Head Rambles

Grandad January 28th, 2007

I seem to have upset one of my readers.

I’m sorry Nancy. You seem to have taken exception to my little article the other day. That’s your right. But you are confusing me a bit.

For a start, you take me to task for implying that all Americans are stupid. In fact I said [and I quote] “I said how I didn’t think they were all stupid. Only the ones who voted George W back in.”. I stand by that.

No. The only people who proved themselves to be stupid [and ignorant] were the people who were interviewed. And they were - you’ve guessed it - Americans.

I take your point that the Australians could have interviewed other people. You even provide a list of alternative candidates.

Bill Gates - OK. I’ll give him ten out of ten for constantly nearly getting things right. They never work properly the first time, otherwise why does he keep having to rush out fixes? I certainly wouldn’t buy one of his cars if he made them!

Doctors and staff at the Jonas Salk Institute - I’ll disqualify this one, because there are research institutes all over the world. Some worse. Some better.

Neil Armstrong - Hold on now! He is a fighter pilot who was trained for a different job. He did it well, I grant you but it doesn’t qualify him as a mastermind. I think you are confusing intellect with achievemnt here.

Hillary Clinton - Ex-president’s wife? Senator? How does this qualify her?

The staff at Google Earth - OK. You have one here. Hats off to them.

Oprah Winfrey - Now you are joking! She’s like Pat “The Plank” Kenny on speed with a screechy voice. Disqualified.

Noam Chomsky - A professor. I would expect him to qualify. No problems there.

Thomas Friedman at the New York Times - He’s a journalist. I would expect him to know about things.

The engineers and designers at Boeing - They are designers and engineers. That’s all. The world is full of them.

No Nancy. You are missing the point entirely. If I had a film crew, I’m sure I could travel to the States and interview some great intellects. I’m sure if I brought the same crew around Ireland I could find some right gobshites. But in either case, I would have to do some research first.

What worries me is the magnitude of the ignorance. I doubt there are many people in Ireland who would say that Australia is Iran, just because someone had changed the name on a map?

Incidentally, I did a search on the Internet using the term “are americans stupid” and got 2,930,000 results. Wow!

One I picked at random was quite good

And by the way, Nancy - I didn’t write the above.

Maybe we should start a debate on the American sense of humour?

• America
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Grandad January 27th, 2007

I used to be plagued by cold-callers on the phone.

They were all trying to sell me something I didn’t want. The worst offender was Smart Telecom, trying to get me to switch my phone account to them.

“You won’t regret it” says they. Ha ha! How wrong they would have been. [For the benefit of overseas readers, Smart failed to pay their bills and left thousands of their customers high and dry with no phones]

Lately I’ve come across a new breed of cold-callers. The Surveys.

I keep getting calls from people who hastily tell me that they don’t want to sell me anything, but could I answer a few questions for a survey please.

The first couple. I let through and answered their questions.

Then it occurred to me - why not have some fun? I didn’t ask them to ring after all.

So the next few that came on, I answered their questions with random answers.

How many bottles of water do you drink in a day? - 156.

How many children under the age of 18 reside with you? - 25.

What type of pet do you have? - A bottle-nose dolphin.

How far do you commute to work? - 15 feet.

You get the idea.

I think they began to get suspicious, because the calls started to tail off a bit. This annoyed me because I was having fun. So I decided to go for broke.

The phone rang the other night.

“Hello. Please-don’t-hang-up-I-am-not-trying-to-sell-you-anything”

“Is this a survey?” says I.

“Yes” says he, sounding very relieved. “I won’t take up much of your time. I just want to ask some quick questions”

“No problem” says I. “Can I see some identification?”

Long pause. “Pardon?” says he.

“I’ll need to see some identification so that I know you are who you say you are”

“But I only want to ask you some general questions. No personal ones”

“Ah!” says I, “but if a stranger arrived at your door and didn’t identify himself, would you invite him in even if he said he wasn’t going to steal anything?”

He thought for a while. “No. Probably not”

“Damn sure, you wouldn’t” says I. “Now show me some identification”

“I can’t. This is a phone line. I take it you don’t want to take the survey?”

“I don’t mind answering any and all of your questions, if you show me some identification first”

There was a very long pause. He muttered something and hung up.

Now a lot of companies get their information this way. And then they throw it back at us in their advertising.

