Photo casebooks break new ground

I saw this in the paper this morning. It seems the era of sexual phonetics has finally dawned in the world of tabloid problem pages. Either that or they really have given up all pretence of pretending to be about problems. Made me laugh anyway. Blogging this from my phone in liverpool by the way, I'm on stag. More anon.

Always cook your burgers on the George

I had burgers for my tea last night. I made them myself using a top secret McDanger family recipe that I shouldn't share for fear of excommunication from the clan, but I love you all, so here it is:

Get a lot of mince, squeeze handfuls into burger shapes and fry them. Then eat them.

My ma used to swear by that recipe. As in, literally - she'd stand by the mixing bowl going "fuckin' ravenous hoors of kids and their bastard burgers, c**tin' fuckin' bollocks shit bugger." She was a colourful, earthy woman.

Anyway, I always cook my burgers on the George Foreman - he put his name on it! - and it never fails to shock me when I look at the sludge tray afterwards. What you see in the above picture would, had the burgers not been cooked on the lean, mean, fat-reducing grilling machine (rolls off the tongue dunnit?), be oozing fattily and stodgily about inside the Temple of my body doing all sorts of skullduggery upon me.

So remember kids, always cook your burgers on the George. Or patties as the Americans call them.

Here, now that I think of it, I know a woman called Patty. I have secretly wished all my life that her surname was O'Doors or O'Windows, but she was a Lynch instead.

Damn her. Damn her to hell.

Anyway, moving on, I had a pound of beef and made three small burgers out of it. Does this mean I ate a turder pounder for tea?

I want to kill the Galway Girl

Every time I have to listen to this fucking song it makes my ears melt. My toes curl up like sweet wrappers in a fire and I lock myself in a dark wardrobe and hurl myself against the walls shouting 'La la la la la I can't hear you' until it goes away. This skippy-shitty-ditty is stealthily trying to take over the world and turn us all into some sort of gormless cider-loving yokels banging around on accordions and tin whistles.

It's all Bulmers fault. The cider company's latest ad, a typically gold-hued effort featuring utopian orchards, summery tones and a bit o' the ould dancin' and a-flirtin' between avuncular apple-pickers and gamey cailíns, uses this on its soundtrack. And now you can't turn on the TV without hearing it, or the radio either because it's having the arse thoroughly worn out of its welcome there as well.

Will you fuck off to hell with your fucking Galway Girl!

It's driving me bonkers. I'm thinking about getting a cat just so I'll have something to kick when it comes on.

I don't even know what the song is about, all I can gather is that some country singer with a really apalling twang - Steve Earle - found himself in Galway some time or other, and managed to find a local looker drunk enough to get past the sheer awfulness of his accent and hop into bed with him. She may well have gagged him, and he may well have liked it. Anyway, when he wakes up, she's obviously seen sense and bolted for the hills, leaving him all wistful and unfortunately, moved to write a song about his one night stand. Oh yes, her hair might have been black and her eyes blue Steve, but it'd be nothing compared to the seven shades of shite I'd kick out of you if I ever clapped eyes on you. And I wouldn't just batter you once Steve, no, I'd do it all day-i-ay-i-ay.

Thankfully, experience tells me that Bulmers will launch a new ad soon and the song will change. Their marketing is very clever in that every new campaign tells us that cider is for life, not just for summer, because in winter you can drink it with plentiful ice and look forward to spring that's just around the corner, and when spring arrives you can see the apples starting to grow and look forward to summer, when summer arrives it's like cha-ching folks it's summer out there get some cider down ye, and then autumn is all burnished reds, yellows and golds, so ergo, get some more cider down ye folks. Brilliant stuff.

But Galway girl is a step too far. They've crossed the line from mildly annoying into downright nauseating. I'd damn well drop my pants and piss in their vats if I thought anyone would notice.

Four things I feel like doing when Galway Girl comes on:

1. Taking up a position as the head cleaner of Jabba the Hutt's spitoon

2. Putting on my double-album of Country and Western covers, sung by Professor Stephen Hawking

3. Stripping naked and covering myself in jam and jelly, before agitating a wasps nest with a big stick and a petrol bomb.

4. Re-enact the famous Oliver Reed/Alan Bates Greco-Roman wrestling scene from Women in Love, where I'd take on a Speedos-clad Willie O'Dea in a fight to the death, for the right to face Mary Harney in the final.

Now, is everyone clear about my feelings on this matter?

