Severe Jam Damage

So apparently this blog is 4th on the list if you google ‘kylie news dildo found.’ Now that’s kinda worrying. But what is even more worrying is wondering exactly what the original googler was looking for when they stumbled upon my little blog.

I spent the weekend in Kildare chomping on various pieces of pig. Well, that’s after I left work here on Saturday afternoon. We headed up to a friends farm where we dined on pork belly and cracklin’ and all sorts of good things. I’m getting hungry again just thinking about it.

Slow roasted pork belly that was finished on the barbecue, makes for some excellent crackling. Potato salad (potatoes from the garden) with homemade mayonnaise and a touch of mint was the most delicious thing ever. Bottles and bottles of wine - last count 14 empty bottles - plus gin and vodka and a dry, warm evening meant we could sit outside and enjoy ourselves.

The next morning there was more food in the form of home-made black pudding and sausages - from the same pigs - and fresh eggs collected from the chickens that morning and a jug of bloody mary to ease away the hangovers.

There’s truly nothing better than good food, good wine and good friends.

Not much going on today. Heading off to the country for a barbecue and to eat someone’s pet pigs this evening. I find myself here in the office getting nothing done.

Had a bit of a mare this morning, on the phone back and forth with different people in different stages of crisis about different things. It meant I didn’t get out of the house until the afternoon and now I’m sitting here in work trying to kill some time.

Good things today:
My new green stripey chuck taylors - comfy!
Chocolate Nemesis which I made last night for dessert tonight
New hair colour - gets the grey out!
A good nights sleep - wahey!

Bad things today:
Dun Laoghaire - passing through it
Mong on bus - stank of BO and sat on me
Work - being in the office on a Saturday afternoon sucks

The plan last night was to work a few hours extra and try and get something done. But it was a bad day for that. Nothing was going right, everything I tried didn’t actually work properly. So when the barfly mailed me at two minutes past five last night with the words
‘PINTS NOW. (This is not a question.)’
I really had no choice but to down tools and head off down the road. In the pub I found him sitting in the window, supping beer.
‘Where’s mine?’
‘Still in the barrel I’d imagine’
‘bah.’
‘Hey, look who’s on tonight!’
‘Adam Green, who he?’
‘Moldy Peaches guy, remember I was telling you bout it last week?’
‘Umm, no. I don’t think I’ve heard their stuff, what’s it like?’
‘It’s good. You’ll like it.’
‘So we’re going then?’
‘Yeah, we’re going.’

A goodly number of pints later we were queued up around the corner waiting for the doors to open.
‘Strange crowd.’
‘Yeah, odd alright. What is it?’
‘It’s all - It’s all, jesus, it’s all fuckin’ GIRLS.’
The barfly was in his element.
‘Woohoo!’
It was gonna be a long night.
But it wasn’t, really. Or maybe the alchohol just dulled my awareness of the passing of time. We spent a while identifying which artists the support band were ripping off, er I mean paying tribute to, as the crowd continued to fill the room.
‘Violent Femmes’
‘Tanita Tikaram, twist in my sobriety’
‘Fuck!’
‘Robbie Williams?’
‘And that one’s pure Oasis’
‘Yeah’
‘Lotta girls here’
‘Yeah it’s great isn’t it?’ the barfly was looking increasingly over-excited.
‘Keep it in your pants man.’
Eventually the room became nothing so much as a big sweaty crushed box and Adam Green arrived on stage. The songs - none of which I had ever heard before - are raucous and loud and bawdy, or they would be in any other band. But with a voice that’s pure Neil Hannon and a writhing dance style that’s more Salome meets a young Mick Jagger the songs have a twisted innocence to them.
(Sample lyrics:
well we came upon a cracker
and we all came on this cracker
and the last one had to eat it
and she did)
‘Who’s got their cellphone on and is wreckin’ this folk festival for everyone?’ muttered the singer after someone had gotten too close to the speaker stacks and was causing feedback mayhem. The crowd laughed, earlier there had been shouts to ’shut the fuck up’ when half the crowd had started to sing along.
‘Man, there’s gonna be a rumble between the kids who are singing along and the kids who aren’t singing tonight’ he drawled. The mullet in front of me laughed, she hadn’t fuckin’ shut up for the entire show and I was ready to brain the silly bint. For the last hour everytime I moved she moved to stand directly in front of me. The barfly gallantly offered to swap places with me at one stage, but I think that was just so he could get a closer look at her arse.
‘She’s a stupid bint, with a stupid mullet.’
‘Yeah, but she’s got a nice arse.’
‘Fer fugsake.’
‘Ahh if you’re that pissed off, drop your pint on her back, so you soak her shirt, the beer running in rivulets down her back, all sticky and wet and just- erm ’scuse me’ The barfly left and returned a few minutes later slightly out of breath.
‘You ok there perv boy?’
‘Yeah, better now. Good show yeah? That was my idea.’
‘Yeah, you’re fuckin’ wonderful now quick! To the bar before the plebs figure out the show is over!’
We stumbled over and pushed our way through heaving masses of adolescent females. Hours later we stumbled and pushed our way out of the bar. I lost the barfly somewhere along the way, last time I saw him he was trying to hail a taxi. Poor fucker, the state he was in, he’s probably still there.

