The question is five what?

I don’t know.  Five minutes?  Hours?  Days, weeks or years?  Who knows?

In the meantime, chat amongst yourselves.

And here is a wee something for your edification, amusement or education.  Take your pick.

Our little pipsqueak of a finance Minister [Noonan – the one who always sounds as if he is issuing a summons] has told the Greeks to get their act together and form a government.  That’ll put the fear of God in them?

Talk about an overblow sense of self importance!

I can just imagine the scene; all those Greek parties squabbling over how they should form a government when word seeps through – Noonan has spoken.  Quaking in fear, they put all their differences to one side and the Greek political crisis is solved, and disaster is averted.

Right!

Our gubmint is getting quite slap-happy about the Greeks.  Only a couple of days ago they issued a dire warning to the people of Ireland – if we reject the Fiscal Treaty we will end up like the Greeks.  Quite how rejecting a treaty leads to having no government I don’t know but if it does, then that alone is reason enough to reject it.  Far more likely is that if the Treaty is accepted, we’ll all end up like the Greeks – jobless, homeless and hopeless.

For a campaign which they swore would be truthful and honest and wouldn’t threaten the voters, they are doing quite well.  So far, all I have heard is tales of money drying up, and how we would lose the respect of Europe [big fucking deal] and now, how we will end up like Greece.  We have been threatened with bankruptcy and isolation.  Vote NO and Ireland will cease to exist.  No putting the fear of God in us there, then?

So far, the only positive things they have had to say were all about how it will stabilise Europe and in particular the Euro.  And therein lies the rub.  This treaty is simply and solely to prop up a failing currency.  It was designed with the currency in mind and certainly not the citizens of Europe.  We can all go to hell in a handcart so long as their precious fucking Euro is all right.

In a nutshell, the Fiscal Treaty is good for the Euro and very bad for the Irish people.

I see Ganley has joined the fray too.  There is something about that man I don’t like, and I can’t quite decide what it is, but fuckit, if he is campaigning against the Treaty then I’ll let him buy me a pint anytime.

Anyone or anything that puts the shits up our gumbint has to be a good thing in my book.

Why is that, you ask?

[Or maybe you don’t]

Because Dublin City Council has a problem and has used the most remarkable piece of logic to solve that problem.

The problem is that the Council has placed litter bins throughout the city.  And people are putting their litter in them, and this apparently is infuriating the Council.  So it is removing the bins again. 

You have to admit that the logic here is quite brilliant.  Remove the bins, and that removes the litter.  Sheer fucking genius!

I used to have a computer game called SimCity.  This involved constructing a city with all the required services such as roads.  As the city grew, so the roads became more congested.  The solution [in the game] was to remove the roads again, whereby traffic immediately stopped!  So someone in Dublin City Council must have played that game and is applying the same logic to the litter bins.

I presume by the same logic, councils are going to solve the water problem by removing all the water mains?  And while they are at it, they might as well remove the sewers to solve any potential problems there?

Of course other departments and organisations are soon going to see the advantages here and will presumably jump on the bandwagon.  The HSE will cure the nation’s health problems in one swift bang by demolishing all the hospitals?  The financial crisis will be solved by blowing up all the banks [why burn the bondholders when we can burn the bonds]?  Our political problems will be solved by nuking Leinster House?  [Pleeeeeease can I do that one??]  We can eliminate crime overnight by removing all the Garda Stations?  The list is potentially endless.

All our problems will be solved.

An it all started with a piece of litter.

Sheer fucking genius indeed.

You know those moments?  You are reading the paper when you find a wee article that causes you to pause and mutter “What The Fuck?”

I know a little bit about business.  You invest some money in the company and with a bit of luck you make profits.  If you run your business properly, you will continue to make profits, of if you fuck up, you make a loss.  Sometimes, due to influences outside your control, you take a bit of a beating and that is the name of the game.

But supposing you are a private company, that has a contract with the gubmint that states that if you run into the red, that the state will step in and make up the loss?  That would be pretty sweet, wouldn’t it?  While the profits roll in, you sit back with your cigars and Champaign and enjoy the ride, but if there is a downturn you know the tax payer will step in and stop you making a loss?

Nice fucking work if you can get it? 

This apparently is what is happening.  The item that elicited my “What The Fuck” response was about our toll roads losing money because the level of traffic had dropped.  Apparently revenue is down everywhere except Dublin.

“But don’t worry,” says our gubmint.  “If you go into the red, we’ll step in and make up the difference.  The taxpayer will never notice a few million going into propping up a private company.”

So if times are good, you rake in the profits and keep ‘em.

If times are bad, the taxpayer foots the bill.

Talk about a win-win?

She has this strange thing of wanting to watch the Late Late show “in case anything interesting comes up”.  The fact that nothing interesting has come up in the last ten years doesn’t seem to sway her.

