The Panel on RTE 2 (again)

by Twenty Major on December 31st, 2007

It’s that time of year again. No, not that time of year, but the time of year when sometimes when I come in from Ron’s I put on the old TV box thing and watch some crap.

I can enjoy festive television as much as the next man. No, that’s a lie. TV is mostly crap but as I began to flick around last night I caught the very beginning of The Panel Christmas special edition. Having written some time ago about this show I thought it would be good to watch it again to see if it was as bad as I remembered. And I have to say it wasn’t.

It was worse. There was a silly man in the middle who was the presenter/host. Sort of like a lobotomised Angus Deayton. Then there was that Northern Irish cunt who laughs at everything, some girl whose name I do not know, some other bloke who looked about 17 and Ed Byrne.

They sat around and talked about all the events of the year like cocaine and some other stuff and made some ‘jokes’ about it. Except the whole point of jokes is to make people laugh and I did not laugh. I did not. Then they brought out some big fat celebrity chef whose name I can’t remember and he seemed to have a cold or a dose of the sniffles, poor chap. They could have just let him be to recover at home with a bottle of Night Nurse but they made him go on TV. Booo, I say, that poor old chef.

Then they had another guest and he was some weird looking doctor or something with strange hair and even stranger teeth but he was not funny either. You would think that when the entire panel is incapable of being funny they might get a funny guest to try and make things better but it seems not.

To be fair to Ed Byrne he looked a bit ashamed to be there. I know, it’s a long way down from voicing Carphone Warehouse ads and I appreciate a man has to make a living but I think even he knew the disgusting life of a freegan, foraging through bins for scraps of food, would be a better choice than appearing on The Panel. I expect to see Ed Byrne gathering pizza crusts and potato skins in the months ahead. I might even leave out a bowl of milk for him to lap from on the coldest of nights. I’m not a total cunt.

Eventually I feel asleep and woke up on the couch some time later with a tremendous pain in my neck but that pain was better than The Panel.

It was funnier too.

It’s that time again

by Twenty Major on December 30th, 2007

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Not a word of a lie

by Twenty Major on December 29th, 2007

“Come on, Dirty Dave”, I said, “we’re in the most tremendous hurry. We must leave at once.”

“Ok”, he said, “but I have to go for a poo.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“In a pub? You’d go for a poo in a pub?”

“I’d poo anywhere.”

“Well just hurry the fuck up.”

“I will.”

Some time later

“Right, I have pooed.”

“At last. Now we must away with great alacrity.”

“No problem. Just let me have a wee.”

“What?”

“I have to piss.”

“But you just went to the toilet.”

“I know, but I forgot to wee.”

“You had a poo and you forgot to wee?”

“Correct.”

“How is that even possible?”

“Who can say, Twenty? Who can say?”

Stupid headlines

by Twenty Major on December 26th, 2007

‘Irish entertainer Dolan dies’, said the headline on the BBC.

‘Please let it be Pat’, I thought.

Bollocks.

I’m just wondering…

by Twenty Major on December 26th, 2007

…if this morning’s upcoming poo is going to be shaped like a turkey.

I really fucking hope not. I had the lads around to my place for Christmas dinner yesterday, what with me being the chef of the bunch an’ all.

Jimmy brought a couple of crates of beer, Dirty Dave brought 6 bottles of red wine, Ron brought various spirits, Splodge brought mixers and ice while Stinking Pete came with 24 bottles of Ritz, the complete cunt.

As a present I stuck him out the garden with a packet of rashers stapled to his back and we stood in the window and laughed as Bastardface chased him round and round and round.

He wasn’t too badly mauled. Sort of.

Update: Not turkey shaped. Phew! It was, in fact, the perfect Yule log.

Season’s greetings

by Twenty Major on December 24th, 2007

*bring bring*

“Hello?”

“Ah hello, Twenty. This is Santa.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I mean Satan.”

“Ah, that’s better.”

If you’re not a complete and utter cunt have yourself a very drunken Christmas and I hope you grow large with food. To the rest of you, go fuck yourselves.

See yiz in a couple of days.

It’s Christmas all right

by Twenty Major on December 23rd, 2007

Head pounding? Check.

Mouth dry? Check.

Liver complaining? Check.

Wallet emptying? Check

Bowels loosening? Check

Poo blackening? Check.

Oh, it’s a fun time of the year, isn’t it?

Fantasy Kris Kindle

by Twenty Major on December 21st, 2007

You choose one person, alive or dead.

You choose one present for them, good or bad.

Who do you choose and what do you get them?

I’d get Damien Rice a life-support machine so I could take him off it.

You can’t have a bank account and yellow hair?

by Twenty Major on December 21st, 2007

When I got my very first job many years ago the first thing I did was open a bank account. In fact, I found the whole idea of opening bank accounts tremendous fun and for many years I had a proliferation of them all in different names.

Seriously, all you had to do was go into a bank, say ‘I would like to open an account please’, and they’d ask you for your details and you told them anything you wanted to tell them. Fantastic. I had about 6 accounts with the EBS all under different names and all of them with about 30p in them. But that’s how easy it was. Obviously it’s a bit different nowadays.

