See: Connolly’s Folly
Posted on | August 29, 2010 | No Comments
Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.
Your Opinion Does Not Matter
Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 5 Comments
I have just read a news story on the BBC’s site. As you can see, it’s linked but for those of you too lazy to bother clicking through, the condensed version is ‘according to a YouGov poll, 69% of people questioned want live voting to alter storylines in TV shows’.
People want to have a say in the plots of the TV shows they watch.
What?
Really? But that’s… I mean… What?
In the good old days, the airing of opinions was confined to your dad ranting about some, barely existent, slight over the dinner table while the family avoided eye-contact. If someone wanted to voice their opinions to a wider audience, they either stood on a soapbox with a loud-hailer and got pointed at or scrawled their poorly spelled, poorly considered, non-thoughts on the nearest wall (like the artistic effort in the photo).
Now though. Now…
The internet has given people the idea that their opinions matter. Worse still, they have the idea that others must be made aware of those opinions. Instead of harrumphing behind their newspapers, morons can now post comments at the bottom of Daily Mail articles online so the entire world knows how correct they really are. Instead of sitting down the pub, bellyaching about immigrants eating cats out of wheelie bins, idiots can start Facebook groups calling for the stoning of cat-eating foreign people.
It’s not just the internet, of course. Simon Cowell and his ilk have their culpability in the public’s erroneous inflation of its self-importance. Look at fucking Jedward for proof that democracy doesn’t work.
Instant, opinionated, gratification is already buggering up politics. How many tough decisions get made when the decision makers (who, in the kindest terms, care only about covering their arses) can see real-time disapproval? Don’t get me started on the democracy that put most of these idiots in power in the first place – that’s a whole other can of educationally subnormal worms.
And now they’ve set their sights on TV. Sweet Willmott-Brown, I pray the big TV cheeses don’t hear of this. Plotting by massive, public, moron-committee? No good can come of it.
Mark my, opinionated, words.
And yes, I’m aware of the irony of blogging these opinions. The difference is that I’m right but feel free to tell me I’m worse than Hitler in the comments below.
Gladly, the cross-eyed bear
Posted on | August 16, 2010 | 3 Comments
Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.
SEE: Hellfire Club, Dublin
Posted on | August 12, 2010 | No Comments
Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.
A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Book: Three For One
Posted on | August 11, 2010 | No Comments
It’s occurred to me that I haven’t done one of these for a while. Well, I say ‘occurred’ but I’ve been all too aware of it over the last month or two. I’ll attempt to get you up to speed a little with a subsection of the books I’ve read since the last book/tea post (that subsection being those that I remembered to take a photo of next to a cup of tea).
First up Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show On Earth. I love Dawkins. I love his passion. And Dawkins is, quite clearly, passionate about his subject matter. That subject matter here: evolution – something about which the prof knows more than a little. Anyone who has read any of Dawkins’ other books will be familiar with his style and won’t be disappointed. He explains everything clearly and makes his science-bits (most of it) easy to read and very entertaining. Getting back to my earlier point, I believe he manages this because of that passion. It’s so obvious that he dearly loves what he’s explaining and also – I think – loves passing on his understanding in the hope that we’ll love it too.
In the wake of The God Delusion, there is an undercurrent of poking at the creationists throughout. I’d hazard a guess that the concept for this book may have occurred during Dawkins’ repetitive debates with creationists during The God Delusion’s book tour.
Whatever, this book is a wonderful, beautiful look at what really is The Greatest Show On Earth. Get it. Read it.
Ah, Douglas Adams, you great and brilliant geek. Reading this was a bit weird for me. As a young man, bemoaning the fact that the girls were just interested in handsome and cool blokes, I read the Hitchhiker’s books. I loved every cleverly-twisted little word of them. I had always intended to move on to the Dirk Gently books but never really got around to it. Oddly however, while reading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, huge swathes of it seemed incredibly familiar to me. I have no conscious recollection of ever owning or borrowing the book so how do I explain this odd déjà vu? It’s entirely possible, I suppose, that I read snatches of it in a bookshop while killing time. In a friend’s house, perhaps. Who knows? I don’t. Weird.
Oh, by the way, the Dirk Gently stories (and this contains the Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul) are fantastic. Adams makes language his bitch and has it contort itself into unusual shapes for our amusement. It’s not Hitchhiker’s but it’s certainly worth a read.