So the next time you see an ad on television proudly announcing that “99% of all known cats brush their teeth with Gro-more”, don’t mind it. It was just me having fun.

• Around the house , Rambles
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Grandad January 26th, 2007

Woops.

Irish Blogs Awards are apparently bringing the internet to it’s knees.

Who says electronic voting doesn’t work!!!

ENN Article

• Internet
• Comments(0)

Grandad January 26th, 2007

I received an e-mail from Robert who apparently is a reader.

He wrote to me because of my attitude to Americans.

I wrote recently about my latest opinions on Americans, and I hope it was reasonably flattering. I said how I didn’t think they were all stupid. Only the ones who voted George W back in.

Incidentally, I got a postcard from George W the other day, which was nice of him. He signed it personally and all……….

Anyway, I digress.

Robert’s mail enclosed a link, which I followed. To say it is scary is understating things. This is horrific stuff. It’s a video of ordinary Americans being interviewed on the street by an Australian TV crew. It would be really funny if it weren’t so frightening.

Now I know there are stupid people in Ireland. You only have to look at Ryan Tubridy or any of the Boy Bands to see that. But we don’t have Weapons of Mass Destruction.

About the only sensible answer was from one who was asked to name the countries in “the Axis of Evil” and he suggested “California, Florida and New York”.

Go on. Watch it. You know you want to

I rest my case, M’lud

• America
• Comments(26)

Grandad January 25th, 2007

There has been a lot of talk recently over “Gayness”, or whatever you want to call it.

There was the news that one of the Anglican Churches in America has split down the middle, because they have a gay bishop.

And of course, Matt Lucas got married.

Now the Catholic Church and the Anglicans [or someone] are arguing over the subject.

Now I gave nothing against homosexuals [and I mean that in all senses of the word]. I am not homophobic. I don’t care what people get up to in the privacy of their own homes provided it is consensual and doesn’t involve children.

It doesn’t bother me if I see two men, or two women walking hand in hand down the road.

No. What REALLY gets up my nose is the word “Gay”. They have hi-jacked an innocent word meaning happy, or carefree and have turned it into something else.

I’m sure there are a lot of happy, carefree homosexuals out there. Fair play to them. But there are a lot of happy, carefree heterosexuals out there too. But they can’t call themselves gay any more.

What about miserable homosexuals? We all have bad days. What do they call themselves when they are feeling down? “I’m gay and morbidly depressed”??

A lot of older literature uses the word ‘gay’ in its original meaning. But you can’t use that literature in the classroom any more without ripples of sniggering and smirking.

Go find another word. No. On second thoughts, invent a new word. We can have world-wide competitions to find an appropriate one.

When I was a lad, life was a lot simpler.

There were three genders - male, female and Quentin Crisp.

You could tell the females from the males, because they had bumps on their chests, long hair and they wore skirts.

Men chased women and women ran from men.

I’m sure there were homosexuals around then too. In fact I know there were. But they didn’t have parades and get married on the front pages of newspapers.

Now it’s all confusing.

We have males, females, shemales, transvestites, transexuals, homosexuals, heterosexuals, and God knows what else.

I wish life was simple again.

I’m gay myself. But I’m not homosexual. I’m just happy.

• Rambles
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Grandad January 25th, 2007

Well, my web design company seems to be going from strength to strength.

I have already had a lot of interest, and one firm contract.

Now Blacknight seem to be showing an interest. They want to buy me a domain name. That seems fair enough. I’ll need one.

I’m in with the Big Boys! And I’m only in business two days.

To Michele: Thank you for your interest. I would like a domain name please. If you could let me know how much it is I will post a cheque. You can post me back the domain name and I’ll stick it on my laptop, so people know where to find my site.

It’s only fair that I do business with Michele, because I know Ron who works for Dick who knows Michele. Conversely, I know the prospective-mother-in-law of one of his employees. So either way, that should be a good enough reference.

In the meantime, I have been pursuing my quest to learn Java or Javascript or whatever it’s called. I pestered Ron all yesterday to give me a lesson. He was a bit frazzled because he was trying to write out a tender for a big contract [I'll be doing that a lot soon..!!].

In the end I think he got a bit annoyed, but he gave me some code to try.

I put it on a page but it does strange things.

Maybe there is someone out there who can help me. Ron says that web designers are great for helping each other out. Maybe there is a forum I could join?

• Web design
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