Twenty Major - Still smoking in Dublin bars

Cunt overload

Twenty Major — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:08:40 +0000

At the opening of the new convention centre in Dublin today. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part but Bertie looks sick. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.

Pic via Broadsheet.ie

Halal, is it meat you’re looking for*

Twenty Major — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:47 +0000

Around and about the SCR there’s a load of Halal shops.

I’m not much into Halal meat, I have to say, but you can get some right good stuff in those shops. For example, those little sticky pastry things that I used to get at the shawarma place on c/Escudellers in Barcelona and have struggled to find since.

Yesterday I was looking for paneer cheese. Halal 1 didn’t have it, Halal 2 didn’t have it, but the big Halal Superstore on Clanbrassil St had it. And not only did it have it, it had free chillies too. Well, he didn’t charge me for them.

“Yeh can have dem fur nuttin’”, he said in his broad, ArabaDublin accent.

While many bemoan all the furriners coming here and takin’ urr juuuubs, I think they’re great because of all the knock-on effects. They want to eat their own kind of food and so we get shops. The Asian markets, the enormous plantains for making Tostones to glug down with your rum, Johnny Halal and his free chillies and all the spices and cool stuff.

Fruit and veg here was always very fucking boring. Even if they’ve brought bed bugs, cockroaches, organised crime, baby mafias and taxi drivers who don’t know how to get to Rialto from Kilmainham, they’ve brung good stuff too.

* title nicked from a pic I saw of a halal shop in London. Shop was not owned by Lino Richie

What with the what now?

Twenty Major — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:14:55 +0000

Some actor who was in American Pie got caught driving while drunk. He’s been sentenced to probation plus, get this, ’18 months of alcohol education classes’.

If the cunt can’t make a good Manhattan after that there’s no hope for him.

The brown arts

Twenty Major — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:22:41 +0000

Go in, hold your breath as long as possible, only breathe through your mouth, do your business as quickly as possible, come out, gasp for fresh air, exhchange looks with person who is next in the queue. Yours is a mixture of ‘oh fuck that was disgusting’ with a touch of ‘I feel sorry for you having to go in there’. There’s is a ‘I know it’s disgusting’ mixed with ‘Oh I really don’t want to go in there’.

Electric Picnic toilets. Except for one man.

“It’s easy” he said, as one person returned from an epic trip to find the least worst toilet to have a poo in.

“What’s that then?”

“Immodium in, Senecot out”.

“Eh?”

“A load of immodium on Friday and Saturday means you never have to sit down. Get home on Monday and Senecot it out”.

And thus a new verb was invented. ‘To Senecot’.

I think we already know what happens

Twenty Major — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:07:29 +0000

A particular bugbear of mine is the blanket acceptance that it’s ok for media outlets to take pictures of grieving people at funerals. Do we really need to see a picture of a 12 year old’s stricken mother as her daughter is brought to/from the church/graveyard?

I don’t think we do. I think it’s a gross invasion of privacy and I don’t understand why we simply accept this. I can tell you for a fact that if I were ever in that position and I saw cameramen I would insert the cameras, shards of lens end first, up their holes.

But more than that, why do we feel the need to report on funerals at all? Yes, the death of a 12 year old girl is awful and tragic and newsworthy. Her funeral is not. It’s should be a time for her family to grieve, away from the public eye, and without strangers writing cloying, sickly and turgid articles about the whole thing. Attempts to sound sincere and profound come across as nothing but patronising and artificial. You would need to be a skilled wordsmith to make funeral reporting anything other than vomit-inducingly bad.

We all know what happens at a funeral. None of them are that different from the other. A service, some prayers, probably a sermon given by a priest who barely knew the deceased, if they knew them at all, lots of crying and upset people. Only the names change.

Irish people have an uncommon interest in death and funerals. That is reflected by our media who no longer see or no longer care that their presence is a repellent intrusion into people’s lives. And those people have no comeback when their misery is used to sell newspapers and fluff up news bulletins.

They’ll claim they’re only giving the people what they want but would people really miss it if it were gone? I don’t think so. And we’d be better off for it.

Ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes

Twenty Major — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:13:06 +0000

I’ve taken to reading a bit of science fiction lately, as a change from the usual. Space, future, wars, telecasting, fugue states, time travel of a fashion, and loads of other stuff. It’s all good.

