Step back in time…

by Twenty Major on February 15th, 2006

My parents were ordinary decent folk. My mam was a housewife while my father was a burglar. Well, he was once. I know this because the house he burgled was the next-door neighbour’s and he brought me along as a look-out. I was ten years old.

What happened was Da was good mates with Mr Lynch who next door. They used to go to the local and drink pints together in the front bar which they loved because women weren’t allowed in. They’d talk over the garden wall about football and they both used to go and watch Shamrock Rovers together. I’m not 100% sure what happened to bring about the falling out but all of a sudden the two men went from being best of friends to the most brutal of enemies. My mother told me years later that they had a disagreement over the merits of Johnny Giles as a midfield ball winner, an old friend of Da’s told me it was because Mr Lynch and my Da were planning a business venture together – importing some kind of spices from Colombia he said – and my younger brother said he heard from a friend of his that Mr Lynch was getting it on with the wife of another of their friends and that Da had seen Mr Lynch performing cunnilungus on their mutual friend’s wife while she inserted a lard covered digit up his hole.

“There’s that prick now!” my father would exclaim if saw Mr Lynch. It didn’t matter if he saw him over the wall of the garden, in the local shop or in the street. Till my dying day I’ll remember Da shouting ‘Siddown ya cunt!’ at Mr Lynch when got up to go to communion one Sunday.

I don’t know what life was like in the local but there were times when Da would come home after a few pints and bemoan the fact that Mr Lynch hadn’t dropped dead, been brutally murdered and buried in a shallow grave or had a terrible accident which left him a drooling vegetable and a drain on his family.

The entire Lynch family, that was Mr and Mrs, and their three sons Shane, Hugh and Arseface (his real name was Alan but we called him Arseface because of his Kirk Douglas type chin dimple), always went out on a Sunday afternoon to visit Mrs Lynch’s family who lived in Naas. So one Sunday afternoon when they’d all piled into their car he climbed in the back window and stole Mr Lynch’s prized possession, a stuffed dog which he’d had since childhood.

He once told my Da that the little West Highland White terrier was his best friend in the world when he was growing up. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters and his parents were strange and austere people who believed a child should not only not be heard it should very rarely be seen either. They bought him the dog to teach him about responsibility and also to give him a companion because there was no way they were going to have more children. Anyway, Mr Lynch and his dog, Dermot, went everywhere together. When he went for a game of football Dermot would snuffle around while the game was going on, sometimes sleeping behind the goal, sometimes joining in the game but he stopped doing that when Mark Walsh booted him in the bollocks as he was nosing the ball towards goal one day.

He’d had the dog about five years or so when the tragedy happened. He was walking home with Dermot trundling along happily behind him, stopping now and then to urinate at a tree or a gate-post (the dog, not Mr Lynch) when all of a sudden he heard a strange yelp. He turned around to see Mrs Flynn’s Burmese mountain dog – and those fellas were a rarity in Dublin back then, let me tell you – attempting to impregnate Dermot. Obviously Mrs Flynn’s dog was pretty indiscriminate about where he put his mickey. Firstly there was no way he could get Dermot pregnant because of his lack of womb and ovaries and secondly he didn’t have a dog-gina. It didn’t matter to Bentley, as the giant Burmese was known, who pounded away at poor old Dermot’s dog bottom.

The young Mr Lynch tried to separate them but there was no stopping Bentley when he got going – as Richard Clarke found out to his eternal shame one day a year or so later – and the rutting continued until the big dog had shot his load. Sadly for Dermot it was all too much and he lay as dead as dead can be on the ground. The vet said later that it was a simultaneous heart attack and stroke brought on by the vicious raping he’d received. Young Mr Lynch was traumatised though. He refused to let go of his best friend’s corpse and wouldn’t even entertain the idea of burying him. He brought him up to his room and wept. Even his normally unflinching parents were the tiniest bit shocked.

Luckily Mr Lynch senior knew a man was a keen taxidermist and when he put forward the idea of having poor old Dermot stuffed young Mr Lynch put aside his sadness and recognised the opportunity he had to have his friend with him forever.

