Archive for the 'Rants' Category

Read the small print

November 2nd, 2011

It’s no secret that I hate this time of year.

I hate the dark evenings that are still getting darker.  The weather is miserable and damp, and we a long way short of the worst of it yet.  I hate the false jollity of the advertisements on television trying to convince us to have “The Perfect Christmas” with their tacky products.

And then there is the budget.

Yesterday I listened to a smug little bollix on the radio.  He is part of some fucking quango that advises the government on taxation, and was gleefully explaining how they were going to milk us for every last cent.

The little pox-bottle happily went through a long list of ways to screw me, from property taxes and residential taxes through car parking taxes, water charges and septic tank charges through to a new brain-child – the sugar tax.

Yup.  The Nudging has started.  The little fuck talked about the “obesity epidemic” that is sweeping Europe and how we must put a stop to it, and how they are going to tax sugar because it is bad for us.  Next it will be fats or carbohydrates or some other shit that gets taxed and it’s “all for our own good”.  One again the gubmint has decided what is good for me and I get no say in the matter.  I just have to pay more.  As fucking usual.

So this little failed abortion listed every single conceivable way they are going to screw me.  They will tax the food I eat and the water I drink.  They are even taxing my fucking shite.  No doubt when my time comes, they will rip open the coffin to make sure I’m not bringing anything of value with me.

But that is not the end of it.

Oh no.

This gubmint that is ripping my pension asunder is happily giving away one billion dollars today.

I will rephrase that.

Our gubmint is making a present of seven hundred and fifteen million euro to a shower of fucking gamblers.

They don’t have to do it.

The gamblers are well aware of this.  They read the small print – you know the bit about how investments may go down as well as up?  They are not expecting any money but our fucking shower are giving it to them anyway.

Why?

Because they want the world to see what nice people the Irish are.

I’m sorry, but I don’t feel very nice at the moment.

Time for a change

October 30th, 2011

This time change business really pisses me off.

They come along in Spring when the days are full of promise for warmer times ahead and when nature is at its best and they rob an hour off me.  Without so much as a please or thank you, that hour is gone.

Then in Autumn when days are getting short and the weather ain’t at its best, they come along and give the hour back again.  I don’t want an extra hour of Autumn and I resent having to lose an hour of Spring.

I see there is talk of getting rid of all this faffing about.  The Brits are talking about making it Summer Time all the year round.  [Now if they could make it Summer all the year round, that would be brilliant?]  They say they are happy to do that if Scotland agrees.  No mention of Ireland, I note?  Of course it has fuck all to do with the Scots, as the Brits will find out.  It will depend entirely on whether Brussels agrees or not.  How long, I wonder will it be before we are all working off EUST [European Standard Time]?

Of course the Brits have one ace card up their sleeve.  All they have to do is turn Greenwich Observatory into a car park and the whole world is fucked through a lack of basic reference.  Time would go into free-fall just like the Euro.

Of course I now have to go around the Manor and change all the little yokes that keep time.  God be with the days when we only had clocks to worry about.  Now just about everything has a little built in clock somewhere.  A right pain in the hole.

In all probability I will waste the entire hour I have just been given, going around resetting everything.

And it will be getting dark in the afternoon instead of late evening.

I fucking HATE that.

All that jazz

September 30th, 2011

I have just been rudely awoken from my slumbers.

I was sitting here with my eyes closed, enjoying the scent of freshly cut grass from the garden and just thinking about nothing.  I then made the mistake of switching on Lyric FM.

I like Lyric FM.  It is a classical station that isn’t as snobbishly highbrow as Radio 3 and tends to play what I would call middlebrow classical.

As I said, I switched it on and kept the volume low to accompany my idle thoughts, but was very rudely awoken.

Some fucker seems to have taken over the station and is playing Jazz!  Instead of some gentle Mozart, Brahms or Beethoven, what I get is fucking Art Tatum.

There is a style of jazz that I cannot tolerate.  It makes my ears bleed.  It’s the type of jazz where four or five blokes come on and they each play a different, totally airless tune all at the same time.  It seems to be obligatory that there is a piano, a saxophone and a trumpet, and the only talent required is that they be able to play as many notes as possible without any regard for what the others are playing.

I have a theory that everyone in fact hates jazz.  They are just afraid to admit it.  It’s a case of the king’s new clothes where no one dare be the first to admit that jazz is tuneless shite.

I kept the volume on very low in the hopes that the presenter would see the light and play something decent, but no – all we got was Art Tatum after Art Tatum.

I have given up on the radio.

I would like to go back to my doze.

But my ears are still hurting.

Running through treacle

August 2nd, 2011

For various reasons, I have to use Windows at the moment.

I fired up my Mail thingy and the last mail that I had downloaded was dated last February.  That indicates reasonably fell my fondness for Windows.

The Other Fella tells me that this is a fairly good laptop.  He says it has a Double Core Processor, which sounds like some kind of kitchen yoke for mashing apples.  He says it has four gagas of memory which is more than I have.  He also said something about sixty four bits, but he didn’t say what they are bits of.  He’s weird. 

Leastwise, it is supposed to be a fast machine.  I wish someone would tell Windows that.  The fucking thing is driving me mad.  It is so fucking slow that I swear I could work things out faster with a pen and bit of paper.  It keeps nagging me about updates for various things and I keep trying to ignore it, but it is so fucking persistent.  It just keeps nagging on and on and on.  It’s worse than Herself, and that is really saying something.

They say that the majority of offices use Windows.  It is no fucking wonder that the world is in a state of chassis.

And the games are fucking crap as well.

Real money

July 4th, 2011

Back when I was a lad, currency was simple.

Coinage consisted of the farthing, ha’penny, penny, thruppeny bit, sixpence [or a tanner], shilling, florin and half crown.  There were notes for ten shillings, a pound, a fiver and the rest upwards were rarely seen unless you worked in a bank.

The relationship between the pennies, the shillings and the pound was very simple too. There were twelve pennies to the shilling and there were twenty shillings to the pound.  It couldn’t be easier.  Any child could, and did cope with it on a daily basis.

In fact it was all so simple we tried to make it a little more difficult by using English currency at the same time.  They used the same denominations but slightly different shaped coinage.  One thing that did piss me off was that the Irish were literate enough to use both coinage systems, but the British weren’t and would rudely refuse the Irish versions.  That was enough to convince a young lad that the Irish were far more intelligent than the British, but that’s another story.  Heh!

Then back in the early seventies, they fucked the whole thing up by introducing decimalisation.  It was sad seeing a tradition being killed off in the name of dumbing down but there it was.  We had to cope with a new range of coinage. 

That changeover wasn’t too bad and within weeks we were all used to the new coins and the over-simplified conversion of a hundred pennies to the pound.  Slapping down the correct price of a pint was no problem whatsoever.

Ten years ago we changed to the Euro.

I don’t know what it is about the Euro but I fucking hate it.  After ten years I still can’t get the hang of those fucking coins.  They are small, fiddly and a pain in the fucking hole.  Every time I have to pay for something I find myself twiddling coins to see what number is stamped on the back.  The coins are too small and there isn’t enough difference in size.  Fucking Mickey Mouse money I call it.

The sooner that fucking Euro implodes the better.

Then we can get back to the good old pounds, shillings and pence.

Real money.

« Prev - Next »