Rapa Nui and chromosomes

Welcome to my heady and burgeoning times.

You may recall my tearjerker post of a few months ago, cataloguing my series of epic failures at, um, just about everything. For all of my days out there in white heat of competition, I had wilted always and bloomed never. Darts, athletics, pool, sumo wrestling, white water rafting, Bob-a-Job, Shave the Goat, University Challenge, Hungry Hippos and Kerplunk! – I flunked them all. Always finishing second.

That was until I went to a round table quiz last November and romped home with my team mates to claim a bounty of smoked salmon and red wine. That was a watershed day, the day Lady Luck took an almighty U-turn in my life.

The latest instalment? Last night, our crack commando team (we all wore undies though. I did anyway) reunited and went to another quiz and, yawn, we won again. Well okay, we sneaked seven on to a five-man team and four of them were girls but it was for charity and we handed back our €200 prizemoney as it was all for good causes. Namely, the Niall Mellon Township Trust, my ego and the Things to Blog About Foundation, in that order.

It’s irrefutable fact now that I will win every quiz I ever enter from here to eternity and without fear of overstatement, I announce to the world that I, Terence Alphonsus McDanger, know absolutely everything.
You should see me writing this. I’m wearing a suit of armour atop a white steed with my pennant a-snap and flapping in the breeze over my shoulder, as I survey my lands and watch for more of the good times coming teeming over the hills.

I’m literally cock-a-hoop. This sounds painful I know, but trust me, I’m actually in a good place. I’m strutting about, you know, doing that funny sort of funky get-down groovy walk people morph into when approaching a dance floor. That’s comedian Peter Kay’s observation but trust me, he won’t mind me taking it. He’s hardly going to mess with the man who knows everything, is he? I could fuck up his shit real bad like, if he starts thinking he knows stuff like what country the island of Rapa Nui belongs to, or how many pairs of chromosomes a woman has.

I’ve now taken to flexing my great matter in public too. I’ve just come back inside after standing in front of the GPO challenging passers-by to a quiz-off.

“Here you! Yeah, you.”

“Sorry, can I hel….”

“Yeah yeah, listen. Just ask me a question. Anything at all. I’ll answer it. I fucking know everything me. Go on, ask me a question, anything at all.”

“Em…ok…er….what is 1/4 of 1/2 of 1/5 of 200?”

(Pause).

“Right! Ask me another question, anything at all, I know fucking everything me.................”

Caroline Morahan appreciates me, without the trowel

"Oh I give up, will ya just marry me to hell Terence you big oul' sexy hunk o'love."

Sigh, I would that it were without her towel, having just stepped out of the shower or something, but listen, you can't have it all. All in good time and stuff.

Seriously though, is anyone truly surprised at this morning's dramatic turn of events that saw terencemcdanger.com catapulted right to the heart of both the national media and Ms. Morahan herself? That, as surely you all knew it would, the delectably smiley, lovely and voluptuous curvaceous one would be exposed to my ardent love poetry and swoon, buckle at the knees and collapse helplessly while imploring me to marry her?

Oh yes. My little seed of a few weeks ago has borne sweet fruit. I have played this one like a dream.

So, I've got her hopes up now, I suppose it's time to take the plunge and throw the diamonds on her.
Email me any time, pet, and we can talk turkey. And ham. Or beef or salmon. Whatever you want on the big day. But before then we can just concentrate on being all kooky kerazy in love like I said we would be, dressing up in sumo fatsuits and throwing painted piglets at each other in the back garden and stuff.

Anyway, I've gone this far without actually explaining because no doubt all of you were listening to the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show on Today FM this morning, where my soon-to-bethrothed was being interviewed. From second hand reports as yet unconfirmed (I only get up around 11, other days I sleep late), I've gleaned that Dempsey, long married and babbied up to the eyeballs and therefore hoplessly out of touch in the witty-patter-with-sexbombs stakes, was forced to crack open the McDanger on his show in an effort to keep the flagging conversation going. All presenters are taught this at media school - if it's going to raggedy hell out there on the air with an uber-babe and nobody else can help, open up the McDanger and sit back and watch the fireworks baby.

Anyhoo, needless to say, a few well chosen witty pearls of homage from my recent post, read out by Dempsey, struck just the right note and brought a radiant smile to the cherubic face of the lovely lovely gorgeous fantastic Morahan, rescuing the DJ's bacon and almost keeping the show on the road.

