Bigger Boys
I thought it was spam at first… when a strange message containing all my correct details arrived in my Junk folder a day or so ago, I wrote it off as coincidence, just clever marketing or something. The subject line read ‘Cease and Desist’, and there was an attachment. I’m no goat, I know not to open attachments in my Junk folder so I deleted it.
I got another one this morning, this time the subject line included the word ‘litigation’ in bold type, so I scanned the attachment and opened it, ready to pull the plug if anything nasty happened. It did, but not in the way I was expecting.
Turns out this email is the real deal! We seem to have pissed off some Blogging Commission, a bunch I’d never heard of before. When I say ‘We’, of course I mean ‘Maxi’ because the whole idea was his – I just went with it out of boredom. I’m not sure what to do now, other than write a flaming return email.
Anybody out there got any experience with so called ‘Blogging Commissioners’? Is this for real?
If you’re curious, this is the email I returned:
Hi Cuthbert,
Look, I don’t know if you’re a bonafide pencil-pusher or just somebody having a laugh, either way I don’t care. Sending me bogus letters on behalf of some made-up company is a huge waste of time based on the premise that blogs are, by their nature, free-for-all. I can publish whatever I damn well like.
As it turns out, I have no intentions on publishing further material relating to this ‘Blog War’… frankly I would rather burn out my entire quotient of sebaceous glands with the sulphured excrement of a burned match. I’m sick of it. Rest assured, the idea for this whole cockamamie idea falls solely at the feet of Maxi Cane and his blogspot, and was about as scary and as realistic as Beaut.ie’s bargain bin.
I won’t be taking down any posts or removing any images. Your letter doesn’t scare me, for I have a Thesaurus too and can read between the lines.
You haven’t a leg to stand on, mate.
Sincerely
K8 the Gr8
Manumission succesful
Your Queen has returned!!!
Ye gads what an adventure. It all began with the kind donation and smuggling of beard trimmings from Grandad and Rick O’Shea. The combined volume made enough rope to lower me to the ground from a fourth-storey window!!! Well, almost to the ground anyway. I found myself dangling six feet above ground, only to find Capt. Mick McFool was below, ready to catch me – my knight in shining lipstick! His clever ploy of dressing in drag let him seamlessly wander through the rancid streets of Maxiland, and to be honest, I think he enjoyed the liberation that fishnets bring (you should see his high-kicks!)… it brought out a crazy side in him that not all of us are lucky enough to see in our short lives… I felt privileged.
We legged it through the borders, ducking and detonating as we went until the madness ebbed away behind us through the smoke. We found a quiet country path…

… and McFool explained his mental adventures, describing the plan that was to come. He stopped suddenly and turned around. He paled.
“What’s wrong?”
“Wood doesn’t go ‘clink’ when you stand on it, does it?” I asked. McFool slowly shook his head and raised his eyebrows into a shrug. “I think I’m standing on a land-mine…”
“Jump!” He shouted in a gleeful fit of madness.
“No.”
“Right!” He began to charge…
“STOP!!!!!”
McFool ran straight past me, into the wilderness beyond, shouting about getting a ‘big rock or somethin”, when it happened.
My computer froze. I was stuck, immobile, unable to do anything but the three finger salute. My computer was euthanized and I was obliterated from the outskirts of Maxiland instantly, but to my surprise it was not the end for K8 the Gr8!!! I was re-born in a pile of cookies, a new creation, a new Queen of K8opia…

K8 the Ir8!!!
I am now the combined anger on the entire world wide web for cuntries like Maxi Cane’s. It is channeled through the links… the maledictions and nastiness shall ooze through his Pings and his Feeds and my vengeance shall be felt!!!
To my most graciously patient comrades;
It’s time to stop pussy-footin’ around here and unleash the power of your virtual honour!
The kidnapping of K8

The defenstration of Maxi Cane
There is much rejoicing in K8opia!

