Lunchtime
Posted on | July 26, 2010 | No Comments
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.
SEE: My hometown
Posted on | June 12, 2010 | 3 Comments
Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.
Calling all geeks! Calling all geeks!
Posted on | June 9, 2010 | 5 Comments
Come in geeks. I’m in need of geekly assistance for I am suffering my own geek-fail. Mayday! Mayday!
Why do you say ‘Mayday?’ It’s only a bank holiday. Why not ‘Shrove Tuesday’ or ‘Ascension Sunday?’ Ascension Sunday! Ascension Sunday! The fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost. [That's how to get geeks on-side - quote Red Dwarf.]
My site is doing something a little odd. While I’m somewhat au fait with the basic tweakage of the stuff that makes my ones and zeros appear as beautiful works of aesthetic wonder that travel down your internet pipes and splatter onto the back of your screens, the deeper intricacies of the dark CSS and PHP arts are hidden from me.
If, therefore, you have any idea why some single pages of this site seem to render what should be a sidebar as a bottom-bar, I’d appreciate your advice. For reasons unknown, some pages shove the sidebar right down the bottom, under the comments. This doesn’t seem to be related to the post length or number of comments. Nor does it seem related to whether comments are closed or not. I haven’t been able to figure out a common factor. Which sucks, really.
This one, this one and this one, for instance, are doing it while this one, this one and this one aren’t.
What’s going on?
The site runs on Wordpress. It’s version 2.9 as I haven’t gotten around to going to 2.9.2 yet but, let’s face it, it’s relatively unlikely that’s causing the issue. A few plugins installed – nothing too odd, I should think – and all at current versions. If anyone is so bored they want to help and would like a list of plugins or any source files, feel free to shout.
UPDATE: All better now. The luminescent brilliance of Golden Boy has, er, brilliantly located the problem and it should now be rectified. Brilliant. As you were, geeks. You can go back to installing Linux on everything and porting Doom to run on your mum’s teapot. Thanks.
Last One Out, Please Turn Off The Lights
Posted on | June 8, 2010 | 6 Comments
On the off-chance anybody is wondering, I have said my not-so-fond farewells to Facebook. I’m very aware that there was a mass ‘Leave Facebook Day’ a week or so back but I left a few weeks prior to that. I’m no trend-following sheep – I blaze my own trail. Well, in this case anyway.
Facebook, while it served a bit of a purpose for me two or three years ago quickly began to get a bit tedious. From the outset, I hated most of the apps and never used them. I balked at the virtual greetings and the messages reading ‘Barry took the What Sort Of Stool Are You quiz with the result: SOFT’. I never used the game apps either. That others were happy to use them is absolutely fine but I tired quickly of hearing that someone’s virtual cow needed a virtual vet’s arm up its virtual arse.
Along came Twitter and, for now at least, it remains largely free from the worst of the who-cares apps. I checked in on Facebook less and less and became more and more annoyed when I did. I put off the termination for months, reluctant to do so, afraid I might miss something. Reading of the many privacy issues lately had all but convinced me to bite the bullet and when, a few weeks ago, I logged on to be greeted by some annoying systems glitch, that was the straw that broke the mixed metaphor’s back.
Facebook is dead to me.
If you happened to follow me over there, please feel free to hang around here or check in with me on Twitter. I promise scintillating and erudite conversation. Or, at very least, some poor quality knob gags and news of what I had for breakfast.
It was a scone.
Animals Exist For My Amusement
Posted on | June 6, 2010 | 2 Comments
Simples
Look, look, he looks a bit like that Meerkat from the ad.
Go on, do it. Do the line. Say “simples.”
He’s not really him. He’s not even a meerkat. He’s a mongoose. I think. Actually, I’m not even certain he’s a male. What do you want from me? I’m not David Attenborough.
I recently visited the Natural History Museum for the first time in ages.
Dublin has a brilliant Natural History Museum. It’s housed in a big, old building on Kildare Street, right next to the Leinster House (where the Irish parliament sits and pretends to do something useful when they can be arsed). Apparently, the museum used to be bigger but the politicians needed more room to store their mistresses, rent-boys, brown envelopes and gout-inducing foods so they annexed some of it. It was built about 150 years ago and it and the exhibits had remained largely unchanged since then.
Slightly Startled Owl
A few years ago, a staircase collapsed in the museum and, in the interests of safety, the place was closed. This being the useless country it is, filled with pointless, lazy apparatchiks, the museum remained closed for years as various bureaucrats tried to find someone else on whom to offload responsibility. Some of the exhibits were moved (eventually) to a space provided by the National Museum of Ireland and, while this was a decent stopgap, it had only a small selection of the treasures of the actual museum and lacked the wonderful, olde, atmosphere of the original.
The museum has been open again for a little while and I stopped in recently. The brother and I had a bit of a nose around. There is still one section (the balconies) closed – at least on the day we visited – but, for the most part, things are back to splendid normality there.
Proboscis Monkey
I didn’t have as long as I’d have liked and only had my iPhone with me, so I confined myself to taking pictures of only a few animals – namely the ones that could be anthropomorphised into creatures displaying human emotions or those that just seemed a bit amusing. I realise that this is a particularly low-brow use of the splendours on show, but that’s the way it went down. I promise to visit again soon and share some better pictures.
In the meantime, feel free to point and snigger childishly at the amusingly phallic nose of the Proboscis Monkey.
Summer, Summer, Summertime…
Posted on | June 2, 2010 | 9 Comments
…To quote master songwriters, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the freshest of Fresh Princes.
I am desperately trying to get things back on an even keel again. Many events have conspired – in furtive, secret and conspiring ways – to prevent me doing much of the things that I like, and should be, doing.
I haven’t managed to get much done of late. Well, not much that’s creative anyway (is building walls creative?) and I’ve found myself getting that fidgety, antsy feeling that I get when this happens. Events continue to plot and machinate and take up my precious, precious time but I find myself railing against them. The summer, or what we have of a summer, is helping with this. It’s easier not to flop in front of the TV when it’s still daylight. It’s easier to get up early when the sun peeks through the curtains.
I will get things back to normal. As some sort of made-up, supreme being is my witness, I will kick the piss out of scheming events.
First, a tea though.
And I think there’s a Family Guy starting soon.
OLDER Entries »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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