I say almost because according to reports, shock, awe and lovestruck Morahan literally wasn't worth tuppence after being spellbound by the sheer majesty of my words and obvious depth of feeling for her. She basically ignored every question thereafter in her blissful distraction and could clearly be heard tapping my URL into a nearby laptop, hankering as she was for more, more, MORE OF YOUR WIZARD WORDS OF LOVE AND DAMN YOU FOR MAKING ME YEARN THUS YOU ARTFUL FORGER IN THE SMITHY OF MY DREAMS I WANT YOU I WANT YOU OH FUCK IT LET'S GET HITCHED TERENCE YOU LOVELY BIG SOPPY OLD BASTARD YOU, I CAN DO FRIDAY LUNCHTIME.

As she was doubtless thinking at the time.

As the ears of a stunned radio nation hung agape, and it takes something special to make ears do that, all that could be heard on-air was herself sobbing plaintively into a bewildering succession of hankies. I'll admit, unshakable as my ardour for her is, the music of her honking big emotional boogers into a tissue down a microphone doesn't precisely capture my beloved at her most alluring. Then again, she has many years of "Christ, is that a cruiseship docking?" farts to look forward to from me and fair exchange is no robbery as they say, ho hum.

A cautionary note here though folks, don't try any of this at home. No ladies, the McDanger Magic is not to be unleashed lightly, least of all, heavens above, in a live broadcast situation where it remains the final and lastest of last resorts. It's an even bigger last resort than Bundoran for the holidays.
Like, if Morry (I call her Morry now) wasn't such a paragon of beauty and bastion of lovliness and self-control, it could well have turned Christina Aguilera video in there. Some women just can't take my honey'd verses and lose the run of themselves entirely, disrobing on the spot and spilling scented oils over their naked bodies and going crazy Morris dancing in the nip, like scenes out of the Wicker Man starring Edward Woodward. It's been known to happen. There was a Fleadh Ceol down in Clare one year and the bishop had to come and break it up with a blackthorn stick and tell all the girls to put their clothes back on and go home to their husbands and cook them their tea. (But, fret ye not fair damsels of Ireland, for I would never use my gift for evil).

Now lest anyone should doubt that this actually happened, I will endeavour this week to secure a didgickle recording of the magical McDanger-made moments that melted Morahan mive on mational madio. I will post it here for all to hear here, should Dempsey cough up a copy.

If Iano won't come up with the goods, what the hell, sure you can just all come to the wedding instead.

Ah Caroline, my sweetest rose, all I can do is smile and shake my head at you, you little giggly rascal. It took a while for you to succumb and fall head over heels for me but now that you have, I suppose I'd better make an honest woman of you.

Drop me an email there and then you can call over to my place so I can tickle you for a few hours and get the ball rolling on this crazy adventure.

Just blow your nose and tidy yourself up a bit first, k?

Mwah!

Ok ok I'm done now!

Yes, I've been carrying out some more bloggery feng shui, moving the furniture, aligning my chakras and other such palaver. I thought I'd settled on the other template but noticed it was taking an awful long time to load. There were sundry other annoyances I won't go into to. Mainly I didn't think it was quite me.

On this new one, you will notice some cool new functionality; you can rate my posts now and let me know if I'm being all shite, or indeed, wonderful. There'll be no pressure from me in that regard of course.

But if I get zero stars off anyone out there I'll impale you on a Knight's jousting stick and then carry you through your neighbourhood on horseback, inviting folk to throw slugs at you. 

The biggest plus of all? Doesn't this new look just evoke cows a lot better? And when all's said and done, isn't that what we're all striving for here?

Right. That's me done mucking about now, I promise, unless technical difficulties arise or people start reporting annoyances.

Down to a T

Okay, it's Aunty Meme time here at the zoo.

Kath Chocklett has been throwing the alphabet about indiscriminately like a tennis ball machine gone nuts, and has clobbered me across the head with the letter T. I hate beingT'sed by the ladies but I'm loath to disappoint young Kath so I'll proceed.
I think the vague idea is that I scattergun ten random things related to or beginning with the letter T. Deep breath and off we go.

Tantric sex
I keep meaning to look this up properly but as far as I can gather, you just find a pyramid and climb inside it and you can shag like a trojan for hours on end. The trouble is finding a pyramid round these parts, due to the crippling lack of Egyptianess of the Irish race generally, going back centuries in fact. To bridge the gap, I will instead scatter my bed with pyramid-shaped tea bags and chunks of Toblerone and see if I'm still giving it the old Duracell bunny the following Tuesday. I'll let you know how I get on.