In the guise of an innocent peace-offering, we managed to smuggle several brave soldiers into Maxiland, hidden in a giant ‘M’. Based on the knowledge that none of the residents of Maxiland ever went to school, he would be unprepared for this tactic, and guess what? We were right!!!
Maxi has been captured, and his various parts will soon be on display in our gift-shop.
Medals of valour will soon be presented to our brave officers…
Grandad; Army Chief of Staff, for a perfect infiltration plan.
JackMcMad; For his epic rage against the SUCK.
Jefferson; For his undying loyalty against the endless siege of abuse
Kirk M; Because every war needs a puppy.
Roy, English Mum and Brian; For excellence in bombing.
Tune in for the playful torturing of Maxiland’s remaining lapdogs!!!
Operation Shenanegan
I recently deployed some expertly trained men to infiltrate Camp Maxi and catch them at their strange antics.
Mission successful.
Retaliation
I worried for my name for a moment this weekend in the knowledge that I would be forced to abandon my loyal men and women followers, but only for a moment. The unavoidable trip to the donkey santuary left their mission wide open without my guidance, but as my loyal submarine commander told me upon my return;
“Often in war, lines of communication become cut off. That’s where you have to trust your cells of fighters to carry on without you. The first sign of a fine leader is that your people can carry on when you’re not there. All Hail K8 the Gr8!”
Okay, so I added that last bit but the surprise party went down a treat and conveyed the same message. Such nice people. In fact, it would seem that their dedication has inflamed them into epic tasks. The uniform is fresh from production seven months ahead of schedule! To see their faces… their triumph as they handed me the last uniform with plastered fingers and exclaimed: “We just love the smell of Napalm in Blogger.” I shed a tear.

The blog bombings were inspirational.
These brave soldiers defended me to the hilt in my absence against an unholy torrent of abuse and I am so proud to be their leader. They are true K8opian heroes.
What a mess my good name has become!!!
Brutal allegations of a grievious nature have been pinned upon me on the internet and I would hereby most defiantly like to tell you that these are all false. To think that I would sell cigarettes to small children?!? I merely teach them how to roll their own, thus cutting down on pocket money expenses and eliminating arsenic poisoning. If they’re going to smoke, they might as well do it properly.
It is a sad fact that ‘He who must not be mentioned’… *sigh* link… has based his entire defense on lies. Such cheap tricks, such shameful tactics.

This is what I look like. All the time, even when I’ve just squshed an increadibly large spider barefoot in the dark by mistake on a stumbling visit to the loo.
All I can offer to you, my loyal people, is the truth. We all know that the truth is far uglier thing than fiction, as you will soon find out. Spies have been deployed all over the capital city of Maxiland in an effort to sample the taste of their regime, and they return feeling very ill indeed and carrying video tape footage that suprisingly didn’t burn to a crisp the very moment it was recorded.
The great leader of Maxiland is a wanker.
I do not use the word in its derogatory sense, it is simply pure fact. I offer to you some damning evidence as recorded by my faithful troops;
“I’ve wanked pretty much everywhere. If I’ve been to a place more than twice, chances are I’ve blown my beans in the surroundings … Every room of every house I’ve ever lived in, or visited. Every room of every place I’ve ever been employed in, or visited. A car. A bus. A phone box.”
“I remember a time I was walking past Ann Summers on O’Connell Street and there was an old dude outside the front door, and God love him he was trying to catch a glimpse of some girl changing into underwear or the salesgirl running through a demo of a new dildo and he had his hands hidden under his over coat. I would have judged, maybe even stopped him but I was on my way to Brown Thomas to whack off all over the Manolo Blahnik displays.”
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
—
Overheard at a bus-stop;
“And I left the shop, went and calmed myself down with a nice shot of crack.”
—
One brave soldier even had the nerve to engage this so-called ‘leader’ at the bookies and recorded the following perplexing information;
“Yeah, “I guess I turned to drugs and murder after I saw my drunken father mowed down by a devilishly handsome Ford Fiesta driver when I turned 5. He turned to look at me, and said “Happy birthday, sweetheart” and then turned to face his death.”"
A man with such weighty responsiblities who has learned his leadership skills in prison is not a pretty sight. I fear for his people, I imagine an evolved landscape of Orks, poor pure elvenfolk who got caught up in the madness and are now forever damned. I urge those people to step back, to have a proper look at this leader of theirs… a man who hates bank holidays, who enjoys having his privates gnawed on by zombified hamsters, who doesn’t actually have such an innate fear of tampax!
“In all the commotion I forgot my tissues, but as it turns out “feminine products” are much more absorbent for a runny nose than even the strongest tissue, and the smooth applicator does make a difference.”
My undercover interviewer almost passed out when this information was recorded, this golden piece of damning evidence. She is now away in the Bahamas for some well earned R&R, but not before she found out that the Queen of Maxiland - the position I so politely requested in the days before this cruel war began – is an avid fan of Boyzone. Boyzone. While Keith Duffy is already in my army for his sensual comedic skills, I cannot condone the music. He knows that. We’re cool.
Would you really fancy ‘Love me for a reason’ playing in the cold interior of an army tank as you advance into battle? Would it motivate you into killing yourself or the enemy? I think you know the answer.
Do not be fooled by this leader’s big puppyblog eyes. He is no innocent, I fear this past weekend’s infiltration is but the tip of the iceberg, that Maxiland is a scurrilous place and should be gravely avoided.
This is a rare photograph of the elusive character taken at a so-called ‘Peace’ rally yesterday (on the right, beside Baino’s oranges:

