miscellaneous extraneous aneous

The Future's Bright The Future's Hungarian
Morning in the Chat And Chew cafe.
"Why are you learning Hungarian?" wondered Doctor Barn.
I allowed myself a meditative sup of caffe latte.
"It's very comfortable," I explained finally. "I predict that in a few years everyone will be speaking it."

Idea For Charity Music Video
A version of Pink Floyd's Brick In The Wall sung by teachers. The teachers would sing:
"We don't need no psychotic teenagers.
We don't need no half witted hoodlums out of control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Children leave them teachers alone.
Hey.
Children.
Leave them teachers alone."
I think this could work. All proceeds to the Buy James Healy A New Car Foundation. They're good people.

Fun With Indeplagiarist Newspapers
Good headline on the cover of the Sunday Independent after Ireland's rugby victory at the weekend. The headline read: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive and to be young was the very heaven..." It takes a real act of courage to begin a news article with poetry. At least it did when I first used the same quotation at the start of an article about Kildare's victory in the Gaelic football Leinster Championship eight years ago. The very same quotation. Okay folks. Seriously though. Do you think anybody in Tony O'Reilly's rat infested newspaper group had even heard of William Wordsworth before I came along?

Ones The Got Away
More from my series on great photos I missed. Driving up Thomas Street as the sun was going down. A man and woman in a state of stupefied drunkenness, sitting on a stone plinth surrounded by their discarded bottles and cans of wine, whiskey and lagar. A picture of utter desolation. Just behind them a large sign proclaiming in triumphal gold the single word commentary: "Guinness!" It would have been perfect.

Cooeee Johnston Press
Time was when I could bump up the monthly visitor ratings on this blog by about fifty percent simply by unleashing a few mild hate filled diatribes against my former employers at the Johnston Press. The moment I mentioned these legends of modern journalism, my statistics monitor would light up with visits from Johnston Press offices all around the United Kingdom. There would be log-ons from Bateson in Accounts, Morgan in Wales, Melchett in Derbyshire, Awd Jenkins in Leeds, Blackadder in London, Rigsby in Bolton, Ganucci in Assassinations, and Hymen Roberts in Legal Firms That Sound Like Female Genitalia. Not to mention some mysterious Heelers sympathiser in the Stockport And Blackpool Gazette, who occasionally left messages of support for me. I kid you not. But now? Nothing! My wildest rantings get at most a visit or two from some non entities in Clyde. It's as though they all have other more urgent things to think about. (A share price at five pence perhaps. - Ed note.) Just last week though, the Daily Mail financial services website referred to the Johnston Press as the fourth biggest media group in the UK. Well that's just swell. Of course it depends on how you define big. I mean if the Johnston Press are the fourth biggest media group in Britain, what with their debts in the hundreds of millions and no revenue, why then I myself and The Heelers Diaries must be just about the biggest media group in the world. By the Daily Mail's standard of reasoning I'm bigger than the Johnston Press, Time Warner, the New York Times and CNN put together. Because I have at least twenty readers a day. Real readers. Readers who actually exist. Not readers created by fake statistics generating companies. In addition I have no ten thousand million dollar debts. No debts at all in fact. While all these supposedly fourth biggest companies in the world are up to their ears in debt. Every idiot on the planet can buy a few hundred newspapers with borrowed billions and then sit back and lose money hand over fist. The real talent is to get twenty readers a day and lose no money. So I'm bigger than them. And now they know it. Hoo boy! It's good to be the king. Memo to the Johnston Press: In a prize fight, the winner is the one still standing at the end. Ah my gentle travellers of the internet. It looks like I'm finally letting it go.