So naturally when he arrived back from Naas that Sunday evening and discovered his house had been burgled and Dermot had been stolen he was distraught. I was under strict instructions not to say anything to anybody about what Da had done, not that I would have anyway. I understood the unwritten rule. You never tell tales, especially not on your friends but especially not on your own family (unless you hate the cunts and you have an ulterior motive).

Mr Lynch even put aside his contempt for my Da and came around asking had we seen anything suspicious at his house that afternoon.

“I know we haven’t been friends for a while, Gerry (for that was Mr Lynch’s first name), but I hate the idea of anyone breaking into your house,” said my Da, lying through his teeth. “If I’d seen anyone I’d have battered the spineless gobshites,” he spoofed.

Mr Lynch went from house to house, put up little posters for his lost and extremely dead dog, put a reward notice in the local shop (£10 for anyone with information leading to the return of Dermot) but nothing worked. He never saw him again and died less than 9 months later a broken man. Not even the love of his good wife and three sons was enough to keep him going.

All the while Dermot sat in a box under the stairs in our house. He’s still there for all I know. Maybe one day I’ll go up and leave it on Mr Lynch’s grave for a laugh.

Bash the elderly

by Twenty Major on February 14th, 2006

What about those people who dressed up as Gardai and robbed an old lady in Dundalk? You know you can take your travellers, Romanians, Damien Rice fans, junkies, beggars, AIDS-lepers, child molesters, Welsh and crooked politicians but if you gave me the choice of killing one of them or some cunt who robs eldery people I’d choose the the latter every time. Apart from Romanians. And Travellers. And Damien Rice fans, junkies, beggars, AIDS-lepers, child molesters, Welsh and crooked politicians.

They truly are cowardly cunts. However it put me in mind of the time a good number of years back Jimmy the Bollix’s dear old mam, God rest her, was attacked and mugged whilst walking along a quiet residential road. The scumbag stole her wedding and engagement rings, robbed her handbag with her pension that she’d just picked up and for good measure gave her a black eye.

It took a week to find out who he was using all the contacts we could muster. Then we got a couple of authentic looking Garda ID badges from Counterfeit Conor (he used to sell £20 notes for a fiver each if you bought a grand’s worth), borrowed Ron’s dark blue Ford Sierra and called round to his house.

He answered the door.

“Good afternoon. I am Detective Major and this is Detective Inspector the Bollix. We need a word with you. May we come in?”

”Show me some ID”, he said.

“Of course”, I said flashing by authentic looking Garda ID badge. All the same it could have been something we knocked up using bog rolls and double sided sticky tape as when the bloke leant in to have a look Jimmy punched him so hard in the throat I heard his Adam’s apple shatter into a thousand pieces. We pushed inside.

”Now, here’s the word we want to have with you. The word is: PAIN”, said Jimmy as he administered a beating the likes of which I haven’t seen since. To say the man was beaten to a pulp is an understatement. Imagine if you started with pulp and beat it into more pulp. It was savage, primal, vicious.

Jimmy then ransacked the house, found the rings and found the bloke’s money hidden under a floorboard in his bedroom. As he left he pissed on his head and told him why he’d suffered the sound thrashing that had left him mewling soft.

Let me tell you something, that 78 year old man never robbed anyone again.

Irish blog awards - voting nearly over

by Twenty Major on February 13th, 2006

Voting in the first ever Irish Blog awards closes this Friday. If you haven’t already voted please go here to vote now. Still no shameless campaigning from me. You do what your heart tells you….

Story time

by Twenty Major on February 13th, 2006

“Did I ever tell you about the time I met Jack Nicholson?”, I asked Dirty Dave in Ron the Barman’s the other night.

“No, you never did, Twenty.”

“That’s because it’s a shit story.”

“Er, right…”

“What about the time I intercepted a set of instructions for the IRA leadership which led me to find a drugs cache which I sold to Dermot the Dealer and spent 4 months in the Carribean drinking rum cocktails and betting on cock fights?”

“No, you haven’t told me that one.”

