Do you think I can get a research grant?
Posted on | November 26, 2007 | 2 Comments
I’ve had a nasty cough and a cold for the last couple of weeks. Bit bunged up and I’ve snorted enough Vicks Sinex that I’m sure my nostrils resemble Amy Winehouse’s. In an effort to get rid of this nasty ailment, I’ve taken to drinking a considerable amount of beer every evening for the last four days. My reasoning is that I’ll make my body so inhospitable a place to live that the cold germs will hitch their little wagons and move on to some tea-total bloke.
So far it seems to be working. I’m feeling less bunged up and coughing less. A further bout of intensive research over the next few days will confirm my initial, empirical findings, but I think you can expect to see me published in the next issue of The Lancet.
No cure for the common cold indeed.
Morte a Venezia
Posted on | July 30, 2007 | 2 Comments
Popped away for the weekend. Quiet time of it as I was a complete crock of a man. I’d somehow managed to pull a muscle in my neck which meant that anything other than staring straight ahead and slightly downwards caused complete agony. This is not really what you want on a weekend away with your wife. To add to this neck discomfort, because I had to hold my head in this position all the time, those muscles in my neck and shoulders that were not pulled began to ache and complain at the lack of movement.
I’d also contracted a head cold that bunged up the old sinuses and had me, more than once, wake up from dreaming that I was suffocating. Waking with a start when you’ve a pulled muscle in your neck is not to be advised.
A number of other ailments, too personal to go into, means that my weekend away might better have been spent in a wicker bath-chair, my legs covered with a blanket, being followed by an orchestra playing a Mahler adagietto.
Still, it’s a break, isn’t it?
P.S. It wasn’t anything as exotic as Venice. I was in Wexford.
Her father’s daughter
Posted on | July 23, 2007 | 1 Comment
My daughter has been a little uneasy at night of late. She’s normally a pretty good sleepy person but for the last month she’s been a bit troublesome getting settled and shouts for us in the night if she wakes up.
The other night, my wife was putting her down but she was not keen on settling and when quizzed as to why, she said “I will have sad dreams”. Dear God, if I’d been there I’d have climbed into the bed and hugged her until dawn but my wife is made of sterner stuff.
“No you won’t”, she said, “You will have happy dreams. You can dream that you’re on the beach with mammy and daddy and we’re throwing stones into the sea”.
With an extraordinary ability to see the cloudy side of any silver lining, my daughter replied in a sad voice, “But then the stones will be lost”.
I’m so proud.
Sad?
Posted on | June 26, 2007 | 3 Comments
Part of me thinks this is cool but the wiser part of me acknowledges the incredible sadness of it.
The other night, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was a sort of apprentice CTU agent and was working with Jack Bauer. He was showing me the ropes, so to speak. Things meandered along as we tracked down this band of bad guys and I eventually had to accost them up as they, for some unknown dream reason, loaded bags of compost from a supermarket into the back of a truck. In proper 24 fashion, I managed to beat them all up (there were about six of them – I’m quite a guy) and I then gave the kingpin of the operation a sound trashing and left him lying in a pile of compost that had burst from bags during the scuffle.
Popping back to where Jack was (characteristically sitting on a hill looking at the sun set across the ocean), he told me I’d done a really good job and that I was ready for my own assignments.
Possibly it’s withdrawal since season 6 finished up on Sky.
Darwinism
Posted on | June 6, 2007 | 6 Comments
Graeme, over at Tokyo Music and (I think) the wonderfully titled, James Blunt Must Die was good enough to comment on one of my recent rants – the one about morons not being allowed to vote. He put me in mind of a long-held belief of mine that, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned, Darwinian evolution has ceased to apply.
Now, I’m not saying that our evolution has ground to a halt or, necessarily, that we have reached some sort of evolutionary dead-end. What I am saying, is that the Darwinian process of natural selection, or ‘survival of the fittest’ no longer seems appropriate to describe the onward trudge of Homo sapiens.
At it’s simplest (which is where I’m best qualified to rant about it), natural selection tells us that favourable traits which aid in the survival or procreation of an organism get passed along more successfully to subsequent generations. In this way, those traits become more common and over lots of generations become the ‘norm’. Thus, the ‘fittest’, or better-adapted survive and those without whatever these traits may have been, don’t.