Plus ca change

I was watching the television there the other day and I was struck by something. I think it was a projectile midget fired at me from a nearby circus, but I can't be certain.

In any event, said missile didn't distract me from a fundamental realisation concerning the state of man. It seems that after thousands of years of evolution, and massive strides in the realms of medicine, technology and self knowledge, advertisers can still get away with flogging underarm deodarant to dozy men on the flimsy premise that sniffing it will turn innocent passerby women into gymnastically accomplished nymphomaniac sex vixens. All desperate to get down on the good foot and do the bad thing, preferably with their noses wedged in your armpit.

The latest ad suggests that using Lynx turns you into a walking chocolate man, which is fiendishly clever because as we all know, there's scarcely a bird on the planet worth her salt who wouldn't gleefully drop her knickers at the sight of a Mars bar. So naturally, if you're a bloke made out of the stuff, they'd come teeming naked over a hill of razor blades just to take a bite out of your arse.

Now the question I have is as follows. Has any woman reading this ever been in a situation with a random interested bloke, where it was a borderline case on the brink of a 'no, feck off dickhead' but was swayed towards a yes, simply because he smelled nice? It does seem a frivolous question but then again, I have turned down marriage proposals on the basis of thinking her handbag was shite.

I'm anxious to know because generally, I air my clothes in cabbage and nettle steam, and a hint of turf smoke, before going out. And I never pull. So I'm seriously considering upgrading to a dab of listerine behind both ears before hitting the town, and would appreciate some womanly perspectiveness. Thanks in advance.

This made me laugh out loud

I read stuff like this and laugh like a maniac.

Dunnion

Then I get slightly peevish and a bit jealous that I didn't think of it first. Sigh.

Farmer beer chic

Well it seems I've finally done it.

After almost a decade ploughing my lonely furrow for Smithwicks, the downtrodden ruddy ale has finally caught on again. Smithwicks chic is here. It's rustic, it's red, it's retro, it's alot of rice things beginning with R and best of all it's tastes rabsolutely rovely. Sure everybody's drinking it now.

Well, maybe not everybody per se, but at least four people I know are now converted, which is a mammoth increase from the previous opinion poll figure of one, the one in question being myself. That's about a three millions percentage points surge by Shire reckoning and you can laugh at the Hobbits all you like but the little bastards could certainly put away a few pints.

It all started when Radge texted me recently to say he'd been drinking, which is not of itself unusual of course, except that this time he had been drinking Smithwicks. With the Guinness head on it to boot. He'd taken a notion and chanced a few. He liked it. It warranted texting me he felt. He was right. He enjoyed the typical Smithwicks hangover the following day, which is to say, he didn't have one. Emboldened, he tried a few the next night he was out. It's now going so well, he's becoming quite the regular.

In itself, this was quite the landmark development. I no longer felt like the parochial pub pariah, frowned upon by trendy types. Aglow with some sort of quasi-parental admiration, I texted him back with a tear in my eye and told him I was never so proud of him.

It's sort of snowballed from there. I was in sunny Cavan for the weekend, and ambled in to the local with the youngest McDanger, ordered my usual and was bemused when two foamy pints of the red diesel nectar were placed before me. I wondered was it a bad keg the barman was trying to get rid of, or had he made a mistake with the order. Nope, says he, it's for McDanger the younger.

"Ah yeah," says the brother, "You're always going on about it, I might as well try a few and see."

"Jasus," gasped I, and then sat there looking at him silently, wondering would I give him a hug or something. I'd claimed two souls for Smithwicks inside a week, this was just a little bit tremendous.
He farted then and spoiled the moment, so I didn't embrace him. Or his musk either.

Anyway, we drank up and went off to a 'function' as we call it down our way. It's a rather robotic description for a party or benefit/fundraiser type thing where a large crowd convenes and gets drunk, eats 10% meat (at least, guaranteed by law) cocktail sausages all night and then has a raffle. Anyway, that's not what's important here. The salient information is this: In I goes to the bar and finds sister McDanger's husband at the bar. Flushed with goodwill towards all drinkers, I asked him what was he having and fervently hoped it wasn't a double of anything costly.

He pursed his lips and rubbed his belly as he surveyed the taps and optics before him and went through his options. He usually goes for pints of Heineken, godamn intestinal masochist that he is, but by dint of his extended musing, he was obviously considering a change.

"Ach sure...go on there and get me a Smithwicks."

