatross that is my mortgage.

No longer: AIB now want to charge people ‘maintenance fees’ if they don’t keep €2,500 minimum  in their current accounts, NOT saving accounts, current. The bank admit that this will have an effect on 40% of its customer.

Well not this customer, I’m going to close it down and  make the permanent move across. It’s a small act of defiance, probably not even noticeable  in the grand scheme of things, but I’m doing it anyway because I’m totally sick to the back teeth of everyone trying to get their paws on what little money I have.  Plus AIB have closed so many branches now it’s a pain in the arse trying to bank with them in the first place.

So there you have it, so long bank, nice knowing you, but no, no bloody way.

By the way, are you registered to pay the house hold charge? Are you going to pay it?  What happen if, en masse, the population of this country revolt and refuse?  What tax will they come up with next I wonder.  The car tax has already gobbled up my earnings this week, at this stage I’m terrified they’ll tax the bloody air I breathe.

Death, sentimentality, lack thereof.

 

 

 

Most of you know Puddy, beloved old cat of this house, was euthanised in late December after many years of constant battle with ear problems. Puddy was 21 when she died, a good age for a cat, in excellent health BUT for her ears and a very much-loved creature. She had traveled all over with me, had her own passport and was an absolute sweetheart of a cat. She liked sliced ham, and people. In that order. You simply could not sit down in this house for two seconds without her landing on your lap, doing that weird little silent miaow she did in delight at finding a human in repose.

So I am rather amazed to discover that I clearly didn’t care for her at all.

Why?

Because when she died I left her in the vets.

Yes, really.

‘I can’t believe you just left her there.’  I was told recently, in an incredulous fashion.

‘She was dead.’ I countered. Diamond Mark did ask if I wanted her ashes, but I didn’t. Puddy wasn’t religious, I doubt she would have given a shit about being scattered. More importantly, what the feck did I want with a dead cat’s ashes?

‘You could have buried her in the back garden.’ incredulous person said, incredulously.

‘Er, in the flower beds or the lawn? Are you nuts?’

 

I have oft pondered the strange weird sentimentality people have for death. I don’t understand it at all, not even a little bit. I have been to my father’s grave exactly twice in my life, and on both occasions it took me  a good while to find it. Once there, I cleared away a few weeds, felt slightly foolish and a little cold and wandered off.  The second time I was at a different funeral, so I swung by, just to see if I could locate it again.

My oldest friend finds this utterly remarkable.  She’s the sort of woman who visits graves on anniversaries and so forth, she drives comfort from this. Therefore I wouldn’t say anything to her about it. Indeed why would I? On the other paw I get no comfort standing in a field surrounded by buried corpses. I’m just not hard-wired that way. I find funerals tedious,  the open casket thing weird and slightly creepy. I want no such funeral for myself and don’t give a  rat’s ass what they do with my body once I am dead. If I don’t get my wish of being cremated, loaded into a blunderbuss and fired into a reiki centre to a cry of  ‘HEAL THIS MUTHAFUCKERS!’ I think I’ll just donate myself to science, let them get some use from me.

Back to Puddy, so yes I left her there on Diamond Mark’s table, looking surprisingly small, and terribly old. No I didn’t take her body with me. No I didn’t bury her in the garden or pay for her ashes to stick in an urn over the fireplace. What I did was love and care for her for 21 years. I loved Puddy, but she was dead. Incinerate her, put her in a bin, whatever it is vets do with remains; she was already gone, dead, passed, no more. I was with her in her final moments, I held her close so she would not be afraid, and if not fucking about with her corpse makes me a heartless fiend, then fuck that shit, so be it.

Maybe if more people spent a little more time worrying over the living and less time stage-managing corpses the world would be a better place.

 

 

 

ta-tee tat ta St. Patrick’s Weekend starts with a Gingerday bang.

Top o the mornin’ to ye! Tis St. Patrick’s weekend, a weekend of debauchery, tom foolery, drink, parades, vomit and shenanigans. And I will – as tradition dictates– stay as far the hell away from it as humanely possible by spending most of tomorrow morning running from Howth to Fairview and back again.

The party started yesterday is seems, I had to go into town last night to attend an event, and boy howdy, the place was mobbed. Shout out to the three American Ladies who looked lost and scared outside the Hairy Lemon who it turns out were staying on NCR, and had no idea how to get back there.  Upon directing them to the quays, the map holder turned to me and asked  ‘is it safe?’ in such an anxious voice I felt bad for them.  I suppose that’s one of the things about staying a foreign city, you don’t really know where’s a good area until you get there.

Anyhoo. I’m as busy today as I was yesterday, so I just want to wish you all a very happy St. Patrick’s Weekend, where ever you are. Stay safe, have fun.

Norris rears up on Tallafornia

I don’t watch Tallafornia as I’ve absolute no interest at all in ‘reality television’, none. I don’t watch Jersey Shore or the Kardashions or…I know there’s more, but those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head. Gothy used to watch them, but for some reason has recently grown out of them. Not before catching a few episodes of Tallafornia and declaring it ‘ just awful.’

By golly, it must be, because David Norris spoke out about it in the Seanad yesterday, calling the show ‘compulsive and repulsive’. Imagine? The country is in the dog house and he’s calling for a debate on a reality tv show! This piqued my interest so I investigate, and oh my god.

He felt moved to speak after one of the ‘stars’ a girl called Nikita, gave a lap dance to someone. He said:  “the last episode was really obnoxious in that one of these young women who had an interest in somebody who wasn’t particularly interested in her managed to bring somebody back to the house and the other guys decided to gang up and take a bet on whether she could be taken from him. And there was simulated relations sexual activity, leaving eventually to full thing and I just wonder what kind of values this is inculcating in people.

