“Don’t be stupid”, replied Dirty Dave. “It can’t be racist because it’s not about black people. You can only be racist about them. That’s the way I learned it anyway”.

“You idiot. Racism isn’t just against black people. It’s against anyone involved in another race that isn’t white. So me trying to sound like Junichi Kishawaki is probably racist”.

“But black people have seemed to capture the market in the whole racism thing, haven’t they?”

“They have, I suppose”.

“When you think about it that’s a bit racist of them”.

“I don’t think you can ever solve the problem of racism, you know. Not as long as there are other races”.

“What if you put something in the water that made everyone the same colour?”

“What colour?”

“Something neutral, I suppose”.

“Beige?”

“No, that’s racist because we’re beige-ish. Or slightly pinked. It’d have be a pale mauve. There are no mauve races at the moment”.

“What do you call someone who is against races in which competitors try to cross a finish line as quickly as possible?”

“Racerist?”

“No, that’s someone who doesn’t like bikes with dropped handlebars”.

“I saw someone the other day with the racer handlebars turned upwards”.

“Just another sign that we’re regressing to the 1980s. I bet he was wearing drainpipes too”.

“He sure was. Wham bar?”

“Don’t mind if I do”.

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However, in one thing he is right and that is his insistence that people don’t stand too close to him. Today I was talking to somebody who stood way too close to me. And when I backed up a bit he forwarded down (I assume that’s the opposite).

It is horribly uncomfortable. Worse than shaking somebody’s hand to discover their palms are sweatier than prop forward’s gooch at the end of a game. You don’t want to wipe their sweaty hand slurm on your clothes, nor do you want to leave your hands dripping. Yet I would prefer that a hundred times to one encounter of a close stander.

Stupid making me agree with Sting cunts.

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She’s off swanning around New Zealand at the moment, you know. With her husband and various flunkies. This is not any kind of surprise either.

The annual Paddy’s day junkets have begun. There’ll be no first class travel though. No, sir. Tighten our belts time. Just business class. And no hotel suites. No way. We have to count our pennies. Just normal rooms in 5-star hotels. And no limos. Just top of the range hire cars that will be driven by somebody else.

I think it says a lot about our celebrations than politicians can’t wait to get the fuck out of here rather than stay home and have a pint with us mere mortals.

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The deregulation in itself is not a bad thing but at the heart of it there must be an understanding that you have to protect the quality of the industry. Anyone who regularly takes taxis in Dublin, and I’m sure in other parts of the country, must know that the quality of service has declined quite seriously.

If you’re not trying to explain to someone who can barely speak English where you need to go, you have guys who don’t respect the business they’re in. A few weeks back I was walking from South Anne St to the rank on Dawson Street. Pulled up on the corner was a guy who gestured me to get into his cab. I ignored him, went to the rank and got into the car of the bloke who had been queueing properly. He was somewhat exasperated at the queue jumping taxi, saying it happens all over the place.

And it’s a sign that people are desperate for fares, desperate to make a living, and eventually you will be in a situation where people have hung up their taxi plates and been forced into doing something else. The quality and safety of passengers will suffer as the quality of person doing the job declines. This is inevitable and I understand completely why taxi drivers are upset.

However, they’re not going to get much sympathy from me or anyone else if they carry on with the shit they got up to yesterday. Blocking roads, causing delays to people trying to get home from work, inconveniencing people who are just trying to get where they need to go. There are more ‘pickets’ planned for today. I got caught in the last ’strike’ they had and there’s nothing quite as infuriating as sitting in your car going nowhere because some people think they’re above the law.

I know they want to make a point. Do it by withdrawing all service. The inconvenience is there for people who need/want to take taxis. They will be a lot more understanding of the problems taxi drivers face. When you block O’Connell Street and the Luas and Pembroke Square and wherever else, you immediately lose the public. I don’t give one fuck about the rights and wrongs of any situation if I’m left sitting in my car or on a non-moving bus when I want to get home after a long day at work.

It’s quite clear the taxi regulator won’t listen to taxi drivers and both she and the Minister for Transport have to bear some responsibility for the protests that brought traffic to a standstill yesterday. Ultimately though it rests with the drivers who are going to isolate themselves completely from what’s left of public goodwill if they keep this up.

I have to be somewhere today, I have to take a taxi, if they make life difficult for me then I’ll deregulate them right in their cunts.

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Who can blame them? When sporting events take place people drink. They drink before the game, during the game, after the game. Whether it’s football, rugby or curling (those fuckers can drink let me tell you), people enjoy their pints. That includes the people who are actually going to the game and those who merely enjoy the trip to the pub to watch in a social setting.