Yes, like everyone else, I had heard all of the talk of posthumous Pulitzers and of mothers pestering publishers to get A Confederacy Of Dunces published long after the death, by suicide, of its author John Kennedy Toole. I had this book neatly filed in the ‘must get around to reading sometime’ list in my head but never got around to reading it. A couple of weeks ago however, a friend of mine (Aidan – I name him as I’m pretty sure he’s looking for a shout-out) mentioned it and offered to lend it to me. True to his word, he posted it through my letterbox the next day (I was out – he’s not that odd).
Toole weaves a number of characters around the flatulent life of, anti-hero, Ignatius J. Reilly and his unwilling quests for work. Ignatius is over-educated and overweening. His pompous denial of most of his reality, however, makes for a very funny read. Ignatius rails verbosely at (or behind the backs of) everyone he encounters and it was these rants that kept me happy until the characters’ threads met in a nice knot at the end.
Eloquent, funny and slightly tragic, A Confederacy Of Dunces is well worth moving up your ‘must get around to reading’ list. Tell them Aidan sent you.
Tags: A Confederacy Of Dunces > Dirk Gently > Douglas Adams > Ignatius J. Reilly > John Kennedy Toole > Pulitzer Prize > Richard Dawkins > The God Delusion > The Greatest Show On Earth
Lunchtime
Posted on | July 26, 2010 | Comments Off
An odd turn has left me eating sandwiches in the park with the Office People. I used to be like you, Office People. Now I just have no money instead. I probably drink more tea, though. So, you know, there’s that.
Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.
Damn, I’m Deep*
Posted on | July 4, 2010 | 3 Comments
A heart-shaped balloon blew into my yard.
Partially deflated and struggling against a ribbon and plastic weight, it flailed and twisted in the wind.
I watched through the window for a bit before cutting the ribbon.
Then, I watched it float away. Until it was gone.
*I’m exactly like that intense, pot-head, stalker kid in American Beauty.
Curse You, Johnny Depp’s Beard
Posted on | June 28, 2010 | 16 Comments
Look at him. Handsome bastard. Perhaps you’ll get all swoony and weak at the knees. Perhaps your little heart will beat more quickly in your swelling bosom. Perhaps secret parts of you are getting a tad muggy just contemplating his deep eyes, his chiselled features, his oooh-look-at-my-hair-it’s-all-unkempt-and-boyish hair, his patchy beard.
His patchy beard.
Although I normally tame most of my above-the-neck hair and shave it into a funny little chinny beard (and I wear it ever so self-consciously – Ricky Gervais really hurt us), I posses the hirsute wherewithal to grow a full and manly, Grizzly Adams-type beard. As an aside, I do so every now and then, until my wife wears me down and I shave again.
This is the way things were meant to be. If you were a lady, in need of a mate, stuck on a frozen tundra somewhere, you’d pick the grizzly bloke with the small family of ground-sloths living in his whiskers and not the patchy-faced chap because the former would be far more useful stabbing pointy rocks into mammoths and at carrying a hairy elephant leg back to camp. Old Bare-But-Striking-Cheekbones there would be next to useless with mammoths and could only impress you by helping you pick berries and by listening to your interminable stories about last night’s episode of Sex And The Small Encampment Of Animal-Skin Huts. Who wants that in a mate?
But things have changed. Men no longer need to head off in the morning to kill various Proboscidea (and they call this progress). Now, men can attract a mate by having dark, piercing eyes, nice hair and a scraggy beard.
What hope for the rest of us. Or, more to the point, me.
But this is not a selfish rant. It’s bigger than that.
You see, the more that Johnny Depp’s beard is selected for, the more patchy will be the beards of future generations. In a few dozen generations, no more manly, grizzled, bewhiskered fuzzfaces will exist. All the faces of humanity will become less furry and, soon, there will be no beards at all. Is that what you want; a world without beards? ‘Cos that’s what’s definitely going to happen.
Natural selection can be a beautiful and vicious thing.
Don’t let Johnny Depp’s beard win. Don’t let Johnny Depp’s beard’s smooth genes depilate your descendants until humanity resembles some sort of bipedal dolphin. You can beat evolution, ladies. You can do it, but only if you eschew handsome men with inadequate facial hair and, instead, take as your mates, bristly, shaggy, hairy and homely blokes.
You know it makes sense.
Tags: beards > evolution > facial hair > johnny depp > natural selection > you know... stuff
There are worse spots for lunch
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | 2 Comments
Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.
SEE: Moiré soirée
Posted on | June 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.
Gerry Hayes
I mostly sit around all day and drink tea. Occasionally, I write stuff and send it to strangers so they can humiliate me and debase my efforts. Other than the self-harm to dull the shame of failure, it's not a bad life. Like I say, there's tea.
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