So, Homo sapiens would, for instance, in the past have gained an evolutionary advantage over his neighbours through the opposable thumb allowing a precision grip. Because he had this snazzy thumb and could put it to use in getting food or attracting a mate (get your coat, you’ve pulled), he succeeded in passing on his thumb to the next generation more successfully than his buddies. The next generation, in turn, used the thumb to their advantage and passed it along. Survival of the fittest. Beautiful. For a hundred and thirty thousand odd years, Homo sapiens has progressed along this principal, the weak being eaten by sabre-toothed tigers and the strong shagging their grieving widows to pass on their (fitter) genes.
That’s all out the window now though. Now we’ve gotten too bloody nice. Our altruism has progressed to such extremes that we’re going around saving the weak from the sabre-toothed tiger instead of laughing as it eats him. Instead of letting a moron kill himself while drying his hair in the shower, we put a warning label on the hair-dryer to advise against it. Instead of letting some idiot slice his hand off in the blender we add a safety feature and put a warning in the manual – Danger, do not insert hand in rapidly spinning blades. Instead of letting a fatty kill himself eating forty Big Macs a day, we make McDonald’s sell salads and cut down the size of their portions so you have to buy two bags of fries instead of one. It’s no longer survival of the fittest, because the fittest (i.e. the ones that aren’t completely stupid) are mollycoddling the weakest (i.e. the morons). No good can come of it.
And, then we should consider attraction. Attractive traits help an organism to get a mate and secure their genes for the next generation. You can still see the vestiges of this, now largely redundant, mechanism in Homo sapiens when you notice a particularly attractive person on the bus or whatever. You might think that this is great and that your attraction to that person proves that natural selection is doing its job. Nope. It’s a vestige, a remnant. For proof, you should firstly consider how often you approach an attractive person towards which you feel the ‘urge’ and, secondly, consider Homo sapiens’ current mating rituals…
Most of our mating (in my experience anyway) is initiated in the nightclub, after the pub and after a shitload of alcohol. Inhibitions are uninhibited – askers are more likely to ask and askees are more likely to slur “yerssss, awwright then” to the question. You don’t need to be the fittest or strongest, just have a big armful of alcho-pops.
Thus, our species is barrelling forward through evolution, hand-holding the morons so that they don’t hurt themselves as they rut their stupid genes further and further into future generations, and mating on the principal of ‘survival of the drunkest’.
It’s ironic that Homo sapiens means something along the lines of wise man. Let’s see how many of the grunting morons that will likely outlast our species will be even able to pronounce their species designation, Homo fatuus.
Holiday
Posted on | June 6, 2007 | Comments Off on Holiday
I have returned from a small holiday on the west coast of this (sometimes) beautiful island of mine. Not literally mine of course. If it were, there would be far fewer people here and those that were here would mainly be pretty girls. I would only allow a small number of males and only those who were astonishingly ugly (far more so than me). They would perform those menial tasks that prove too strenuous for the pretty girls although this doesn’t mean that the girls will have an easy life. They too would work but would do so in hot pants and heels.
Anyway, I digress. I’ve been on holiday for the last week or so. Popped to Westport. Never been, oddly enough, but it’s a very nice place indeed. Some spectacular scenery along the coast there and some nicely impressive mountains. One of these mountains, Croagh Patrick, has some sort of religious significance and one day in July every year, thousands of religious nutters climb the thing as a pilgrimage. The more mentalist of these nutters perform the climb barefoot. There is a little chapel on the top and they have some sort of ceremony before hobbling back down and, no doubt, getting off their faces on pints of Guinness in the nearest pub. I didn’t climb the thing but I can report that it looks high and steep and rocky and that I believe anyone who climbs it barefoot to be in dire need of some more common sense. Crazy religious people.
So anyway, the holiday was as relaxing as any holiday with a two-year old can be, especially one that, although potty trained until recently, has decided to fall off the poo-wagon. Unpleasant underpants abounded. To make matters worse, my daughter has decided that she will sometimes hold the poo in until it becomes, ahem, pressing. At this point, it becomes a bit uncomfortable for her and she expresses that vocally. You haven’t been embarrassed and scared until you’ve tried to manhandle a toddler from a playground she doesn’t wish to leave as she shouts, “my bum is sore, my bum is sore” at the top of her voice.
Good Friday
Posted on | April 5, 2007 | 7 Comments
To commemorate the death, by crucification, of Jesus Christ, the Irish people customarily mark the occasion by getting completely off their faces. You see, due to some odd connection between the licencing laws and the Catholic church, pubs here are closed for only two days of the year. On Christmas Day and on Good Friday you can’t get a pint in a pub.
Never ones to take such an affront to their human rights sitting down, the Irish people will flock in their multitudes to off-licences around the country today. Vast hordes of people will buy far more beer than they can possibly consume in one day purely because someone has told them they can’t drink tomorrow.
