Man with a Van

Int. night. Drab cocktail party.
Two men in attendance are left alone while their wives “go to the toilet”.

So what do you do?

Oh, I’m a “Man with a Van”!

Interesting…are you kept busy these days?

You could say that, I’m run off my feet! Some days I’ll do 7 or 8 runs for the same person!

Really? That’s a right little money-spinner. So what do you drive to haul all the stuff around in?

It’s a Fiat Uno.

Sorry?

Yes, you know the Uno, the small, nippy, but not very powerful car? Well they’ve only gone and made it into a van!

Oh

Yes, you can fit all sorts of stuff in there; stationary, 1 chair, half of a bike. It turns out that all you need to own a van as opposed to a car is a massive blind spot! Some days I’m reversing out of my drive, and I can’t see a fucking thing!
Basically it all boils down to van drivers being ignorant pricks, and the blocked up windows are sort of, you know, a metaphor for that really, so it doesn’t matter how big or small your vehicle is once you can’t see who or what’s behind you, and don’t care, you’re as good as qualified!

Oh, ok.

Peace Process / Pea's Processed

Batchelors is a brand of predominantly dried food products. It was formerly a Company founded in 1895 in Sheffield, England. The company now makes instant soup, in particular Cup A Soup and noodle products such as Super Noodles. The company is the UK market leader in dried soups. The most popular flavour Cup A Soup is Chicken.

Since early 2008, the Batchelors name has also been applied to Premier Foods' condensed soup range, previously sold as Campbell's.

Also, Batchelors is a manufacturer & distributor of ambient food and drinks in the Republic of Ireland. The UK Batchelors brand (above) has no relation to Batchelors Ireland which is Irish owned and based in Cabra, Dublin. Batchelors in Ireland holds the portfolio of some of the leading consumer brands in Ireland, such as Batchelors Canned Foods, Sqeez Ambient Fruit Juices and the Erin portfolio of products.

Time Travelling Self Loathing

So you know when you are just on a bus or walking down the street or even just having a nice sit down and then suddenly, out of no where a memory of when you made an absolute dickhead of yourself pierces itself into your brain.

This incident may have happened decades ago but the embarrassment you feel and the cringing and the self-loathing are very much happening right now.

How come I can’t remember the good times, the gems of my past that should be recurring and filling my life with joy? Oh no, it has to be the time I didn’t shake that persons hand and went in for a kiss and they didn’t want a kiss so it was just a kinda half hug, oh God, I’m such a dick!!!

It occurred to me that this is about as close to time travel as the human experience is going to get, these incidents are just as visceral and tangible to us now even though they happened in the past.

If only we could piggyback communications to our future selves on these moments of dickheadedness.

So next time you fall over in front of people your trying to impress or say something really homophobic in front of a gay person, even though your not homophobic and it was just a bad joke, that you only told to break the ice, oh God why did I have to open my mouth!!…. Anyway next time that happens, try as hard as you can to leave a message for your future self, whatever you want!

And years later you’ll be on a bus or walking down the street or even just having a nice sit down and it’ll happen and you’ll feel awful but then the message will arrive and you can say to your past self, “No Mars is still not colonised, can you believe it!” and at least get something positive out of the experience.

Where do all the Bullets go?

Jubilation … a civilian cheers as an Iraqi traffic policeman
fires his gun in the air to celebrate the Asian Cup win.
Photo: Reuters

I just think it’s so irresponsible to fire a gun in the air! I don’t care if you are a terrorist sympathiser who’s just claimed a victory over the West or a Mexican bandit extorting protection money from the local favella, it’s just not on!

Poor little Jose, spent his short life wrestling with staying in the village as his father and grandfather had, or leaving for the promise of America and breaking his mothers heart. That morning he had finally made his decision, “I will, I will go to America”, he said in Spanish.
For the last time he closed the door of the shack he had grown to manhood in, only muffling the sound of his mothers weeping. The long and dangerous journey across the border awaited him and for a moment he hesitated, but the new sun warmed his body, melting the doubt and filling him with glow of all possible futures.
At that precise moment Jose’s brains were exploded in a crimson splatter over every inch of the veranda.

In the next village some 19th century banditos were celebrating a wedding.

Mad Max: Beyond Plunder-home.

The other week, I bought a chair on ebay. It’s a nice leather upholstered “Gentleman’s” chair, the type you might find in a Victorian Club, where the industrialists of the day would meet and discuss new ways to extract wealth from the empire.

I offered to pick up the chair from the sellers house not realising it was about an hours drive away in Enniskerry. Resigned, myself and my girlfriend decided to make a day of it and tried to enjoy the “Road Trip”.

We finally found our new ebay buddy and made the transaction exchanging the usual random pleasantries one does with a complete stranger. As I awkwardly bashed the chair into the modest rear of my hatch back the shrill sound of a house alarm could be heard in the distance. “Hear that?” our now €50 richer stranger asked, “That’s all I’ll be hearing for the next 10 hours”.

