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
There are worse spots for lunch
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | 2 Comments
IMG: My hometown
Posted on | June 12, 2010 | 3 Comments
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.
Tags: mongoose > natural history museum > 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.
Tags: antsy > DJ Jazzy Jeff > Summer > The Fresh Prince
A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Book: The Infinities
Posted on | April 13, 2010 | 1 Comment
The day you start a new Banville is always a good day.
I haven’t done one of these Tea-And-Book posts for a while. This is chiefly because my brilliantly fractured skull (and I’m certain it was fractured brilliantly, despite that I can’t remember the incident) gave me a headache that lasted about a month and I didn’t feel much like focussing on text. Rest assured, however, that I have consumed just as many cups of tea as normal.
Anyway, Banville.
I’ve been a Banville fan for quite a few years now. The logophile (word-geek) in me loves the thesaural manner in which he spills intriguing words onto the page. I love the fact that I always have to dig into a dictionary on a couple of occasions when I read one of his books.
The prose-geek in me, however, practically wets himself at the promise of a new Banville because it’s not possible for the man to write a single sentence that isn’t so polished it gleams, blindingly, from the page. Lyrical, evocative, poetic, beautiful; to quote the vernacular of the Youth, Banville the man (ahem).
The Infinities is Banville’s first novel under his own name since he won the Man Booker with The Sea (he’s written as Benjamin Black in the interim – I have these on my shelf and really must get around to them). Set in a big, old country house somewhere in the middle of Ireland over the course of a single midsummer’s day, The Infinities follows the members of the Godley family as their father lies, comatose from a stroke and dying, in bed. Banville chucks in a number of themes that he’s touched on in previous books including a massive helping of Greek mythology. You see, the book is narrated by one of the old Gods, Hermes to be precise. Even big daddy, Zeus himself, features as do some minor deities. The gods watch the family through the day, plotting and intervening here and there (Zeus in his own inimitable fashion).
The Infinities contains something that I don’t remember reading from Banville before – a dash of what’s essentially speculative fiction. Maybe I’ve become a Banville purist or something but it seemed a little incongruous to me; and like an easy path to showing the breadth of impact the dying Godley patriarch’s intellect has had on that world. It’s probably also possible to accuse Banville of over-egging the pudding slightly on The Infinites. It’s a little plump around the waist and not quite so pared and perfect as The Sea or The Book Of Evidence was.
Still though, it is a beautiful read. Even a bad Banville (which this most certainly isn’t) is preferable to most of the books on Amazon. For the odd, little thing that pulled me from the story, there were chapters and chapters of wonderful, rich, flowing prose to pull me back and carry me along, happy as a metaphor mixer in shit.
I will sing Banville’s praises all day, to be honest. I love his writing. If you’re not familiar with him, don’t just sit there, pop off and get something he’s written (pretty much anything). I challenge you not to like it.
Are you still here?
Tags: Books > John Banville > Man Booker Prize > The Book Of Evidence > The Infinities > The Sea
Achy Breaky Head
Posted on | March 14, 2010 | 11 Comments
That’s my skull, that is.
Not really, of course. If it were my skull, it’d have a frickin’ crack in it. If it were my skull, it’d have a fracture in the left occipital bone to the occipital condyle. In non-medical terms, this means it would hurt. A lot.
Somehow, I managed to crack my head. The ‘how’ part is a mystery. Quite literally. A chunk of time, about five hours long, seems to have been knocked out of my head from the jolt. Either that or it seeped out through the crack.
While the cynical among my readers are probably thinking, “yeah, yeah, more likely a beer-bomb-blackout,” I can state that, while I was out with some friends for some drinks before the incident, I was last seen being boring and leaving for an early taxi home (eschewing the chance of more drink in another pub). Somewhere soon after this sensible act, something occurred to see me brought to Accident & Emergency by ambulance, in full spinal-support, with a broken head and suspected broken neck.
Just what this incident was is not accessible in my poor damaged noggin though. I don’t even remember leaving my friends. I have a very clear demarcation line in the evening’s memories that doesn’t go that far (and in fact is quite a while before it). I’m told this isn’t uncommon with injuries of my sort.
So then. Three days in hospital. What fun. In a ward with five other blokes. Of them, one seemed to have had his lungs filled with a mixture of milk-shakes, butter and old motor-oil; one had three-quarters of his scalp covered with skin grafted from his legs, attached with huge, Frankenstein stitches and one woke only infrequently to shout and swear at the nurses.
Speaking of nurses, the nursing staff were absolutely brilliant. Give ’em all a raise I say because they’re not paid enough. To get the money to do so, take it from the doctors (or, to be fair, at least the ones in the hospital I visited). Conspicuous by their absence is the phrase that leaps to mind. Maybe it was just me they were avoiding but I went two of my three days without seeing a doctor. Even my discharge was through a nurse who wasn’t able to fully answer the questions I had. Nurses: great. A&E Staff: great. Ward-type doctors: dunno – never saw ’em.
I blagged my way out of the hospital yesterday and have to rest up in bed, for the next few days. I actually really, really dislike lying about in bed but I’m inclined to acquiesce on this occasion. The constant headache and tiredness, and the occasional dizzy spells, are in bed-rest’s corner on this one. Word is that I’m likely to have a headache for the next fortnight or so. That’s something to look forward to, eh? Nothing strenuous for the next four weeks too so, if anyone wants to build a wall and a raised bed in my back garden, please apply below.
So that’s been my last few days. To be honest, I’d advise against it.
Tags: broken head > headache > occipital fracture > ouch
A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Book: Risk
Posted on | February 23, 2010 | 6 Comments
I haven’t done one of these for a couple of weeks so I thought I’d make it extra special. This is not just A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Book, this is A Nice Cup Of Tea And A Lovely Scone With Some Jam And a Book
The scone: Fruit. The jam: Strawberry.
The book: Risk: The Science and Politics Of Fear by Dan Gardner.
I spotted Dan Gardner on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe a few weeks ago. He said sensible things and then his book was mentioned. Impressionable type that I am, I rushed to the internet to order up a copy.
Risk’s raison d’être is that, as a species, Homo sapiens has much, much less to worry about now than at any stage in its past but most of us go around anxious and stressed about stuff that has a minuscule chance of occurring.
Our brains couldn’t keep pace with our species’ development and, although we’re flying about in jets and curing disease, our brains are still somewhere around the early, hunter-gatherer stages of our evolution. However, instead of a useful ‘there’s a lion in that bush’ brainwave, now that we have very few lions to dodge, we’re getting ‘there’s a paedophile in that bush’ brainwave.
I’m oversimplifying massively of course but the jist is the same. Although the clever ‘head’ part of our brains can work out the statistics of there actually being a paedophile in the bush, more often that not, the ‘gut’ part of our brains goes on what it ‘knows’ – and it reads the Daily Mail. Risk looks at how and why this behaviour happens and – maybe more interestingly – looks at how that behaviour can be, and is, exploited.
Risk is well written and entertaining throughout. At times it strays towards feeling a tiny-bit academic but it really is only a little and it’s worth it for the wealth of information you’re getting. I really recommend everyone read it. I’d go so far as to say it’s required reading.
And, if you don’t read it, a paedophile will move into your bushes. Go and make it so, gullible ones.
Tags: Books > charlie brooker > dan gardner > fear > newswipe > risk
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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