Archive for March 1st, 2009

Latest news – Reckless spending to continue

March 1st, 2009

I have just seen a newspaper headline that has to be a joke.

Is this the 1st of March or the 1st of April?

“Central Bank and Regulator to spend €8m on new offices”

There are several possibilities here.

1) It is a joke.

2) The newspaper has got it wrong.

3) That shower of brainless idiots [aka our government] are taking us for a shower of brainless idiots.

I don’t think it’s a joke, as it lacks a punchline and isn’t very funny anyway.

The Tribune is generally not considered to be a tabloid rag, and I would therefore trust their integrity, especially as they weren’t too harsh on my book.

It has to be possibility number three.

The mind boggles.

That gibbering idiot got up on stage yesterday and spouted a load of meaningless rhetoric about how we have no money left and how we all are going to have to pay more in taxes.

biffo
Blah, blah, fucking blah.

I have a couple of questions for the government.

Where is this €8m going to come from?

Is it going to come from the same coffers that couldn’t afford €10m to protect our girls from cervical cancer?

Is it going to come from the same coffers that can’t afford proper class sizes?

Why is there insufficient funding for special needs schools and resources?

Is it mere coincidence that the money is going to a building firm?

Why am I sitting here writing this when I should be out there burning the Dáil to the ground?

Words fail me when it comes to this government.  Through their ineptitude, their greed and their total incompetence they have dragged this country to the brink of disaster.  They are now blaming the bankers for the whole mess, but they are ultimately the founders of our destruction.  Having completely failed to understand what they have done, or what to do next, they are now carrying on in the same old fashion – reckless spending of our money on their friends the builders, and demanding that we provide them with more cash to do so.

One last question.

Why are we not out en masse lynching the bastards?

Rubbish

March 1st, 2009

One of the great burdens to carry through life is sentimentality.

I have always been the sentimental type, who could never throw something out because it had some significance to my life.

I was the type of kid who would hold on to a cinema ticket because I enjoyed the film, or who would bring a pebble back from my favourite beach.

Over the years, all this sentimental crap has collected and I have boxes of the stuff lying around.

Recently, I made a decision.  All that shite must go.  It is filling up the place and collecting dust and I keep tripping over boxes of what is essentially rubbish.

I got a skip and made a wee rule: if it ain’t decorative or functional it goes in the skip.  Needless to say, the skip was full to overflowing by the time they collected it.  But it hasn’t stopped there.  Every bin day, if there is a spare corner in the rubbish bin, I manage to fill it with more crap. 

All this is very hard on the sentimental side, as I am chucking stuff that goes back to my childhood.  But who the hell is interested in it, apart from me?  I have just binned all my music books that go back fifty years.  They were full of teachers’ notes and little memories that frankly I would rather forget anyway.  So that is another little corner of the spare room that is now clear, and another box gone that I needn’t trip over again.

I am being absolutely ruthless, and following my rule to the strictest interpretation.  Those music books were not decorative, and it is very unlikely that I am going to start learning the piano from scratch again, so they weren’t functional.

So far I have only made one exception to my rule.

There is one item that fails to meet either criteria, yet I am holding on to it.

It is expensive to maintain and takes up a lot of space, yet I cannot bring myself to chuck it in the bin.

Why?

Well….  We have been married for over thirty four years.

I’m a sentimental old fool really.