Archive for May, 2010

A conversation with Slumdog

May 15th, 2010

It’s a long time since I had a strange phonecall.

I think they must have been storing up their strangeness, because I had a really weird one yesterday.

I had only just dressed, and was standing in the doorway to the garden, lighting the first pipe of the day, and inhaling the glorious smells of the countryside – freshly cut grass, pine forests and cow shit.  The phone rang, and I checked the number as I always do.  If it says ‘withheld’ I usually don’t bother answering it, but this one gave a number, and it was an overseas trunk call.  My curiosity was piqued.

“Yellow!” says I.

Well fuck me, but I was immediately bombarded with a load of gibberish.  Whoever he was, he sounded like he was straight out of the slums of Bombay.  Memories of “Slumdog Millionaire” came flooding back.

“Wadyawant” I said.

He ranted on for a while, and I managed to make out a few words.  As far as I could ascertain, he was phoning me because I had a registered copy of Windows Genuine Advantage on my computer.  I asked him what the fuck that had to do with him.

He gibbered on a bit and again I had to try to catch the odd recognisable word.  There was something about a fault in my setup or one of my files or something, and he wanted to fix it for me.

“Feel free” says I.  Was he going to send me a fixed file over the phone?  Was he going to give me a crash course in programming?

“Please switch on your computer” says Slumdog.

“I will in my hole” says I.

“I cannot fix the problem if you do not switch on your computer” says Slumdog.

“Tough shit” says I.  “I am nowhere near my computer and and am quite happy where I am.”

“You have to switch on your computer.  Then press the little button called Start.”  Holy shit!  I was about to get a lesson in Hindi on how to fire up my fucking computer!  As it happened, the computer was right beside me, but I had no intentions of switching it on until I had at least had my first mug of tea of the day.

I told him once again that I was nowhere near my computer, and that he could email me the instructions to do whatever he wanted me to do.  This confused him a bit, and he once again begged, nay pleaded with me to switch on my computer.  I could feel his sweat down the phone.  You’d swear he was trying to get me to disarm a bomb that was about to go off.

I asked him whether he was an idiot, or did he think I was an idiot?

There was a long protracted sigh [which is incidentally, the same in any language] and he hung up.

My computer is still chundering along as it always has.  It hasn’t exploded.

If anyone wants a genuine taste of life in the slums of Calcutta, just phone Slumdog at 00119476632176.  I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear from you.  Be sure though to have your computer switched on, as he’ll get very upset if it isn’t.

At least I’m delighted to know that my hack ‘n’ crack on my pirated version of Windows works so well though.  Heh!

Amazing new revelations about smoke

May 14th, 2010

There are times when I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I came across an article a while ago, and after I read it I laughed.  Then I cried.  Then I laughed again.  Then I just gave up and went to the pub.

The article is a report on a bit of ‘research’ done in Canada.

There are a couple of things to note about the article.  Firstly it was done under the auspices of the University of Rochester Medical Centre.  It’s a university, so they really know what they are talking about.  Right?  Next, the research was carried out by an Assistant Professor of Paediatrics, who is a qualified doctor.  By Christ but she knows what she is talking about.  Right?  So we have research, carried out in a university by a highly qualified and experienced person.  This is something that we have to take seriously, and believe without question.  Right?

Let’s see what this highly qualified person at the university discovered.

She discovered that cigarette smoke can travel through brick walls.  WOW!!!

Even more astounding, she discovered that cigarette smoke can travel through the wall of a house, make its way through the open air and then travel through a brick wall into the detached house next door.

OK.  I’m going to pause here, and add my own little bit of ignorance.

No, I’m not a qualified doctor, and no, I don’t work for a university.  I have no qualifications apart from the usual degrees and diplomas that everyone seems to have these days, so I have no right whatsoever to question the work of such an eminent person.  Right?

I did study science at third level however, and there are one or two things I remember from those lectures that I did bother to attend.

The fist thing is that when you come up with some fact, such as the finding of a chemical [cotinine] in the bloodstream, the first thing you do is work out a hypothesis.  Now, a hypothesis is just that – a proposed explanation.  The next thing you do is test that hypothesis through experimentation. If the experiments fail, you modify or abandon your hypothesis.  You keep experimenting, and you look at all possible solutions, until you find the one that not only fits, but can be proved.

Now ‘Doctor’ Wilson discovered cotinine in the bloodstream of lots of children.  Cotinine is used as a marker to test for nicotine levels.  Her hypothesis was that these children must therefore have been exposed to tobacco smoke, despite the fact that no one in their home smoked.  Therefore it must have come from next door.  The fact that next door was separated from the children by a brick wall didn’t deter her.  Conclusion?  That smoke travels through walls.  QED.  The fact that some of these children lived in detached houses didn’t deter her either.  Smoke can now travel through two walls and the intervening space.  QED.  Somehow she seems to have jumped straight from the hypothesis stage to the conclusion without any proof or experimentation?  Very strange?

As I said, I am not qualified in these matters, but I can say with absolute certainty that this is the greatest load of bollox I have heard in a long time.  If air can travel through the walls of Canadian houses, then they need to seriously amend their building regulations.  The concept of smoke jumping from one detached house to another is so derisive that it could only be taken as a joke. Yet this ‘doctor’ seriously presented this crap to the Paediatric Academic Society.  What is even more worrying is that this paper was accepted without question.