Fortunately I had the spare remote at hand as I was able to quickly kill the sound when Jedward came on.  It’s just a pity I couldn’t kill Jedward at the same time.

Apparently these two screech owls have been chosen “to represent Ireland” in the Eurovision Song Contest.  Again. 

For those of you who are not familiar with Jedward [oh, you lucky, lucky people] they are a pair of utterly talentless twins [funny how twins always come in pairs?] who can’t sing, can’t dance and can’t even speak properly.  They screech.  In fact they screech in txt spk, which I suppose is a sort of talent.  Their only claim to fame is that they dye their hair blonde and make it stand on end.  Remove the hair and that’s the end of their entire career.  [Now there’s a thought…  Heh!]

Last year we unleashed them onto the Eurovision stage.  I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a plot to get revenge on all the times we have had to host that fucking circus – a sort of Eurovision Montezuma’s Revenge.  And just to twist the knife, we are sending them again. 

Herself unmuted the television [the bitch] just as Jedward were about to perform their song.  To say it is terrible is an insult to terribleness.  It was fucking painful on the eyes and ears.  For someone like myself who likes music it was a torture a thousand times worse than waterboarding.   They might even win with it.

As I was calming my nerves with a very large glass of whiskey, the next guest came on.

It was that snivelling cunt John Crown who is successfully campaigning to have smoking banned in cars where there are children.  I’m not going to go into the rights and wrongs of that [the Nanny State thing of a new law to cover the actions of a few].  What got me steamed up was his reasons for this law.

He started waffling about how “extraordinarily hazardous” smoke is and then came up with a classic bit of scaremongering – within a minute of lighting a fag, the atmosphere in a car is thirty times higher than the maximum safe limit and would have the American EPA shouting for people “to leave the streets and close their windows”.  Will someone please ask these prats how for half a century and more, we all survived totally unscathed in an environment where smoking was the norm, in houses, cars, buses and just about everywhere except churches?

This addle brained idiot then went on to talk about Chernobyl, and how there were NO birth defects detected after the disaster in 86.  Zero, says he.  None, says he.  No birth defects whatsoever, says he.

What the fuck is this idiot on?

He is claiming that a lit cigarette is absolutely lethal but it’s quite OK to spread the contents of a nuclear reactor over a continent?

It was about that time that I lost it.  I can only take so much unadulterated crap.

If anyone wants me today, I’ll be out.

I have to buy a new television.

Question One.

This treaty is supposed to provide stability to, and confidence in the Euro as a currency.  The contents of the treaty are there for all to see, and the world knows it is going to be ratified, so why aren’t the markets impressed?  Seems to me as if they are as twitchy as ever, especially if you are a Spaniard.

Question Two.

The Euro as a single currency cannot work.  That has already been proved.  You cannot apply one currency to so many different types of economies.  How is signing a piece of paper going to solve that?

Question Three.

The proposed financial formulas in the Fiscal Treaty are more or less identical to the formulas in the Maastricht Treaty [or whichever fucking treaty governed the Euro – there are so many of ‘em] and that didn’t work so why will this one be any different?

Question Four

Now that Dame Ends has lost his Bestest Fwiend Sarkozy, who is he going to play with in Brussels?

So many questions.

So few answers.

So I come to the slip-road onto the motorway and the fucking car in front of me slams the brakes on and stops as if it’s a T junction.  A woman driver of course.  We had to wait until the motorway was clear of all traffic for five miles in each direction before proceeding.

Will someone please tell these cunts that a slip road is for accelerating on?  You are supposed to build up to motorway speeds and then gently merge with traffic?  You only stop if it is patently obvious that there is too much traffic to merge into.

*sigh*

We came to my exit, so I indicated and pulled into the exit slip-road.

The same fucking bitch, at the last second [and without indicating] pulls off the motorway onto the slip-road and damn near takes off my front bumper in the process.

And they wonder why women drivers have a bad name.

A Crash Course

Lesson 7

If you leave your car parked in the garden for a couple of days, it is not a good idea to leave the passenger side window wide open.

Especially if it pisses rain for those two days.

Not a good idea at all.

I suppose you think I am going to head off on a rant about Brussels?

I couldn’t be arsed.

I shall celebrate the day in the appropriate fashion.

Ireland Supports Mozambique On Climate Change

What in the name of blue fuck is going on here?

We are broke.

Smashed.

Not a penny to our name.

Yet we are throwing money around like we have tons of the stuff?

So some little cunt I have never heard of hands over five million we don’t have to a country I have barely heard of to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?

Five.  Fucking.  Million?

This is beyond incredible.

The word bizarre doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Our gubmint is cutting back on health and education, and is demanding cash from us at every turn, yet we can throw five million at a country thousands of miles away to “help” them with an imaginary problem?

This is so weird that it leaves me speechless.