Tickles
I have a ferocious tickly/hotspot bit around my appendix area that I discovered one day, years ago, when reclining on the couch watching TV. My mother's cat hopped up on to me and feeling charitable, I cocked an eye and ignored it until it repeatedly pushed a searching paw right on to the aforementioned spot, like he was testing the strength of ice on a lake before going skating or something. I flung the little fat bastard twenty feet over the room in shock - talk about a sensitive spot, Jesus it was like ice down my back.
Now if ever I'm getting jiggy with a lady, if she strays a hand that way I dissolve into a fit of giggles and once or twice, I've become such a chuckling untouchable the mood was totally killed entirely altogether. Why do you think I need the tantric sex?
As for the cat, I nailed the fucker to the bottom of the door and employed him as a draft excluder from that day thence. He's still there, content enough, if a little annoyed that he can't lick his groin any more and well, we can all identify with that I suppose.

Testimony
Did you know that this word was coined because the Romans, when striving to indicate that they were telling the truth about something, would grab their testicles for emphasis?
But nobody was buying it with Michael Jackson.

Tall
I had grown to my full height of 6'1 by the time I was 13. I was a bit of a freak. Every time they'd see me, friends' parents would say:
"Jasus we'll have to put a stone on your head the rate you're growing. Sure if you fell over twice you'd be at home! I'd say you'll join the Gardaí, sure you have the height and all."
It was like the gift of not being small was enough to warrant a career in policing.
Hey, Terence, why not become a priest? You have a black shirt! Or a beautician? You have fingernails.

Et cetera.

Thespian
I have trodden the boards in a few stage productions you know, comedy vignettes and the like, even did an evening course a few years back. Strictly amateur adventures; if it was porn, it'd be the readers' wives section like.
The most amateur, indeed, was the one where I forgot my lines and endured an excruciating silence of about sixty seconds before gathering myself and taking off again.
Yeah well, I'll have the last laugh when me and Caroline Morahan star in our very own Rom-Com. There will be nudity clauses however. As in, if she doesn't sign something agreeing to flash her boobtastics, she's not getting paid.

Tongue
I ate a bag of crisps - KP mini chips - there on Saturday and dammit if one of the little fuckers didn't nick my tongue and dislodge one of the tastebuddy pimpley yokes that live there. So now I've a curious injury. I can't think of what you might call this injury but I know it's on the tip of my tongue, BOOM BOOM!

I'll get me coat.

Temper dance
My party piece, apparently, when I was about four. It seems that if taunted and annoyed in the correct way by a certain friend of the family, I would erupt in a paroxysm of stupendous rage and run around like a demented dwarf with one foot nailed to the floor, screaming and caterwauling to get my way. People pay good money for drugs to do that shit nowadays you know.

Turkey
I eat fucking loads of turkey. At carverys - turkey please. At delis - turkey please. At travel agents - turkey please. It can be a bit dry, I'll warrant, but as the last joke shows, so can I, and therefore we are perfect bedfellows.
If you'll permit me a double entry, and if it's good enough for Linda Martin in the Eurovision it's good enough for me, Turkey is also the nickname of the ugliest girl in Cavan, who used to randomly start hormonal frustration cat fights with other girls at discos if she couldn't find some bloke willing to have sex with her. True story. And the trouty ould pus on her, sure the tide wouldn't take her out.

I never did, by the way. **Shudders and goes for a shower**

Tits
You just knew it was coming didn't you?

Anyway, I could issue forth poetically for hours on the all-round magnificence of mammaries - jugs in general, Morahan's in particular - but I'm trying to keep this short, so for all the fellas out there, I'll just say this.

Jamie Lee Curtis. Trading Places. That is all.

Train man
No relation to Dustin Hoffman, but equally odd.
There's this bloke on my train every morning who I hate getting stuck beside. He's about 50 and a good bit overweight with a big collar of walrussy blubber on the back of his neck and puffy cheeks like the fat one in the Gumi Bears. He chews gum audibly all the time, with his mouth hanging open.
It's hard to render the toe-curlingly annoying sound accurately, but it's something akin to "Sss-toh, sss-toh, sss-toh, sss-toh" all the fucking way into work.
Soon, I will kill him, and feed him to wolves in the forest.

C'est tout.

My new frock.

Well?

Am I all fur coat and no knickers or what do you all reckon?

Let me know if it looks like a turd or doesn't work.

The tooth! It's still out there! A little bit.

At the age of three and two, thirty-two, it would seem I'm still teething.

This is an outrageous face of a stairs, as one of my Dad's favourite jokes would have it. Because 32 is no age at which to be teething like. 32 I say. Jasus. What's that in dog years? Old money? Bingo numbers even?

