Our Glorious Government categorically refuse to admit that they fucked up our economy with their tax breaks for builders, and their turning a blind eye to the bank’s activities.  Oh no.  It was the downturn in the global economy that caused our crash and they are all squeaky clean.

Our wonderful rail crowd refuse to admit that they fucked up an inspection of a railway bridge on the main Dublin to Belfast line [which subsequently collapsed].  Oh no.  It was fucking Global Warming!!!!

Our Catholic Church cannot understand why we are annoyed with them for covering up their decades of child abuse, buggery and rape.  It’s the fault of the media, or the work of the devil himself.  It’s nothing to do with them though.  Squeaky clean.

Every daily fiasco in this banana republic is blamed on someone else.  They spend more time trying to find who to blame than they do trying to find the root cause of the problem.

Why?

What is so fucking difficult about admitting you were wrong?

I got a comment on a piece I scribbled last week.  I thought it was spam because of the name of the user – The South of France Guide, and I sent a rather rude reply.  It transpired that they were a genuine commenter, and they wrote to me and said they were not best pleased.  I can’t say I blame them.  I wrote back and apologised, and I hope they accept that apology, though I can’t blame them if they don’t.

I hold my hand up and admit I made a mistake.  I was dog tired on the day, and that is a bad time to make hasty decisions.  I fucked up.

Or there again….

it could have been Global Warming?

That is one huge fucking number.

500,000.

Half a million miles will get you to the Moon and back.

Half a million hours ago, I hadn’t even started in Junior Infants.

Half a million days ago, Ireland was still ruled by the Celts.

Half a million Euro would nearly pay a minister’s salary for a whole year.

Half a million words is two thirds the total output from Shakespeare, or two thirds of the entire bible.

That is a lot of fucking words.

It is the number of words I have written since I started this lark.

I must be mad.

For reasons beyond my sphere of influence, I was a little tied up yesterday.  I would have been more tied up but Herself always was fucking useless at tying knots.

I had things to do; people to meet and, when you boil it down to the essentials, a life to lead.  In other words, I didn’t have the time or the inclination to scribble on this site.

Now, I knew I was in safe hands.  I knew you would drop by and having found no new material would while away your hours finding those gems that you had missed in the past.  I refuse to believe that you have read everything that I have ever written [even I haven’t done that] , so I can guarantee there are hidden treasures that you have missed.

I finally got around to switching on my laptop last night, and what did I find?

I found that you bastards hadn’t bothered your arses dropping by at all.

OK, there were one or two who had enough of a soul to visit, but the rest of you are just fickle, fly-by-night fair-weather users. Have you not heard all those advertisements asking you to check on your elderly neighbours?  For all you know, I could have been dying here of hypothermia and starvation, but do you care?  Not a fucking jot.

You see, I am now officially an Old Age Pensioner.  I must be treated with respect and reverence.  I must be treated with care and most of all, you need to make sure that I am OK.

Yes, I am disappointed, and more than a little hurt.  I thought you cared, but you are more interested in your fucking iPods and your fucking Facebook than you are in my welfare.

I have a good mind to start charging entry into this site.  By God, but when you have paid your €1,000 per year to visit, you’ll want to get your money’s worth and will drop by whether I have written or not.

I was so disheartened last night that I had to console myself by leaving sarcastic comments on Twitter about Ireland’s entry for the Eurovision which was being voted for on the Late Late Show.

The entries were like you lot.

Pathetic.

I used to get a right clatter of visitors from Ireland, which I suppose would be logical.  Second on the list was the Americans, who for some weird reason seem to find some masochistic pleasure in reading my musings.  Then came the UK who never really copped on to this lark, and then finally the rest of the world would dribble in.

For the last few weeks things have changed and I am really fucking worried.

Take today for example.  So far, of all my visitors there are five times as many American visitors as there are Irish.  That is not right.  It is mid morning, so everyone has been at their desks for a couple of hours.  That gives [say] half an hour to do your day’s work, and you should be well into your browsing, viewing porn, playing with Twitter and updating your Facebook by now.  Where the fuck are you?