What? Another one? Two in the one night? I got a bit of a shock and felt somewhat faint. If there hadn't been a buxom lady nearby who helpfully allowed me rest a moment in her cleavage, I might well have keeled over.

"Smith...wicks...are you sure?"

"Yeah what the hell. Apart from the obvious, it doesn't seem to do you any harm."

I ordered quickly before he could change his mind and watched carefully as he raised it to his gob. Yep, he was definitely swallowing it alright. Lordy but this was turning into the perfect evening altogether.
For the rest of the night, both converts sought my advice on matters Smith and Wick and I gathered them closely to me to explain at length the science of the Guinness head, and the almost hangoverless future they could look forward to. Although I was upfront enough to warn them that Oriental barmen in Dublin tend to get perplexed and make a total hames of putting the Guinness in. They were undeterred though and were last seen quaffing and belching away like pigs at a trough well into the early hours, holding their glasses to the light and swapping opinions on this strange new libation.
I went to bed utterly pissed, and happy.

There's no telling where all this might lead. Like all fashions, they eventually come back around again and now I feel the time for Smithwicks second coming is nigh. It'll be all the rage inside 12 months, just watch. All the bars and clubs will be doing promotions and bikini-clad hotties called the "Smithchicks" will be touring the country giving out free teeshirts and bearing with stoic dignity the clumsy efforts of the clientele to subtly feel their arses. It'll probably go all the way to the Playboy mansion where a twinkle-eyed Hugh Heffernan will cast aside his Viagric ways and claim Smithwicks as the drink that made a real man of him, before devouring Miss January beside him in a whirr of entangled limbs.

I have a dream.

Exciting life continues apace, more drama planned

Yes indeed folks, my days off are continuing at breakneck pace. It's quite interesting sitting here alone with my brain and observing myself. I'm not bad company I have to say, I belched there a few minutes ago and had myself in stitches with an impression of Billy Connolly, but am otherwise holding my own attention in the following fashion:

I read a story on the wild wide internuts about a village in England called Lunt where vandals have the locals driven to distraction because they keep scrubbing out the first letter and replacing it with another. I'll give you a clue, the offending letter is not P but it rhymes with it.
All this reminds me of a friend of a friend who once had the drunken idea of vandalising the name sign of a Dublin train station, Grand Canal Dock, by dint of similar letter scrubbingoutedness/addition and so forth. I'll leave it to your imaginations. He never got around to it I don't think.

Televisually speaking, I've weaned myself off the history and discovery channels for the time being, at least until the schedules kick into a new loop. The repetitiveness numbs the brain you know.

The repetitiveness numbs the brain you know.

Instead, I've started flirting with the music channels. I think they're music channels anyway, there's lots of people are on them talking about music and singers and stuff, and hey, every half hour or so they actually play a song. Amy Winehouse is on there now on TMF honking in her fog horn voice about the Rehab she won't go to, as part of a series hosted by jowly astrologer Russell Grant who is tenuously linking song titles to some rather camp, namby-pamby life lessons he's dishing out.
I've also noticed a propensity for the stars of music videos to spend alot of time writhing. Yer wan Leona Lewis who won one of the Pop X Idol Factors for instance, I've just watched one of her videos. She spends the entire duration trying to look sultry while she rubs her flanks and slides her back up and down the wall behind her, hands massaging her slightly agape thighs. She looks like a cross between a cow scratching itself on a gate post and Vic Reeves doing that pervy trouser-rub thing he used to do on Shooting Stars.
The fellas are at it as well. None of the poor divils are allowed wear a shirt to work it seems and have to spend their days singing plaintively to a camera with one hand on their baby-oiled chests while trying to imply that they're on the verge of orgasm, or at the very least, wistfully in love with each and every girl watching. Sure I could do that! And yes, it would be shit. But I could do that!
I've also being musing how dramatically reduced the canon of popular music would be if the words baby, yeah, together, pain and heart had never entered the English language. And indeed, if the words maybe and baby, fight and night, hour and power didn't happen to rhyme. Oh well.

I got a haircut this morning too. It worked out fairly well and I made the cute girl cutting it laugh three times, at least one instance of which was at one of the 679 jokes I chanced. I'll get back to you all when I figure out what the other two were. Maybe however, it was my reply when she asked me did I want much off. "Er not too much no but I want it fairly short I suppose although leave a little bit there to work with like, if you get me, and be careful round the back because if you cut it too short it'll all stick up like Sonic the Hedgehog and all the gel in Gavin Henson won't flatten it. A bit off the fringe too but not too much thanks. Sure a bit of a tidy-up really. Ahem, cough."