Well past two little ducks, and looking for me droopy drawers, that's what.

What sort of a trick of nature is it that the hair on my head I'd like to hang on to is disappearing rapidly and being replaced by ardent growth in my nostrils and ears, where I'd rather it wasn't? Why am I gaining a belly despite doing all I can to stave it off and now, why am I growing teeth in a mouth where there's no place for them? Bleh!

I'm waking up nights with throbbing jaws and flushed cheeks now, and I'm only just short of roaring for my Calpol and putting gripe water on my porridge of a morning. Poor me. I'm having to liquidise my food and if this continues, I'm moving home so my Mammy can play the airplane game with the plastic spoon in an effort to stop me dying of the malnutrition.

Now, I'll admit, I was quite taken with my new tooth back when it first burst on the scene. It only popped up when I finally had an old rotten one removed and I thought I was the chosen one for some sort of anointed dental resurrection. I believed I was one of those rare, blessed people with the power to grow infinite limbs, digits and sets of teeth, no matter how many times I lost the original ones.

I tell you, I was just about to hunt down Shane McGowan and taunt him with my superpowers when the dentist told me it was actually just a belated wisdom tooth coming up, now that the dead one had been removed and there was a bit of gumtown real estate freed up in the highly prized and exclusive area known as My Gob - and we don't grow teeth for nobody else here in My Gob you know.

That was quite some time ago and I've been patiently awaiting the birth of the new tooth in the meantime, except it seems a little bit of a reluctant performer. Now, the puffiness and pain in my gums tells me it's all gone to shit back there and while one side of it is up and looking normal, the rest of it seems to have its arse cocked askance and is tilted someway that won't allow it grow properly.

So I haven't so much got a fully fledged wisdom tooth per se, I have instead a 'somewhat mature but lacks focus tooth' or 'sensible for the most part but is easily lead astray' tooth.

I should do what my Dad did and get the whole lot of them reefed out and replaced by dentures, and then I can slip them out and do impressions of the old fellas in the ads for Bonjela.

Always a silver lining.

Many's a slip...

...betwixt lip and zip.

As Shakespearean parody-porn might have had it. As you like it, indeed.

But sorry, this isn't at all erotic, not by my normal racy standards at any rate.

Thing is, I was out there for lunch and as soon as I exited the building I was met with a bracing wind that snapped me to a standstill and almost peeled my face off. I puffed and shuddered and stamped a wee bit from one foot to the other. Then I opted for a very dramatic and rapid up-pulling of the zip on my new coat, in a Jasus-look-at-me-everyone-I'm-the-only-cold-person-in-Dublin sort of attention seeking Thespian way.

But I did it with such an imperious flourish that I caught my fucking lip in the fucking zip. I've done this twice now in a month. It was sore. The coat is lovely because it's a North Face (it's after piping up at me just there from behind the chair: "Here, who are you calling North Face, you wanker?") and the collars are furry and cup your face when it's all done up to its fullest. I'm laying a trap for Maxi here, let's see if he comes in and bites.

But anyway, today, my lovely coat turned on me again.

So I want sympathy, and laughs. Sympathetic laughs, if you're pushed for time.

Ground. Open. Swallow. Please.*

We were chugging slowly up the canal, sipping champagne on the homely little barge, all clinky glasses and laughs and she brushing hair from her face that wasn't really there and sweeping it over her shoulder, smiling.

This was me, one-on-one with a total, utter lasher from the office, and doing nicely thanks very much.

I sparkled like the champers, I was all panache and brio, clever bon mots and witty quips and she, well, she just stood there, laughed on cue and fiddled alluringly with her pendant. God, that pendant. Lord knows I was finding it tough enough as it was not to be ogling her cleavage and drooling like a Saint Bernard, but with her hands kneading something shiny and attracting me there I was like Fr. Dougal beside the big red 'Do Not Push' button.

I was a wide-eyed magpie gazing at two disco balls.

She reached over then and placed a hand on my shoulder. I did that muscle flexy thing that men do and hoped she'd look away soon so I could take a breath. I generally last 10-15 seconds before I look less manly and rugged, and more asthmatic and trying to choke a fart at birth.

“My feet are killing me,” she said, propping herself on me and dipping her head slightly to slip off her shoe and massage herself, spilling her hair everywhere. She was gazing up out of those big chestnut eyes and smirking at me.

I cocked an eyebrow and looked down at her as she plucked her tights out from the gaps in her toes.