Yet in supposedly secular Ireland pubs are closed on ‘good Friday’ because of the catholic church. How is this still allowed? Surely it’s something that can be challenged from a legal perspective. As Ireland’s society becomes more multi-cultural and multi-denominational how can one religious entity be allowed to dictate when business open?

If anyone suggested pubs should be closed for Yom Kippur or Eid they’d be rightly laughed out of it.

This particular ‘good Friday’ agreement stems from a time when the church had almost total control over Irish life. This is no longer the case. Church attendances are falling, vocations are plummeting, and it’s heading towards end game for them as the agnostic/athiest population grows. Intelligent people are disenchanted with a malign, corrupt organisation having an influence on their lives. So why should businesses be forced to close because of a relgious dictat? Why, in times of recession, should publicans be forced to give up a day’s takings? Why should people who want to work be denied their hours?

And ultimately, why should those of us who want to go and spend money be prevented from doing so? I don’t believe in god. I don’t believe the catholic church should be able to decide what’s acceptable, no more than the jewish, muslim or hindu faiths. Or any faith.

Ireland’s licensing laws are so antiquated it’s untrue. There is no staggered closing, the opening hours are hopelessly restrictive, there is no nod to the fact that we live in a 24 hour society now and it’s about time things changed. Doing away with the stupid ‘good Friday’ closing should be the first step to modernising and improving things.

I hope the Limerick publicans get special permission because that is the first domino. If it’s ok for them to open then it’s ok for everyone else. Another part of old Ireland will be done away with, and about time.

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“Were ya football trainin’, Mistah?”, said the little blond one.

“Where d’ya tink he was ya bleedin’ tick?!”, said the other.

“I was playing football”, I said.

“And are you a professional?”, the youngest one asks.

“Do I look like a professional?”, I reply.

“Yeah” he says (I like that kid). There’s a pause and the other lad pipes up.

“Ya dope, if he was a professional he wouldn’t be living on this road”.

How right he was.

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Nowadays my tastes are more simple. It’s mostly just football but with odd Grand Theft Auto style distraction. There’s nothing quite like driving a car through Times Square … on the pavement knocking down pedestrians as the cops foolishly try and catch up with me. It’s escapism. And seeing as I can’t drive like that in real life, when I very often want to, my PS3 will have to suffice.

Anyway, as last week was kind of a quiet week I thought I’d get something new. I have grown a little weary of playing online football especially when the minute you go more than 2 goals up against some little cunt they always quit the game.

I had seen ads for this game called Heavy Rain and had heard that it was a fantastic new concept blah blah blah. It looked quite interesting. You go through the game making choices which impacts on the story. It certainly sounded different so I bought it.

Worst. Mistake. Ever. And I include in that the time I had to look after Stinking Pete’s infant nephew and I left him with the two bar fire and the plugged in hairdryer to play with at bath time.

The concept is this : There is a serial killer who is killing serially, as they do, and you play four different characters in the game. An FBI guy, a private dectective, a crap bastard who keeps losing his kids (one of whom has been taken by the serial killer), and some woman whose relation to any of it is still a mystery to me.

It switches between them as the story progresses. But here’s the thing. It’s mostly like watching a film or a TV show. Every so often you have to do things by pressing combinations of buttons. For example, you are the FBI guy and you need to collect evidence with some kind of magic glove. To climb a slippery slope to follow tracks you have to press and hold O then Square, then R1 then L2 and so on. Rivetting stuff.

So you do some stuff, there is sometimes a bit of searching or trying to find the right thing to do before you go on to the next scene, move the right stick up and around to control the character, when the game tells you to, and that’s about it.

It becomes tedious very quickly but I thought perhaps there was something I was missing. It might get good. Everyone said it was good, maybe I just needed to give it time. Then came the moment when I realised this video game is an elaborate, expensive piss take. There’s a scene when the private detective is chasing up a lead and arrives at a house. He hears a baby crying, goes in and finds a note on the floor from the mother of the baby who has decided to kill herself. He saves her just in time. A quick Triangle + O + X + L2 and a few waggles of the right stick later you have cleaned up the wrists she tried to slit.

As you try and question her, choosing the various options the game gives you, she expresses concern for her baby who is outside in the sitting room crying. To move the story along you have to attend to the baby. What do babies generally need? No, they don’t need you to run down a load of pedestrians with your car as the thuddding clunk of their skull off the bonnet gives you curious pleasure. Nor do they need a quick one-two followed by a Cruyff turn before chipping the keeper in the last minute to win the league.