The best of the whole lot is that I've still got three and a half days of this left, with a trip to sunny Cavan thrown in where I'm probably wearing out my welcome given that it's not three months or greater since I was there last.

I've also stopped tagging my posts because I can't be arsed any more.

And guess what, work just called and told me they want me to take more time off next month. How would you interpret that?

Days off and downtime

I know I've just been giving out about having to work so much recently but now that I'm at home on time off I'm wondering which is worse.

I've been glued to the History Channel as usual, so by now have seen the same programmes three times and am fully up to 3Xspeed on Mummy Forensics and everything I didn't really want to know about F15 and Raptor fighter jets, vector, thrust and the Lockheed versus Northrop race to win contracts from the US government. And if I see another ad for a Time Life Classics album, the ultimate abs workout machine, or Churchill insurance (Oh yes), I think I might just jump out the window after the telly.

I did watch another revealing programme about the history and development of toilets and pooing however (Discovery channel indeed), and was intrigued to learn how the lazy Elizabethans just basically took a shit behind the curtain or in the corner when the urge came on them, because they frankly couldn't be bothered getting up and doing it somewhere else. Dirty bastards. In the near future though, it seems we'll all be pooing into chute toilets and throwing a handful of sawdust down after it (I don't think you wipe with the sawdust though) to help it mulch into fertiliser compost in some big bucket underneath. Wow. Have a little piece of me for your flower beds type thing.

I do have alternative viewing options on DVD of course but I am trying to ration my watching of the FuckinSopranos, so as not to plough through them all too quickly like I regrettably did with Band of Brothers, because then it's back to the TV and those crap-happy Elizabethans. I'm on Series 4 by the way, and still haven't figured out how FuckinTony gets so many nice women given that he has a face like a donkey chewing thistles.

The Playstation is there beckoning temptingly to me of course, but I'm loath to switch it on because I've often done that just to "play for a few hours," only to lose track completely and over the course of three days solid button-bashing, develop malnourishment and bed sores.

So I'm trying to be productive. I've been catching up on some housework like. I had no choice but do the dishes as every piece of crockery I own was filthy and about to sprout legs and walk out in protest. For the previous week, I'd been cooking and eating out of the Ken Hom (hypersupermegawok extraordinaire supreme), rinsing it and repeating. My Ken Hom is the fucking business so it is but I couldn't lean on Ken forever and took pity on the poor fella in the end.
I did a general tidy up as well which involved cursory hoovering around all my clutter and then moving it all from one side of the room to the other before nodding at it satisfactorily with my hands on my hips. Job done, take a rest fella.

All the laundry is taken care of too. I put on about five washes of clothes, socks, jocks, towels and old sweaty gym stuff (niiiiice) and now have it festooned and dangling about the rooms in an effort to dry what won't cram into the heaving hotpress. There's so much clothes hanging everywhere it looks like Fagin and Fortycoats just had an energetic orgy in here or something.

So now I'm twiddling my thumbs, if you can do that and type at the same time. The lads want me to go into town and watch the match tonight but I did that last week and ended up drinking more pints than I should have, so I'm thinking better of it for tonight.

Which means I'll probably end up in town tonight, ho-hum. Ach sure amn't I on me holidays?

Back broke, leisure earned, thank you

It was the Beatles that aptly sang the line about a man having to break his back to earn his day of leisure and after my recent run of one day off work since Easter (1982), I can identify fully. They were also kind enough to write "I'm so tired, I haven't slept a wink, I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink," and "It's been a hard day's night and I've been working like a dog."

I'd like to thank the Beatles for soundtracking the last fortnight of my life.

There are other Beatles lyrics, of course, that have never struck the same chord, such as "I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob." Tommy was our eggman when I was a child, but I never noticed a walrus or anything.

Anyway, even if I was pulled in twenty different directions of late, the internet didn't fall apart without me, which is a good thing because if they made me fix it I wouldn't know where to start.

This short missive (by my verbose standards at any rate) is just to let you know I haven't been trapped down a mine shaft and am not waiting for Skippy the Bush Kangaroo to come and save me or anything. But I guess anyone reading this regularly is used to my mysterious disappearances for weeks at a time.

Anyway, groannnnn, I have to get back to work. Working through till Sunday evening and then a whole week off. Well earned and all.

Toodley pip now!