However, when you think about what I, a normal bloke with no great understanding of finance other than I like to make more than I spend could do, then how ludicrous is it that the Minister for Finance claims not to have had a bank account in the late 80s and early 90s. That Minister for Finance, now the Taoiseach, says:

I was separated, the accounts were in my wife’s name. I had cheques and I cashed them. That’s what I wanted to do…there’s nothing in the law or constitution about it… I decided to cash my cheques full stop…some people decide to dye their hair yellow.

Marvellous. You know I once dyed my hair yellow but I still had a fucking bank account. And don’t married couples normally have joint accounts anyway?

Then you read this and he says he had ‘no reason’ to open a bank account. Well, apart from the fact that that’s where normal people keep their money. You deposit your money in there, you can take it out whenever you like with your cash card and you know it’s safe. That is what everyone did…except the Minister for Finance, who obviously had no desire to earn any interest on his money. Which is a surprise when you consider he had bills and maintenance to pay. You’d think a man with his financial savvy would do his best to stretch his punts as far as they would go.

This is the best bit though. When telling the Mahon Tribunal about his rather unique home-banking arrangements the Irish Times reports:

Mr Ahern said he would count what he had “a few times a year” or he would check his money “if it was Christmas time or if I needed to buy a present or whatever”. He didn’t check it much, but he did so “every now and again”.

Fuck me. Do you know who has no need to check their money? Somebody who has more money than they know what to do with. Does he really expect us to believe that a man who had to accept ‘digouts’ from his buddies to help him through financial difficulties after his separation only checked his money ‘every now and again’?

He might accuse the Tribunal of trying to stitch him up but who can blame them? The evidence he gives never answers questions, it simply raises more of them. What madness is he going to come out with tomorrow? What unbelievable behaviour will he try and pass off as normal?

I don’t envy the Tribunal lawyers one bit because Bertie is the one of the slipperiest cunts I’ve ever seen in my life. He is quite brilliant at not answering questions and while he’s not answering them spouting the most confusing gibberish to befuddle anyone listening. I hope there’s someone in there that can stay with him though and nail the little cunt. It’s definitely coming. And I will dance the jig of all jigs when it happens.

—–

Extra: Gavin has a Mahon Tribunal Wiki if that’s your bag.

A Christmas choice

by Twenty Major on December 20th, 2007

“Twenty”, said Dirty Dave, “if you had to be Santa, a reindeer (any one of the magic ones) or Jesus which one would you be?”

“Dave”, I replied, “that is a very good question.”

“Really, do you think so?”

“No, you hapless cretin, it is up there with the worst of the ‘Which one of these three things would you be questions’ but nevertheless I shall do my best to answer it for you.”

“Santa. There’s the whole workshop full of presents thing which is very appealing, isn’t it? All year round you’ve got your North Pole sweatshop working overtime and, given the fact you have magic and stuff, you could employ somebody like Willie Walsh to administer, leaving you lots of time to play Pacman and the like.”

“I can sense a ‘but’ coming up here.”

“You know me too well, David, you know me too well. Having to deal with screaming kids for a month is not exactly my idea of fun. It’s a job that Gary Glitter and Derry O’Rourke would love. Little children sitting on your lap all day but like Achilles I have one weakness and that is my lap. Perhaps one day in the future ‘Twenty’s lap’ will enter the lexicon in place of ‘Achilles heel’ but child after child would leave me destroyed so that rules out Santa. Plus I hate dwarves in all their various flavours and working with elves every day would make me sick.”

“It is hard to argue with your reasoning there.”

“Now, Jesus. It’s tempting, isn’t it? Son of God = serious power. However, I do not want to be the King of Jews. They’re such an exacting bunch of people that there’d be queues of rabbis around the corner as they’d come to me and say ‘Look here, we don’t think it’s appropriate for the King of the Jews and the Son of God to get that drunk and to vomit in that holy place and to beat up that 12 year old for simply pressing the keys on his mobile phone a little bit too hard’. I don’t need that kind of guff and it would be all I could do not to turn them into frogs with the awesome powers I would have as the Son of God. The last thing the world needs are enormous bearded Jewish frogs.”

“Once again I am finding it difficult to find a flaw in your argument.”

“So, that leaves us with reindeer. Now, they would not be my favourite four legged forest dwelling animal. That honour goes to the badger but if one were to be Rudolf, for example, one could make a very good living as an Alex Ferguson impressionist. That red nose, those cloven hooves, the peculiar stench. The demand for after-dinner speaking appearances would be tremendous and you know well enough that my Scottish accent is near perfect after that time I had to infiltrate Big Country back in the late 80s. As well as that the ability to fly really does appeal to me. Can you imagine me flying through the air, big fat cheque in my inside pocket having just done a half an hour gig at the Dublin Manchester United Supporters Club Christmas party in Out on the Liffey, and spotting somebody I didn’t like below me. I could swoop down and cover them with reindeer piss and shit before zooming skywards again and laughing at them as loudly as I could? Outstanding. So that’s it. I’d be a reindeer.”

“Thank you for taking the time to answer that.”

“You’re welcome. Which one would you be?”

“Santa.”

“Why?”

“I’d sexually harrass all the little females elves. I have a thing for female elves. I’d like them to give me a good gobblin’.”

“Ron, axe please!”