He went on to explain that he was a security guard and directly after the chair handover he would be making his way to work, where his job was to patrol and guard one of the many new “Ghost Estates” now littering once rural Ireland.

These are the housing estates build on the iridescent surface of the property bubble, on once farmland, out of town, pie cutter design. Now in the crunchier reality nobody is stupid enough to buy into these overpriced slums, even the cows that once grazed the field are happier just to rent in the adjacent patch.

I asked if the security guard got much trouble from the local youths with this new and destructible playground now at their feet. The guard said that it wasn’t kids he was guarding against but the builders who had built the estate. It had become such a problem the security number had recently been doubled.

These builders had completed the project but were never paid by the developer, as the house were un-sellable. They would amass in force under the cover of darkness armed with tools and flatbeds, to rip out anything of value from the houses themselves. Kitchens, copper wire, fittings and fixtures. Demolish what they had just completed building.
On being alerted to the rival faction the Security Guards would assemble on the opposing side of the street ready to protect the only real commodities to be found in the ghost estate.

When one thinks of Collapse it never plays out quiet like the post apocalyptic books and movies make out, for one thing where are all the hot robotic prostitutes I’m meant to be shagging? But this scenario is about as close to Mad Max are we are probably gonna get, where paper money is useless and the new currency is the increasingly scarce resources fought over by gangs of marauding brickies.

All over Ireland these commodity battles are being fought in the blackness of night, in the middle of nowhere.

Bring 2 courses into the shower? Not Me!

I'm a busy man, and in my hectic lifestyle I don't have time to bring a main course and desert into the shower, I want to Nosh & Go.
Nosh & Go features all of the hearty goodness of Lasagna with the delicate indulgence of a Viennetta in one easy to use serving.
Excite your taste buds in just one bite with a layer of delicious pasta, topped with cool vanilla ice cream, then a layer of rich meat sauce, a tempting layer of chocolate, then another layer of pasta, ice cream, meat and chocolate all topped with white sauce and cheese! (And another layer of chocolate!)
So next time you're in the communal shower have a laugh at the other men for a change with Nosh & Go!

Em-barrister

WWF

falafel/feelawful

Trocaire Box

I would encourage everyone to get a Trocaire Box this lent.

Everytime an African swears you have to put money in.

www.trocaire.org

Hand? Dryer

If you choose this option on a dryer in a public toilet, what exactly have you been wiping your arse with?

Hiking on a budget?

Use tampons for crampons

Schindler's to do list

The Overcast Knight

The Bat-signal is a floodlight with the Batman logo on it that shines into the night's sky and projects onto clouds, calling Batman to Gotham's aid. But watching Batman again, it dawned on me that Commissioner Gordon can only contact the Caped Crusader weather permitting.

What happens if there's some crime going down but its a clear night?!, the Bat-signal will just fade into the blackness of the nights sky with no clouds to project on. For that matter what does Commissioner Gordon do if he urgently needs Batman during the day?

In saying that maybe the criminals of Gotham are a fickle bunch who would only commit crimes at night with overcast conditions, but that's not a risk I'm willing to take!

Batman must sit in Wayne Manor through those long clear summer evenings wondering why Commissioner Gordon, "Just doesn't call anymore", all the while Gordon, in the midst of a crime wave, is frustratedly scouring Facebook.

Different Weather Umbrellas

Heavy Showers


Sunny Intermissions

Poltergeist / Poultry, geese

Hang on a minute!! Has it just been geese moving furniture around all this time? Look at the glint in that little fella's eye, he's been up to mischief.

“I’d just like to say where I am”, came Duncan Banatyne’s deadpan response, “I’m out”

I recently had an idea I was sure would get me the financial backing of the Dragons. Who else here finds carrying both a watch and compass not only an annoyance but also inconvenient? Ok, I see not too many of you are raising your hand, but the invention I am about to reveal is so impressive it will make you want to start carrying them just to find out how annoying and inconvenient it is.

I am proud to reveal… the "Compass Wristwatch"! It'll be called the Comwatch or the Watchpass or something, we'll let marketing handle that.

Worn on the wrist and looking just like a conventional wristwatch, its ergonomic design utilises the already in place second hand as the magnetized pointer. Combining both a time piece and a navigational instrument in one device means less hassle in our busy lifestyle and is guaranteed* to make you more attractive to the opposite sex.

Obviously with the second hand always pointing north you must revolve around your wrist counter clockwise constantly to keep good time, but we at Comwatch (maybe Wristpass) International feel this is a small inconvenience compared to your previous drab life carrying both watch and compass, which you probably didn't do anyway.


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Today’s enemy is tomorrow’s camp villain

Having recently had the misfortune of paying money to see the mess that was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I got to thinking about movie villains. The original trilogy (which was great...well apart from Temple of Doom) were all set in period just prior to World War 2. The villains in these three films were unsurprisingly Nazi's.