This is an ongoing trend.  Each day I see that America tops the rankings.  Why?  Have they all decided to learn proper grammar and spelling over there?  Am I now part of the school syllabus?  It is very worrying as I may find myself starting to talk with an American accent, which as we all know is the first step on the road to hell.  Next thing I would find myself insisting on lunch in McDonalds, having to watch TV3 all the time and I would start using words like ‘awesome’ and ‘totally’.   You wouldn’t wish that on me, would you?

I suppose one possible explanation is that the naysayers are right – the Irish “blogging” scene is dead.  Most of the decent crowd have dumbed down their intelligence level and moved to Twitter instead?  I don’t know.

There again, I noticed that the list of nominations for the Irish Blog Awards is huge.  I have never heard of the majority of the sites listed, which would lead one to suspect that there are a lot of people out there giving their sites several names in the hopes of grabbing some limelight?  It’s a scurrilous idea, and I’m just glad that I thought of it before the nominations opened.  I have actually been nominated 327 times under various names and guises, but don’t tell Mulley.

So I’m appealing to all you Irish out there – please don’t let me become Americanised.

And if I don’t appeal to you, maybe if I wear my gingham dress I would be more appealing?

I suppose it’s worth a try?

There are limits though.  That Other Eejit had the fucking gall to ask me if he could use my site to write a post about his site.  I told him to fuck off.

Most of you will probably not be aware of his site.  I think it is an invaluable site for the simple reason that it is a benchmark that marks the bottom dregs of the web world.  Compared to that site, any other effort shines.  He provides the ultimate example on how not to write a site, and for that alone, the world owes him a debt of gratitude.  Heh!

For the last couple of days, he has been moping around the place complaining that no one ever visits, and he has discovered that it’s because the search engines won’t refer anyone to it.  He has never had a single visit as a result of a search.  Who says search engines aren’t intelligent?  Hah!  He wanted to write here to ask peoples advice and that’s when I threw him out.  I told him that if he wanted to ask for help, he should do it on his own site [where no one will ever see it] and he got very upset.

Of course the reason no one ever visits his site is very simple, though I’m not going to tell him.

Every time he’s not looking, I take his site down.

I was a little bit disappointed to see that I failed to get nominated under the Best Beauty/Fashion Blog as there is at least one site in there I would love to hammer into the ground [no names – no pack drill! Heh!].

I was more than surprised to see that I slid in under four categories which I did not expect – Best Personal Blog, Best Humour Blog, Best Political[?!!] Blog and Best Blog Post.  Our K8 is in there too, so I’ll collect her gong for her when I’m there.

Nominated under three different categories?

To whoever nominated me – thank you very much.

I am humbled.

I am flattered.

I am a little embarrassed.

I am more than a little pleased as well.

There were a lot of people linking to this site, and I wasn’t linking back, which didn’t seem fair.  But who gives a shit about being fair?

Anyway, I decided to do something about it.  I very nicely asked those people in Google if they would kindly tell me all the links that people had clicked to arrive here.  They were quite obliging and sent me the list.

All 13,090 of them!

This was a bit of a pain in the arse, as I had to go through them removing pages that were sub-pages of the main site, if you know what I mean.

Then a lot of them were from comments that I had left on other sites [yes – I do comment occasionally].  And some of them were casual mentions, and some of them were on forums and shit like that.

After all the pruning, I then had to visit each site to make sure it was still working, and to get its name right.

I finally whittled the list down to 134.

So there are 134 sites out there that have bogrolls blogrolls that link here?  I’m flattered.

It was actually quite an interesting exercise, as I came across a few sites that I had never even heard of before.  The other thing I got a laugh from was the great names that you lot have thought up for your sites.  Where the fuck did you get them from?

Anyway – I then spent an age putting all those links onto a page on my site.  It doesn’t look very neat, and I may do something about it sometime, but all the links are there.  All 134 of them.  I had to put them on a separate page, otherwise the front page would have been so long, it would have scraped off the floor.

