Cork SMS pervert and political injuries

by Twenty Major on October 21st, 2004

A man in County Cork has been given a 12 month suspended jail sentence for sending offensive text messages to various women all around Ireland.

Twenty Major has an exclusive transcript of some of them:

Perv: im gn 2 ks u

Victim: What?

Perv: I sd im gn 2 ks u & den lck ur ars

Victim: Is this some kind of code?

Perv: Bnd ovr n sk my hge rod u drty btch

Victim: If you’re attempting to dispatch some kind of missive to which I am expected to respond, I suggest you make use of a dictionary for you are as erudite and intelligible as a farmyard beast or a Government minister.

The presiding Judge said the man’s messages were “vulgar, obscene, and grossly offensive“. And that’s the just the way they were written.

Elsewhere I see Fidel Castro has broken his arm after a fall. He may have broken his kneecap too. It put me in mind of other famous political injuries.

In 1984 Margaret Thatcher dislocated her quim during an Anglo-Irish conference. Garret Fitzgerald helped her put it back in place.

In 1989, whilst preparing his Presidential campaign, Brian Lenihan woke up to discover the bolt from his neck was missing.

Nobody was shocked when Doctor Ian Paisley grew up to be an enormous cunt.

Former US President Jimmy Carter once farted and followed through during a debate on live television. The previous night’s curry and peanut wine scorched the shape of Che Guevara onto the back of his thigh.

Finally Mahatma Ghandi had a rectal polyp with foot long tentacles which caught and devoured fish like a sea anenome whenever he went swimming. He was barred from the Delhi Hilton after his arse tried to consume the four year old son of the British ambassador.

Gardai to give trouble-makers a buzz

by Twenty Major on October 20th, 2004

I read this morning in The Independent (and at this point I’d like to point out that I never buy the filthy rag but am not averse to reading it when it’s free and I don’t have the back of a cereal box handy) that Gardai are adding ‘tasers’ to their weapons arsenal.

Now, in Ireland the normal policemen don’t carry guns. Only the special squads, known as Mega-Gardai or Gardai Plus, carry guns. The police chiefs are worried about these lads having guns because they rarely get a chance to use them and the minute they see any kind of mentaller they shoot the fucker dead on his own doorstep. So the ‘tasers’, which shoot an electric current into an attacker, incapacitating him for a few minutes, are thought to be the answer.

They’re a good idea if you ask me, and they should be issued to all Gardai. Using these would put some manners on the drunken louts that plague our city.

Imagine the scene. It’s 2.45am on a Sunday morning. Hundreds of culchies are coming out of CopperFace Jacks on Harcourt Street. There’s a disagreement. Perhaps Mickey-Joe has been having an affair with Seamus’ sister. There are some shovel-handed punches thrown. It’s all getting a bit out of hand. Along come the Gardai, they taser whoever’s involved and leave them lying in a pool of their own piss and vomit on the side of the road. Don’t you think the lads would think twice about fighting the next time?

Another scene to imagine, if you will. A group of crusty, unwashed ‘Reclaim the Streets’ (reclaim the streets from what exactly? The giant ants that terrorise us all? Fuck off.) types are marching up Dame Street. They’re singing, there are fuckers chanting, the possibility of catching head lice is greater than ever before and there are baggy-panted, dreadlocked little pricks from Foxrock and Malahide (who after reclaiming the streets will go home to Mammy and Daddy’s €750,000 house to watch Sky+ or play their Playstations or XBoxs while downloading the latest films on their high speed internet connections) who are playing the fucking bongos. Maybe there’s a right time and place for the bongos, but I’ve never encountered it yet.

Along come the Gardai. “Taste my feckin’ taser Tarquin. Howd’ya like this Lorcan? Eat my volts, Vincent.

The bongos stop. Without the bongos these cunts are powerless. To these new fangled hippy types the bongos are like Samson’s hair. How do they know which sub-Jester dance step to do without them? More lying on the street in their piss and puke (although with some of them it’d be hard to know the difference between before and after), the traffic can move again and the streets have been reclaimed from the nasty infestation they’d suffered before.

It’s so simple when you think about it. There’s no long-term damage to anyone, they just get a short sharp lesson on how to behave.

Taser up the Gardai now. You know it makes sense.

Genius

by Twenty Major on October 19th, 2004

This is just fantastic (via Rob’s Rants)

Why is radio so crap now?

by Twenty Major on October 19th, 2004

You flick through the dials, you hear the same song on 5 different stations, the same ads, the same everything. It’s homogenous, it’s boring, it’s dull and safe. It’s everything that’s wrong about Ireland.

I remember in the late 70s and early 80s listening to the radio in Dublin was cool. For years we had nothing much to listen to. RTE, the BBC on the world service and then we started getting pirate radio stations. Radio Dublin was one I remember, but where it really kicked off was when the English lads came over. For years everything we had to listen to was on medium wave. Most of the kids won’t even know what medium wave is, but it’s like listening to music being played in a tin can 100 yards away after bursting your eardrums.

