miscellaneous

Sparkling Dialogue
Me: I've got a bald patch.
The Mammy: Of course you do.
Me: Arghhhhhhh.
Her: You knew you had a bald patch.
Me: No I didn't.
Her: Yes you did. You've been going on about it for years.
Me: I thought I was joking.

Idea For A Charity Music Video
The singer sings:
"Twenty nine years waiting for a chance,
To tell her how I love her and maybe get a second chance.
Now I've got get used to not living next door to Alice."
At that moment the famous British golf commentator Peter Alliss sticks his head around the door and says in his incomparably plummy accent:
"Alliss? Allliss? Who the f--- is Alliss."

Fortunes Of War
Irish Times Journalist Of The Year Kathy Sheridan said on the Irish National television station RTE recently that it would be "unfortunate" if the head of Anglo Irish Bank, Sean Fitzpatrick, got into trouble during the present economic crisis as she knew him and she believed he was a decent man. Her comments were made during a programme called Questions And Answers. The bank official to whom she was referring, Sean Fitzpatrick, approved loans to himself of 129 million Euro. These loans were concealed by Sean Fitzpatrick through a process involving periodically transferring them to another bank. In addition, while Sean Fitzpatrick was head of Anglo Irish Bank, ten Anglo Irish Bank account holders were given loans of thirty million Euro each to buy shares in Anglo Irish Bank. These loans were designed to create an artificial demand for Anglo Irish Bank shares. The Irish government, led by a party called Fianna Fail, is now corruptly refusing to reveal the identities of the ten account holders who received loans of 30 million Euro each. Interestingly enough Anglo Irish Bank also received temporary deposits of several billion Euro from a financial institution called Irish Life allowing Anglo Irish Bank to present a false balance sheet with regard to its deposit accounts. The Fianna Fail government has now taken over Anglo Irish Bank. The Fianna Fail government has been deluded by false balance sheets and by its loyalty to an unidentified golden circle of super rich criminals. This week Fintan O'Toole, another Irish Times journalist, was a guest on Questions And Answers. Fintan O'Toole is a typical Irish Times champagne socialist. He did some honorable enough sniping at the banks. He did not once mention Kathy Sheridan.

Coffee House Chatter
Sunday afternoon at the old Kylemore Cafe in the Stephens Green Centre.
Famed for its all-milk no-coffee caffe lattes served up by smiling Muslim assassins called Privya.
Ah Privya. Dearest Privya. Thou art indeed a honey.
I'd convert to the peaceloving religion of Islam for you in a second.
No in half a second.
But today I was there with Roman Viviana.
Viviana was telling me about her family.
"My brother is 35," she said. "He's really old."
It was a Kodak moment.
I endeavoured to look as if butter wouldn't melt in my mouth.
I think I caught the look nicely.

Belling The Quinn
A journalist called David Quinn in one of his articles last week called President Bush "a brutal unilateralist." Mr Quinn is an employee of Tony O'Reilly's horrendously anti Catholic organisation Independent Newspapers. Interestingly enough, Mr Quinn poses Catholic. I believe Independent Newspapers hired him because of references in my humour column some years ago exposing Independent Newspapers as an anti Catholic organisation. Around the same time as Quinn was hired at the Indo, the Irish Times hired a certain Miss Breda O'Brien. Another bleeding heart who cannot tell us often enough how Catholic she is. I think she was hired by the Irish Times for similar reasons to those which caused the Indo to hire Mr Quinn. That is to say, I think I played a similar role in the Irish Times decision to hire her. Much good may it do any of them. But I digress. Quinn's remarks about President Bush. Utterly untrue of course. Worthless conformist pseudery. But when has that ever mattered to the Irish Independent? President Bush is not hostage to their ill considered sneers. I wonder has David Quinn ever expressed a single courageous opinion in his life. Aside from when Tony O'Reilly is paying him to mawkishly attach himself to an ancient and beautiful and true religion. And here he is now, sneering to order, at the only world leader to take down two dictatorships in the last fifty years. The leaders of murder regimes in Zimbabwe, Sudan and North Korea, the Mugabes, the Kim Jong Ils, the Omar Ahmed Hassan Al Bashirs, slept uneasily in their beds, knowing President Bush was on the job. With the present shower of world leaders there is no longer any real threat to the most psychotic governments in all Africa, Asia and Arabia. They can murder and starve their subject peoples with gay abandon. Hoo boy. The Mugabes, the Kim Jong Ils, the Omar Hassan Ahmed Al Bashirs, sleep sweetly tonight knowing that brave non brutish multilateralists like the valiant David Quinn are keeping an eye on them, and will never, under any circumstances do anything to stop them. Bah humbug.

