World Cup

by Twenty Major on June 8th, 2006

So the World Cup starts tomorrow. Excellent, this means non-stop football on the telly.

I’m glad Ireland aren’t there to be honest. I find it hard to get myself revved up supporting players just because they happen to be Irish when I’ve spent the whole season hating them because they play for teams I hate in the Premiership.

Robbie Keane. He’s like a 21st century Desperate Dan. What an enormous jaw he has. No problems putting away those cow pies, that’s for sure. The thing is Robbie plays for a team I hate so why, all of a sudden, am I supposed to cheer him on when I’m hoping all season long he’ll somehow fracture his anus and his cruciate ligament goes on fire.

I’m not really following any team in particular this year, just hoping for some good football and memorable moments.

Underdogs beating favourites, cracking goals, some scandal involving some famous players, handball goals against the English, mad Africans booting the ball away at free kicks and Jimmy Magee’s commentary.

I haven’t missed a World Cup final since 1958 when Pelé scored two. I’ve always been fairly neutral but I badly wanted Holland to win in 1978. Without the talismanic Johann Cruyff they played the hosts, Argentina, in the final.

The Argies won after extra-time and Mario fucking Kempes but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much toilet paper on a football pitch as in that World Cup. It’s no wonder the Argentinian economy has gone to shit. They’re so wasteful.

Despite my reluctance to support Ireland I have to say Italia 90 was good fun. So much drinking. I remember coming across town when we played Romania in the second round. The streets were empty. There wasn’t even a Romanian beggar to be seen.

Dirty Dave didn’t have a happy night when we crashed out to Italy though. He was walking up Nassau Street having watched the game in Club Nassau and some bloke walking alongside him kicked the lights in on a car. When the owners of the car caught up with Dave they were convinced it was him that kicked their lights in and they pummeled him into hospital for 4 weeks.

That would never have happened if Toto Schillachi hadn’t been born but how can we hate a man who has given us such classic hits as ‘Africa’ and ‘Rosanna’?

Come on authors, get real

by Twenty Major on June 7th, 2006

I like books, I think I’ve mentioned that before. One of the things that annoys me about books though is how nobody eats properly.

Now before you accuse me of being just like your mum when you were away at college (”Are you eating properly? You look thin. You don’t look like you’re eating properly”), I mean they don’t ever eat like normal people.

Authors seem far too keen to show us they know how to cook when they’d be much better off concentrating on writing. Take the book I’m reading at the moment as an example. The main character has just become involved in a series of murders. Basically the people she talks to get bumped off just moments after she’s left them. Talk about a fucking Jonah. Anyway, she’s naturally a little freaked out by this and rushes home to discuss the situation with a friend.

Now most people, if they could face eating at all, would ring a chinkies or get something from the chipper. Not this girl though. Here’s what she prepares, whilst scared out of her wits:

A loaf of fresh dilled rye bread which they cover with a crock of trout mousse. Then they move on to have thinly sliced veal smothered in kumquat sauce, fresh spinach with pine nuts and fat red beefsteak tomatoes broiled and stuffed with a lemon apple sauce. That was all served wth wide fan-shaped mushrooms sautéed lightly and a salad of red and green baby lettuce with dandelion greens and toasted hazelnuts.

Seriously, that is not a word of a lie. Fuck me. What a well stocked larder she must have. If people all around me were being bumped off I’d be hard pressed to make beans on toast let alone all that.

Come on, authors. Make your characters eat properly. The book isn’t bad but it would have been much better if that whole scene had said:

She came into the house, looked in the cupboard and found some pop-tarts which she ate while explaining the situation to her friend.

And another thing, authors, watch those overly long descriptions. I read a thriller by an Irish writer recently and she took great pains to explain to us how to make coffee.

Joe opened the cupboard and took out the coffee beans. He then opened the drawer and took out a spoon. He put the spoon in the coffee beans then emptied the spoon, on which the coffee beans rested, into the grinder. He ground the beans then when the beans were ground he put the powder into the coffee maker. Then he opened the top of the kettle and filled it three-quarters full with water and then put the kettle back on the element. He turned the kettle on and waited for the water to boil. When the water had boiled he poured it into the coffee maker….

I swear to God it was at least half a page when she could have just said “Joe made a cup of coffee”. We get it, lady, you don’t drink Maxwell House instant but give me a fucking break.

Less is more, sometimes.

Dirty Dave and the Church of Scientology

by Twenty Major on June 6th, 2006

He may be a smelly cunt but Dirty Dave is a Macintosh genius. He came over earlier to upgrade my system and now I have brand new iPhoto for all the pictures I don’t take and brand new Garageband for all the music I don’t make.

While he was doing his stuff I went round to Ron’s for a pint.

“Don’t fucking wreck my gaff”, I said, “or do anything stupid.”

“No worries”, he said.

