Archive for January, 2011

Quadraphonic silence

January 9th, 2011

I have a loud-speaker system.

I’m not sure where exactly I got it from.  It may have accidentally slipped into my pocket when I left work, or I may have bought it.  It doesn’t really matter where it came from – the fact is that it exists.

Originally I hooked it up to a computer, which is what it is designed for, but the computer blew up shortly after.  I hope that was just a coincidence.  Leastwise, the speakers have been sitting there doing nothing for the last ten years or so.  It is a complicated thing with a dirty great sub-woofer, a tiny tweeter, and four weird looking satellite speakers.

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but yesterday, I decided to see what would happen if I hooked the speaker system up to my television.

I dusted it off, untangled all the wires and set it up.  I plugged it in.  Nothing happened.  The television sounded exactly like it did before.  And then I remembered a tiny volume control on one of the satellite speakers.  I turned it up, and damn near blew my eardrums in.  I adjusted the volume.

As experiments go, I think I can mark that one down as an unqualified success.  The sound is quite remarkable, and I spent last night listening to Classic FM off the satellite.

One of the great things about the new sound system is that when I mute advertisements, I can listen to the resulting silence in full glorious surround-sound, which as everybody knows, is far preferable to stereo silence.

I am looking forward to the evening news tomorrow.  I shall be wrapped up in the all enveloping silky tones of my Sharon in glorious, full spectrum quadraphonic sound.

It should even make the news tolerable for a change.

Weirdos

January 7th, 2011

I do wish they would fuck off.

They keep phoning me and when I answer, there is no one there.

What’s worse, they keep changing their number that comes up on my little display.  Sometimes it’s 000123456789. Sometimes it’s 111111111111  They phoned today, and their number was 0061111111112.

Cold callers are bad enough.  At least I can tell them to fuck off directly [and I frequently do], but the Weirdos [as I call the latest batch] don’t even hang around for a bit of abuse.  They just disappear as soon as I answer.

If it’s the CIA, they had better get their act together, though why they should just set out to annoy me is a tad baffling. 

If anyone out there knows who they are, could you please pass on a message for me?  I don’t like having to give messages by  proxy, but they leave me no alternative.  Could you please tell them to fuck off?  From me?

Wishing you good health

January 6th, 2011

Whatever else you do, don’t fall ill or have an accident in Ireland.

If you are misfortunate enough to require hospital treatment, you are fucked.  Mad Cow Harney has managed to reduce the health service here to a point where you would prefer treatment in Uganda or Libya.  In fact you would wish you were anywhere else other than Ireland.

Yesterday there were 569 people waiting for beds and having to make do with lying on trolleys in hospital corridors.  What the fuck are our billions being spent on in the health service?  Far from being reformed, the service still manages to hit new lows in performance.  At this rate it has to be the sickest health service in Europe.

Relying on the HSE is like playing Russian Roulette.  The only way to ensure proper treatment in a proper hospital is to go privately, and this of course means health insurance.  We are informed today that at the end of the month we are going to have to pay more.

Ireland has been in recession for two years now.  There has been a long period of deflation, with both prices and wages decreasing.  In theory, all salaries and prices should decrease at the same rate, so the overall effect is that no one is worse off.  So health insurance should decrease also?  Wrong.  It is increasing.  Bearing in mind that prices generally are going down, by how much do you thing the insurance is rising?  5%? Nah!  10%?  No way.  20%?  Hahaha!  Premiums are going up in my case by a staggering 45%!  How can anyone justify a price increase of 45% in the middle of a recession?  Fucking madness.

There are times when I feel that I am living through a nightmare.  Such crass incompetence, waste and crass mismanagement couldn’t possibly exist in the real world.

But it does.

Out of my face

January 5th, 2011

Like Twitter, I never really understood Facebook.

I created an account there a couple of years ago just to see what all the fuss was about.  I played around with it for a while and then I just got bored with it.  I stopped visiting, and only drop in on the rare occasion where Herself wants something.  For example, I dropped just after Christmas to stick up a wee video I had made of the Wren Boys.  I did the job and left again.  I don’t believe in hanging around where I’m not wanted.

I went in again a short while ago, just to see if I was still there.  [I am]  I discovered that there were 14 friend requests, 2 friend suggestions, 51 application requests and a partridge in a fucking pear tree.  There was also a sack full of messages, and that’s where things get a little sticky.  You see, a load of them were Christmas wishes and not having seen them, I never replied to them.  Woops.

One of the little difficulties I always had with Facebook is the concept of ‘friends’.  Apparently I have 133 friends, most of whom I have never heard of.  Then there are the ‘friend requests’ where apparently people want to be friends with me.  That is fine, but where I come from, you like someone and you become friends.  There is no need for a fucking formal contract, or an RSVP.  It would be interesting though to treat real life like Facebook – I walk into the pub and see a good looking Young Wan so I hand her a small contract asking if I can be her friend?  I wonder how she would react?  Heh!

Another thing I found irritating was the number of ‘applications’.  The hard and fast rule about them seems to be that they are either boring, or else they demand my mobile phone number.  They can go fuck themselves.  That number is only for the women in my life.  Even Herself doesn’t know it.

So, having made my annual pilgrimage to Facebook, I can ignore it for another year.

Oh, and before I forget -

To all my friend in Facebook…. have a Happy Christmas.

hot and cold

January 4th, 2011

There are two fridge-freezers in the house here.

How we came by two is a long story, and if I told you that at one stage we had an extra refrigerator as well, it would be an even longer story.

It is sort of convenient having the two units.  One is in the kitchen and that is where all the groceries go.  The other is in the garage and is used mainly for the freezer bit and not so much for the refrigerator bit.  The latter is just handy for storing white wine [if I have any] and any other essential drinkables.  I even store milk in it.

You may wonder how I would manage to fill two refrigerators and two freezers, but it is quite simple.  I hate shopping and the worst type of shopping is the trip to the supermarket.  I fucking hate those places with their tacky muzak, the kids running around and the trolleys with wobbly wheels, so I get all my stuff delivered.  Seeing as we live some way from the supermarket, I only get an occasional delivery, so each one nicely fills up my two fridge-freezers.

I have a problem though.

The fridge-freezer in the garage has gone all temperamental on me.  I don’t know if it is sulking at being excluded from the kitchen or whether it is just bloody minded, but the fucking thing stops working every now and then.  And the now and then always coincides with a cold spell.  So all during the snow, the garage yoke refused to work and we had to throw out a load of stuff that had thawed in the freezer.  As soon as the snow melted, the fridge-freezer started to work again.  It is really fucking irritating.  It means that every time a cold snap arrives, I have to bring everything out of the freezer and dump it in the garden, which by then is a lot colder than the freezer.

I have a nasty suspicion that the fridge-freezer has been cozying up to the oil tank.  For the last couple of years, whenever we get warm weather the oil tank fuel gauge shows empty  and only shows the correct level when the temperature has dropped a bit.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.  It’s a fucking conspiracy.

Fucking technology!

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