I had forgotten the animal magnetism of Dame Street on a Saturday night. Those muscular thighs in short dresses, the staggering, stumbling gentlemen and the overall atmosphere of ‘Will I vomit or fight someone’ was not something I’ve missed, I have to admit.

Nevertheless, found myself in a bar on Dame Street around midnight. It was quite busy. Some pissed up rugby fans and assorted folk, nothing crazy.

Went downstairs for a piss, took my place at the urinal and noticed the one next to me was full. These urinals were quite deep, I’d estimate about 6-8 pints of piss was sloshing about in it. So, who the fuck goes for a piss in a urinal that is clearly blocked? Maybe the first couple of people can get away with thinking it’s just slow at draining, but when there’s a good couple of pints in there why would you add to it?

Why would you risk the splashback of so many different flavours of piss? And what sort of a scumbag are you that when it’s almost up to the rim you still go for a piss in it, as the bloke, who wasn’t that drunk, did when he settled in beside me and pissed on the piss? The worst thing was there were at least three other urinals free and his immediate reaction on seeing the piss-filled one wasn’t ‘Urgh. I’ll go elsewhere’.

People that dirty ought to be put down.

Via Election.ie today’s Sunday Tribune is running a story saying the Church wants its legal fees, arising from the Ryan Report, to be covered by the taxpayer:

While the orders are close to a final agreement with the government to make additional contributions of €100m plus properties to the redress scheme, the Sunday Tribune has learned that the Department of Finance has been notified that the orders have applied to have their massive legal bills arising from the Ryan inquiry covered by the taxpayer.

It sounds ridiculous. Scandalous. Beyond the pale. But would you be in any way surprised if we ended up footing the bill? I wouldn’t.

Remember, this is Fianna Fail, the party who did a deal with the religious orders that saw the taxpayer pay the vast majority of the compensation for victims of child abuse. Michael Woods capped their liability at £100m, the rest of the money paid out came from you and I. Even last year he defended that deal even though it is clearly one of the most corrupt, dishonest deals done in the history of this state, and it’s got some stiff competition there.

So while on the face of it we can think the idea of us paying the religious orders legal bills is absurd, it’s hardly unlikely. Brian Cowen leads this government and is still supplicant and deferring to the cunts from Rome. He backed the papal nuncio, doffing his cap to him like this man was some kind of superior, when his actions were indefensible. We needed leadership in the wake of the Murphy and Ryan reports, we got inaction, cover-ups and whitewashes.

Despite everything the religious right still have a stronghold over this country. That the religious orders would even contemplate such a move is outrageous. That is hasn’t already been dismissed out of hand more so. The taxpayer is not liable for the crimes of the church. They are responsible, they should pay.

If they get away with this then what have we learned? What’s different? We might as well just let them do whatever they want. This country is filled with brain-dead apologists for this most corrupt of organisations, sadly too many of them are in government.

The religious orders are like violent, perverted criminals – they fuck us, then rob us.

We had a fundraiser in Ron’s last night for that old earthquake thing.

“Hatin’ for Haiti’ was a resounding success. Each person had to get up and rant about something they disliked intensely. Jimmy’s prolonged tirade about the fat old one from Boyzone and how he could be directly linked to the financial and political crisis in this country was a thing of wonder.

Stinking Pete spoke about how much he detests public speaking, Splodge about people from Luxembourg and even old Charlie down the end of the bar had a go, explaining why people who put your change on the counter when you have your hand out for it ought to be exterminated in concentration camps.

In the end we raised a good old sum of money which Ron put in a pint glass behind the bar before doing his bit about how he hated fundraisers and as such was confiscating the money to help pay for the urinal Dave cracked when he passed out in the jacks last week.

Hey, needs must.

America, the land which produces the most pornography in the world. The country which is involved in more wars than any other. A land so huge and massive and populated that even when you think there is nothing that can shock you, someone commits a crime of such heinousness you are genuinely taken aback.

So why are Americans so up their own arses about swearing? I saw some website this morning exclaming with shock and horror that Mel Gibson unleashed ‘the A-bomb’ on television. This is not an actual bomb containing AIDS or Anthrax or AntswithAIDSorAnthrax. No. He said the word ‘asshole’. Imagine.

You see it all the time though. “The F-bomb” or heaven forbid, “The C-bomb”. Because you can’t say cunt in America. It’s just not on. Even though there are so many cunts there you can’t call them cunts in polite society. Or even impolite society. One of the good things about Ireland is that we, at least, can call all the cunts we have cunts. Not C-bombs or ‘C U Next Tuesdays”.

Could you legally change your name to Cuntface McCunt over there? That’d be awesome.

“What’s your name?”

“Cuntface”.

“How dare you … you can’t say that to me”.

“But that’s my name”.

It’d probably be really difficult to get a job on TV or in the media “And now over to our New York correspondent, Cuntface McCunt…”, but it’d be fun, wouldn’t it?

I just don’t get why swearing is such a big issue when there are surely dozens of things it’d be better to be uptight about.

