Oh, the embarrassment

I have a horrible feeling I'm going to want to see The Da Vinci Code when it comes out. I always enjoy Ron Howard's films, I like Tom Hanks, I adore Paul Bettany, and I thought the book was fun.

The shame.

Even more shameful is the fact that this blog entry is merely an excuse to post a picture of Paul Bettany on my blog. Again. Although I am not using any of the publicity stills from the film, because they make him look like a young Emperor Palpatine.

White heron

Truth be told, it can get a little lonely out here by the sea. Far away from all the friends in more ways than one, there's some connection lost there.

But then some mornings I get out for the walk and it's rainy and blowy but I've worn the right hat and coat for once and I'm bundled up and the dogs are leaping around trying to decide if they're hunting or playing and a white heron flies overhead and lands on the river to fish. I've never seen a white heron before, and it's good to be able to stand and watch it for a while without fear that someone is going to come along and disturb us. After a bit it saw me, though, and started to do its "I'm not a bird, I'm a stick!" routine, so there was no point in watching it anymore.

More baby announcements today on the list. Feels very springtime.

A night at the theatre

When you only ever go to the theatre to see things written by people you know, or actors you went to college with, or something experimental in a small room above a pub, there's a whole level of polish and style and years of craft that you never get to see. A whole world of actors who can make their voices carry across a full house without ever seeming to raise them above the conversational, without covering the front row in spittle.
Mister Monkey and I went to see Brian Friel's The Faith Healer at The Gate, starring Ralph Fiennes, Ingrid Craigie, and Ian McDiarmid. Quite the cast of heavy hitters, and quite the night they delivered. The play is great and interesting and says much about the nature of playacting and storytelling and desire for glamour and a belief in unattainable happiness and a need to be noticed and loved and to be in the spotlight. The simple staging, in which monologues are delivered to the audience as if the audience were a journalist interviewing each of these people about their memories, is very effective and successfully brought us into the action so that, even from the very back of the theatre we wanted to answer the actors whenever they appeared to fumble for their places in the story.
It was just great. I would be interested to see it again with a different cast, just to compare, because I thought that Ralph Fiennes in particular was absolutely mesmerising, and not just, you know, because of the charm and everything.

The Known World

I waited so long for this book to come into the shop, and was looking forward to reading it so much, that I suppose it couldn't help but be disappointing. It could be the frame of mind I was in when I read it. It could be a whole lot of things, but I just wasn't engaged by it, despite its credentials. I usually like a Pulitzer winner. I usually like an epic tale of hardship in the American South. The fact that this was an epic tale of hardship in the American South that also included a black slave-owning family only made the book more attractive.
But I couldn't follow it. I kept having to go back and reread sections because I found the names confusing and the characters blank. Nothing much happened that I haven't read in other books. The timeline was constantly disrupted, which I know is a deliberate style to make the book seem more like an oral history, and the actual story moved very, very slowly. I'm sorry I didn't like it, but I just didn't. It was, well, it was boring.

A Pound of Paper

John Baxter's memoir of his book collecting is all the things I like in such a book. It's a quick read, full of interesting little asides and anecdotes about books and people and places. It's also got some top tips for making yourself popular with Parisian shopkeepers.
Book collectors are funny people. They appear to attach no value to the words in a book, only to the object itself. They see minor details that most of us miss - a tiny line of numbers close to the spine, an extra zero here or there, a missing errata slip where one should be, and so on. Like record collectors, they pore endlessly over boxes of apparent junk in the vague hope that they just might come across a first edition of something amazing, or something that will fill that last hole in their collection.
They hate the internet, by and large. It has removed much of the mystique from what they do and has made it easy for anyone to pass him or herself off as an expert.
I suspect that they wish they were private detectives. This is a fun book.

Proof, if proof be need be...

... that wasps are just the creepiest things on earth

I'm so glad I didn't watch that David Attenborough programme.

The Ultimate Question

Why, lord, why?

Pack Up the Moon

Bleucch, eucch.

