K8 the GR8

I’m officially a big fat hypocrite.  I used to love whingeing about taxi drivers, saying what wankers they were to push me out of a lane or cut me off.  I joked when people told me I’d be the same… I swore I’d remain considerate, but no, today I fell over the edge. 

Drivers dithering at the lip of a slip lane are asking for me to overtake them.  People sitting at filter arrows across from me seem to want me to cut them off, it’s not my fault.  Taxi drivers are just on auto-pilot most of the time… I am, even after only three days.  I’m too busy concentrating on the radio, my destination and other car’s bumpers for me to remember to be nice. 

So on behalf of all the taxi drivers in Ireland, we’re sorry, but if you’re dozy, we’ll just keep right on trucking.  We have to.  Feel free to bully back, it makes a nice break from the routine!

I found a video for you.  I hope it works.  It’s a rather inspiring story about an adopted African boy:

Thanks Kelly

I worked my first day as a taxi-driver today.

My first customer was a really sound one armed-bloke from Los Angeles.  He is thinking about opening a Mexican restaraunt in Bray which I very verbally fully supported, as there aren’t many places you can find good chili around Wicklow.

I then had an airport run, so got to spazz around on the M50 for a while listening to my choons in the early springtime sunshine, so that was pretty nice. 

I’ll tell you what though, it’s nifty having a CB radio.  There was a quiet spell at 6 o’clock when I got to sit on my thumb and read the paper for a whole hour, and I got bored.  There was no chatter at all on the radio, Bray was dead.  Everyone must have decided to walk home I suppose.  I had to resist some serious temptation to press the button and tell a really dirty joke. 

Somebody dare me to do it.  Give me something really short but pee-inducingly funny to say on the CB and I’ll do it.  Go on, I know you have material.  Cough it up.

I don’t understand politics, mainly because I’ve never tried to.  It’s not something that upsets me much, at least it didn’t until I started reading blogs and found I had to skip over the political ones - my brain just can’t process the sattire or the original point.  No offence to political sattirists, it’s just the way I am.

I do, however, understand children very well, and it wasn’t until this morning when little Sally next door came in to play with Puppychild that the truth suddenly hit me.  The parallells between the infant world and the political world were right in front of me all the time!

To demonstrate this theory, for this next part I will assume the position of both a child between the ages of two and five, and a political bigwig.

~*~

- If you are doing something interesting, I will butt in and do it with you until I am better at it than you are, unless you get bored with it and go on to do something else.  At this point I will change too and continue proving I am better than you are, until such a time that I fall asleep or a body of greater power comes along and stops me.

- Hello, I see you’re new to this neighbourhood!  See this kid/country here?  This is my friend.  You can’t play with us until you provide evidence that you have a stash of Smarties/Weapons of Mass Destruction.  That’s just how it works.  Ok?

- If you push me, I will not ask you why you pushed me, I will just go ahead and push you back.  I will continue fighting with you for no underlying reason until such a point where a body of greater power intervenes or one of us starts crying.  If there is no body of greater power around, then I guess we are both fucked.

- Hey!  Where did you get that ball/space exploration equipment?  That is MINE.  Not going to give it up?  Fine, I’ll just ask my mum to go and buy me one, and if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll just draw a picture of it and put it against my bedroom window so you’ll think I have one, then you won’t want yours any more!  HA!  No wait… easier yet… I’ll get the other kid down the road to steal it for me.  Yeah.

- Where did you get that money?  What?!  You found it on the ground?  Well, then it’s my money, because I dropped it yesterday, and no, I won’t tell you where because I don’t have to prove myself to you.  Not going to give it up?  FINE!  I’ll tell my mom/the media!

- So you want to play our game?  I don’t know whether or not you’re allowed - you’ll have to ask the leader.  What do you mean he already told you to ask me?  I’m not the leader so it’s not my problem… go ask… somebody else, OK? ‘Bye!!!

- If you see a tree full of apples and think it’s pretty, you’re wierd/left wing.  Me?  I see a tree full of apples, I get my dad to chop it down and bring it home.  I’ll then pick all the apples, shout; ‘I’m going to turn you into poo!’ and eat every last one without sharing with you, just because I can.  And you know what else?  If I feel sick afterwards I will come and throw up all over you because it’s your fault for not stopping me.  So there.

~*~

There you have it.  My stab at politics.  I know now, that when I read a headline in the papers like:

“Ahern insists he will stay on until 2012″

I’ll know to translate it roughly as…

“Bertie needs a nap.”