I think it fair to say that this man has issues.
Medical News: Blog author responsible for mental health decline
Maxi Cane, also know as Maxicane.blogspot.com, is a dangerous website, according to recent clinical findings. It is involuntarily read by nonbloggers, lingers in the brain hours after web browsers have been shut down and can cause or exacerbate a wide range of adverse health effects, including shock, sexually transmitted diseases, and a severe lowering of I.Q.

Secondhand reading has been classified by the Mental Unified Protection Prevention Ethics Treaty (MUPPET) as a known cause of ignorance in humans.
Secondhand blog exposure causes panic and premature brain atrophy in children and adults who do not read Maxi Cane’s blog. The blog contains subliminal messages, including pornography, defamation, bad taste, photographs of Madonna and nasty suggestions as to what you can do with ‘yer ma’.
Secondhand reading causes approximately 3,400 cases of pink-eye and 22,700-69,600 losses of higher brain function in adult nonreaders in the world each year.
Nonreaders exposed to Maxi Cane’s blog at work are at increased risk for adverse health effects. Levels of secondhand cynicism in restaurants and bars were found to be 2 to 5 times higher than in residences with blog readers and 2 to 6 times higher than in office workplaces.
Since 2007, 70 percent of the world’s workforce worked under a Maxi-free policy, ranging from 83.9 percent in Ireland to 48.7 percent in the United States. Workplace productivity was increased and absenteeism was decreased among former readers compared with current readers.
Secondhand reading of Maxi’s blog may also cause buildup of bullshit in the frontal cortex of the brain, resulting in 790,000 physician office visits per year. Secondhand reading can also aggravate symptoms in 400,000 to 1,000,000 children with an existing pre-disposition to sarcasm.
In the United States, 21 million, or 35 percent of, children live in homes where residents or visitors read Maxi Cane’s blog in the home on a regular basis. Approximately 50-75 percent of children in the United States have detectable levels of spite, the breakdown product of sarcasm.
Research indicates that private research conducted by K8′s science lab of explody goodness in the 1990s showed that secondhand reading of Maxi’s blog was highly toxic, yet the company suppressed the finding during the next two decades because they weren’t particularily arsed.
The current Surgeon General’s Report concluded that scientific evidence indicates that there is no risk-free level of exposure to Maxicane.blogspot.com. Short exposures to the blog can cause temporary blindness, damage to brain cells, an increase in erectile dysfunction, and a reduction of Intelligence Quota levels, potentially prepetuating Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