*I should note that any Americans I know on a personal level are not representative of this and are quite happy to swear – apart from one woman I used to work with who visibly cringed every time I did. So, naturally I did it more. She was grotesquely fat though and nobody cares what the morbidly obese think about anything. They’re going to die soon so what’s the point in listening to them?

A delivery man called to my door earlier. He had a delivery. He delivered the delivery to me, took out an electronic device and said ‘Sign here’, pointing to the screen. I signed. It looked a bit like this:

This is because those things are impossible to write on. A little pencily-nib dealy and a dodgy screen and any old cunt could sign any old thing and nobody would ever know the difference.

Surely it makes deliveries ripe for not being delivered. Old Delivery O’Toole decides he’ll keep your thing, scratches a signature on it and then if you complain you haven’t received it they’ll say “But we have your signature!”

“That’s not my signature”, you’ll reply and they’ll say “Well, sign another one of these machines and we’ll compare” and as your signature is nothing but the scrawl of a window-licker on that device they’ll just laugh and your delivery is gone forever.

Bring back pen and paper, I say, before nobody ever gets any deliveries ever again.

It is late at night. Correction, it is early morning. The Dublin sky is that mix of blue and grey, viewed with a haze of last night’s induldgence, adding a film of moving dirt to everything. Walking home up the canal. And you think about the night before.

The bars, the club, the party afterwards where the man is leading his circle in the party in the flat. He is standing on the chair, his gym built muscles in his vest prominent due to the dehydration of a night clubbing and dancing and, every so often, remembering to take a drink. Of water. He is performing.

Makin’ mad love to my girl on the heath
Tearin’ off tights with my teeth

And they, his disciples, are enraptured. He is the conductor, they the orchestra. They wave their arms with his as he intones in time with the music, a middle-aged, southside hairdresser channeling the Brixton rapper in his best Lahndaaaahn accent. And when the words finish and the drums build and it finally kicks back in they lose themselves in the music. They are pliant, they would do anything he asked them now.

You sit amused, smoking at the back of the tiny flat above the shop on the bridge which was open 24 hours and from which you got your Rizla. In the end it is too much, you slip out and this is why you find yourself walking up the canal, laughing at what you’ve just seen.

The impression, though, is indelible. Every time you hear that song that is what you see. The man on the chair, conducting, rapping and watching with a gleam in his eye as his underlings, his biddadble dogs, do as his arms tell them.

Till the end of days that is the image associated with that song. That is the song place.

It’s sad to see. He lies on the floor, at my feet, big brown eyes looking up at me. His cold, wet nose glistening as the flickers from the fire light up the room.

Getting old now, you see. Gone the sprightly beast of youth, the non-stop energy, the gay abandon with which he took to life. Those powerful hind quarters are not what they once were. He sighs. The top of his enormous head is coated with matted hair. He sighs again, scratches vigorously, grumbles.

“You wanna go for a walk, old fella?”, I ask.

He looks at me. I know he understands but what normally has him up and circling like a lunatic, excited to be going outside like it’s his first ever, leaves him stretched out on the floor. He turns on his side. Once lithe, now the belly is pronounced. He stretches.

“Walk?”, I said, jangling his lead.

Nothing. He grumbles again from that deep, barrelly chest, deep, resonating. I can’t help but think of the good times. Out walking. ‘Get ‘em!’, I’d say and he’d leap forward ready to chase and maul and possibly hump whatever it was I was pointing at. Time waits for no man, nor beast. It catches up with us all. The cat strolls in, sniffs him, recoils as is the cats wont, but they are old friends and the feline sits next to him for a while, as if to say ‘It’ll be ok, I understand’.

I put down my book, blow out the candles and put on my coat. I’m going out and he’s coming with me. His life might be passing from autumn to winter but dammit I’m not going to let him fade away like this.

“Get up. Come on. Get up”, I say. He groans again. Lies panting on the floor. “Come on. We’re going out. You have no choice. Get up”. This time he turns away from me. ‘Leave me be’, he’s saying. ‘I just want to lie here to wither in peace’. It’s heartbreaking. A once proud beast reduced to this.

I won’t let him wither though. I will make sure of it. I walk slowly over to him and look down. It’s pitiful. He won’t make eye contact. I’m not sure I could cope if he did. I pretend to walk away, I can sense him relax as he thinks I’m going without him, but quickly I turn and kick him as hard as I can in the balls.

“Come the fuck on, Dave”, I say. “We’re going to Ron’s for a pint and that’s the end of it”.

He gets up. Eventually.

I’m sure I wrote a post before about buildings that you associate with places and landmarks. I can’t seem to find it or maybe I didn’t ever post it and it’s rotting my drafts folder somewhere. That’s besides the point. For me, the landmark I associate most with Dublin is the ESB power plant and the chimney stacks at Poolbeg.

Maybe it says a lot about Dublin architecture that there’s nothing else that really stands out on our skyline. The Spire? Too new. Liberty Hall? Too disgustingly awful. What else is there? In a low level city there’s not much choice, not a lot stands out.

The red and white stacks stand over the bay like pollution producing barber’s poles. They’re a constant when you leave Dublin or when you come back, viewable by boat and by plane. They’re not pretty but they’re Dublin. And now it seems they’re for the chop.