Babies need feeding. And changing. The game requires you to feed the baby, change it’s poo filled nappy, before ever so slowly moving the right stick to rock the baby to sleep. Whoever thought up this game is a genius. I mean, it’s utterly shit, but I read last week it sold over 500,000 copies in the UK. That’s half a million hardcore gamers rocking a baby to sleep after changing its crappy nappy.

I can’t explain just how fucking terrible this video game is.  My copy is back in the box and will go back to the shop. I’ll lose some money as I trade it in for something less crap, like Pong on one of those old Colecovision systems, but I can live with that. There’s no nappy changing in Pong. There’s no heating up milk for a fucking baby.

Congratulations to the makers of Heavy Rain, they have played a huge practical joke on the world. I’m sure they’re laughing their very rich, 500,000 copies in the UK alone, arses off, but if this post can serve to save one guy or girl from wasting their money on this piece of shit then it will have done its job.

Heavy Rain – worse than Crystal Swing. Remember that. Tell your friends.

To spread the word rotate the right stick slowly in a circular motion holding L1, X and O. Cunts.

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He was waiting for Paddy to come in so they could sup Guinness with a Jamey chaser and both talk at the same time. I feel bad for old people that don’t have anyone to talk at so I sat and listened to his stories about life in the tenements and what he and his pals used to do to the swans on the canal at Suir Bridge.

Eventually Paddy came in.

“Where have you been?”, asked Charlie. “You were supposed to be here ages ago”.

“I would have been only I had a little hassle doing the shopping”, he said.

“What happened?”, I asked.

“Ahh, you know yourself. A little misunderstanding is all”.

“What kind of misunderstanding?”, said Charlie.

“Well”, he said, “I was in Superquinn and going around the place quite happily with my price gun, bleeping and putting stuff in my bags. Bleeping and putting stuff in. Bleeping and putting stuff in. I was as content as a sheared sheep, the shopping was a pleasure”.

“And?”

“I went to the checkout and she said the two words you never want to hear in those circumstances”.

“Oh-oh”, I said.

“Yeah. Re. Scan”.

“Bollix”, said Charlie.

“Bollix is right”, said Paddy. “They took the gun, bleeped it, then re-scanned all the stuff in the bags”.

“Much?”

“Well, there was the odd leg of lamb that I simply forgot to bleep. And how those king prawns didn’t cross my mind I’ll never know. It’s a mystery to me why I didn’t remember the packets of batteries, the bottle of Vat 69 or the double pack of Fig Rolls and quite how I failed to recall to bleep the sausages, the brown bread and giant box of teabags will forever haunt me”.

“Yikes. So what did they do?”

“Ahh, the manager came over and we had a bit of a chat and the security man came over and then the assistant manager and we went to the office and in the end, after I’d told them I was very old and forgetful but not on purpose or anything, I paid for what I’d somehow forgotten to put through myself”.

“Sounds like an awkward situation”, I said.

“That it was”, he said, “but at my age it’s about as much excitement as I get”.

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From 2014 all workers over the age of 22 will have to pay 4% of their income into a pension scheme (if not already a member of a work related one). For every €4 paid in by employees, the state and the employer will contribute €2 each. And some other shit.

That’s enough for me. They can go fuck themselves. If I don’t want to pay into a pension scheme then that is entirely my business. It’s just more nanny state, stealth tax bollocks. I pay my taxes already, I’m not paying any new ones. Especially ones ‘cunningly’ disguised to seem like some kind of benefit to me when in fact it’s another way of scraping together the money we need because we’re bankrupt thanks to this Cock Piss Patridge of a government.

I’ll go fucking retire somewhere else, on my own terms. This country is fucking shit and it’s not getting better any time soon.

And weather is a load of cunt too.

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And since when did politics become like modern football? The odd reshuffle here as the leader gets tired of looking at the same old faces in cabinet meetings aside, rotation is a fairly new concept.

Not that I think Gormley is particularly good at his job or anything but isn’t it weird that he performs the role then just gives it to someone else?

“I left all the details in a file somewhere. It’s brown. On the desk there. I think. If not ask … erm … ahh, you’ll find it. I’m off to be a Super Junior!”

And Gormley is to be replaced by the man who made the worst YouTube video of all time. And he’s got some very stiff competition there.

Is Paul Gogarty going to be appointed Minister for Twitter? That’d really annoy Dan Boyle who leads the Green Twitterati – but as he’s only a crappy old senator he’s just going to have to look on, green with envy, like an avatar in support of Iranian democracy.

The only good thing is that there’s no way the Greens who are rotated in are going be ministers long enough to get their pensions.

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