A lot of you seem to be very keen to log into this site so you can write your own stuff.

Some of you try several times until you get locked out.  You wait until the lockout expires and then you try several more times.  Some of you have tried so many times that I think you may have an obsessional complex.  Yes.  I keep track of these things.

I could make life a little easier for you by telling you that I don’t log into this site using “admin” or “Grandad”, as I have deleted those accounts but why should I make life easier for you?

I could tell you that my password isn’t “password”, “Gandalf”, “Sandy” or “admin” but again, you’re on your own.

What I can tell you is that my password is a bitch to remember.  In fact I keep forgetting it, and if it wasn’t written on a certain part of my anatomy, nothing would ever get done here.

So if you are really that desperate to write stuff on the Interweb, I would suggest that you start your own site and fuck off out of mine.

Yours etc,

Grandad

That’s it.

I have had enough of this ‘blogging’ nonsense.

I’m quitting.

I am not going to write another post for the rest of the year.

I may start again next year.

If I feel like it.

I muddle along through life, doing the best I can and occasionally jotting my thoughts down here.  I don’t see anything extraordinary in that?

But then I come across something like this –

GET YOUR FOLKS ONLINE

Are your folks missing out because they’re not online?
Have you ever tried to help?
We know how difficult it can be!

Aha!  So that’s where I have been going wrong?  It explains one hell of a lot.  I shouldn’t be messing around here on the Interweb at all.  I have to wait until the daughter shows me how.

I will look forward to that.

So apparently she is going to teach me about “Using the mouse”?  That’s wrong for a start.  I don’t want to use the little fucker – I just want to kill it.  It has been shitting all over the place and resolutely ignoring all the traps.

Then there is “Sending an email”.  Again, that’s wrong.  I want to know how to send thousands of emails with one press of a key.  Those Viagra won’t sell themselves.

And “Shopping online”?   No, no, no!  That won’t do.  I need a course on “Stopping shopping online”.  Maybe then I could teach it to Herself.  Badly needed.  Just ask the poor postman.

Delving onto the site, I found a links page with all the links that any old fart would need.  There is a section there called “Blogs written by Older People”.  That’ll be interesting, I thought.  And what do I find in there?  Me.  Me and Grannymar.  The only two they could find?  And we are not even related?  Fuck!

So I am being held up as a beacon of light to the Old Folk of Ireland?  If that old fart can do it, then anyone can?  Hah!

In the meantime, I had better let the daughter know about this site so she can start teaching me.

Now, if only I knew how to use email………………

I must do it more often.

Maybe take an extra day off every week?  Or a couple of days?  Or seven days?

One of the problems I have is that nothing much happens here from one day to the next.  I therefore have little local news to regale you with.  I could write repeated and endless descriptions of Pullit pulling pints, but that would be monotonous.  I could amuse you all with Spanner’s futile attempts to get his leg over the yang wan in the grocery shop, but he would never forgive me, and I value his friendship. 

Life in the Manor isn’t much better, so that leaves me with very few subjects.  The only three that really get me worked up are the smoking bans, the EU and our useless fucking gubmint.  The problem here is that you are tired of hearing about them.  It has reached the stage where even oblique references brings forth moans from certain quarters.

I could invent stuff but that would be hard work and anyway I have always followed a policy of telling the truth, so that’s out.

It’s pissing down like incontinent elephants at the moment so I doubt I’ll get out and about today.  It’s also blowing half a gale so all in all, it ain’t very pretty out there.

So once again, I’ll probably have nothing to write about tomorrow.

No change there then.

Right Wing?  Left Wing?  Conservative?  Liberal?

Personally I don’t give a shit about labels but if I had to give myself one, I would like to think of myself as as Aspiring Libertarian.  And what is that, you may ask?  Essentially I believe in personal liberty.  People should be free to make their own mistakes.  The only law that should exist should be there to protect people from the action of others, and any law that doesn’t fulfil that basic requirement is a bad law.  Government dictats that tell me what I can eat, drink, smoke, where I can park my car or any other action that doesn’t affect others is a bad law.  The goal of an intelligent mature society should be to have a few laws as possible and not to have life so wrapped up in petty laws, rules and regulations as to make it virtually impossible to live without breaking some fucking rule or other.

I would like to think that I use my philosophy in the running of this site.  I try to have as few rules as possible.  There are some things though that I will not tolerate here.

I will not tolerate anything that could be deemed to be libellous.

I will not stand for racial or religious intolerance.

A bit of banter is fine but serious abuse of commentators is not allowed.

The most important rule though is that I have the final say in what is acceptable or not.  I reserve the right to alter or delete comments I deem to be offensive.  I reserve the right to bar people from commenting altogether.  I reserve the right not to give any explanation for my actions.

So there you are.  Essentially just four rules.  A Libertarian site?

Of course there is another rule…..

It’s my site and I can do what I fucking like with it.

He has rightly fucked up his own site that used to be theotherfellow.com.  He has moved it to apipeandakeyboard.com but has somehow screwed things up [as only he can do] so that the old address won’t work at all.

