Oh Mr Winamp, With These Random mp3’s You Really Are Spoiling Me….

As I am want to do on occasions, I throw caution to the wind and request that Winamp (for you technophobes it is the music playing programme on my ‘puter) randomly select a song for me. Today my request was met with the most wonderful choice, as Winamp dove into my vast collection of (legally owned) mp3s and instead of returning a violent rapping song (the likes of which constitute 98.4% of my music) selected the amazing disco-synth pop of the Pointer Sister’s “Jump!(For My Love)”. The result being the emergence of a wonderous grin on my world-weary face.

I was further amused by the thoughts of the sisters Pointer holding a jumping contest to select suitable partners.

Yes, I consider randomly listening to songs as throwing caution to the wind. As you can probably tell i’m one of those dangerous go-get-’em types.

Take a picture, it will last longer

Yesterday after having spent the morning creating all manner of magical things in 3d like a one-man Pixar I sat down to enjoy some Saturday lunch. Fairly non-descript morning. However, my luncheon was interupted by the timely intervention of the boy Halpin who arrived at my door like a character from a time-travelling movie. He grabbed me by my shoulders and said “Merv, we need your help! Let’s go!”. Being the helpful sod I am, I abandoned my half eaten sausage and raced out to the road, where Rob was waiting in the Crab Mobile and we were off! It seemed the boyos had arranged a photoshoot but one of their number couldn’t make it, so I became a stand in (under an assumed identity and all). So there I was, posing with Starsky and Hutch in a carpark as a man took pictures of us. Odd.

The photoshoot incidentally was to promote the boys propsed entry of the Student Gumball rally. That’s right, the two lads with the most preposterous haircuts I know are going to drive across Europe with 600 other idiots in September. God speed! This led to a conversation of matters adventurous where we get to the meat of this blog-entry. Not only are our thrill seeking hairballs entering an exotic race along the Mediterranian, but they will be spending their summer living it up like a modern day Wham! in sunny Hawaii. This sharply put into focus my immediate future of going nowhere. Now, i’ve never been one to desire nor crave far flung adventures. I’m not adverse to them, but neither do I display any desire to get off my hole and do them. I’ve never had that part of most peoples souls that wants at least once to see the world before they retire to a life of meaningless routine.

Until now it seems.

Alot of people I know either are or will be adandoning the shitty rain-soaked land of ours for pastures new. An alarming amount. And I know plenty of people who have done it already. Yet for some reason I remain absolutely unable to motivate myself to partake in such activitys…Now, you may be gripping the monitor and screaming at the screen “Just fucking do it then!” but alas, things are never that simple with me. Of course all decisions must go through a lenghty process of being Hoo-ed and haa-ed over, over-analysed to death and debated til I go insane with self-thought. The usual outcome is I go for the safe option. Its a funny situation to be in, lamenting the fact that I dont want to do something that I actually want to do. In fact, now that i’ve written that I realise its not funny, its just weird. And stupid. Oh well.

Anyways, this time next week one of the major clouds of doom that has followed me for an age will have almost vaporised and I can go back to a stress free existence. Which means a Summer of World Cup, regular beer intake, Big Brother, being shouted at on the phone by posh cunts about their Nokia 6680 and other sorry excuses for life experiences. Hooray!

Pah. On a scale of 1-10 for self-indulgence this blog-entry is an internal monologue from the Wonder Years. Sorry.

Spammers 1 – Me 0

Folks, comments are gonna have to be switched off for a while. It finally happened and those evil spambots finally got me. I’ve spent the last hour cleaning up nonsense about drugs and home insurance. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to secure the site right now, so democracy won’t return til the Summer.

(Mark, Linda and that randomer with no humour, dont think for a second you’re inane comments contributed to this. I like your stupid remarks, they remind me how much cleverer I am!)

Alas. Im not going to let some spam annoy me, i’ve got plenty of other things to get annoyed about right now!

Arsenal 1 – Barcelona 2

Meh. I could write some foul mouthed tirade against the ref….or a cheesy philosophical diatribe on life, defeat, taking chances, pride etc. Or shite on again about how the universe has dealt me a bad hand….but i’m not in the mood. . Maybe in a few days I will. I wont even go into an account of the match, we all saw it. So for now I think i’ll just let the men themselves do the talking, via football365.com

Ya did yourselves proud…..

Arsenal striker Thierry Henry accused referee Terje Hauge of favouring Barcelona after the Gunners lost the Champions League final 2-1 to the Primera Liga side.

An emotional Henry claimed the official ignored a series of challenges on him and insisted Arsenal had “made ourselves proud”.

He told Sky Sports 1: “I don’t know if the referee had a Barcelona shirt on because they kicked me all over the place.