Beat that, Marx-y baby!  I finally understand…

I had a bloody interesting conversation with a litter warden a few days ago.  It was the sort of conversation that left me thinking, the sort of conversation that could even be excellent thesis material.  It went something like this:

-Why is it that we Irish insist on emptying our ashtrays out of our car windows, even though we’re proud of our country?

-Why is it that we keep smoking even through the drastic price hikes and the knowledge that it’s killing us?

-Why do we keep speeding on our roads when we know we’re putting ourselves and others in grave danger?

-Why do we have appalling statistics for underage drinking?

I’ll tell you why.  It’s because we Irish are born rebels.  Rebellion still flows through our veins; we have, after all, only been independant for just over two generations.  It’s a latent feeling that we don’t deserve to be spoken down to, to be ruled by anyone other than ourselves.  We want to be our own boss and have ample intelligence to know what is or is not good for us.

Moreover, I bet if somebody was to analyse statistics, they might find similar trends in other historically supressed countries.

The people holding the purse are worried and embarrased.  They want to stop us from killing ourselves and prepetuating our bad reputation, but they are unfortunately going about it the wrong way entirely.

We are sick and tired of people in authority wagging their chubby fingers at us and shouting ‘NO, NO, NO!’  Price hikes aren’t working.  Restrictions aren’t working either.  Fines are possibly the worst way to solve this problem… they just fatten the hate and disrespect.

You know what the government should be doing?  They should be re-inforcing the original Irish pride, yes, the stuff they named the sliced pan after!  For example, the litter warden I was talking to doesn’t hand out fines to litter offenders.  She goes to the source.  She encourages school kids to take part in recycling programmes, gets them to pick up the rubbish on the streets left there by their ignorant elders.  They see the fruits of their hard work and they are proud kids.  She is respectfully teaching them instead of punishing them.  It’s so simple.

Wouldn’t it be radical for bill board posters to say something like…

‘Go ahead and speed if you want to, but you’re killing your own people.  Your ancestors fought for their freedom, so why undo their hard work?’

Or

‘Congratulations, thanks to you and your fellow Irish people, Ireland could have the lowest rate of alcohol related deaths in the world!’

Instead of supressing our kids, we should be encouraging them!  Don’t tell them they’re stupid for drinking, tell them that they are the much-needed brains of our future.  Ask them with respect to preserve those brains, and listen to their needs for alternative entertainment during their wilderness years.  Respect goes a lot further than bullying, but I’m afraid bullying is the only tactic being used these days.  Our government seems to have lost faith in us, in our ability to take care of ourselves.

We Irish need to learn how to respect ourselves, to re-kindle the pride.  We should stop whingeing about the government and infecting our young’uns with hatred, and take matters into our own hands for we are indeed big and ugly enough. 

Coincidentally, I’m listening to ‘Warning’ by Incubus at the moment.  Brandon Boyd just sang these words to me:

“I suggest we learn to love ourselves before it’s made illegal”

I found a most excellent book today on the ‘please take me I’m free!’ bookshelf in the Murrough recycling centre.

It’s called ‘211 Things a Bright Boy Can Do’, by Tom Cutler.  It’s not as old as it looks, in fact it was only published in 2006, but there is still very much an old-school sort of style to it.

The book answers questions on ‘How to be a real man’, gives excellent science experiments, teaches you how to give speeches and behave at parties, explains tricks and cons, has pretty decent recipies… it even has an ‘everything you want to know about…’ section. 

I’ve been pouring over it for the last while and have found that there is way too much good material in there - it’s just too hard to pick my favourite questions.  So instead, I thought I’d post some of the questions here, then answer which ones take your interest in following posts!

1 - How to light a fart
2 - How to appear more intelligent than you are
3 - How to impress a girl on a budget
4 - How to cure a hangover
5 - How to drive a nail into a plank with your bare hand
6 - How to win money in a casino without cheating
7 - How to blag your way in philosophy
8 - How to do a five minute show with just a blade of grass
9 - How to make a boomerang actually come back
10 - How to fold an origami gift box
11 - How to make a glass harmonica
12 - How to stop a train with your bare hands
13 - How to cook for a girl
14 - How to tell when a girl fancies you
15 - How to judge a woman’s bra size at a glance
16 - How to walk through a postcard
17 - How to get by in Pidgin English
18 - A guide to DIY funerals
19 - How to make a pair of trousers from pub beer towels
20 - Four diversions with a banana

And… if you find the above of some interest, I might even make this book a prize for future caption competitions… YAY!

No, not underwear models… this is much more interesting.

There is a well kept secret here in Wicklow, it’s buried in the countryside, halfway between Roundwood and the Sally Gap.  It’s a very wierd peace-haven called Victoria’s Way.