There’s one bit in the book I’m reading the moment where the chap in question has too many martinis (good to know we’ll not have descended into a race of Jaeger-bombing halfwits, even fictionally) and wakes up with an enormous hangover. He then simply takes a pill the next day and within seconds his hangover is gone. Disappeared. I want this.

I’m enjoying the stories but every so often I stop and really regret the fact that I’ll never get to see any of the cool stuff they’re going to invent in the future.

Dr Murphy

Twenty Major — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:24:02 +0000

She was mad, the doctor next door.

We knew she was mad because she had the ‘Surgery’ sign outside her house but nobody ever came to get well. She had the black sign, the white writing, and even when the young man was run down by a car outside they didn’t go into her. Instead they chose the acoholic further up the road.

We knew she was mad when the first time the ball went over into her back garden and one of us clambered over to get it we discovered she’d concreted over the lawn. Why didn’t she have some grass like everyone else? If you called to the door you had to sit in the front room, statues of St Anthony and pictures of the blessed virgin on the wall, and she’d talk to you.

And talk. And talk. And because you were young and didn’t want to be rude you listened and then, after ages, you were so uncomfortable you said you had to go and she’d ask why you came and you’d stammer and say the ball, the back garden, and she’d go out, all 5’1 of her and give it back to you. Sometimes anyway. Other times she’d just burst it.

One night she came hammering on the door, screeching about something. I don’t know what. I was small. It was scary. She just needed the hat and the broom to be the witch. She had the wart. She only went when threats to call the police were issued.

Then you got a bit older and realised she wasn’t that scary. She was just small. Her husband had died. Both the signs were gone. The garden was still concrete and she was an old woman, suffering the effects of age. A mind deteriorating, stricken with loneliness and dementia.

When the man across the road went missing they all worried because his family told everyone he had the alzheimer’s and had wandered off. We helped look for him. When nobody saw the doctor next door for ages nobody worried. There was nobody to tell us she’d fallen down the stairs, nobody to tell us she’d been there weeks at the bottom, her head turned the wrong way around, alone in her house without her husband, with only her statues and her pictures.

And my burst ball in the back garden.

Fuck off Tony Blair

Twenty Major — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:50:13 +0000

Tony Blair is coming to Dublin on Saturday for a book signing in Eason’s. Strict rules will apply:

Those who wish to have their copy of his autobiography A Journey signed at the store in O’Connell Street will have to check in all bags, including purses and phones into a holding point.

There will be no customer photography and no personal dedication. Wristbands will be issued for the event and will have to be removed after signing.

There will be no guarantee that people who get wristbands will get their books signed as Mr Blair will be operating to a tight timetable.

Firstly, I have no idea why anybody would buy his book, let alone want it signed. Blair is the British Bertie, just a bit more warmongering. Anyone who contributes to his retirement fund by buying his book is tool, in my opinion. Then jumping through those sort of hoops just to get his signature on it … come on.

Have a bit of self-respect and treat him the way he deserves to be treated. I would imagine the security presence means throwing bricks at him won’t be tolerated so the next best thing to do is ignore him.

He’s a contemptible, arrogant, religious zealot who thinks Irish people should set aside personal freedoms just so he might deign to sign their book?

What a fucking cunt.

And this is worth a read, just in case you didn’t think he was a cunt. Because he is one, you know. He really is.

They’re at least 8000 times worse than the KLF

Twenty Major — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:11:17 +0000

Fuckers.

And it’s worse than they say.

Flaming Nora

Twenty Major — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:08:11 +0000

So Mick Lally dies the Gaiety School of Acting celebrates 25 years in existence. Coincidence?

To be honest, I don’t see how the two are in any way related whatsoever. It did intrigue me to see the story in the Irish Times though. The GS of A marked the occasion by setting somebody’s head on fire. Oh actors, they’re so zany and different.

I used to know a few people who went to that acting school. Worked with them down in Leeson Street in the day. A couple of them worked behind the bars, one of them hilariously worked on the door of nightclubs despite being the same size as Tom Cruise. He had his beefier brother to protect him though.

There’s no better way to get to know somebody than over a bottle of £22 Liebfraumilch at 5.30am when all the sloppy drunken wankers had gone home. We remain fast friends to this day. That’s a lie. I’ve never seen any of them since and I’m glad of it.

I do like the idea of setting people’s heads on fire as a celebration though. Does Joe Duffy have an anniversary coming up in RTE? We could bring his career to a whole new level as the Irish Simon Weston.

Twenty Major - Still smoking in Dublin bars

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