Archive for February, 2007
Irish blog awards coverage
by Twenty Major on February 20th, 2007
Nice to see it’s been picked up and run on some of the big sites. Yahoo has a story here.
However, I am very upset at being referred to as a “four armed midget”. Where the fuck did they get that?
As regular readers know I am not fond of the small person, they make me queasy, so for me to be cast in the same light as those is most distressing.
I shall be seeking legal advice from Thruppenceworth, my totally above board solicitors.
Who’d be a Garda?
by Twenty Major on February 20th, 2007
I was walking down some quiet residential roads the other day with Jimmy the Bollix and towards us came a fresh faced young Garda. As ginger as the day was long, with ruddy cheeks and a farmer’s gait. He couldn’t have been any more than 23 or 24.
As we approached he gave us a bit of a nod and said ‘Howya’.
I nodded back, mostly in surprise. Normally my dealings with the Gardai are a lot louder and there’s much more getting away involved.
Thinking about it though he must have been a bit nervous. Naturally I’m a very respectable looking member of society but Jimmy is a bit intimidating. He’s around 6′1, very tight hair, broad shouldered, stubbly, generally wears some kind of sunglasses and looks like he’d bite the head off a puppy just for larks. Of course he wouldn’t, he’s very kind to animals (except travellers).
We were in a quiet area, the sort of road where a young Garda could get a pounding from a couple of reprobates if he had the misfortune to encounter them, and he’d probably been in Dublin about 3 days before they sent him off on his johnny to walk around ‘on the beat’.
It got me thinking. I’d fucking hate to do their job. There are jobs that you’d naturally never do because they’re too disgusting like nurse in an old people’s home or bin man or writing PD press releases but the cops is a step above again.
You’d spend 75% of your time dealing with the scummiest scum of society and the other 25% dealing with generally decent people who had lost all sense of decency because of their run in with the scum. Scum on scum shennanigans would be much higher than scum v decent, see.
Drunks vomiting on you, junkies trying to bite you, battered girlfriends turning on you when you give the bloke who’s been slapping them around a good truncheon in the bollocks, petty thieves, dealers, basically every undesirable member of society.
And everyone hates you. It’s just natural suspicion of the police, isn’t it? When you grow up you become bitter and twisted, understandably, because you’ve spent years having to cope with the worst that the world can offer you. It makes you immune to emotion because that’s the only way to survive and your live becomes loveless, meaningless and filled only with drink and worrying about meteorites on the line when you make a phone call.
Then there’s the pay. You’d want to be paying me a lot more than that to have anything to do with those kinds of people even once let alone every day. So why do people do it?
Don’t we, as a society, have a responsibility to the people considering a career in the police to dissuade them from it? I mean, they don’t even get to shoot people or beat up random blacks like they do in America. Where is the upside?
Anyone?
Here we go…
by Twenty Major on February 19th, 2007
Classic Irishness:
The Government was urged last night to act immediately and build an orbital road around Dublin. A National Road Authority study has found that the new €1bn road from Naas to Drogheda is feasible on cost grounds and would divert large volumes of traffic off the M50 motorway.
Brilliant. Sort of lost in the story here is the fact that the M50 was supposed to be an orbital road to take traffic out of the city centre but as we all know that has failed miserably.
What’ll happen is they’ll build this road, slap a toll booth right in the middle of and call it a motorway even though it’ll only have two lanes. Then the traffic will build up and it’ll take hours to get from one end of this road to other, all the while the traffic in the city centre will be just as bad and the M50 just won’t move at all.
Then someone will suggest another orbital road which will start in Arklow, pass through Galway and end up in Downpatrick. When that becomes full there’ll be another big problem because we’ll have run out of land to actually build on so some bright spark in the National Roads Authority will suggest the world’s longest suspension bridge when the road, which starts in Rosslare, bypasses the previous road around Limerick and comes within sight of Iceland before it hits ground again somewhere near Portrush.
You realise what’s happening, don’t you? This is all a plot between the Government and Raleigh to make us use bicycles. The Government have invested billions of pension money into the bike making firm banking on making huge returns when using a car becomes completely impractical.