Video: Jessica Simpson

So apparently Superman is living in Serbia, the Brits won’t agree to using the Euro but DO want their own 99p coin and an american credit card company offered a card to Mr. Palestinian Bomber.

Okay, this shit is lame, but I got nuthin’ today.

I went to the Pixies last night.

If you can’t tell from that opening line I am less than effusive about this. Not that i’m not a big fan of the band, not that I didn’t spend most of my college years with Doolittle turned to 11, not that I didn’t think Kim Deal was the coolest chick in the universe (for a time.) I saw Frank Black in concert just after he’d stopped being Black Francis. I even once managed to get into a ’secret gig’ in Tower records the last time he was in town promoting his solo album. So I know the noise and the power that the band are capable of.

Unfortunately last night though, the wind wasn’t with us. I have no idea how many were at the gig, 10, 20 thousand maybe? We were on the pitch, and considering we didn’t get there till about 2 minutes before they came onstage (yes we missed all the support acts) the place was surprisingly empty. I suppose the Pixies aren’t the type of band who you would think would fill a stadium, perhaps if they’d been in the Point it would have been better, although that place also has crap accoustics. Certainly when they arrived on stage they didn’t appear like one of the most influential rock bands of the 90’s. Kim Deal, in a pink jumper and white cotton trousers looked more like someone’s mother caught short on laundry day than a rock icon. Frank Black was no longer Black Francis, and instead had turned into a Christy Moore look-a-like. Only Joey Santiago looked like a proper rock star. Shaved head, tattoos, all dressed in black. As one of our group said ‘I bet Joey gets all the women’ my response ‘Well it’s probably not Frank anyway.’

But for all the changes that time has wrought, they still played the old tracks with a familiarity that belied their time apart. ‘Gouge Away’, ‘Monkley gone to heaven’, Here comes your man,’ and for some inexplicable reason ‘Wave of Mutilation’ twice. I’m sure it would have been great if we could have heard it. I’m sure the people living on the northside of Lansdowne heard a fabulous concert, but for us it was all blown away on a bitter wind.

60 quid to hear muffled guitar and strangled vocals. What a pity.

Hunter S. Thompson was fired into the sky from a cannon on the weekend. It’s ok though, he’s been dead six months.

Article here.
Video here.

Also this is kinda a cool site. Works of ‘art’ were bought for under a fiver from ebay (think velvet crying boys and poker playing dogs and then take the talent down a step.) and re-worked by artists to be re-sold on ebay. Kinda cool, although I’m not sure even with the reworking that I’d want to have any of them hanging on my living room wall.