War on Maxi
Today should be a joyous occasion… a new and reliable president has been elected to bring the U.S. back into the light, the world is full of hope and promise. The world apart from this blog, that is.
Ladies and Gentleman, I am loath to inform you that war has broken out.
Maxi Cane, as you all know, is a filthy fucker. His is the sort of site you pray that your children will never accidentally find, the blog that NetNanny was invented for. Nastiness, corruption and feculence await you should you ever find yourself having wandered in there by mistake.
Fed-up with the carnage of indecency, I made the ultimate sacrifice. I rounded up my entire stock of tampax and bombed his country with it in an effort to absorb the filth. Maxi Cane did not take this kindly, and has seen fit to call this an act of terrorism, of war. He likened me to the Mc Cain to his Obama, but the reality is that I am the Geldof to his Cowan… such underhanded behaviour should not go unpunished.
I implore to you, my readers, not to stand and defend my blog, but to stand and defend the concept of human decency. I cannot promise you riches or wealth, merely the knowledge that you’re on the side of the good guys, the tireless and un-wielding people who know that to fight the good fight is all that matters in this world.
I am Samuel L Jackson, I am Ezekiel 25:17;
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.
Together, good people, let us round up our collective imaginations and bring down Empire Maxiland. No punishment is too harsh, there is no line to cross as Maxi has long ago ascertained, there are no boundaries.

Let us keep the peace by bombing the shite out of Maxi Cane.
Who will join me in this fight and rage towards the dying of the shite?
House Proud
We have a… erm… ‘friend’ who lives in London. A while ago, she decided to visit us and rather than have her stay in a hotel, we invited her to stay with us. We gave her a warm bed, food, local tours and endless shopping trips; no expense was spared, we wanted to make her feel as welcome as possible. Her aura felt strained, though, the entire time. She sat on the edge of her seat nibbling at her fingertips, and I caught her sneaking a quick whiff of one of our cushions at one stage, screwing up her face as she did so like she’d accidentally spilled raw sewage on her hands, oblivious to the fact that I was watching. When she left on the Sunday, her parting statement was not of thanks but of dismay.
“Don’t you have any pride?” she asked… “Can’t you see that your house is a mess? You should really take care of your home better.”
Instead of my being shocked, I found myself questioning her definition of the word ‘home’. Her house is pristine… she surrounds herself with expensive porcelaine dolls to witness her perfection, makes you take off your shoes as you enter and confines you to the wooden flooring lest you crimp her shag pile with your oaf-ish feet. Her walls are adorned with cheap prints found at M&S, designed to make you feel as though you’ve stepped into the most perfect house in the world… modern, yet demure. Fake plants, fake flowers, fake books and soap that is never to be used. Fake, fake, fake. She has a young child, but she must keep it in the attic lest it spill something, for there is no evidence of it at all… a pure oddity to me.
My house has errant beads and lost jigsaw pieces under the couch. Paper covered in painty splodges is stuck all over the refrigerator with silly chipped fridge magnets, and a dotted line of grime adorns the wall above each step of the staircase, the graduation marks of a toddler’s ability to master the epic skill that is stair-climbing. Each smudge of grime elongates slightly upwards to show how fast she’s growing, and I think it’s the most beautiful thing she’s created in her short life so far. Tufts of dog hair sleep cozily in corners, and painted toilet roll tubes decorate the bookcase proudly showing off their apprentice artist’s work… far too sentimental to throw away.
This is home. Home tells a story and describes its occupants… it reflects the countless giggles that hang around stubbornly in it’s crevices, and it is not afraid to show its weaknesses, its colourful history, the bare underbelly of disorganisation. I feel most welcome in places like this and look forward to returning… to finding new marks of family life to warm the soul. I don’t look forward to re-visiting houses where my presence most obviously creates more work for its owner, where I feel as though I’ve stumbled into the territory of an empty heart.
So far my nicest experience of what is most definitely a ‘home’, happened today. I stood with a friend, nattering by a boiling kettle and my eye suddenly fell upon a forgotten sight. I interrupted her flow of conversation rudely with an exclamation of pure joy, and went to it like a pirate to the treasure of Davy Jones. A height chart was rudely marked on the door frame of the kitchen in an array of different mediums… pencil, crayon, marker… each displayed a proud date and a loving line, made uneven by the jiggling head of a young child. The dashes stopped at waist-height, and I got the sense of a story that hasn’t ended, the anticipation of things to come… blank wood… the patient wait for that final line. If ever there was a picture drawn based on pure love, this was it. It was truly beautiful, just like mine was when I was growing up. I felt honoured and proud to have seen it.
Proud. House-proud.
Home.
Unfare
So taxi fares went up 8% today. At least they would have if the people that be could sort the bloody process out a bit.
8% wage increase eh?
So to get this increase, a taxi driver must first drive into the city, pay an arm and a leg to re-calibrate the machine, then drive back to an NCT/SGS place and get the meter ‘fixed’ or ‘sealed’ or whatever it is they do to get the machine legitimized, forking out the end of the hard-earned penny-jar to do so.
TAT embarked on this increadible journey last week. He took time off work to drive to Rialto to have the wheels tested and re-timed, and to have the meter re-calibrated. He pulled his plumb for a whole four hours while they did their thing, then he returned to Dunlaoghaire to get the meter tested and sealed, only to be told that our car had failed.
TAT called Rialto to question their obligations quite firmly, but they claimed innocence. Apparently SGS had a widespread problem which meant that “shit loads” of drivers were calling up to rant about their cars having failed, legally meaning that they can’t go to work.
Can’t go to work? On halloween night? Sod that, so it seemed to TAT and countless other drivers. This meant that all over Ireland last night, A fleece of cabs found that at midnight, 31st October 2008 (the witching hour?) their meters began to talk gibberish and cease to work. Bray certainly suffered the scourge anyway, with countless drivers reverting to hackney status instead of admitting defeat and going home to their beds. TAT certainly didn’t mind, but that’s because he’s an opportunist. It *ahem* opened many doors for him, as it were. If he’d have been caught by the regulation vultures he’d have been absolutely screwed, but I suppose they didn’t foresee this disaster.
Apparently the system is fixed now, so they’re inviting TAT back out for a re-test. Happy days.
What a ballache. What a wage increase!
That’s like your boss telling you that you are entitled to a minimum raise, but only if you travel to Thailand, climb Mount Wannahockaloogie* at midnight (in your bare feet) and pick a flower that only blooms when the moon is waxing over the third mystical stone. Wouldn’t you tell your boss where to stick his raise? If only we could!!!