“Maybe next time I’ll learn how to dive. I expect the referee to do his job but I don’t think he did.”

Henry said: “Henrik Larsson was the difference but I didn’t see Ronaldinho and I didn’t see Eto’o.

“So many times (Carles) Puyol should have got a yellow card, so many times (Rafael) Marquez came from behind to take my ankles.

“We made ourselves proud.”

Arsenal midfielder Freddie Ljungberg said on ITV1: “They had a lot of possession but we were leading until the 76th minute. We could have won it, this is hard for us.

“They are a great side but I felt we controlled it quite well; unfortunately they got the goals.”

Henry added on ITV1: “I’ve been told that the first goal (by Eto’o) was offside. They are already a good team, so if you help them, it is going to be very difficult to beat them.”

The Frenchman had a chance to finish Barca off when Alexander Hleb played him in but his low shot was easily saved by Victor Valdes.

“I had nothing in my legs, nothing whatsoever,” he said.

“No disrespect to Barcelona, I feel we played better than them when it was 11 against 11.

“We can be proud, we can be more than proud but I’m sorry, some of the refereeing today was horrendous.”

Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger admitted he will now try to convince Henry that his future is at the club.

“I do not know how difficult it will be [to keep Henry] but we will try to do it. It is not in my hands. It is Thierry’s hands.”

He added on Sky Sports 1: “I felt we played a great game and gave everything. We had a few chances in the last 20 minutes but it was difficult.

“I also felt their first goal was offside.”

Asked how much the referee influenced the match, Wenger added: “A lot. We have lost it and it is difficult to take. This team have been fantastic today and right through the European season.

“I knew we could hang on and I knew nerves would play a part in their game. They did not look especially dangerous.

“But we will do it again and I believe the team is growing a lot after this season.

“We have plenty of good young players who have contributed a lot.

“This team are strong. Sometimes you can come back even stronger.”

Lehmann understood the referee’s decision to send him off rather than letting play unfold.

“He could have given advantage to Barcelona but the referee had to make a very quick decision and it is difficult for refs to make the right decisions,” the German said.

“It was fantastic (watching from the bench) until the first goal of Barcelona. We’ve done very well and fought fantastically, it was a great achievement from the team to play 10 against 11 against a good side.

“But unfortunately I think their first goal was offside. We had a referee in the final who makes two decisions against us.”

Asked whether a referee who operates weekly in the Norwegian league should be officiating the Champions League final, Lehmann told Sky Sports: “We have lost and it’s over but everybody has to learn out of everything.

“Barcelona have the capability to play quickly, so we should have taken a guy who is used to this pace.”

Lehmann added on German TV station Sat 1: “You don’t play in those kind of games very often and to have an ending like this is very tragic. It feels tough.

“In football you make mistakes and then you get punished for them. We played great with 10 men and it is a pity that it did not go well for me.

“What really makes me sad it that the equaliser was an offside goal. If the referee had been a bit more alert, we would have maybe won 1-0.

“I expected him to send me off but I immediately thought it was not all over as we could have won the game with 10 men.

“I cannot look ahead (to the World Cup) right now. Now is the time to be sad.”

Ashley Cole was more philosophical in defeat than some of his team-mates, and told Sky Sports: “We lost the game but it’s not worth moaning about the offside, it’s finished, we have to get on with it. The lads deserve credit, they’ve chipped in and done well as a team.”

England team-mate Campbell, whose goal looked set to be the winner until the final 14 minutes, said: “Losing Jens so early on is going to cause problems but we battled well.

“A few decisions went against us but you just have to keep going. We’ve done well this season, it’s a shame we couldn’t just finish off the game.

“We passed the ball well, they’re a great team and passed it around well too but we had a couple of chances where if it goes our way they’re dead and buried.”

The Price is Right

I’ve had a long standing promise that when the price of a pint of Harp reached 4 euro in the town I would cease drinking. Expecting this to be at least another 3 or 4 years off I was confident of at least another couple of years hoochery, by which stage my liver would probably have not been able to take any more abuse anyways and I would be glad to stop. Well, it was with shock and dismay that on Friday night I discovered that fate had a different plan.

Me and Senór Duffawitz decided to try out the newly reopened Blackrock Inn (now called Harrisons). Inside we were pleasantly surprised by the lack of Elvis memorabilia on the walls and the general niceness of the decor. We had not stepped into this place in a long time, having declared a boycott of the old establishment because one night as we sat round trying to enjoy ourselves the musical atmosphere was provided by the most depressing song ever, “High and Dry” by Radiohead. There’s nothing worse than sitting round on a Saturday night with your mates looking over at a bunch of depressed has-beens slumped over the bar staring into their pints trying to work out where their life went wrong whilst Thom Yorke cries in your ear. The final straw was when they played an elevator muzak version of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”. That was it.