Another thing that amused me is that half link to Head Rambles, and half link to Grandad.  Make your fucking minds up!  One or two linked to “Grandad at Head Rambles” which made sense.

Now, I may have missed one or two.  Take a look, and if you have a link on your bogroll blogroll, but you ain’t on the list, just tell me.  I will probably ignore you as life can be cruel sometimes.

If you want to be put at the top of the list, just change your site name, as the list is alphabetical.

Which explains why Grannymar is cuddling up with Grumpy Old Twat.

Heh!

First there were the callers to the door, and then there were the phone calls.  All interrupted my natural flow, so I just never got a chance to put pen to paper, or should I say finger to keyboard?

I even had a call from Pullit to say that the smoking inspector was down in the pub causing trouble, so that meant a trip down there, followed by a diversion to the landfill.  People say that country life is quiet!  Hah!

I have a little problem with my writing that makes it a little difficult.

I have found that if I have an idea for a topic and mull it over in my mind then that is the end of that.  I cannot write if I have thought about it.  I know there are people out there who take notes and things like that, but that just doesn’t work for me.  Spontaneity is the name of the game here.  Actually, I would go so far as to say that spontaneity is too slow.

The only way I can write on a topic is to wait until a thought crosses my mind.  Once the idea arrives, it is a case of typing like the clappers until the thought is purged.  I don’t plan anything though.  I don’t think ahead.  I just type as the thoughts come so once I start, I haven’t a fucking clue what even the next sentence will be, let alone where it’s going to end.

As I said, I had a few thoughts this morning, but I can’t write about them now.  Too much time has passed, and I have had a chance to think about them – a fatal error – and if I tried writing about them then I would write totally nonsensical gibberish.  But then, you say, I write nonsensical gibberish anyway so what’s the difference?  The difference is that even I would be bored reading it.  By writing spontaneously, at least I have the pleasure of reading it after, as I honestly haven’t a fucking clue what I have written until I have written it.

It’s quite a strange experience writing this way.  I read back on the stuff I have just typed and wonder where that hell all that came from.

How does anyone else do it?

Do people really plan things before they write them?

Am I the only one who hasn’t a fucking clue where he is going?

Last night I made up for it.  I had a great sleep with beautiful dreams where sunny beaches, Sharon Ni Bheolain and bikinis featured prominently.  It was good, and I didn’t wake ‘til late in the morning.

I was just contemplating putting my clothes on, when the phone rang.

I managed to answer it, which was quite an accomplishment, as essentially I was still asleep.  It was TippFM wanting to know if I would do a live interview for their morning programme.  What was worse, they wanted to do it there and then.  Fuck!

I am a bit like a steam locomotive.  I need to have my fires lit and I need to build up a head of steam before I venture onto the track.  So here I was, bollock naked, without my morning pipe full and no mug of tea and worst of all, a head that was still on a tropical island.

They said they would phone back in a couple of minutes, so I frantically put on the kettle and hunted for my pipe.  Too late.  The phone rang, and I was on air.

It was a disaster!

The poor chap in the studio did his best to wake me up, but it was a lost cause.  There I was, stark naked in full view of the entire county of Tipperary and I couldn’t think.  There were lots of emms, and errs, and my mouth was dry from lack of tea, and a mind as blank as Mary Harney’s.

He asked me questions and I struggled for answers as my dangly bits swayed gently in the breeze.

He gave up in the end.  I can’t say I blame him.  That’s probably the end of his career.

I finally got dressed, made my tea and lit the pipe.  I’m now awake and wondering if it all really happened.

I don’t remember what I said as it’s all a bit of a blur.  Did I let rip with a few fucks and cunts?  Did I mention anyone by name?  Can I expect some angry litigation?

Did I really stand naked in front of an entire county?

Hurt for Haiti

We all know it’s more than a good cause so if you are unfortunate enough to be in Limerick, then this is the fundraiser for you.

Bock has all the details on his site, so I suggest you take a look -  Limerick Haiti Fundraiser

As a little aside, I see Bloggers for Haiti has now raised in excess of €4,000.  Let’s all have a pint to celebrate.