It is the Irish way. Tell us we can’t do something and we have to do it. Especially drink. I’m off to the offie for 6 crates of beer and a bottle of Tia Maria.
Sick again
Posted on | March 15, 2007 | Comments Off on Sick again
Not the closer from Physical Graffiti, but my condition. Had to go to the doctor’s on Tuesday. Bronchitis, don’t you know? Unpleasant. Painful. Spent the last two days in bed and would have spent today in bed too had not my wife called to say that she forgot to bring her mother’s day cards with her and could I post them. Doesn’t she know I’m sick? Now I have to get out of my cosy bed and drive to the postbox (because in typical fashion, there isn’t on within half an hour’s walk). Arse!
I think I’ll get a Danish when I’m out. I haven’t been eating brilliantly in the last few days so maybe a tasty pastry can persuade me.
Galileo, Figaro, magnifico
Posted on | February 25, 2007 | Comments Off on Galileo, Figaro, magnifico
As my wife popped off with the progeny this weekend to visit her folks, I had, what is colloquially termed in these parts, a free gaff. Decided to get The Brother over for a visit and perhaps a drinkie or two.
Picked him up and headed to the off-licence for some beers. We bought a lot of beers. So much so that we found ourselves wondering what we were doing buying so much beer. “Never mind” I said, “I’ll just drink the leftover stuff over the next week”. The pretty eastern-European girl serving in the off-licence even commented on the amount of beer and I have to assume that she sees lots of people buying lots of beer.
Well, we drank it all. I even recall ringing the off-licence, to request a delivery, at quarter to two in the morning when I realised that we were running short. Needless to say, they didn’t answer as they’d been safely tucked up in bed for the last two hours.
The last thing that I remember was playing air guitar to Queen in my sitting room and The Brother telling me I was getting the chords wrong. After that however, we apparently retired to the kitchen and listened to some Bowie. We called it a night after The Brother fell asleep sitting up on the kitchen worktop. It’s entirely possible that I did likewise.
The kitchen bit is all based on second-hand information as I don’t recall it. Hunky Dory was in the CD player next morning though so I’ve no reason to doubt it.
Terrible Twos
Posted on | February 15, 2007 | 8 Comments
It appears that my daughter has well and truly found The Terrible Twos and made them her own.
On Monday night, I came home about an hour after my darling daughter’s bedtime and opened the front door to much wailing and screaming. I popped upstairs to see what the fuss was and found my wife on the landing looking frazzled. I glanced into the room from which the awful noise emanated to see Small Daughter standing in her cot (she’s getting a bit big for it – bed soon) having thrown everything but the mattress out. The floor was strewn with blankets, sheets and had enough fallen effigies of Pooh Bear and his mates that it looked like a massacre in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Apparently, she had been in similar mood for the last hour as she had decided that bed wasn’t quite the thing for her at that time. I utilised the negotiation skills I’d learned watching some Bruce Willis film and, over a loud hailer from the landing, I managed to talk her down. Then, I threw the Negotiators Handbook out the window and went in. Luck was on my side and I managed to defuse the situation without having to get all Jack Bauer on her.
Cut to last night. As I was busy making the dinner, my wife witnessed a ‘throwing stuff on the floor incident’. Despite a clear warning, the perpetrator did not comply and wifey was forced to apprehend her and place her in the naughty corner (on the mat out by the front door).
Displaying her new-found disrespect for authority however, my daughter decided that this punishment would instead, be a fine new game. Cue much running from the corner into the kitchen and much merriment as her mother placed her firmly back each time. Next, my little miscreant decided that she’d rather sit on the stairs than stay in the Corner of Shame. Her jailer duly placed her back and told her to stay on the mat. On investigating the next scampering noise, my delinquent daughter was found to have placed the mat on the first step of the stairs and was sitting on it. Back she went.
After a couple more returns, she seemed to be getting the message and there was no movement for a while. Wife and I exchanged hopeful glances but before we could breath a sigh of relief, the door was flung open and my daughter ran, completely naked, into the kitchen and proceeded to do a little dance in the middle of the floor.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to appear strict and authoritative when there’s a nudie toddler dancing in your kitchen?
Back she went though and after some more effort, she did her time. Not before telling us that she ‘didn’t like mammy’ during a couple of trips however.
Jesus, it’s tough going. I’m considering a ‘Naughty Box’ with some sort of locking lid for the future.
« NEWER Entries — 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 deride 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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