An architech called Neil McCullough says “I don’t think the Poolbeg chimneys are a particular monument, as an architect or as a Dubliner. The discussion about keeping them represents a kind of psychosis of identity in the city, where people hold onto anything familiar as a security blanket in dangerous times”.

A psychosis of identity? Really? A security blanket? How patronising. Do Dubliners have a severe mental health disorder if we want to hang on to things that many of us identify as being part of our city? I don’t think so. We’ve had Europe’s blandest architecture foisted on us as Dublin has been modernised. It’s hard to think of any new buildings which really capture the imagination, that anybody would be too upset to see razed.

To me the chimney stacks aren’t a security blanket, certainly not part of any psychosis, but symbols of my city. It’d be a real shame to lose them.

Cheers to Markham for the tip.

So it’s 30 kmh for anyone that wants to drive through the city centre. This is, in real speed, 18 mph. Which is very slow.

The AA point out the average speed in Dublin city centre is 11 kmh anyway so what’s the point? It’s supposedly to save lives. I’d like to see some stats on how many people are killed in car accidents in the city centre and how many pedestrians are knocked down by cars in the city centre.

Then I’d like to see stats on those pedestrian accidents. How many of them came from a car going through pedestrian crossings? Then how many of them came from people crossing from behind parked cars or buses? How many came from people trying to scurry across the road instead of waiting 20 seconds for the lights? How many of them were down to pedestrians not taking proper care when crossing the road?

I’d suggest most of them are due to pedestrian error. Yet our answer is to shift the responsibility from them to the drivers. How does that work? Why aren’t councillors campaiging for better pedestrian crossings? For Green Cross Code courses?

Personally, I’m going to pay no heed to the new speed limits and if I happen to run a jaywalker over it’s entirely their fault.

*Note to self : Get those fake numberplates made up.

There was a piece in Forbes the other day about the death of blogging which links to the post Una did on here which sparked so much debate. They used the Sunday Times piece from a few weeks previously to back up their assertions, leaving aside the fact, or ignoring, that the article was roundly dismissed by bloggers. Not because it was the Sunday Times and not because it was bloggers being precious, but because it was old, tired and the same old stuff rehashed again.

With all due respect to Sarah Carey, asking her to comment on blogging is like asking Christy Dignam to comment on being a hugely successful rock star. There may have been some vague involvement at some stage in the past but that time has long gone.

Andrew Sullivan picks up on the Forbes article and says blogging in Ireland has failed. This is based entirely on the Forbes piece based on the Sunday Times piece which, of course, was a load of bollocks. It was a rather definitive headline from Sullivan too. It has failed. Not is failing. Or is in danger of failing. Definitive – IT. HAS. FAILED.

What is interesting is this – Forbes is a hugely respected publication and you would imagine their website is very busy. Sullivan is a widely-known blogger and columnist. You would expect, having being linked by Forbes and Sullivan pointing to the Forbes article, that there would be a good flow of traffic from the article. Not so. Since it was published two days ago, I have received a grand total of 14 referrals. So who’s dead again?

Plus, I have to make sniffy noises at one section of Butterworth’s rather poorly researched piece. He says -

As one journalist told me, Ireland’s media is currently abuzz over a “confidential” legal settlement against a blogger, who allegedly had to pay almost $140,000 in damages for a libelous post, seen by few, swiftly purged from the site, and readily apologized for. This kind of judicial policing has, said the journalist, “scared the crap out of people.”

There are plenty of Irish media people blogging, plenty more of them on Twitter and I’m sure if they were abuzz with a story like this we’d have heard all about it. I have friends who work in papers and in radio and on TV and none of them have mentioned anything like this. And exactly which Irish blogger would have $140,000 to pay out? I call foul on that one unless one of those in the know in Ireland’s media can set me straight. I won’t hold my breath though.

Then there’s this:

Perhaps one of the most interesting critiques of Ireland’s blogging experiment comes from one of its veteran technology and social Web researchers, who says the blogosphere came to reflect the very vices of the establishment it ought to have been eviscerating: “It’s an incestuous little clique that doesn’t like criticism from without,” he said, asking not to be named given the sensitivity of his position. “None of the more established bloggers criticize each other. It’s a complete no-no, and as such the political dynamic is similar to the coziness of the political-financial clique that people are so pissed off with.”

Honestly, who the fuck gives a shit what anyone says about your blog? It’s words on a screen, at the end of the day, and if you take it so seriously that you a) have to slag off other blogs or b) get the hump when they slag off you then perhaps you need a new pastime.

The idea that this person, whoever he might be, asked to remain anonymous because of the sensititivty of his position is just hilarious though. What does he think would happen to him if he revealed who he was? There might be some reaction online but he’s hardly going to be confronted by an angry mob wielding pitchforks and flaming torches, is he? He doesn’t need to go into the fucking witness protection program just because he has a pop at a couple of blogs. Honestly, what a fanny, whoever it is.

Anyway, I eagerly await the next installment of the Sunday Times ‘Bloggers are shit’ series and I can’t wait for the plethora of ill-informed, spin-off articles it produces. Honest.