Anyways, we returned. Duff went over to the bar to get the drinks in and I went to find a nice vantage point from which we could observe the comings and goings of the clientele. Then, the unthinkable happened. Duffawitz placed two pints on the table and uttered the most devastating words in human history.

“Pint’s are 4 euro and 5 cent!”

Suddenly, an unseen choir started roaring “O Fortuna!”, the walls began to shake and thunder and lightning raged outside. The BASTARDS. It had happened, and on my own doorstep too. This was upsetting, even more so that with the impending closure of the Violet (RIP), this was technically to be my new local, being less than 5 minutes wander from my front door. I sat there staring at my over-priced pint, and a little part of me died. I always knew it was coming, but this was too fast…..and too much! Worse, however was to come. Being fancy free gentlemen, we said fuck it we are here now we’ll have some more of these costly drinks. Capitalism however, is a cruel beast. Duffawitz returned on his next round with more incredulous news; the pints had gone up! I wondered what significant world events had taken place in the last hour to have shaken stock markets to such and extent that inflation was now raging out of control. The big flat screens in the pub offered no clue, simply showing a Duran Duran video….Yes, if 4 euro pints weren’t enough, we were now being punished for staying longer in the pub. It truely was a sad night.

However, the next night was to offer a stange juxtaposition. The night began in the Beerkeeper where expensive pints are to be expected (being that they are imported from Narnia), but when we moved our merry band on to the darkened confines of Club Amber we were treated to the wonder of 2 euro drinks. Hurray! A victory for the punter you shout. Maybe so, but the truth is that despite the fact that drinks were far cheaper than usual, you still spend the same amount. Why? Because you drink LOTS FUCKING MORE. The result being you get drunker than you would have, endanger yourself and the lives of those around you, suffer mild temporary insanity and wake up the next day not having saved any money and feeling like you’ve been molested by a rhino. There’s no winning.

Now, theres rumours in the jungle that the Dundalk Nite Club wars are going to go to ground zero, and ONE EURO drinks are to be offered. I’d say that’s what happened just before the fall of the Roman empire. Doomed.

Post-script: People in Dublin, yadda yadda, I know! Pint’s in the capitol cost 5 squillion euro and i should count myself lucky. NO! This is DUNDALK. Blargh!

An Open Letter to Katrina and the Waves

Dear Katrina and the Waves,

The surface of the sun can reach temperatures of up to 5,500 degree’s Celsius. At that temperature the majority of things will burn into nothingness immediately. You may be wondering why I bring up such a fact, well to answer that I would point you towards your own 1985 hit pop-song “Walking on Sunshine”. In this admittedly catchy ditty, you proclaim “I’m walking on sunshine, oh oh! And don’t it feel good!” Well Katrina, I hate to tell you this but it would not feel good; it would feel the opposite of good. Walking on the surface of the sun would result in severe burning and ultimately death. I don’t know about you, but this to me is not the definition of “good”. You also go on to say “Walking on sunshine, I feel alive, I feel a love, I feel a love that’s really real”. I find it quite ironic you mention “feeling alive” as that feeling would be extremely short-lived as the stars internal combustion system blasts extreme levels of heat into the surrounding atmosphere. As for “I feel a love that’s really real”, quite frankly, all you would feel is your body vaporizing. I dare say you would not have time to consider feelings such as love.

Everyday I wake up I thank the Lord that access to the sun’s surface is impossible for our youth. Your naively optimistic lyrics might seem as a trite throw-away song to you, but to our impressionable youth who are striving for a little bit of happiness in this cold world they could be construed as instructions to a better life. I dread to think of the carnage that would result if our young people could get to the sun. For shame.

I hope this has made you reflect on the content of your lyrics, and next time you won’t be so quick to encourage people to walk themselves to a fiery death. To amend for this you may consider giving some of the profits from sales of the single to the burn’s unit at your local hospital.

Yours,
Ruairi

A Thousand Words

Seeing at though you low-lifes havn’t taken too kindly to my word-knowledge as of late, todays’s entry will be of the pictorial kind. Except, of course, for these words. Gah!

Bill O’Herlihy’s World of the Amazing!

Bill O’Herlihy goes to Ray Houghton after the Roy Keane testimonial, “Wasn’t that the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?”

No Bill. Frankly, I’ll take Nelson Mandela being freed, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Man Walking on the Moon, the Tsunami, the mapping of the human Genome, 9/11, sheep being cloned, Bobby walking out of the fridge in Home and Away and Kinga riding the wine bottle on Big Brother last year as things which are all infinitely more amazing than seeing a FOOTBALLER MAN GET A TESTY-MONIAL.