“Hey, those tights make it looks like you’ve got webbed feet. Are you a duck? Mwaw haw haw.”

I turned away at that point and had a small, private marvel at myself and my searing wit.

She straightens up.

“No. I’m not wearing tights. I actually genuinely have webbed toes. And I’m a bit sensitive about it.”

“Oh. Ha ha...cough! cough!....er...

"Shite."

*thanks to Red Leeroy for reminding me.

A medium sized slice of me

My body's in recession!

I'm retracting! Constricting! Contracting! Restricting! Other combinations of syllables! Corstroncting!

This is farkin' serious I tells ye. I am the curious case of the incredible shrinking man. I must be growing retrogradely, reverse maturing, just breaking down and shrivelling up. I know that sounds silly and impossible, but I am the man that a put-upon Biology teacher once denounced in frustration as an "ingrowing shite". So you see, I've got form at this.

Do you know what's happening here? Wait until I tell you. I only went and bought a shirt the other day, picked up my usual large size, didn't even bother trying it on because I'm always a large, since forever started sort of thing, because I was about seven stone when I was born. Then when I got home I put it on to check how jaw-droppingly handsome I looked in it and what do you think happened? It was swimming on me, that's what! I had to go back and exchange it. This has never happened me before!

People, I'm shrinking. I'm...I'm a medium. I've gone through my entire wardrobe. It's full of stuff that's now too big for me. Thankfully, some large size stuff is smaller than other brands' large-sized stuff, so something survives to stave off nakedness. Anything over a 32 inch waist, however, is all for waste. Tighten me belt, there is a recession.

Here, do you think is this a medical condition? Might I be slowly boiling away like some sort of balsamic reduction? Puddling down and into myself like the Wicked Witch of the West until my stripy socks recoil and there is nothing left but my pointy hat? I'm just an accordion slowly gathering itself up. Where will it all end?

I fear, my friends, that I am now just a mere crisp packet left too near the fire, watch me bunch up like testicles in a cold shower and, eventually, disappear. The only comfort I have now is my willy, which is thankfully still so ardent and massive I could use it to batter 50 goats up a tricky mountain pass and down the other side.

I shall go now and find myself an average, banal, middle of the road woman, and as the perfect match, we will truly strike a happy medium. Together we will eat burgers and chips and never be small fry.

The teachers put a little star on my blog

I’ve been longlisted.

Be gentle with me, for this is my first time.

Long lustings now, sigh, I am familiar with those alright. Strong long lustings at that. Strong and wrong long lustings actually. (Jakers, it's like an Andrex ad in here, in more ways than one perhaps).

Longlisting though, I must confess I am unschooled. In my naivety I thought it was, maybe, the motion sickness of old seadogs struggling to find landlegs after years upon the buoyant swell. But nope, it’s not the same thing at all.

Hmmm. Longlisting.

Here, would being near the bottom of a very lengthy longlist, of boys that Caroline Morahan would allow into boobtown, count as previous experience of longlisting? I finished above cut throat competition such as Sloth from the Goonies and Jabba the Hutt but alas, trailed in dejectedly behind Timothy Spall. This hit me hard. But in any event, it's not the same sort of...

...longlisting. Wait up, I had a really old uncle who never put his teeth in, he sounded really funny when he talked, how’s about that? No…sorry, shit. That’s long lisping. Damn.

Listen, I’ll just have to figure it out on my own. I think it’s got something to do with the Irish Blog Awards or something.

I don’t know how they work either, but I gather it’s taken them a while to sort through a lot of blogs and judge them or some such.

Longsifting I think they call it.

Brain freeze

The work clowns made me spend my morning doing nothing. They'd only gone and overstaffed something like the zealots they are and there we all were lurching about like zombies with nothing to do.

The whole sodding morning sitting there with my jaw resting on my hand, staring passively like a cow at a stranger in a field.

This is not unusual, this me doing nothingness. I do it for long stretches every day. What I resent, however, is that I was not doing all this nothing on my own terms, and was in fact, obliged to idle at the bidding of somebody else. It's intolerable is that.

Anyway, I freed myself by dint of a cunning ploy.

C'mere, I says to the head honcho, am I actually needed here.

Eh no, she says.

Grand so, says I, and I fucked off for a coffee on my way back to the office.

My mental sharpness had been somewhat eroded however, and in O'Brien's, I got confuddled by their boast poster in the window about free range poultry, and so I managed to order a large range cappuchicken in a fit of tongue twist. Everyone laughed at me.

I should have stayed at home today, pretending to be snowed in.