“Bah, it’s boring. Have I ever mentioned the time in 1979 when, after a long session, myself and Jimmy the Bollix ended up in Nicargua having befriended one of the founders of the Sandinista rebels and spent 6 weeks fighting against the right wing National Guard and eventually overthrew their regime? There was hand to hand combat, we witnessed horrific acts of violence, saw more blood than Paris Hilton has seen cock and once the fighting was over there a 5 week party during which a thousand goats were slaughtered as sacrifice in the most hilarious way you can possibly imagine.”

“Ooooh, tell me more.”

“Nah, it’s rather dull. Tell me this, have I ever related to you the tale of 1998, not long after my act of sabotage on fat-arsed Brazilian Ronaldo ensured France won the World Cup and my spread betting cartel made enough money to retire three times over, when I was approached by a NASA scientist who begged me to a lead a mission into deep space as a newly discovered alien race was coming towards earth with the intention of making humans into slaves and food for their pets? Being the fearless leader I am I led this mission in a top secret craft which can travel through time, which is why nobody noticed I was missing, and we intercepted the alien fleet. I boarded their spaceship without even an oxygen mask and punched every single alien in the face until they died and that wasn’t easy as they didn’t have faces. On the way back to earth we got caught in a space storm and were catapulted down a wormhole to the dawn of time where I saw the creation of the universe itself and how it came into being. It allowed me to understand completely the reason for our existence and meaning of all life as we know it. With little fuel left I used the gravitational pull of the newly formed planets to steer the ship back into the wormhole and back to the earth. The the NASA people tried to wipe my memory with a Men in Black style machine but the radiation and space rays that had passed through my body made me immune to their nefarious technology and I can remember with perfect clarity everything about that adventure.”

“I’m sure I’d remember you telling me that. It sounds great. Let me get a pint in and you can tell me the rest.”

“Hmmm, it’s rather a vapid narrative now that I come to think about it.”

“Jaysus.”

“What about the time I went to Lenehans Hardware shop and they gave me back the change of a twenty even though I only gave them a tenner?”

“Nope.”

“Right, well it was a Saturday morning, as I recall, and I needed a new lock for the side gate ….”

How can I help you?

by Twenty Major on February 10th, 2006

* bring bring*

“Hello, US embassy.”

“Hello, is that the US embassy?”

“Yes, this is the US embassy. How can I help you?”

“I’d like a double-whopper with cheese, large fries and a coca-cola.”

*click*

*bring bring*

“‘Allo, Fraunch ombassy”

“Hello, is that the French embassy?”

“Yes, zis eez ze Fraunch ombassy. ‘Ow can I ‘elp you?”

“I’d like two large portions of frogs legs, a family sized bucket of snails and some wiiiiiine.”

*click*

*bring bring*

“Hello, Australian embassy”

“Hellio, is that the Australian embassy?”

“You deaf or what?”

“Erm, yeah, well I’m an Australian citizen and I’m in a bit of trouble?”

“That right, mate? How can I help you?”

“I need 4 double-roo burgers, a wombat pie and 4 litres of Merv Hughes extra-strength lager.”

*click*

*bring bring*

“Hello, Meheecan embassy.”

“Hello, is that the Mexican embassy?”

“Si, si, ees Meheecan embassy. What I can help you, hombre?”

“4 large chicken tortillas, 2 quesadillas and a platter of tacos y burritos.”

*click*

*bring bring*

“Harro, Chinee Embassy”

“Hello, is that the Chinese embassy?”

“Yes, is Chinee embassy. How I help you?”

“I’d like a won-ton soup, two spring rolls, one chicken chow-mein, one beef in black bean sause and a portion of prawn crackers”

“Address prease…”

There are too many stupid people

by Twenty Major on February 9th, 2006

Today, over a beer or two, I discussed the make up of the world’s population, and I don’t mean eye-liner, mascara and lipstick.

I insisted to my beautiful companion that the vast majority of people were fucking stupid. Intelligence doesn’t just mean education. You can have highly intelligent people who went to expensive colleges and hold down high-powered jobs who are still stupid. You also have people who didn’t get any pieces of paper to prove their educational ability but who are as clever as they come.