If you want something different, whether it be a picnic with the family, a quiet stroll or just some good old fashioned food for thought, you’ll want to visit this place.

It isn’t very well marked, but you’ll recognise it by the painted sign on the road.  Its carpark is usually bare apart from a wooden shed with a coin slot on the side, for any donations you feel like throwing in.  From the carpark, the entrance is through the gates of hell, into a huge field full of these fellows:

Each has their own musical instrument, their music is only bound by your imagination.  From this field you have several options - there are extensive walks dotted with random sculptures to freak you out unexpectedly, or there’s an open maze, which is not so much a maze really as a set of random paths intertwining around small signposts.  Each signpost is obscurely worded and will confuse you utterly, but still manages to provoke alternate levels of thinking, which is pretty much the overall effect of this sculpture park… absolutely everything smacks of ‘WTF?!’

When you’re finished meandering, you’ll eventually find yourself back at Victor’s house, which is a tiny cottage attached to a mighty garage.  Inside this garage, are statues the likes of which you would never forget… like this starving chap:

Or this mildly upsetting but vastly intriguing couple:

Once you’ve signed the far wall, you then advance to the shop where you’ll find a wallful of totally unique hand-made jewellery.  This is surrounded by Buddha and Ganesh statues, incense burners, books and ornaments.  Everything is extremely well priced, unless you count a conversation with Victoria himself the extra cost, for it’s a conversation full of arguments like; is 1 + 1 = 1? Are you really a ’self’ or an expression of ’self’? 

Absolutely everything is confusing in an unexplainable way.  To give you an idea, here is the story behind Victoria from his book ‘Making your dream come true’;

Victoria was born Victor Langheld on April 29th 1940 in Berlin, Germany.  On Ash Wednesday, 1945, he emerged from the firestorm of Dresden a dead man walking and began a second life.  He came to Ireland in 1946.

At the age of 12 he decided that enlightenment would be a goal worth sacrificing his second life for.   So he took to heart the advice of so many spiritual masters to go east.  He arrived in India in 1964 and there studied and practiced relentlessly to make his dream of enlightenment come true.  He eventually became a Buddhist monk and, on December 1st, 1980, much to his surprise, he achieved the peak experience of awakening and release.  To his astonishment he realized that reaching the peak is easy, but that the return home is difficult.  Indeed, it would take another 18 years of toil and an encounter with a fully realized spiritual mistress before he began to glimpse the way home.

It was in honor of this extraordinary woman and in submission to her unsurpassed knowledge and power that he changed his name to Victoria.

Mr. Cool - The Nirvana Man

Are the Irish more innocent than the British, or do we just get sex education later on in our school years?

I’ve noticed a very common feature on DVD boxes lately.  You might have seen this before:

What does it mean?  I’m picturing cinemas full of British kids… maybe the odd Irish kid with a fake ID, while the rest of the poor innocent Irish kids are forced into the pubs who will, let’s face it, accept any age group now that the smoking ban and price hikes have diminished their punter numbers so dramatically.

Last night for example, TAT and I indulged in a comedy fest and watched both ‘Superbad‘ and ‘Mr. Woodcock’.  ‘Superbad’ is rated 18 by the Irish Film Censor’s Office, but also rated 15 by the BBFC.  ‘Mr. Woodcock’ is rated 12 by normal standards, but rated 15 for the Irish.  Doesn’t this make us look a bit pathetic?  Are Irish children that naive?  I don’t get it!

I bet that if you approach any Irish 17 year old and ask them what ‘fellatio’ is, they will probably not only be able to spell it backwards correctly the first time, but will also be able to quote references to its performance in at least 10 different films.

Why don’t they do this with speed signs if this is the case?  If you’re foreign, you’re probably a better driver so you may travel at 120kmph along this stretch.  If you’re Irish, you’re probably still on your third provisional license and over the intoxicated substances limit, so you may only travel at 60kmph. 

I’m Irish, and I feel special.  I just haven’t figured out whether it’s a good or a bad thing.

There’s a constant internal nagging stuck on loop in my head.  Every mother feels it in her own way, each worries needlessly if they’re caring enough, providing a good enough start for their kids, knowing deep down that to hug and to keep safe is all that really matters.

With Laughingboy, this feeling has more pronounced lows and highs.  The kid is six years old and completely dependant, meaning that he can’t ward off boredom by kicking a football against a wall, twiddling on a transformer, or even holding a blinking toy.  He just lies there, stuck in the position he was last left in, sometimes for hours on end.