So many things wrong with Anna McPartlin's book, I barely know where to start. I was asked to read it and review it on Newstalk106's lunchtime show. The other guest reviewer, I was surprised to see, was Dermot Lacey, a strange, showbizzy kind of politician who appears to be so completely consumed with being popular and being elected that he has lost all of his critical faculties along the way. Along with his powers of hearing and listening. During the review I said that I thought it was good that young women were writing books that were relevant to other young women in the same social category as them, I just didn't think this was a good example of that type of book. He said that he didn't care if the book wasn't socially relevant, he thought it was a good book anyway.
He reminded me of my least favourite kind of man, the ones who don't listen to women, who don't listen to anyone, in fact, except for other men who are exactly like them. You know the kind of guys who sell you a crappy car or fuck up a simple plumbing job or arrive three hours late to move your furniture and then, when you complain to them about the level of service you've received in return for your hard-earned money, they roll their eyes at your husband or father as if to say "women, eh? They just don't get that this is how the world works". I do not like men like this. I did not like this man. I did not like this book either, but I've ranted about it so much that I've lost the will to rant about it any more. Suffice to say that I think it's a disgrace that women are expected to pay a tenner to buy this sort of shoddily written, shabbily edited rubbish. Of course, what would I know? I just think that people should do their jobs well. Including writers.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

I could easily write the same review for this as I wrote for The Girls of Slender Means. Short, punchy, single event causes mayhem, ripples of strange behaviour upset the status quo, etc. Really, more people should write like Muriel Spark. Fewer people should write like Anna McPartlin. The world would be a better place. Okay, maybe not the world, but bookshops certainly would be better for it.

All the clocks in the house are wrong

As soon as I get better and can get the hell off this sofa, I will buy batteries for the clocks. I will buy a new lightbulb for the little lamp in the sitting room so that the corner of the room that the telly's in isn't only lit by the glow of the telly. I will post the Pinefox the book I promised him. I will pick out the books I haven't read yet and arrange them in some way so as to make it easier to find them when I want to read them.
There are so many things I will do when this crappy winter is over.
That is soon, right?

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Another break from Aussie convicts. This is a subtle horror story from Stephen King about a nine year-old girl who gets separated from her mother and brother while out hiking and has to try to find her way back to civilisation, dodge nameless horrors in the woods, and has only her personal stereo and its tinny reception of baseball games far away to keep her company. I read this at one sitting, which is the only way to read Stephen King really. He builds up a great atmosphere here, doesn't lay it on too thick, and has his usual fun with homey details in the middle of great fear. I liked it a lot, partly because I love stories about people walking and covering loads of ground. My favourite parts of Lord of the Rings are the walking parts. However, I do think he has a nerve calling it a novel when it barely skims a hundred pages.
PS, Tom Gordon is a baseball player. No, I didn't know that either.

The Necropolis Railway

Just one of the books I read while reading The Fatal Shore just to give myself a little break from the relentless size of the thing. This is a thriller, supposedly, that I kept thinking was going to turn out more thrilling than it really did. The title promises all kinds of spooky steam-age goings-on, but really it's a fairly straightforward story about a young man who comes down to London to work on the railways and gets mixed up in some bad blood about unions and land sales leading to moider; it's Steamtown. Interesting historical research though. There really was a necropolis railway, the spirit of Edwardian London is evoked quite faithfully, and so on. But the story, I thought, was weak. Ah well. It passed the time and at least it was short.

The Fatal Shore

It is a constant source of disappointment to me that Mister Monkey can read history books galore and actually retain facts from these books, while I learn only vague concepts. For example, he has just finished reading a big fat book about Persia and has learned many exciting things about Persia which he will happily share with you (if he ever updates his bloody blog, that is). I read a whole exciting novel about Persia last year, and the only thing I can remember is that there was once a Persian king called Arses.
I'm a bit like that about Australia now. Even after reading six hundred fairly dense pages about transportation and the colonial beginnings of Australia, all I can really tell you is an amusing story about a bloke called Pearce who was a cannibal. Or that you really, really didn't want to end up getting transported to Norfolk Island. Or that you didn't want to be a woman who got transported. Otherwise, there were worse things that could happen you than being sent to Botany Bay. In general, you worked hard, you got your ticket-of-leave, and you had a chance to be set up with some land and you could get some convicts of your own and start your own farm or business or whatever it was you had been doing in Ireland or England before you got greedy or stupid and did whatever it was that got you transported in the first place. In fact, one of the British government's biggest problems, once the colony was up and running, was to retain some sort of threatening air about it, which was very difficult seeing as how things were pretty crap for the English poor at that time.
It's a very good book, even if it does repeat itself a little and sometimes there's a little too much talk about architecture for my liking (namely, any at all. I don't care about architecture), but there's no way it should have taken me two months to read.