Having thought about it for about 3 seconds I came up with an 80-20 ratio. That is 80% of the world’s population is as thick as two short planks.

‘Average intelligence’ doesn’t exist for me. You’re either intelligent enough not to reply to a Nigerian promising you a share in $34,000,000 or you’re not. Taking quick stock of the people I know and the people I have to deal with on a daily basis I may, perhaps, be underestimating the percentage of intelligent people but not by much.

Maybe it’s because that old saying about birds of a feather flocking together has some basis in fact. Intelligent people find themselves in the company of other intelligent people while the stupids all find themselves hanging out in the same place.

Stupid people will allow the Catholic Church to abuse children for years and get away with it. Stupid people will pay the toll at the M50 every day instead of saying ‘Why has it taken me two and a half hours to get from Sandyford to Santry?’ (a 25 minute journey - maximum - if the toll bridge wasn’t there). Stupid people will buy enough David Gray albums to make the cunt think it’s perfectly acceptable to make another one.

I’m not sure what my point is anymore but there’s just too many fucking stupid cunts around. We should organise a cull.

What’s more stupid than regular stupid people are the stupid people who think they’re intelligent.

Like the cunt who complains, for example, that you can do something which doesn’t disturb, affect or impact on him at all but he complains simply because he can’t do it, not taking into account the many good reasons why he can’t.

This person thinks they’re clever enough that it’s not obvious that they’ve complained but when you’re told that you can no longer do something because it’s not fair on another group of people who can’t do it, despite the many good reasons they can’t and they I can, it doesn’t even take genius level intelligence like mine to work it out.

That sort of cunt is the sort of cunt who could, for example, come to work and find his computer with all his important documents has been wiped clean, along with the back-ups he made on the network drive.

That’s if he finds his computer at all, what with him having had his eyes gouged out and all, the blind cunt.

A real floater

by Twenty Major on February 8th, 2006

Today I had the misfortune of entering a toilet cubicle about a minute after somebody else had left. There were no urinals in this place, only fully enclosed cubicles.

The person who was in there before me had obviously had a similar weekend to Dirty Dave and had just given birth to a brown baby boy. Who was really, really smelly.

Then, as I tried to have my wee and ensuring I was breathing only through my mouth, I thought that maybe breathing through my mouth wasn’t the best idea. Obviously some of the smell comes from gas but the plop itself is very smelly. For that smell to travel through and hang in the air doesn’t it make sense that some particles, or pooticles as they’re officially known, are also floating about in the air and that if I’m breathing through my mouth so I don’t have to smell the smell does that mean the pooticles are going into my mouth and in a roundabout way I’m eating somebody else’s poo?

Perhaps I’m wrong, and I’d be happy to be proven wrong in this case, so if any science boffins out there can put my mind at ease I would be most grateful.

If not it turns out we’re all a bunch of shit eaters.

On a slightly different matter how does that Abu Hazma guy wipe his arse when he’s got two hooks instead of hands?

Very fucking carefully, I’d imagine.

I know him so well

by Twenty Major on February 7th, 2006

“Hello, Dirty Dave”, I said as my malodorous chum came into Ron’s last night.

“Yah mo be there, Twenty”, he replied.

“How was your weekend then? Didn’t see you around…”

“Ah, I was up to all sorts. Places to go, people to see, you know yourself.”

“What kind of people? Which places?” asked Jimmy the Bollix.

“God, so many I can’t begin to remember.”

“Let me have a guess”, I said.

“Go on then!” he said.

“Right, you were here Friday night and you had a rake of pints of Smithwicks, then on the way we home we stopped at the chipper. You ate a spiceburger, a portion of curry chips and onion rings. As we have been friends a long time I have heard you moan every time you combine Smithwicks with spiceburgers. You say it turns your poo to molten lava and anything with curry in it liquidises it so I’d say you got up on Saturday morning and made coffee. You took a sip, lit a smoke and then felt your bowels clench. You then spent 25 minutes on the toilet with your insides gushing out of you, screaming a little bit each time a new gush came, and whimpering softly as the burn began to kick in. Shall I go on?”

“Continue.”