They think they’re so smart but I’m onto them. Oh yes, I am.
Irish Blog Awards shortlist announced
by Twenty Major on February 18th, 2007
You can see all the shortlisted nominations for yourself right here.
Thanks to everyone who voted for me and now it’s down to the judges. Word is they’re being sequestered immediately and won’t be allowed out until after the ceremony.
What happens if Rick O’Shea wins the Best Contribution category? He’s going to say, “And the winner is…me!”, and nobody will believe him and people will storm the stage and he’ll get crushed to death. A good death is probably what the blog scene needs to kick on in 2007 and if Rick is serious about making a contribution then he knows what to do.
Then next year it can be the Rick O’Shea memorial award. Nah, fuck it actually. That’s way too mawkish. We’ll just stare at the spot on the carpet that they couldn’t get the blood out of.
Anyway, Jimmy the Bollix says he wants to go along this year. Something to do with settling some old scores with some people. I don’t know who though. It’ll just add to the excitement.
Woe is me
by Twenty Major on February 17th, 2007
I got up this morning, head a bit delicate, and set out to cook myself a nice breakfast. Then I noticed that I’d bought low fat sausages from Superquinn yesterday.
I’m distraught and I’m not sure I can go on any more. Why must the fates mock me so?
Last chance…
by Twenty Major on February 16th, 2007
…today to vote in the Irish Blog Awards.
Simply go here and vote Twenty. To help focus your mind here’s a little jingle you can sing to make sure you don’t forget. To the tune of Rock me Amadeus (don’t you love the way he’s says ‘Monkey cunt’ in that song? Listen out for it):
Vote for Twenty, Vote for Twenty, Vote for Twenty, Vote for Twenty, Vote for Twenty, Vote for Twenty, Vote for Twenty, Vote for Twenty, Oh oh oh Vote for Twenty.
Happy voting.
Shut the fuck up about Widgets
by Twenty Major on February 16th, 2007
I hate the word widgets. It reminds me of midgets, little wooden midgets. And I fucking hate midgets. And midgets made of wood, flammable midgets. The worst possible kind.
Widgets are supposedly useful things for your computer or website or whatever. I use a Mac and there’s this thing called the ‘Dashboard’ which you can activate at the press of a key. You can download all kinds of widgets, like Flight Times Widget, Wikipedia Widget, Weather Widget and hundreds more.
Once you’re in the ‘widget environment’ though you can’t do anything on your normal desktop which is, no matter how you want to dress it up, a bit shit.
For example, there’s a ‘Check your Gmail widget’. Quick question - why the fuck would I leave my web browser, in which I read and send and deliver my Gmail to go to the Dashboard to check whether or not I actually have any Gmail when just looking at the Gmail page in my browser would do exactly the same?
Another classic is the ‘iTunes widget’. Now, with one click in the normal environment I can bring up iTunes and play whatever the fuck song I want. Explain to me, if you can, the benefit of me going to the dashboard and then using the iTunes Widget to control iTunes. I bet you can’t although somebody might say “Well, you can use iTunes while you’re using the dashboard without having to go outside the dashboard”.
The thing is though, there’s no reason to spend that long in the dashboard anyway. There’s nothing you can do in there that you can’t do outside just as easily.
For a while I did use a ‘post to blogger’ Widget which was quite handy. I’d write a post, go to dashboard, go to that widget, paste the text and then it would post automatically to Blogger. But that was as far as it went. You couldn’t edit afterwards, you couldn’t change the time, you couldn’t do anything else without logging into Blogger so you might as well just fucking use Blogger in the first place, especially as I always make mistakes that need to be edited. Despite what you might think I’m not perfect.
I remember someone once saying “I’ll write you a widget which aggregates all your RSS feeds and then you can read them from there!”
“What’s the point of that though?”, I asked. “I have an RSS reader which does all that without the need for any widgets”.
