I just saw a very interesting piece on bbc.co.uk about Hugo Chavez personally flying to Colombia to seek the release of three hostages being held by the FARC there. Now I know that Chavez has polarised opinion like no other South American leader in history, and the fact that the good old boys in the USA have already deposed him once before the people of Venezuela decided to popularly re-elect him is testament to his staying power.
However, his promise to bring his own unique brand of Bolivarian socialism to his country has been tempered somewhat by the fact that early successes, such as redistributing the oil wealth among the inhabitants of the barrios and refusing to cowtow to the US’s demands, have become little more than smoke and daggers (thank you Bertie, you ginormous walking Cockhead) to mask the crackdown of free speech, like when he shut down a television station critical of him, and attempted to wedge plans through the Venezuelan parliament to rubberstamp him as President-For-Life a la Castro so he can continue to keep giving two fingers to the US for many years to come.
Certainly, Chavez genuinely seems to have the best interests of the Venezuelan people at heart, a prime example being his campaigns to eradicate iliteracy in a nation where it is rampant. That being said, who knows what his intentions are? Does anyone care? And why am I writing about a Venezuelan leader when I’m about to leave the house?
Home to what usually are the biggest winds in Ireland, yep, St. Stephen’s Day.
I’ll give you guys the full sceal in a day or two the … eh … Christmas cheer has worn off, but til then I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Atheist Present Exchange Festival, and I’m off this evening to get floored in Club 92 with the boys. Tommy Cajones has promised me a bottle of brandy all for meself this evening, so no doubt I’ll be well and truly liquored up by evening’s end and well into tomorrow.
My internet’s been on the frizz, and thanks to the extortionate folks at O2 mobile, I can just barely squeeze this on. It’ll be a few days before I catch up with you all …
While everyone else is prattling on about cocaine use – we get it, guys, we have a problem – I saw on Google News that Enda Kenny raised the cost of water in schools in a recent debate. This saddens me in a way. While water cost will never be a problem for me – I went to Gonzaga so sport was really more of a concern – I think it’s awful in these days we live in that a precious commodity like water must be paid for. As we are some 70% water and require it to live, it should be a Government obligation to provide water services for free to the public.
It’s frankly ridiculuous that Bertie Ahern, the man who has brainwashed the masses in Drumcondra, can ‘appease’ the public by delaying – not cancelling, delaying – his proposed pay rise, and yet the schools across Ireland, crippled already by overcrowding and underfunding, are being forced to pay for such an essential commodity. This is frankly ridiculous, but we live in a country where people will grumble and whine and generally be stupid c*nts but not make any serious effort at protesting.
I think I’ll move to North Korea. At least there they’ll have free water … right?
Then again, this is the country that allowed Brendan O’Connor to get a number one with this ditty …
I was tagged with my first meme there from Baino … apparently this is a bad thing, but being the noob I am, I’ll follow through with it. Hell, I have little better to be doing.
1) I have a tattoo of the Batman logo on my right leg, just to the side of my knee: I got this on holiday in Ayia Napa with the mates post-Leaving Cert. Girlfriend/parents unhappy, but I was a brewery beyond wasted at the time
2) I can’tdrink cow’s milk: I have an allergy to it, so I have been drinking goat’s milk since I was a baby
3) I once took a swim in Booterstown Nature Reserve: Anyone who has ever seen this stagnant water body will know that swimming in it is likely to leave you with some kind of cancer
4) I used to have a comulsion for plucking my eyebrows: I was nicknamed ET at primary school
5) Same as above but for biting my fingernails
6) Bon Jovi are my favorite band
7) I am the only person in the world who cried through the English Patient … I had something in my eye …
Anyway, that’s my list, and while I should pass it on to seven peeps, I don’t know enough
Guess you’ll have to settle for little old me
So I got the call at ten this morning that I finally got the job. I have to report in next Monday for ‘orientation’ (am I the only one who has images of a map and compass) and start my new career as a burger turner. I have to wear an embarrassing uniform, smile at people who look at me like I’m dirt, and treat cantankerous old people with the respect they deserve.
Wonderful. I give it two weeks.
- Update: I just got the blog email up and running, you can contact me at briandamageblog@gmail.com
Serriously though, I have been thinking about getting a job lately. I have been happily unemployed since I was sacked from my job as a clerk for an IT firm in Dublin, and I have drifted between part time stints at various locations around Dublin, even toying with the idea of heading back to Belfield to do Arts or something equally unchallenging. I nearly had a job in October when I got a trial period in St. Vincent’s Hospital as a ward attendant, and what happened? Thevery next day the fucking embargo on employment came into play and I was told it’d be near the New Year when I got work, so I was understandably pissed … and subsequently that evening in more ways than one.
So I swallowed what little is left of my pride and went for a job as a burger turner in Burger King on Baggot Street, figuring that the clientele on my home side of the city would be slightly more civilised then our northern brethren, and less likely to jump across the counter, shout ‘open the fookin’ counter bud’ while brandishing a blood-filled syringe. That said, Ed the Ram thought it was hilarious when I went for this interview, and Ed has never met a stereotype he didn’t like, so he assumed that ‘you’re going to start being ignorant, hating yourself, and speaking in broken English too, yeah?‘ and decided that hell, he’d take an interview for the craic too.
