Archive for March, 2009

Mankind has seen the light

March 3rd, 2009

I have to admire our Council’s initiative.

For years now I have admired their ability to stick temporary traffic lights up at every available opportunity.  It only takes one bloke with a pickaxe and the lights are erected and traffic is brought to a standstill. 

In the Good Old Days, they would send out a team of men to do some job or other, and they would bring the lights along as an afterthought.  Then they realised they were on to a good thing, and would start erecting lights on an arbitrary stretch of road and then invent some work to justify them.  Quite often they would stick up the lights and then just park a JCB in between them for effect.

Now, of course, the Council has run out of money.  They can no longer justify spending money on wages for blokes who are only there as an excuse for the traffic lights.  They can’t even afford to hire that clapped out JCB to decorate the roadside.

The Council has a problem.  They need to erect temporary lights, otherwise traffic will flow freely, and we can’t have that.  The lights are a necessary part of our culture now, and motorists feel deprived if they can make a journey from A to B without having to be delayed by fifteen minutes or so.

Fair play to them though.  They have come up with an ingenious solution.

Last week they erected a set of lights on a particularly tricky stretch of road.  This piece of road is on a steep hill and is very narrow.  They erected the lights, and to protect them from traffic, they surrounded them with cones, barrels and signs.  They then set them to a delay of about ten minutes, and left them there.

Can you not see the blinding simplicity, nay the utter genius of this? 

The lights are their own justification.

They are necessary, because the road has been narrowed by the lights themselves.

This is the stuff of Nobel Prizes.  This is a sure sign of Man’s intellectual evolution over the apes. This is a concept that surpasses Cold Fusion or Perpetual Motion.

Now, when I travel that stretch of road and have to wait my ten minutes behind the light that is protecting itself from itself, I have to marvel.

Sheer genius!

Having to Do It Yourself

March 2nd, 2009

Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t posted earlier today.

The fact is, I was Out.  [Why do people start sentences with ‘The fact is’?  I hate that.]

I had to go to one of those great warehouses they call DIY stores.  I had a load of stuff to buy, such as paint, wire netting, floorboards and a cattle prod.

I wandered around for half an hour.  The musak was bloody awful so I tended to head for the quiet corner, which wasn’t very helpful as the only thing they had there was toilet seats.

Not wanting a toilet seat, just at the moment, I had to brave the musak and head out amongst the endless shelves of paint tins, claw hammers and things to hang on your wall.  I found the paint easily enough as they had great stacks of the fucking stuff at the end of each aisle.  Paint brushes were easy to find as they were strategically placed behind the lighting section.  You couldn’t miss the floorboards as the pile was so big it looked like it was waiting to be loaded on a ship.

I couldn’t find the wire netting though.

I searched everywhere.  I found wattle fencing and bamboo fencing.  I found razor wire and I found three-core wire, but no wire netting.

I found a bloke who looked like he worked in the place.

‘Excuse me!’ says I.  ‘Can you point me in the direction of the wire netting?’

He pondered this for a moment.

‘I know it’s around somewhere’ he said while looking at the ceiling for divine inspiration.

He wandered off, and I followed him.

He peered around a couple of corners and walked down a few aisles and eventually, he accidentally tripped over a roll of wire netting that someone had left lying out on the floor.  He picked himself up, beamed at me with delight and then vanished as only a sales assistant can.

I now knew where everything was, and I did my calculations as to how much of what I wanted that I wanted.  I then went up to the main information desk to find out where to get a bloke to help me carry the floorboards out as they were fucking heavy.  She paged Paddy, and Paddy duly turned up.  It was my friend of the wire netting fame.

He beamed at me again, and I explained to him that I needed someone to carry half a ton of floorboards.  I told him I would do it, but that I had a bad back.  He immediately claimed that he had a bad back too, so we looked each other up and down, and decided we were well matched liars. He grabbed one of those low loader things they have and headed off to the furniture section.  I called him back and told him the floor boards were in the other direction.  He looked a bit confused but followed me anyway.

We reached the flooring section, to his surprise and delight and loaded the trolley.  I also loaded all the rest of my stuff.

‘Hold on’ says I, ‘I nearly forgot the wire netting.’

‘I don’t think we do wire netting’ he said apologetically.

And I thought I was bad.

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.

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