But then along came Radio Nova, on 88FM. Man that was cool stuff. We had the hottest hits to listen to, cool DJs, groovy sounding jingles and a city was changed. Soon we had the likes of Sunshine 101 and Q102 competing for the same listeners. But the Zoo Crew with Declan Meehan and Bob Gallico was the one show you had to listen to in the morning. As a kid going to school I didn’t like getting up in the morning, but I’d wake up and lie in bed listening to my alarm clock radio just to hear these guys.

Then there were the giveaways. Nova ran a competition to give away £10,000 when they played 3 particular songs in the correct order. After weeks of promotion and almost playing them came the fateful day. The three songs got played, caller 100 was going to win the prize, but such was the fascination and enthusiam of the listeners that they brought down the entire telephone network in Dublin. Heady days.

Sadly Nova ran into difficulties with the NUJ, boss Chris Cary was a spiky character and it closed down in around 1985 I think. A re-grouped station called Energy 103 emerged but things would never be the same again. For those few years if you were cool you listened to Nova.

Now we have DJs all reading the same scripts, playing the same songs, station bosses afraid to give anybody licence to say anything that might upset advertisers and sponsors. And it’s boring. Tedious. It makes me want to invent a device which would enable to me to say the words ‘fucking cunty bollocks’ over any broadcast in the land and nobody would be able to find me.

Regulation killed Irish radio.

Talentless beggars

by Twenty Major on October 18th, 2004

Don’t you think they’d make more money and raise the profile of their industry if they actually did something to convince you to give them money?

What’s the big difference between a busker and a beggar (apart from one generally lives in a house and the other lives under a bridge or in a shop doorway)? The busker plays his guitar and sings a song, people willingly give him money. The beggar shuffles towards you stinking of piss and Liebfraumilch and you pass him by without making eye contact.

Now, everybody in this world has a talent. It might be singing, dancing, playing the guitar, turning your eyelids inside out, shooting milk out of your eyes or anything else. But we all have them. What beggars need to do is find out what it is they can do that will entertain people enough to give them money, and who knows, it might change their life.

Take the 3 little itinerant lads who used to stand together and sing on Grafton Street. They got money from people who thought ‘Aaahh, look at the little urchins, aren’t they cute?’ and not only that they got themselves a record deal. At the moment they’re recording an album in New York with Bob Clearmountain and Sting has written some meaningful songs for them to sing. True.

Then there was the bloke who used to beg outside the Golden Gonad at the Central Bank on Dame Street. It was discovered that he could paint stunningly accurate replicas of old masters from any era, and now he has a €1,000,000 a year job in Singapore producing fakes.

And what about Parliament Street Pete who could knock old women to the ground with a single punch. He’s now a major celebrity in the Arab world.

So next time you see a beggar, don’t ignore it. Encourage it to find its niche in the world, to cultivate its talent and to try and do something to earn the 13cents you have in your pocket.

If they refuse they should be ground down and fed to poor people for sustenance.

You know what’s annoying?

by Twenty Major on October 16th, 2004

People who link to Salam Paxo - the Baghad blogger and stuffing manufacturer - when the rest of their blog is full of mindless drivel about their missing cats, what the weather is like, how they spent the weekend, and their links are all fluffy tripe hoping to send traffic the way of their Live Journal ‘friends’.

If you think it makes you look intelligent, it doesn’t. If you think people will think you’ve got gravitas and a keen political and social conscience, well they won’t.

It’s like all the kids in my class who bought ‘Brothers in Arms’. Why? For fuck’s sake, why? Because they thought it would mean their musical opinions would be more grown-up. It didn’t. It just made everyone painfully aware they were mindless cunts.

QED.

Drugs, glorious drugs

by Twenty Major on October 15th, 2004

HALF OF YOUNG PEOPLE OFFERED HARD DRUGS screams the headline.

Leaving aside grammatical issues as to whether or not it’s the top or bottom half of young people that are being offered these drugs, I have to express my disappointment at these so-called ‘pushers’.

When I was in 6th class, the last year before you enter senior school here in Ireland, I remember one of the teachers giving the class a talk about how when we got to senior school we’d become targets for people offering us drugs. They’d approach us and we had to say ‘NO!’

I remember wondering who these people were. How come I’d never seen them before? Our school had a junior and senior section, but maybe you needed some secret knowledge to see them. Knowledge you would only get once you got into First Year. Well, after a final innocent summer of football and throwing stuff at girls instead of trying to kiss them, the big day arrived.

I was starting senior school and I was going to be offered drugs. The first day I came out of school I looked around to see if there were people hanging around the bike sheds to offer me drugs. Nope. Maybe they’d be outside the school. Nope. What about outside the newsagents where everybody stopped on the way home to get quarters of cola bottles, fruit cocktails and bonbons. Nope.

In fact, nobody offered me any drugs at all. No hash. No heroin. No acid. No smack. No coke. Not even a small pot of glue or tippex thinner. It was terribly disappointing, I have to say. It made me question what I’d been told in school. If this drugs thing wasn’t true, maybe God didn’t create the earth, maybe the Shannon wasn’t the longest river in the British Isles and perhaps the sum of the the areas of the squares on the legs of a right triangle is not equal to the area of the square on the hypotenuse. What was a boy supposed to believe?