 

The problem as I see it, is that whatever acts are committed by the ‘stars’ of the show, are forever recorded and can be used time and time again by TV3 or sold to other stations. Nikita, as far as I can gather is very young, and being young, makes mistakes. Unfortunately these mistakes are now recorded. ( there is of course a video of the lapdance on youtube, but I’m not going to link to it. If I can’t bear to watch it, I don’t see how having it here would be anything other than fully cringe worthy).

I can’t imagine what is going to happen to this girl everyone is taking about when the cameras stop rolling, as they will. Public interest is fickle, at the moment Tallafornia is bringing in big numbers, so these young un are riding high ( pardon the pun), living in a bubble of yes people, fueled by drink and notoriety, when the ratings slide, what then of Nikita? She’ll be remembered as the slutty young one who gave the terrifically sloppy lap dance live on television.

TV3 – naturally– are thrilled that there’s a furore, and why wouldn’t they be, this show costs buttons to make, has a huge audience and now has free advertising courtasy of a Senator. They’re DELIGHTED and if challenged offer only ‘ if you don’t like it don’t watch response. A rather Pontius Pilot view, but there you have it.

Where are this girl’s parents as a matter of interest? They surely can’t be happy about Friday night’s carry on, ca they? Or is the cult of celebrity so powerful now that watching your child enter the lion’s den without a weapon considered fair game?

 

Without wishing to sound like an old fuddy duddy, I feel sorry for this girl, she’s the lightening rod now, and I doubt she even realises it or understands why. It’s a wee bit depressing. It’s too late to drag this particular jenie back into the bottle, but for some reason, makig a spectable of yourself is regarded as something to be proud of and the public are thirsty for more.

Bravery

“Mulvey, of Ferney Grove, Mahon, Cork, would get his daughter to touch him. When she was older he would touch her private parts and when she was 15 he raped her. The court heard he raped her on two more occasions.

The victim told her mother about the abuse in 1997. When her mother confronted her then ex-husband, he admitted the abuse.

Ms Mulvey went to gardai three years later and the man told them that the abuse happened at least once a month. He said he didn’t find it unusual when she didn’t try to stop him raping her.

He believed that his behaviour was caused by something wrong with his mind and that he couldn’t control himself.”

 

“Mr Justice Paul Carney declared him a sex offender and sentenced him to 12 years imprisonment. However, he suspended the final six years.”

Rage inducing, isn’t it?  Here’s a fully grown man, a father, who has systematically groomed and abused his own child and he’s given a 6 year sentence, the same sentence as a woman who mowed a man down in a drug fueled rage and an importer or Chinese garlic who declared them apples to avoid a garlic tax. I do not know by what arbitrary decisions sentences are made, but I’d sure like them explained to me.

I don’t understand if the mother went to the gardai when she learned what her husband had done or not. It reads like it was down to the daughter to report him three years later, but maybe I”m reading it wrong. Regardless,  I am in awe of at the bravery of Lorraine Mulvey in waving her right to anonymity so that she might help other victims of abuse speak up against their abusers. I don’t understand how any parent can subject their child to such a monstrous betrayal of trust. I don’t get how any man could sexually assault a five-year-old. Either way, I hope for her sake she finds some measure of peace, and I hope her prick of a father who ‘couldn’t control himself’ around a child, rots.

Agility Staffies!

This made me laugh out loud. I so love these little dogs.

Driving in Old Age.

I’m not even sure how to broach this without sounding rather ageist, which I am not. But twice over the last week I have been pushed into a state of anxiety by elderly drivers on the road. The first was on the motorway returning from that time tardis, Ikea. I was in the slow lane, poodling along, I came close to my slip way, put on indicator and as I pulled in and old lady cut across two lanes of traffic to get ont the same slip way, causing two lanes of traffic to brake and that’s not funny on the motorway. She waved apologetically, put on the wrong indicator, then her wipers, then shot off again in a plume of exhaust fumes, going through the red light at the roundabout!   The second was up in Christchurch when an elderly lady couldn’t decide which lane to be in, so settled on both, with minor drifting. It was nerve-wracking I tell you, and the taxi driver who lost his rag and blared her out of it only made matters worse because she suddenly veered to the centre island and bounced a wheel off it before straightening again. At the traffic light she sat for ages until more horns suggested she move off, and by the next set of lights she had been overtaken by more irate drivers, none of whom ought to have over taken her where they did, but fully understandable that they might. I should also probably mention the gentleman in the Merc who parked up in Rathmines on the bend, wheels on the footpath, not actually in a space, who eventually just gave up trying to park his bloody boat of a car, put on a cap and wandered off.

It’s a sad fact of life that as we age we lose certain abilities, and as much as I applaud the elderly for keeping active and independent, there also must be some kind of awareness that it’s not always advisable to continue doing certain things unless capable.  It’s not just the old that have to be aware of failings. My long vision is rubbish, so I never ever drive without my glasses on, and I am far from blind. But I see no reason to risk my wellbeing or indeed the well-being of others so the glasses are on. I think most people are aware of their own limitations.

In the UK there is a drive to retest elderly drivers. to make sure they are safe on the road and have the reflexes and dexterity and skill to operate a motorised vehicle. I don’t really think that would be a bad idea here. My Pops would be livid if he had to retest, but I know for sure he’d pass with flying colours as he’s a good driver. My mother, on the other hand, in her 60s, would not, as she is truly dangerous and I have no idea how she ever passed to be honest. Thing must have been hella different back then.

What think you? Unfair to the older person, or sensible move?