Waste Not want Not

Many people recycle. I do. Germans and people who are forcibly made to wear Birkenstocks do. Most American sitcom writers do but don't admit it. And yet there are two good reasons why it's bad for you. One, there's no value any more in rubbish as a commodity. Fact. The price of waste collapsed like Jabba the Hut in a marathon stair climbing contest. Second, it's bloody dangerous.

I destroyed myself this morning going into my back room to find things to stuff my car with. In the end, I nearly perished. My legs got trapped under three tons of jumbo sized milk cartons, and no one could hear me call for help, as Styrofoam became lodged in my mouth. After I was eventually rescued by a St.Bernard dog and a news crew, I nearly sliced my finger off, washing the inside of an empty tin of fruit salad.

Another great piece of recycling is Madonna, queen of the reinvention, who's apparently now a cougar. Our Lady of the Fishnet was snapped with Jesus de Luz, a 22-year old product of the model breeding program in operation Brazil, ever since Mengele visited there after the war. The world media savoured pictures of the pair. Not even The Sunday Times could resist the entitling their snap with the obvious 'Madonna and Child'.

Madonna is not Michael Douglas, nor is she the nonagenarian squillionaire peanut-in-a-wheelchair, who Anna Nicole Smith married. Perhaps, and I'm just putting it out there, there might be a double standard here. Madonna is a woman, but she has every right to a mid-life crisis as any man, including engaging in near comical flings with unfeasibly young people, who have none of the life experiences she might have.

Her right to a life notwithstanding, it won't stop people mocking her. Let's hope she never gets a comb-over and a Porsche!

This week, a video!

As an experiment, I'm going to try to not only blog in writing, but from time to time, I'm going to use the wonderful gadgets on my laptop in order to present my notions and ideas as they come out of my mouth, sometimes after gestating in my brain. Uploading pictures would take too long and take up too much memory, so instead, I'm going to do it this way. Sometimes writing on the internet is like shouting your name in a dark cave, where only bats and Facebook stalkers will here you, but I hope that even the bats will take notice and enjoy my stuff.

That's not to say I'm not going to let you away so easily. Enjoy my video, it's a bit of fun more than anything else.

I leave you with this thought. Can a man get by on less than €2 million a year in these hard times?

Winter of Discontent....

Our huskies are dead. That's right, I took a hatchet to the bastards. I had to look into their big, brown, vacant eyes and somehow detach myself as the grim deed was done. It was necessary and totally humane. For us. We were cold and hungry, and their meat and fur helped nurture what was left of my wife and I on our trip home at the end of an arduous week. We had been camped out on the M50 for much of the last three days, and before that, we were forced into the purchase of said huskies from a dodgy looking Eskimo following our near fatal expedition on the N7 out of Castledermot. Cars slid and slipped, vans hilariously got stuck head first into holes like Winnie the Pooh. Buying our snow-hounds seemed a good bet as a glacier formed rapidly from Carlow to Dublin. South Leinster looked like the Baring Straights, though we couldn't see Russia from our house. It turned out to be just another panic buy.

Instead of venturing forwards with our new dogs, however, we turned back and went home; took a mad, bad and definitely sad trip on public "transport" the next day and found that the weather was, like manflu, not so much bad as it was messy.

All because a few county councils couldn't have been arsed gritting the roads, thereby risking our already fairly peeky looking economy as 9% of us stayed at home (not including the near 400,000 who have nowhere to go in the morning anyway).

Maybe it's stay at home telemarketing for everyone. It's better than waiting for the powers that be to do up a recovery plan and grit the damn roads!

I'll get by....

This is the first time in about a week that I've had the time to post anything on my accursed blog, accursed, that is, because I use rude words in disbelief that I don't write enough on it. There's only so often you can get indignant enough about the country to write, without having to resort to a cocktail of Pepcid and gin to keep the show going. Ireland has been mentioned in the same breath as Iceland by Jose Manuel Barroso, and not because of our innovative music industries.

Iceland is run by corrupt inbred weirdies who look like they escaped from Royston Vasey, so being likened to them in any respect I don't think is a good thing in any way. did I mention they're also inept? Just saying....

Amid the current turmoil and Brian Cowen's grossly offensive, "It's my country and I'll fuck it up if I want to" rant, and the utter contempt shown to the our parliament in fixing the unfixable, Sebastian Barry went under the national radar, winning the Costa Book Prize, the old Whitbread prize. No fanfare to speak of. Yes, the Irish Times reported the win, duh! They would. No one else however saw fit to really mention it or its significance, beyond the fact that he won and the cash prize he received(quel surprise). Why?

We Irish have a contempt for success and particuarly for intellectual discourse. Successful writer? not interested. Don't read anyway. Why would you, sure? Reading won't soup up your Subaru Impreza, will it? This malaise is not limited to Barry's literary success. It's the very reason why the political classes are incapable of dealing with our current crises - they're ignorant, illiterate and arrogant. Cowen's abovementioned rant is just one example of this. There are plenty more that you can no doubt think of yourself.

So as writers go unaknowledged and tough decisions go unfaced, we get to sit quietly and watch the sun go down on our glory years, whilst being beaten over the head with a fraying Chloe Handbag and a copy of the Irish Times property Section.