Well, my gaff isn’t wrecked but he’s only after going and making a Podcast which involves him ringing the Church of Scientology to get some publicity for the new branch he’s opened on the South Circular Road.

I have no clue about how to do the Podcast/iTunes thing or what tags and shit you need so it’s just uploaded and you can download it by clicking below:

Dublin Church of Scientology Podcast - 12.45mb

ps - if someone wanted to fill me in on how to do that ’subscribe in iTunes’, RSSing of podcasts and such that would be much appreciated.

Ways we have influenced music over 35 years

by Twenty Major on June 5th, 2006

You might think that just because I’m an old cunt from Dublin I’ve had no impact on the world of popular music. Long term readers will know this is false as older stories will prove. However, there are many other examples of how I, or my friends, have influenced music over the years.

Oh, you want specifics? Ok then.

1 - Stuttering Steve, Dirty Dave’s second cousin, was in a bar in London in 1970 and asked David Bowie if he had any ch-ch-change for the cigarette machine.

2 - Jimmy the Bollix had a friend who had an ice factory in America. He would go round with these massive blocks of ice selling chunks at a time to people during the hot summer months. Sadly, this man also had a young son who got run over by a car. He was on the point of death when the man had an idea. Distrusting of hospitals he decided to freeze the boy, Walt Disney style, until a cure was found for his many injuries which included a fractured arse, dislocated testicles and ruptured armpit.

So the boy remained in a freezer for many years. One night Kate Bush came into Ron’s for a pint, which she often did back in the day, and Jimmy told her the story which then inspired Kate’s big hit ‘The man with a child in his ice’.

3 - I once told Stinking Pete to take our mates Supertramp to Bewley’s on Grafton Street for breakfast. Being a piss head simpleton he thought I said take them to New York. The rest is history.

4 - One day me and Jimmy were in Northern Ireland and we ran in to Undertones lead singer Fergal Sharkey. After we’d stopped taking the piss out of him for having no lips whatsoever we went on the lash and got to discussing how things used to be much better 10 years ago. Music, clothes, girls, everything. Even bodily functions were so much poorer in that day and age prompting Jimmy to opine “A good fart these days is hard to find.”

5 - Lucky Luciano tells of his sexual prowess, particularly when he was a young man. He tells the tale of when Abba toured Italy and he scored with the blonde girl. Apparently they had sex for 48 hours straight but after the first 24 hours she went into some kind of trance and completely blanked out the rest, including Lucky’s enormous climax. Some time later they released ‘The day before you came’ in tribute.

6 - Me and Jimmy used to hang around in San Francisco with Chris Isaak in the early 90s. What a quiff he had. To take the piss a bit we got toupees made in the exactly same style. “What a wigged game to play”, he’d say.

7 - Not many people know there were originally 6 members of Duran Duran. As well as the ones you all know there was a lad called Lorcan McManus from Clondalkin and I was actually the manager of the band at that stage. Well, I decided we’d go on a bonding weekend to Yellowstone National Park which went fantastically well until we got lost in the woods one day and Lorcan was set upon and consumed by a starving wild beast.

Although “Hungry like the wolf” was a massive hit I never got any of the credit as I’d been fired by a distraught Nick Rhodes just after the tragedy.

8 - While in New York Stinking Pete introduced the Fun Loving Criminals to a new type of Ecstasy which were shaped exaclty the same as Great Dane testicles. Scooby’s Nacks became all the rage then.

9 - Gilbert O’Sullivan once came into Ron’s and after a few Canadian Club and Ginger ales proceeded to read us a poem he’d written.

“That’s a load o’ me hoop”, said Ron. “Nothing rhymed”.

10 - Stinking Pete was involved in a tempestuous affair with Rosanne Barr whilst he was going out with a triple amputee with two tongues and a gee that joined up perfectly to her anus. As my good old friend Bernard from New Order commented that was a bizarre love triangle.

All true.

We?

by Twenty Major on June 3rd, 2006

Why do some blogs insist on referring to themselves as ‘we’ when it’s clearly just one cunt and his computer?

“We here at Super Blog Towers think that…”

Get to fuck. The word you need is ‘I’.

Dirty Dave’s lovechild

by Twenty Major on June 2nd, 2006

So it turns out Dirty Dave’s lovechild, Felipe, comes from Dave’s liason in 1987 with a young Spanish girl called Yolanda.

Dave picks up the story.

“So there I was walking past the Gresham Hotel, whistling ‘Sign o’ the Times’ by Prince, wearing a deadly polyester-linen combo suit I’d gotten at Unique Boutique on Liffey Street, when a young woman came flying out the door and landed on her arse.

‘Holy shite’, I thought to myself. So I went over to help her up.

‘Y’all right there, love?’, says I.

‘Jes, I am marrrrvellous’, she says.

‘Ahh, fair enough’, I said and carried on. It was only then I realised she might have been being sarcastic so I asked her if that’s what it was.