So it has come to my attention that there are now such things as proper Wonka bars and they have -holds breath, jumps up and down - made the WHIPPLE SCRUMPTIOUS FUDGEMALLOW DELIGHT bar!!

Now, I am in two minds about this. From the very first time I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I imagined the WSFD to be a light, airy chocolatey marshmallow thing with - for some reason known only to my subconscious - a touch of strawberry.

i just KNOW that the WSFD that is in the shops right now will NOT be anything like what I have imagined all these years. The chocolate will be nestle, the fudgemallow will probably be some sort of nougat and there won’t be a hint of strawberry in the whole thing. (As I said I have no idea why strawberry, it’s just the scent that popped into my head when I first read the book.)

Even the wonka bar (pictured right) isn’t what I imagined. Graham Crackers?? It sounds like a cheap Club Milk. When I was growing up I always imagined that Wonka chocolate would be the best chocolate in the world. Better than Cadbury’s. But then nestle brought out the Wonka range of chocolate bars and well, we all know how bad their chocolate is. I can’t imagine what the Nutty Crunch Surprise is like. I may have to re-think my initial delight at hearing of the existence of the WFSD. Some things are best left to the imagination.

Everyone is a fucking writer. Have you noticed that? Lately everyone is either a writer or they ‘have always wanted to turn their hand to writing’. I don’t know what it is these people are imagining… Some sort of bohemian lifestyle in a lonely attic room; bottles of red wine, ink-daubed pages and a string of lovers perhaps.
They certainly aren’t thinking of sleepless nights sitting in front of a computer, or having to go to work the next day on 2 hours sleep. They can’t be thinking how it feels to receive rejection after rejection after rejection. They haven’t a clue what it means to sit for hours staring at a blank screen, trying to speak with their characters and having nothing to say. They are certainly not thinking about the world these individuals will live in or what is inspiring them to do what needs to be done because they are too busy listening to the sound of their own voice telling me they want to be a writer. They don’t have notebooks filled with scribbled thoughts and ideas for use later. They don’t understand that every time they get 5 minutes to themselves they should be thinking about the who, the what, the when or the why. For them writing is as simple as sitting down with a pen and ‘being creative.’
And if you ask these people how much work they’ve done so far you receive blank looks.
‘Well I’m researching at the moment you see.’
‘Oh I have this great idea, it’s just getting the time to sit down and write it.’
That is all bollox. If you are going to write then you either do it or you shut the fuck up. You don’t bore me with tales of how you are going to get a publishing contract (never having written a word.) You don’t tell me how your story is really good, but it’s all in your head at the moment. And you certainly don’t tell me that it’s ‘so original… no-one has ever thought of this for a story’ because Honey, I hate to tell ya, but it has all been done before. Writing is hard and lonely and painful. It’s ripping experiences out of your life, and vomiting up things you’d hoped never to remember. Its heartache and loss and everything you’ve ever suffered. It’s slashing open your guts and laying them out where anyone can see. It’s death and it’s life and it’s going to hurt. Anyone who tells you anything less is lying.

Honestly, my life at the moment is like a really bad blues track, sung by a one-armed guitar player who goes by the name of Two-fingers Joe and his backing band The Tone Deafs. Shall we begin? I’ll start you off easy…

My nephew and sister are both very ill at the moment, the nephew was in hospital last week on a drip, they’ve picked up some sort of gastric bug. Suffice to say I am staying well clear.

Our puppy dog, just 10 weeks old is also very ill. The vet is hoping it’s not parvovirus and is just bacterial. We are keeping our fingers crossed as if it is parvo… well, you know the rest. There was a crash on the Arklow road yesterday that has been reported on the national news.

My brother-in-law’s uncle and aunt were both injured and are still in hospital with serious injuries. And finally, I’ve just received news that an acquaintance was found dead this morning. They don’t know yet how he died, but think he may have choked in his sleep.