He has asked me to ask any of you lot who visit his site to change the address if you have it bookmarked.  I told him it was a waste of time and that he would be better off letting the site die a natural and humane death.  I also pointed out the the new name was far to long, but would he listen?  Would he fuck!

Anyway, I have passed on the message.  I have earned my three pints.

I drive a hard bargain.

Heh!

It was somewhere around the 17th or 18th of October 2006.  Maybe it was the 23rd?  Who cares?

One way or another, it represents five fucking years of wasted time.

Five fucking years!  When I think of all the things I could have done instead of wasting my time here, the mind boggles.  Herself never misses an opportunity to tell me that it’s a complete waste of bloody time and that nobody reads it anyway.  I just point out that so far nearly half a million people have read it [actually it's 457,630 but who's counting?] and that can’t all have been searching for a bit of porn.  If I eliminate the porn seekers, that still leaves nearly 10,000 visitors which isn’t bad.

Apart from three very sharp angles, 5 is a nice round number.  Not quite as round as 0 or 6, or even 8 for that matter.  Come to think of it, 5 is the least round number apart maybe from 4?  Anyhows, it is still a notable number and I think it deserves a few pints tonight in celebration.

I suppose it’s about time I put its name down for secondary school?

It was a comment on my little rant the other day about Ireland being a nation of sheep.

It was off topic, but I think it deserves a little examination…

MartinW writes as follows -

Most of the  impact of that essay is lost through the swearing, which only serves to indicate a poverty of thought and language.  If the author would desist from the use of the F-word, then his posts would enjoy a much wider circulation and listener sympathy.

Apart from the fact that I didn’t swear [much] in that post, he raises a question that I can’t answer.  How can I possibly know peoples attitude to the sparse cussing that goes on on this site?  I presume I could answer that MartinW’s comment is the first complaint/slap on the wrist that I have had in quite a few years.

I tend to write as I speak.  If something annoys me I tend to let rip with a few choice words.  It’s nothing to do with poverty of thought or language; it’s to do with my feeling a little better, and anyway a good adjective or two can nicely express my feelings.

As a little aside, one thing that does annoy me is the expression “the F-word”. It smacks of cowardice as we all know what “the F-word” is, so why not say it.  Unless of course it’s a different F-word in which case it is damned confusing.

So it’s up to you lot.  You are the people on whose behalf MartinW is writing, so only you lot can reply.  Let’s hear your opinion.

And I hope you all appreciate how I didn’t use the word ‘fuck’ once.

Aw shit!

Why the fuck do I bother with this site?

It takes a chunk out of my day where I could be otherwise doing sweet fuck all.  I could be napping?  I could be staring at the clouds trying to make pictures out of them?  There are lots of things I could be doing, but instead I am sitting tapping out nonsense.

Do I do it for your sake?  Hah!  I bet if I charged a wee premium for reading this shite, you’d all soon disappear.  I don’t kid myself. 

Do I do it for the money?  Well, that helps, but this site has been in recession for the last two years, with each month seeing a reduction so that I am getting less than a quarter of what I was getting a couple of years ago.  Even the housing market hasn’t fallen that far.  I wonder if NAMA would be interested in buying it?

Do I do it for myself?  I dunno.  Do I?

All I know is that most days I promise myself that I won’t write anything as I have nothing to write.  Then the fingers get twitchy and the laptop looks at me in that accusing way it has, and the next thing I’m tapping out another inanity.  Sometimes I read what I have published and cringe.  I wonder why the fuck I wrote that but it’s too late to do anything about it because as soon as I press the Publish button, it flies off into feed readers or Twitter or something and I can’t call them back.  So I am stuck with it.

I have made myself a wee promise that I won’t write anything if I have nothing to write about. Today, for example, nothing has happened yet.  The newspapers are full of shite that isn’t worth writing about so I am devoid of ideas.  For that reason, I won’t be writing today.  I’m taking another day off.

Hang on……

Shit!

Since then I have been musing away for my own satisfaction, and if others want to read it too then that is fine by me.

When I started, I discovered the delights of RSS for keeping an eye on other sites and I started a collection that I read every day.  That collection grew as the months went past and it ended up with a couple of hundred sites.  Occasionally I add a new one, and occasionally I delete one if I know it’s no longer in use.

Over the weekend I was mucking about and decided to clean out my RSS reader.  The rule I used was to delete any site that hadn’t posted in the last year.  I thought there would be a few, but to my surprise, I found I had deleted around half the feeds and was sorry to see such once excellent sites being consigned to the bin.

Looking through the remainder, one thing struck me – how few of them are Irish.  Only a handful remain and it’s a damned small handful at that.  All the rest are in the UK, America or various other outposts of humanity.  Where the fuck have they all gone?  And more to the point, why?

Of the remaining sites, only around half a dozen are posting on a regular basis and half of them are relatively new at the game.

I blame that fucking Twitter.