But these were Nazi's that had been filtered through the shimmering lens of Hollywood and puked onto the silver screen a gross caricature of the disgraceful reality. Sure they had the goose-stepping and the black uniforms with the skulls on them, but every time they did their "Hail Hitler" salute you almost expected them to turn it into an "I'm a little tea pot " recital. These were fun family films after all and they needed a fun family villain. Parents don't want to bring their kids to a movie and then have to try and explain the horrors of the holocaust to their cute little frightened minds. No, no, no... no holochaust in Indy land, just the silly accents and being chopped up by propellor blades, thank you.

So, years later Steven Spielberg had a bit of a serious change of style and attitude toward the events of World War 2 and showed in stark contrast to his previous representation of Nazi's, a more accurate and frightening truth. In both Shindler's List and, to some extent Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg conveyed a brutal reality. And vowed never to show Nazi's in such a fluffy light again.

Trouble is, his old buddy George Lucas hasn't had an original idea since 1983 and keeps bangin on Steve's door with the "I've already exhausted my other original idea to death, lets drag Harrison Ford back into his Fedora!" line. "But Harrison's really old now and I don't do fun Nazi's anymore!" comes his muffled reply. "Hang on!?" Spielberg, exclaims, "I've got it, the solution, those dirty...Commies!!!"



So, here's my point. How long is it before enemies of the American people are viewed as, retrospectively by Hollywood, caricature villains? The Soviet's who posed a clear and present danger at the time and had committed incredible acts of genocide, just like the Nazi's, are now passed this threshold it appears. Let's ignore movies like Dr. Strangelove and Spies Like Us for the minute because this doesn't really work otherwise.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed in 1989 and set in 1938, a 51 year difference, enough time period to have Nazi's as bad (but not as bad as they really were) bad guys. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was shot in 2008 and set in 1957, again a 51 year Silly Soviet buffer.

Does this mean that poor old Harrison Ford will be dragged out of the retirement home at the ripe old age of 116 for Indiana Jones and the AL-Qaeda Scrolls? I kinda hope so. It's comforting, at least, to know that all enemies no matter how threatening they seem at the time, will either be victorious or represented in Hollywood film as caricature.


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The Age of Information

Recently I found myself at a dinner party where the conversation got round to discussing this very blog. 1 or 2 of the diners had read a few entries and were keen to discuss the ideas further. After a while I found myself having to defend what I had put on the blog. My empirical fellow diners wanted things like research and reliable sources to back up what I had posted. The more they quizzed me the less I was able to justify what I had written. They poh poh'd and gafah'd my little blog until all it seemed was a baseless collection of misinformation.
And they were right, that's exactly what it is.
But, by God, that's what makes it so great!
The great thing about blogging is that you can say any old crap and post it on the internet for everyone to see and read and believe. The internet doesn't ask for a bibliography. The web has no time for footnotes, and neither do I!!
When the internet was new and everyone was hopeful, people thought we'd soon be living in a hyper age of information, where fact was king and rumor, superstition and ignorance would be banished to the darkest tiniest recesses of the world, or at least places with dial-up.
Its true, we do live in the information age, and it is great. All the libraries of the globe are at my fingertips. I can perceive the tiniest movements of the world in real time.
But what I think is really interesting is that the information age is actually vastly more about incorrect information then it is about facts.
Previously bad ideas usually never ventured further then the head of the gobshite who thought them up. These bad ideas can now be proliferated through-out the world before anyone has even the time to think about cross reference his sources.
I'm still personally astounded by the amount of blogs/websites dedicated to creationism.
So welcome to the information age, don't believe a thing.
In the spirit of this I will finish with a few completely false, that I've just thought up, statements for you dear reader to take with you and proliferate as you wish.

People under 5'2" don't tidy up after themselves in McDonalds. They find the yellow "wet floor" men derogatory.




Elephants can put their trunk up their arse to become a fast rolling gray ball to quickly escape predators.




Snow is gods dandruff




If you hold a buttercup to your chin and it glows yellow it means you like butter. However if your chin doesn't glow yellow you're probably more fond of polyunsaturated spreads, and as a consequence have less greasy (and therefore less reflective) skin.




When you die and go to heaven, you can ask to see your room first and if you don't like it you can get a free upgrade.




The Inca's built a vast and sophisticated empire without ever discovering the wheel (this one is actually true)



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Pigeon Detective

I was walking to work this morning and there were all these pigeons eating some trampled on chewing gum, of the path.
How did they know it was eatable?, or how can they pick out a lump of bread in a sea of stones.
Is it smell? (but the chewing gum must have just smelt of path at that stage)
Is it sight? (just looks like more muck to me.)
They dont even have any teeth why did they want chewing gum, humans dont even eat chewing gum, we spit it out. its very frustrating.


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