He had no answer for that. When I upgraded to Wordpress someone mentioned there were widgets I could use. So fucking what? What do they do? Do they make me a cup of tea while I’m writing my post? If not then I don’t fucking want to know.
Let’s face it, widgets are the equivalent of going to use an outhouse when you have a perfectly good toilet upstairs. They’re like hoovering your house with a dustbuster when you’ve got a Dyson under the stairs.
Just stop wasting your time making widgets and make me a fucking drink instead.
No No No
by Twenty Major on February 15th, 2007
A BOOKKEEPER who admitted to being in possession of 1,200 child pornographic texts and videos has been given a three-year suspended sentence. Judge Frank O’Donnell said he viewed a sample of the images and texts, and agreed they were at the “lower end of the scale” of pornography. Ronan Kennedy, counsel for Bradshaw, said society would be best served if Paul Bradshaw was not jailed. He said Bradshaw had no previous convictions and had a job.
Three year suspended sentence? Mind boggling.
He has a job, does he? What the fuck difference does it make if he has a job? Would you have sent him to jail if he’d been unemployed or retired? And if you ask me society would be best served if people like Bradshaw were put in prison or sent to Pervert Island which would be a place I’d promise to make if I was ever elected.
Bradshaw’s development was somewhat retarded until he had established “a satisfactory adult relationship” with a female friend. This allowed him to come out of “his fantasy world”, and he had “gained a good understanding of the effect sexual assaults have on children”.
Oh, it took some half-hearted sex with a woman for him to realise that fantasising about having sex with children was wrong. That’s all right then.
Once again the courts, in their wisdom, have shown that they’re as soft as ever on stuff like this. The message it sends is that it’s ok to fund the most vile industry on earth and all you’ll get is a slap on the wrist. The fact that the images were at the “lower end of the scale” is irrelvant - at least there needs to be an acceptance that even if it isn’t the most ‘hardcore’ stuff it’s still wrong in the extreme and worthy of more than a suspended sentence.
I fucking despair sometimes, I really do.
Piss off Cullen, you cunt
by Twenty Major on February 15th, 2007
The Minister for Transport Martin Cullen is welcoming the introduction of barrier-free tolling on the M50 motorway. Mr Cullen says the decision by the National Roads Authority to collect tolls through an electronic system will mean improved traffic flow for motorists.
Wanker. You know what would mean improved traffic flow? Get rid of the toll altogether but then people’s palms wouldn’t get greased, the government won’t get their great lump and the fat cat cunts who have gotten rich off motorists for years will bitch and moan.
This man is in charge of the worst public transport system in Europe, if not the world. There are people in huge third world cities who have to travel on rickety buses and mopeds with people carrying chickens and enormous parcels who get around better than we do in Dublin.
This is a man who allows the LUAS, the tram system which has two lines which don’t even meet, to raise fares at rush hour times to discourage people from using it because they can’t handle the capacity. At the same time he urges people to leave their cars at home to ease traffic congestion. It really is quite unbelievable.
And this barrier free tolling on the M50 won’t even come into place until next year and that’s being optimistic. Chances are it’ll be another enormous fuck up like the electronic voting where millions of our money is spent on a system that doesn’t work. Guess which cunt was up to his bollocks in that fiasco? Anyway, this is all just pre-election rhetoric, I’ll believe it when I’ve sat in traffic for an hour to see it.
Here’s how to achieve barrier free tolling - BLOW THE FUCKING BARRIERS UP YOU CUNTS.
It’s so bad that businesses are ruling out Dublin as a location because it takes so long to get anywhere and the worst of it is this toll bridge which causes more traffic jams than any amount of toppled over lorries or car crashes or anything else. There should be toll free travel on the M50. End of story. It’s been paid for over and over again.
Politicians are just such fucking cunts and Martin Cullen is one of the cuntingest fucking cunts there is. The fucking cunt. Is it wrong to wish a slow, painful death on someone? It is?
Ok, I hope he has a brain clot and dies in his sleep.
Update: A French private company has won the tender for the barrier free system. Cost? €113m. Who pays? We do, of course. CUUUUUUUUNTS