Speaking of ‘we’, technically this is now the Royal We, for K8 the Gr8 has now officially been forced to quit taxi driving. Booooo.
I loved that job so much, its perks were bountiful. It gave me a sense of purpose, a reason to wear make-up and fine clothing, and an endless source of material for this here blog, to name just a few.
Roy’s going to be pissed off, but not as much as I am.
So why quit?
- My insurance alone cost €900(ish)/year.
- My radio rental was €60 a week (special offer ‘coz I was a girrrl)
- The ‘session had dropped my daily earnings to a quarter of what they were when I first started.
- My leaving the house at lunchtime left a severely sleep-deprived TAT with an endless chorus of ‘DADDY WAKE UP DADDY WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP’ no matter how many sleeping pills I’d put in the child’s cereal that morning. He was suffering from perputual ‘flu because of this, as three hours sleep a night just isn’t enough for some people. So selfish, but there you go.
- Puppychild’s attending playschool 28 miles away was playing havoc with our diesel costs, which was a large enough problem without me further adding to it by driving almost as far to work and not earning any money.
- I wasn’t being entirely honest with my earnings (SHHH!) and I get cranky at the prospect of losing my Carer’s Allowance etc… by the way, did I mention I never charged for fares?
There may still be some strange and wonderful taxi-driving tales to be told on this blog, but they will henceforth be written vicariously through me from The Accidental Terrorist who tends to have a memory like a sieve and may be keeping one or two stories from me for fear I’ll collapse in horror.
Guest-blogging is right out. I tried.
So, I’m back to being house-bound. A domestic engineer. The crazy cat lady.
PANTS
*Yes, I do get most of my material from Finding Nemo. Sue me.