“You didn’t finish your coffee but smoked about 3 cigarettes. Then you didn’t shower, left the house and went straight to the chemist and bought a packet of Imodium to stop the flow of poo. Then you went to the supermarket, bought some groceries for one, making sure you went to the checkout where that lady you fancy, but who hates you, always works. You attempted small talk, took the fact she said ‘Thanks, luv’ as a sign that she might one day have sex with you when she’d rather cut her flaps off with a pair of rusty garden shears than ever go near you, and then went home. You ate something, spent the afternoon watching sport on TV via your enormous satellite system, the early evening downloading porn from the internet, had a wank, then you went down to Xtravision and rented two, or possibly three, lame DVDs starring the likes of Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant or Jude Law. Whilst there you attempted smalltalk with the pretty young redhead who works there and the fact that she was civil to you made you fantasise about her one day inviting you to a private ‘screening’ in the back room when the fact is she would rather be raped by a bear than come within a counter’s width of you. Then you went home, ordered a pizza or possibly a Chinese, stuffed your face, farted then spent the rest of the night on the couch drinking cans of Dutch Gold lager before passing out there and waking up late Sunday with a huge hangover and a pain in your back and shoulders because you slid halfway off the couch but were too drunk to wake up and correct your posture. Am I right?”

”Go on….”

“So Sunday afternoon you walked round the corner to the local Spar where you bought the News of the World, The Sunday World, the Sunday Mirror, the People and the Sunday Star. You tried a little wink at the 65 year old woman who works there thinking she can’t possibly be that fussy and the fact that she didn’t get sick down her front led you to believe that you could tempt her into a night of bingo-wing, granny sex when, in reality, she would pray to God to slap her with a massive stroke which left her a dribbling vegetable in a nursing home where they abuse old people rather than feel the sweaty, stickiness of your hands anywhere near her. You then went home, looked at the pictures of tits in the paper, had a wank, read the sports pages and cooked a fried breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausages, black and white pudding, fried tomato, mushrooms, baked beans and fried bread all washed down by a pot of tea which you drank out of your ‘Frankie says: You’re a cunt’ mug, which we had made for your birthday a few years back, putting 6 sugars into each one. After having an enormous, and thankfully more solid than Saturday’s, crap you went back around the video store hoping to see the pretty young redhead but were disappointed to see the fat, Goth chick who even you, despite the fact you would get up on the crack of dawn, wouldn’t go near. How am I doing?”

“Erm…”

“You stopped off at your Mums for your weekly visit and she went on at you about eating properly, about being an old cunt without a wife and how you’ve never given her any grandkids unlike Mrs Hanlon next door whose two children have 7 of their own and God wouldn’t it be a blessing to even have one and would that she’d had two sons so maybe one could have given her the gift of a grandchild but sure weren’t you an only child and she had to put all her eggs in one basket so no wonder she was disappointed. You love your Mum but you left there raging because she makes you feel like a little boy. Then you went to the pub around the corner from your house because there’s a barmaid there who is much easier on the eyes than Ron, in all fairness, and you wanted to sink a few pints there because you didn’t much feel like coming round here and joining in the banter. You stayed for probably one too many and when the barmaid gave you your change you tried to hold her hand and because she’s a nice woman and felt sorry for you she let you, for just a second. However, that meant you left there thinking that one night she might close the doors and tell you there’s a lock-in for just you and her and you’ll go to the snug and do those things you dream of but in actual fact she would jump into an industrial sized wood-chipper rather than even think about your smeggy chopper getting anywhere near her fragrant vag. You went home, looked at some porn, had a wank, watched some TV, had another wank, and then passed out on the couch again while watching something like CSI on living TV. Wake up Monday and here we are. How’s that?”

“You think you’re so smart, Twenty. But you’re not.”

“Fair enough then, Dave. If I’m totally wide of the mark then I’ll hold my hands up. You’re a better man than I give you credit for.”

“Yeah, you cunt. I had an Indian on Saturday night.”