Did it never occur to ‘Doctor’ Wilson that Cotinine is found in other substances?  In fact, nicotine [which produces Cotinine] can be found in a lot of plants, including potatoes, eggplants, aubergines and tomatoes.  It’s funny that she never thought of these?

I wonder if she thought of asking the children how many surreptitious fags those children enjoyed behind the bicycle shed?

Read it and weep.  Or laugh.

Democracy does not work

May 13th, 2010

Democracy in this Godforsaken country does not work.

Democracy is supposed to represent power for the people, by the people.  In this country, it represents power for the elite, by the elite gobshites.

How would I go about changing things?

First of all, scrap the constitution.  It is supposed to be the written aspirations of a country, not a fucking rulebook.  Any constitution that can be cited as a reason for not reducing a judge’s pay has to be seriously off the rails.

Scrap our entire electoral system as we know it.  It doesn’t work.  Any system that places a small town solicitor in charge of a country is asking for trouble.  Any system than can have a pig ignorant social worker as second in command is dangerous.  Any system that has a national politician sorting out individual social welfare payments or broken street lights is laughable.

Local elections are fine.  They carry on as before, and the elected representatives look after their county which is the way it should be.  National elections however would be non constituency based.  Anyone can vote for any candidate no matter where they are standing.  TDs would therefore be national representatives which is their purpose in the first place.  They would have no say whatsoever in local affairs, which would eliminate the ‘parish pump’ politics which is the scourge of our times.  I would also slash the number of TDs and abolish the Senate.

I like the idea of appointing ministers, not from the pool of elected TDs, but from public competition.  That way, people can be appointed according to their real suitability and there are no more bicycle shop owners trying to organise communications, or farmers’ daughters running the education system.

Rewrite our legal system.  It is outdated, cumbersome and half the laws should be scrapped anyway. 

Tell Europe to mind their own fucking business when it comes to how we run things.

It needs some ironing out, but I think it could work?

The only problem is that turkeys never vote for Christmas, so there is only one way this could come about.

Anyone for a revolution?

Tree fellers

May 12th, 2010

I am quite tired today.

A neighbour decided to fell some trees a few days ago, and since then I have been woken early every morning by the sounds of chainsaws and tree munchers.  I can’t even have my afternoon nap, and that makes me irritable.

By this morning, I had had enough.

Today I hired my own tree fellers [actually there were four of them] and they came with a bigger muncher than the neighbour’s one.  They arrived, and battle commenced.

The neighbour’s muncher tried to compete, but mine had a deeper, more angry note.  My lot had more chainsaws too.

It was not a pretty sight.  The neighbour’s lot realised early on that they hadn’t a chance, but made a valiant, if futile attempt to fight back.  The battle was swift, vicious and bloody.

Of course the neighbour’s lot lost.  They packed their bags, their chain saws and the muncher and they went home with their tails between their legs.

My lot did a great job of cleaning up the mess.  There isn’t a leaf, a twig or a drop of blood left.

At last, I can have my afternoon nap.

Quiet, please…….

Just follow the condoms

May 11th, 2010

I have mentioned before how there is a very simple method of postal addresses in Ireland.

We don’t have one.

In the cities, everyone is neatly filed away in housing estates with fucking stupid names like Beverly Hills Heights or Windsor Downs that bear no relationship to the estate itself.  The usual rule is the more fancy the name, the worse the estate, but that is neither here nor there.

In the countryside, we don’t bother with names or numbers.  We just are.  Our identity is well known, and if you call into any shop in the village and ask where Grandad lives, they’ll tell you.  Because we don’t bother to name our roads, directions tend to be rather precise, which is a good thing.  There is none of this “follow Seaview Road until you reach Marlborough Lane” type of rubbish.  It’s more a case of “follow that road until you see a red barn on your right.  If you see the red barn, you have missed your turn”.  Directions tend to be very poetic at times, and I think visitors to the countryside appreciate that.

Of course our government are trying to change this by introducing postal codes, in their usual trick of giving us all numbers instead of identities, but that is going to be fuck all use.   “Drive two miles to WE109993 and turn right”?  Right!

One of the rare times our system comes unstuck is when there is a children’s party in the area.  The postmen and the deliverymen all know where we live, but for some reason young children are hopeless at working out the lack of system.  Young Johnnie’s idea of an address is most likely to be “a big house with green windows” which isn’t much help.  Because of this, the party hosts tend to tie balloons to trees, bushes and hedges in a breadcrumb sort of fashion.  Follow the balloons and you’ll find the party.

As I own part of the entrance to our lane, people used to tie their balloons to my trees which was fine by me.  They were slightly more decorative than the usual old plastic shopping bags that have been stuck in the branches for years.

In the last few years however, brambles have somewhat encroached on the trees, and brambles have thorns.  Thorns and balloons don’t mix very well.  One gust of a breeze and the entrance to the lane sounds like an artillery barrage.

So if you are looking for a children’s party in my area, just look for the tree that’s decorated with brightly coloured strips of rubber.  You’ll find them easily enough.  They look like used condoms.

If on the other hand, you’re looking for the party in my gaff, just look for the tree decorated with condoms. 

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