Heelers Recommends
Here they are folks. My five favourite music videos. You should find them on Mr Youtube's quirky little website. These are the ones I guarantee to put a smile on your face.
1. 60 Miles An Hour, by New Order. Should be studied at film school. Effortless storytelling, sublime wit and tremendously appealing totally unknown actors.
2. America, by The KLF. Catchiest studio engineered song ever, fitted to perfect self parodying imagery.
3. Spaceman, by Babylon Zoo. Originally came to prominence as the theme from a Levis ad. They should have used the ad version for the whole song but they chickened out. You'll see what I mean. The beginning and end are the bits that were in the ad. The rest is padding. Brilliant padding though.
4. Ya Mama, by Fatboy Slim. This has never been bettered. A group called The Chemical Brothers did a passable rip off version of the video for one of their own songs called Do It Again. But see this. The cast of this video are my favourite actors of all time.
5. The New Pollution, by Beck. It's not funny. But it is art.

A Train To The West
A bored voice comes over the intercom.
"Due to a fire at Ballinasloe the train may be delayed for some time."
Ah yes.
For some time.
In Irish train company jargon that phrase means: "For the rest of your lives."

Insufferable Self Righteousness
A decade ago, a lady called Millie Fielding asked me did I seriously think there was any real difference between Ireland's political parties.
I replied thusly: "I can endorse no political party in Ireland because they are all abortion parties. All of them. But I will say this. It is my profoundest conviction that our main party of government Fianna Fail is a deeply diseased political party, corrupt and corrupting. This is a party that will first diminish and then destroy all probity in governance. There is no evil of which they are not capable. And I fear there is no limit to the wrongdoing they will do in pursuit, or in possession, of power. You people are still going to vote for them though. You're going to vote for your pay rises. Because you know they'll give you free money. Fianna Fail are kleptocrats and they will recreate the nation in their own image. In the end we'll all be thieves blaming each other for our thievery. All you nice middle class teachers and nursies and cops and bus drivers, all of you are going to be responsible for what Fianna Fail do to this country."
I have waited a decade for Millie Fielding to come back to me and apologise for refusing to listen to my warning. Now the teachers, the nursies, the cops and the bus drivers are protesting in the streets because they don't want to have to pay for the mess we're in. Someone else should pay. The corrupt bankrupt banks maybe. Or our corrupt bankrupt government. Here is the news. The heads of Ireland's banks should be in jail. But the rest of us need to find a way out of this mess. That means teachers, nursies, cops, bus drivers and everyone else in the freebooting State Sector, as well as the thieves in the Irish utility phone and electricity monopolies, voluntarily taking a forty percent pay cut. The forty percent might be enough. We're in a heap of trouble anyway. But a general pay cut of forty percent for State Sector employees just might stave off a total currency collapse and attendant civil war and starvation. It might stave off currency collapse, civil war and starvation. It just might. I wouldn't bother mentioning this, only my warnings in the past have tended to be spot on, and I have a certain responsibility. Your children's college fund isn't going to be much good if the streets are running red with blood. I am not going to make this appeal a second time.

Here's One I Wrote Earlier
More fake Gospels showing up day by day. Something called the Gospel of Judas currently doing the rounds. This has been newly reconstructed from fragmentary sources. Very fragmentary from what I've read. Wherever a sentence was incomplete, those doing the reconstructing appear to have reconstructed it themselves in such a way as to refute some aspect of traditional Catholic doctrine. Hilarious stuff. You couldn't make it up. Although in this case, the reconstructors apparently did make it up. Well most of it. Gnostic Gospels, supposedly based on hidden or previously suppressed sources, have been coming to light for centuries. The word gnosis refers to the concept of hidden knowledge. The Da Vinci Code book and film have produced a new vogue for such items. Some of the more interesting Gnostic Gospels include the Gospel of Barnabas, which is considered a Muslim forgery. In Barnabas we are introduced to a Jesus who comes out with the classic lines: "I'm not God. The real prophet of God will come in a few hundred years. He will be called Muhammed." I'm joking, but this is very close to what it says. There is no historical evidence for the Gospel Of Barnabas having existed before the 15th century. Another more recent Gnostic Gospel is the Secret Gospel Of Mark. Known to scholars simply and rather romantically and indeed optimistically, as Secret Mark, the best evidence suggests it dates all the way back to the 20th century and that it was written by a fellow called Morton Smith who wished to use Jesus to propagandise in favour of homosexual lifestyles. They should be calling it Secret Morton. Some of the Gnostic Gospels are much more ancient though all seem to have been written long after the four Gospels accredited by Christian believers as being true Gospels. There is an Arab Infancy Gospel which is possibly well over a thousand years old. It features an account of Jesus' childhood which reads to me like a bad flashback episode of Superman. But it is written reverently enough. For the Arabs have ancient souls. And that's the interesting thing. It seems even people who were faking stories about Jesus, or producing false Gospels to promote particular agendas, or producing Gospels which were effectively novels featuring a character everyone had heard of, well even the worst of these lying scribes, or manipulators, or entertainers, or whatever they were, even the worst of em, can't quite bring themselves to deliberately diminish the person of Jesus. Almost in spite of themselves they write of the Messiah with awe and respect.