Radio daze

by Twenty Major on February 6th, 2006

A long time ago I worked in the radio business and I made some good old friends. Since then once a year Larry Gogan, Howard Stern, Rick Dees and I meet for a weekend of beer, discussion about the state of the radio industry and to reminisce about the time we tried to make a clone of Stern which went horrifically wrong and we ended up with Ryan Tubridy. I told them we should have just waited and extracted a bit more DNA rather than using some of Larry’s poo but they wouldn’t listen.

We used to be 5 though as part of our group was Valdimir ‘the impaler’ Vladovic. He was the main man of Russian radio. He started as a 16 year old on a pirate station in Saint Petersburg called KISH FM. His zany style and wicked impersonations soon saw him gain a massive audience and by the time he was 21 he was on Moscow’s hottest top 40 station. Within 3 years his show was being syndicated across the whole of the country and his Russian Top 40 countdown was earning him a fortune.

He was a true Soviet celebrity, super-wealthy and he, following the lead of many others, decided to buy his own radio network. It wasn’t too long before he was known as the king of Russian radio.

Naturally he fitted in well with all of us and our annual weekends became legendary in the radio world. They were debauched, they were non-stop, they were great fun. Sadly one of them ended in tragedy. We used to vary the location. One year New York with Howard Stern, one year in LA with Rick Dees, one year in Moscow with Vlad and then a year in Dublin with me and Larry.

It was the Dublin weekend of 1983 that cost Vlad his life. Having been in Dublin before he was a huge fan of fish and chips and especially those in Leo Burdock’s on Werburgh Street. We were staying in the Berkley Court Hotel, Stern had insisted on a suite in which we could ‘paaaaarty’. So we were there drinking and carousing and singing and certainly not snorting enormous lines of cocaine because there was no cocaine in Ireland back then. Really.

Anyway, mid-party Vlad got peckish and decided to nip over to Burdock’s for a cod supper. No harm, we all just carried on. Larry Gogan was in a hotel bathrobe strumming a guitar and singing Thin Lizzy hits in that rich, baritone of his. Rick Dees was entertaining a young Finglas girl called Jacinta in the jacuzzi while Howard Stern had two blondes on a four-poster bed and I can’t tell you what he was doing as it’s still illegal.

After a while Stern decided he’d give us all a treat. He gotten into home cinema and had made his own ‘home movies’. Although we weren’t really into seeing any more of him than we’d already witnessed during the party he’s just not the kind of guy you can say not to. So he stopped doing what he was doing to the blondes, which took about 10 minutes, and pulled a tape out of his suitcase and put it in the machine. However, instead of the adult entertainment he was hoping to show us we got a taped from TV version of the Omen II.

To say he lost his temper is an understatement. He went beserk, throwing things around, kicking things over and at one point he vomited and some of it came out of the corners of his eyes. Lastly he went over to the machine that had offended him so and hurled it through the window. Real rock and roll style. We were all silent after his outburst and a minute or two later Rick Dees went over to look out the window.

“Oh Jesus!”, he said. “I think you’ve hit someone.”

We all rushed downstairs as fast as our little legs would carry us and once we pushed through the crowd we were greeted with a terrible sight. Our chum Vlad, having stuffed his face with the best fish and chips in Dublin, was on his way back to the hotel to carry on the party when a Sony SL-C7UB Betamax landed on his head, killing him instantly. The king of Russian radio’s brains were spread all over the pavement.

“Oh fuck!”, I said.

“I’ll be right back after these tears”, said Rick Dees. Stern just looked shellshocked and slightly guilty.

There was a plaintive sob from behind us. Larry Gogan stood there, his bathrobe open, his eyes welling as his genitals swayed gently in the autumn breeze.

“Oh no. I can’t believe it”, he cried.

“Video killed the radio Tsar….”

Irish blog awards - Voting Open!

by Twenty Major on February 5th, 2006

Damien has been working like a Mary O’Rourke campaign staffer all weekend it seems and the voting is now open for the Irish Blog Awards. Naturally you are free to vote for your favourites, I wouldn’t do anything like solicit votes or say “Please vote for me”. People should be free to decide without any undue pressure.

To vote simply stare at the image below then, after a while, click on it to go the blog awards site.