What was amazing about seeing people go to see a football match? Then clap their hands? Sensationalist BASTARDS.

Secondly, someone in the Indo says that “loyalty is a term rarely associated with footballers these days…unless its Roy Keane”

Im sorry, when was it loyal to abandon your country during the WORLD-FUCKING-CUP because the footballs weren’t inflated enough? He wouldn’t know loyalty if it strangled his dog.

My VERY IMPORTANT opinion on music.

The Black Eye Peas. They’re a pack of cunts, right? OK, So as long as we’ve agreed on that we can continue. Did you know that the Black Eye Peas used to actually be a hip-hop group? No, don’t laugh, really. They even did a song with DJ Premier! (non rap-fans, thats like discovering James Blunt used to sing with the Beatles) But nowadays they’ve become the epitimy of a sell-out, hiring a piece of tits-and-ass to prance about in their videos and doing songs with Justin Trousersnake. I mean they recorded and released “My Humps”, I don’t think a Judge in the land would convict you for using that song as a defense for murdering them all with a nail-gun.

(At this point i’d like to point out that i’m not a former Black Eyed Peas fan who is lamenting their current status, I never really liked them at all, i’m just stressing they used to have credibility)

Anyways, I was channel hopping earlier and I came across their new video. Now, usually I would have shouted “CUNTS!” at the screen and moved on, but it said that it featured “John Legend and Q-Tip”. Being a fan of Q-Tip I was suitably interested enough to have to endure a Black Eyed Peas song. It was stunningly apparent that the Pea’s were attempting to convince us that they hadn’t become a bunch of performing monkeys and were still a rapping band. After Mr Tip did his thing, that main shit from the group decided he was a rapper again and treated us to his rhymes. I was all set to zap them off the air when suddenly who do I see but one of my favourite rappers Talib Kweli who then shames the whole sorry bunch of them by pulling out a fantastic verse from under his hat. Which both pleased and saddened me. Pleased in that the masses of brainless turds who buy this kind of thing will get to hear some Talib knowledge, but saddened me in that he should be concentrating his time on making good albums and not helping these fuckers get some hip-hop credibility back. After this brief moment of greatness, the rest of the Pea’s take over, including a verse from that dude who looks like he sells his teeth for crack in car parks, then the long-haired git rolls out a minute of hip-hop cliches and the whole sorry debacle comes to a close. You’re fooling no one, you are forever going to be considered sell-out arseheads who inflicted some of the worst music in history on us, and no amount of shouting “real hip-hop” or name-dropping De La Soul will change that.

Incidentaly, John Legend’s contribution consists of a 30 second bit of warbling the word “ooohhhhh” and giving his date-rapists wink to the camera. I’d love to know how much he got paid for that bit of extended vocal acrobatics.

Ah well. Music’s gone to shit anyway. Mobb Deep now shout-out “G-Unit”, DJ Shadow is apparently going to release a crunk record and Pete Doherty’s still alive. If Nas’s new record isn’t anything but amazing i’m going to retire to a desert island with a copy of “Straight Outta Compton” and abandon Western civilisation completely.

But, at least we have Ghostface Killah still being mental.

All Hat And No Cattle.

That’s the new working title for my autobiography (following “Get Drunk or Die Tryin’”, and “One Drink Too Many“). But as the title itself suggests, it is doomed to be a non-existant piece of work, being as it is of my own invention and thus will never likely to be done. Just add it to the list. My infinitely expanding list of things I say i’ll do but of course never actually do is quite impressive. Well, impressive if you are impressed by people who never follow through on their convictions, and if you are impressed by that then I’d guess not many people are impressed with you. Impressive, no?

Another thing to add to the list would be the essay I am currently attempting to write. Let me tell you folks it is no picnic trying to treat of the success of the Irish Governments in implementing the Strategy for the Digital Content Industry in Ireland whilst your brain caves inside itself under the weight of a spirit-crushing hangover. Personally I am going to blame Linda and Benny for this. Linda for convincing me to go to the night club, and Benny for his ever-enthusiastic endorsing of the 2 euro drinks therein. Thanks guys!

(By the way I am fully aware that I am not taking responsibility for my own actions. That is something I have not, and will continue to not practise)

I did however hear some amusing tales, involving people rearing maggots in home-made bio-domes and I had a wonderful conversation with someone who expressed an interest in killing a dog. I can’t remember why exactly, but at the time it was a compelling argument that perversely was to do with “dogs being so nice.”

Hmm…why couldn’t the title of the essay been “Write a whinging blog entry about your hangover including a half-arsed account of your previous nights exploits along with some subtle self-pity”. I’d be done!