As I grew up I learned some things. The only people who actually offer you drugs, apart from friends or relatives, are generally scumbags trying to shift chunks of briquette as hash or Anadin pills.

If you want drugs, go ask. That’s my advice and that’s what I’ll teach my kids. Save them the disappointment I suffered.

Call centres and India

by Twenty Major on October 13th, 2004

As someone who worked in call centres for quite some time, both as a phone agent and a ‘team leader’ (which meant I got to manage a group of people who’d rather have eaten their own poo than come to work some days), I found this quite amusing.

This outsourcing of call centres to India obviously makes financial sense. Typically a call centre agent in India costs about 20% of what they do in Ireland, quite a saving. But without hands-on control over what goes on in the call centre these companies are heading for a customer service nightmare. Mark my words.

In the call centre I worked in we generally had 3 or 4 team leaders present every day, as well as a call centre manager during regular working hours. Even on the late shift there were never less than 2 team leaders. And we still had problems. Agents hanging up on customers, being rude, playing network games of Counter Strike and Delta Force and just making up stuff to get the customers off the line. To be fair we did what we had to do well enough, and given the fact it’s the kind of job you can only do for a short period of time without wanting to kill yourself I was always fairly lenient.

But can you imagine the Indian call centres? Not only are there the language difficulties, and I don’t mean ‘name and address and operating system’ type normal English, but the idiomatic expressions as so beautifully outlined in the MP3 above, but there’s the problem of clients not being able to recognise who they were talking to.

Example: “Hello XXXXXXnet technical support, this is Joe speaking. How can I help you?”

Joe has a very strong Dublin accent and Joe is a name you’d remember, right?

Example 2: “Hello XXXXXXnet technical support, this is Surav. How can I help you?”

Surav sounds like an Indian bloke. You don’t know the difference between the accent of an Indian guy from the north of the country, or the south. He just sounds Indian. Now don’t look back. What was his name again? Erm…”Hello, I was talking to some…erm…Indian bloke….”

Problems. Then there’s the quality control. If something serious happens how do you manage it? And no doubt where our lads are playing video games these guys have full-on cricket matches happening in the call centre.

The other day my Dad rang Dell to order a printer. He got through to a bloke in India who didn’t have a clue what he was on about. And this wasn’t even customer service, this was sales.

The companies may be getting away with this cheap shit for now, but it’ll come back to haunt them in the end. Maybe another time I’ll post some of my call centre stories, revealing the scandal, drugs and sex that goes on inside these places of work.

For now though it’s Counter Strike. Kabooooom.

Street urchins and video games

by Twenty Major on October 12th, 2004

I saw a charming story this morning on the BBC about video games are helping street children in Buenos Aires with their reading and writing. It really is quite remarkable.

If you’ve never seen a real street urchin they grow on damp buildings, down dark alleys amongst the moss and lichen that grows wherever there’s lots of dog piss. They mature faster than normal children and by the age of 4 they’ve got the equivalent stealing stills of an 18 year old in Western countries. They survive on a diet of shellfish shells, mouldy vegetables and their infirm elders and communicate through a series of subsonic grunts and cries, which only they, with their specially adapated ears, can hear. This unique system of communication means their victims never hear the “¡Oye! Pablo! Tourista a las Once!” before their wallet is pilfered from their back pocket.

But now it turns out that playing games such as Streetfighter II, ISS and Manic Miner has improved the language skills of these strange creatures and they’re also learning how to mingle with human beings in video arcades and cyber cafés. According to the Juan Marquez-Vasquez III, leading Argentinian sociologist, soon the urchins will mate with their new found friends and create a new species of Playstation Urchins, who can clear level after level of the most complicated games while using telekenisis to gather wealth and jewels, without even leaving their seats.

It’s a remarkable world we live in.

The curse of Superman

by Twenty Major on October 11th, 2004

Well today came the news that Superman actor Christopher Reeve has died, nine years after an horse riding accident which left him paralysed.

Some people have spoken about ‘The curse of Superman’ and when you look at some of the actors involved in the various films and TV shows it makes sense. Obviously you have Christopher Reeve, but in 1959 George Reeves, who played the man of steel in various TV series and movies, was found dead with single gunshot wound to his head. It’s thought he was knocked off for having an affair with a studio boss’ wife.

Then there’s Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the most recent movies. She went totally insane and used to shave her head with a Bowie knife and eat furniture until a cocktail of drugs made her a drooling vegetable.

What of Dean Cain, who played Superman in the TV series in the 90s? Well, since the series ended Cain has become completely invisible, which is not much good if you’re an working actor, while Teri Hatcher, his Lois Lane, grew a 3 foot long tail and now works in a sideshow in Mexico.

Worst of all though is my old childhood friend John. He used to have a Superman outfit which we were all pretty jealous of back in the day. He had the flowing cape, the outside the pants underpants and the muscly, or girthsome, physique to wear it well. Sadly the curse has affected him too - he’s now an accountant living in Callan, Co. Kilkenny.

It just doesn’t bear thinking about.