‘Noooooo!’, she says dramatically. ‘I am totally serious.’

I don’t need to be told twice so off I went. But something told me I might have been mistaken so I went back and there she was crying.

‘Ahh now. What’s the matter?’

‘I now have no job. Stoopid focking manager he think I am stupid but he don’t know nothing, hijo de puta. He fire me because I tell to cusomter ‘Don’ you focking touch my arse you bastard old pervert. Juh make me seeeck!’ and manager tell to me is no way to talk to this man because he own tea shop and I say ‘I don’ care how many focking tea shop he own he don’ touch my arse’. Now I must to go look for other job and this week is my rent and is come at terrible time. Terrible.’

Now, at that time I’d come into a few bob after I collected on the bet I made with Stinking Pete when we were kids. I’d predicted the death of Fred Astaire and Pete said there was no chance of me being right and even gave me a three day window each side of the date. June 22nd I said and fucking bang on June 22nd he died. Pure coincidence of course.That meant Pete had to cough up. Remember that Pete? Deadly, it was. No point sticking your fingers up at me now. Quit living in the past man.

So I offered to give her a hand till she found a new job. I sorted out her rent for her, took her for a slap up feed at Gigs Place and we even had a drink or two. For a little woman she certainly put away the booze. Apparently they’re all drunkards in Seville, for that is where she was from, and she told me a bit about her hard life back there.

‘Oh Daveeeed, ees a story very difficult and shiny’, she said, getting her adjectives mixed up in a way I would come to adore. ‘When I am young my family is live on beeg, smelly farm and my father every day he make me go out and milk the bulls and horses. Was terrible, every day to do thees. Also we have many trees of olives and he make me go pick the olives and then hatch olives into oil.’

Her verbs were a little off too. She went on, ‘For years I am thinking to escape and to learn the Eeeengleeesh and one day meet an Irish sailor in Seville who is very lost. He tell me Doobleeen is home to many great writers like Brendan Bejam, Jaime Joyce, Samwel Beckett and man who will write hilarious newspaper character about man who pretend to be rich and say ‘Roysh’ and make much money from same joke over and over. He say me to learn Eeengleeesh I must to go there. So one day I stick out thumb and get lift to Doobleeen.’

She also explained that all the time working in the smelly farm had dulled her sense of smell which is why my distinctive odour wasn’t off-putting to her like it is to nearly every other woman in the world. Soon we had become embroiled in a passionate affair like Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity or that boy and the shop dummy in Mannequin.

We did it everywhere. The sofa, the kitchen, the front hall, the Barna shed, the toilets of the Submarine bar in Crumlin, in the back row of the Carlton cinema watching Full Metal Jacket (heh, suck on that Private Pile), her little bedsit in Rathmines, on the banks of the canal in full of everyone drinking outside the Barge and in every alleyway we could find.

She would say ‘I love juh so much Daveeeed, we do it like… how do you call those leetel animals with the beeg ears and beeg teeths?’

‘Germans?’

‘No! Rabbits. Thees. We are like the rabbits!’

It was a wonderful time, probably the best 2 days of my life, but on the third day I went to meet her and she never showed up. I went to her bedsit and knocked on the door but she wasn’t there. I checked back every day for a week until I realised she’d gone and I was never going to see her again. For months afterwards I would just find myself walking up Grove Road for no reason hoping against hope that she’d be there but she never was. Jaysus, I still remember that smell she had. Like olive oil and horsespunk.

And I missed her like the deserts miss the rain but I thought it was all over. And I was right. I’ve never found out why she left the way she did, the way she shattered my heart into a thousand tiny pieces like a glass that has been pushed over and shatters on the floor into a thousand tiny pieces.

Now look, I’ve got a 19 year old son.”

And that’s how Dave got his lovechild. For the record the young fella smells like his mother and his father combined.

He’s now known as Filthy Felipe.

Surprise Surprise

by Twenty Major on June 1st, 2006

Sitting in Ron’s having a pint. A scruffy young vagabond enters.

“Do any of you know a bloke called Dirty Dave?”, he says.

“Maybe”, says Ron. “Why?”

“It’s just me Ma told me I’d find him here.”

I’m looking on with much curiosity. Jimmy too. Stinking Pete’s jaw is close to dropping. Dave is conspicuously silent.

“So why exactly are you looking for him?”, asks Jimmy the Bollix.

“Well, me Ma and Dave were friends lots of years ago and she died recently and left him a large amount of money. As such I’m trying to find him to pay him what he’s owed.”

“I’m Dirty Dave!”, roared Dirty Dave.

“And your surname?”

“Dirty Dave Davidson!”, roared Dave again.

“Dad!”, said the young vagabond.

“What?”, said Dave.

“Jesus”, said I, Ron, Pete and Jimmy.

Dirty Dave has a lovechild and he’s an unwashed minger. Why are we surprised?