Now I’m not a big fan of interviews, but I can be a charming bastard when I want to be. However, I have interviewers all figured out. You see they are a separate subspecies to us: Homo sapiens humanresourcis, and the defining behaviour of this breed is that they hunt in packs. I’ve never had an interview where I didn’t have at least three people grilling me. The key to winning over these people is to freeze one out and focus on the other two, charming them into submission, that way you’ll always have two-to-one in your favour.
So off myself and Ed the Ram went this morning, and for the craic Ed borrowed Tommy Cajones’ pride and joy, a 1969 black Porsche 911 with a 2 litre engine and a thunderous roar when you’re taking off, and we powered off up the N11 and into town. So off we went to the Burger King, and I went in first. Ed waited outside in his finest Armani suit.
I’ll find out the results tomorrow, but Ed came out pissing himself laughing, having said the words ‘I earn more than all three of you’, ‘my Porsche is outside’, and ‘you can stick this job up your arse becuase I have a pain in my testicles listening to you bastards’ at least twice in the course of five minutes. What a legend. I, on the other hand, coming up to Christmas kinda need the spondilackies, so hopefully I’ll get the job. I can’t see how it’ll help my self-esteem, but money talks, and I’m a bit mute at the minute.
So, if any of you out there have funny job stories … do share. Or you’re a total c*nt.
Being honest here though, I’d be more prudent with this cash than the guy in this video … song’s the same title as the post by the Barenaked Ladies.
I meant to add something to that last post but I figured I’d do it here. Does anyone realise what the fuck people are saying when they use txtspk?
Tommy Cajones introduced me to this abomination a few years back when he showed me some kind of instant messenger system, which he and a few hacker buds of his in the States were using. A typical conversation was:
Tomy_C: Hey doods wats up
Wanksta1: nt much, were jst kikn sum n00bs @ counter-strike gtn tehr ass/s hndd 2 dem
Tomy_C: kk lol
Wanksta1: lol
What the fuck is ‘lol’? I’ve heard some teenagers use it in conversation and short of stuffing a large Oxford English dictionary down the cretin’s throat, I had to laugh sadly to myself. I have predictive text on the ole Nokia, and I use it continuously, and even if the message is seriously long, will text the whole damn thing spelt properly, and most people I know still do that. A girl I once saw briefly used to use txtspk all the time, which among a myriad of other things absolutely wrecked my head. I’d send her a messgae like: ‘I’ll see you this evening, at the Savoy around 8, okay? Any idea what we’ll see?’ and the response I got was along the lines of ‘kk il cu dn, no ida wt wel c, prob kngdm f hvn k?’
I responded, ‘please translate from Fuckwit to English’ to which I received a string of expletives a mile long and two weeks later we were happily finished. The sad thing is I’ve met a lot more women and guys who use this idiotic language, and it’s even more widespread on Bebo, so I have to try and figure out what people are saying, to the point where I’ve just responded with smileys , which do the job rightly XD.
Meself, Jerky Joe, and Dave the Lawyer were down in the Punch Bowl last night – I feel like someone smacked me across the head with a wet fish, but that’s what several triple Scotch will do – and we were watching the big fight on TV and playing First To The Floor, which Jerky Joe lost having drank a whole bottle of vodka before going out, when Dave the Lawyer put on a thoughtful expression, looked me in the eye, and said:
”So, Brian, I heard you started a blog … what kind of bollocks is this?” I smiled a wry smile.
“Think I can’t write, Dave?”
‘Well, considering you robbed an episode of Father Ted as your Leaving Cert English essay, yes, I’m certain you can’t.”
In news that doesn’t concern Dave and his arrogant ways, I heard that Al Gore has been honoured for his actions on climate change. Now having studied Geology for all of half a year in UCD before packing in that bullshit and taking a course in IT systems, I’ve come to the conclusion that global warming is a load of bollocks and that frankly the only result of global warming is that Cork and Limerick will be under 10 feet of water, which is no real bad thing when you think about it, so honouring this crap is like giving Richard Dawkins an award for being an annoying cunt that harps on and on about God and biology and how the rest of us are wrong.
Speaking of people that were never out of the news, isn’t it ironic that when Katy French was alive, the papers were running campaigns like Fuck Off Katy French and now that she’s dead, there’s a massive outpouring of grief??
That shit is well fucked up beyond all recognition.
Having been confined to the house with the fucking woeful weather that is threatening to flood the country, I was drifting through the ether today when I came across this story on breakingnews.ie.
Now I would never go to those kind of lengths, and especially not for a Happy Meal, even if I was after spending forty days in the desert, so meself and Jerky Joe were in the Punch Bowl last night and we had a discussion about this. We cocluded that yes, it was indeed bullshit and it would have to at least be a turkey dinner before you’d start making threats about it.
Still though, it raises a good point about the kind of people in Dublin today. When I was a gosson and Da would bring me into town to Henry Street or Grafton Street to do a bit of Christmas shopping, for one thing there was snow, which is now the thing of legends along with dragons and quality broadcasting from RTE. The beggars were also mostly Irish, and generally drunk, but now they’re all Romanians, and the funny thing is when they stand up, they’ve more fucking gold on them than a jeweller’s. Another thing you could also see was Christmas trees, which I believe are now called Dream Trees – how gay is that, what? – and people (gasp!) singing Christmas carols!
Ah well, it don’t matter, them days are gone.
Just remember when you’re opening your Holiday presents that it’s still Chrismas somewhere.
Except at Jerky Joe’s, cause he’s too much of a tight fuck to buy turkey.