I feel pangs for him when I’m pooching on the net, or fighting virtual baddies on the xbox - I think of how I could be using this time to sit with him and talk or read with him… anything, just to have him aware that I love him and haven’t forgotten him.  It’s stupid, I mean if I didn’t rest sometimes on the long path of motherhood, I’d go crazy, and I know that.

It’s just that when I see him stare into space as he usually does when there’s nothing visual to focus on, I wonder… if he doesn’t know frenzied exercise, doesn’t it stand to reason that he doesn’t know boredom?  I pray that my imagination is so limited that I have no idea of the wonderful stuff spinning through his mind as the hours crawl by, for it’s more than I could stand to think he lives his whole life in prepetual emptiness.

This would have been the case a hundred years ago.  Laughingboy would have been forced into a home or locked in a basement with no-one to hear his giggles, nothing to do all day but stare.

This isn’t a hundred years ago, though, it’s today.  The day of respite, the day of St. Catherine’s.  St. Catherines school, and others like her, are where you want to go if you ever want to meet an angel.

St. Catherine’s fills Laughingboy’s school days with activity; stuff like physiotherapy, swimming and singing.  If you thought Barney was on drugs, these people would Blow. Your. Mind.

This is an era where bad news rules the media.  If you look closely, though, you’ll find that bad news is just the scum on the surface of life’s pond.  There are amazing fish underneath who will bravely land a seized-up Boeing 777 against all odds and save all the lives on board, and fish who will ignore someone’s disabilities and squeeze their untapped happiness out with only the purest of motivations.

I got this photo sent home in Laughingboy’s schoolbag yesterday:

It soothes the crazy like a warm fleece blanket.

For those of you who are sick of hearing about Christmas, or who really just aren’t into that sort of thing anyway…

December 25th is the feast of ‘Sol Invictus’, the re-birth of the sun.  Being a huge fan of the sun (I don’t get to see it often), I will spare a thought for it on Christmas Day.  For I suppose, if it wasn’t for Sol Invictus, our modern day ‘Christmas’ wouldn’t exist!  Or, it would have been somewhere near Thanksgiving which would have annoyed the U.S., or somewhere in January, which clashes with the January Sales, and that wouldn’t make financial sense at all.

In 46 BC, when the Roman “Julian Calendar” was adopted, December 24th was the shortest day of the year. Therefore, December 25th was the first annual day that daylight began to increase. Thus, the origin of rebirth, or annual birthday of the invincible sun. (source)

I have to go cleaning windows for a few days so I don’t know when I’ll next be able to get back to this ‘puter!  Also there are presents to wrap and bags to pack and bits to buy and cakes to ice and plans to be formed and it’s all too much JUST FOR ONE PERSON!!!!

*sigh*

From the bottom of my heart… Happy whatever you’re into.  May you not spill a drop this holiday.

I hope the New Year brings you silky smooth skin with hardly any acne and absolutely no hives at all.  Metaphorically speaking.

Minced beef is a wonderful foodstuff. I couldn’t turn it down when my friend offered some to me. She’d over-stocked in the supermarket, and had left the sealed package in the fridge for a few days with a view to feeding it to her dog. I took it off her hands, and threw it into my own fridge, intending on turning it into something yummy some night.

The days passed, however, and the hectic weekend denied me any chance of cooking at all. When I did finally fish the meat out of the fridge, I saw to my dismay that it had turned a funny grey colour, bordering on green. I peeled back the sealed cellophane and had a sniff.

Women develop a highly effective survival technique when they become pregnant, and it stays with us. We can sniff a product, and instantly judge from our queasiness levels as to how nourishing it will be for our growing foetus. I can smell a rotten sausage from five miles away, as the actress said to the bishop.

This minced green beef, now six days past its sell by date, didn’t smell too toxic at all! Then I remembered a fact I’d learned. Apparently the curry was invented to use up stocks of rancid meat. Enough spices and pungent herbs can disguise even the dodgiest of foods.

I emptied the meat into a dish, then added curry powder, cardamom, cumin seed, chile powder, ginger, worcester sauce and of course, oodles of salt and pepper. I kneaded it all together, and made home-made burgers out of it.

The Accidental Terrorist picked up his burger and took a large bite.

“Jeeeezus!” he exclaimed. I went pale, and squirmed a little.

“Is it ok?” I asked breezily.

“It’s feckin’ delicious!!! Did you make these?”

“Yep!” I said. “Did you know that curry was invented to disguise the taste of rancid meat?”

“No” he said, and took another large bite.

I did my part. I gave adequate warning. I know you’d love to hear that we both spent the remainder of the evening fighting for toilet-bowl space, but we didn’t. Not even so much as a ‘hot ring of fire’ the next morning.

My granny would be proud of my frugality.