Theatre score!

I never get hard-to-get-tickets. But now I have tickets for Brian Friel's Faith Healer at the Gate next month. Starring Ralph Fiennes! And Ian "I wasn't always Emperor Palpatine, you know" McDiarmid! The excitement!

Dead pool 2006

The kids on ILE are playing this Dead Pool, but most of the people I wanted to pick are not available and I'm too much of a luddite and a non-joiner to figure out how to add them.
So, I'm playing by ILE rules, which are:
You must pick ten well-known people who are alive.
You can change your picks until the end of January.
For each person who dies, you score 100 points minus their age.
You must not be complicit in the death of anyone in your dead pool.
Want to play?

Here's my team so far:
Hilda Braid
Charlie Haughey
Bruce Forsyth
Gary Glitter
Margaret Thatcher
Muhammad Ali
Ariel Sharon
Esther Williams
Jerry Lee Lewis
Marcel Marceau
But it could all change between now and January 31st.

And like that it was all over

Blah blah twelfth night blah, but it feels all over, doesn't it? Maybe it's working part-time that does it. I'm not on holiday, I haven't taken any extra time off over Christmas, and the fact that it all fell on a weekend makes it even stranger. I get a total of one extra day off work for the holidays, which somehow seems wrong.
Not that I haven't been sitting on my ass, mind you.
This year I revived the childhood practice of actually telling people exactly what I want for Christmas, and it has paid off handsomely. Books with pictures of ships on the front (a special mention here to the lovely Folio Society edition of Thomas Cochrane's memoirs from Eoghan) and new beds for the dogs were the favourites, as well as my own virtual dog on the Nintendo DS. I haven't quite figured out how to work it properly, and it turns out you can't really use it on the train because you have to talk to it in a loud voice, and my real dogs don't like it very much, but it's a good thing to have around. It reminds me that I don't always have to be doing something useful with my time, or worrying about not doing something useful.
Nice to see no major natural disasters this year either.
New year's eve will see me and Mister Monkey settling down with a full haggis dinner and a nice bottle of ice wine in front of the new Bose speakers (another favourite present) before having an early night. Start as you mean to go on, I say.

What's a blog for, if not to complain about UPS?

I ordered a package from the US. I didn't know it was coming by UPS, no-one told me. "By Air" it said on the company's website. I guessed, you know, pixies or something. So I was quite surprised on Monday evening to come home and find a UPS InfoNotice in the hall telling me that the driver had tried to deliver the package at 9.40am. Surprise surprise, I was at work. There was nothing on the notice to tell me when they would be back to deliver again, because Irish delivery guys never like to tell you anything, because then you might expect some fucking level of fucking customer service from them.
Anyway, mea culpa, I forgot to bring the InfoNotice to work the next day and didn't call them. Sure enough, the driver had been and left another one, this time at 9.10am. Again, no clue as to when this masked stranger might turn up again, but I had a pattern to work from so I guessed it would be today. So I rearranged my morning and reckoned I would go into work a little bit late.
And I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited.
At 10.30 I called UPS and was told that the driver had left the depot with my package and that if I didn't want to wait for him I could always feel free to drive over to Ballymount Industrial Estate and get the package myself. I declined.
And I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited.
At 1.30pm I called UPS and asked if they had any idea when I might get my package. The girl on the phone said no, they don't give times, but it would "probably" be before 5pm. I pointed out to her (in a much more polite way than I am doing now) that shipping companies with far less sophisticated networks can at least tell you within three hours or so when they're likely to deliver. Mighty UPS, one of the biggest delivery companies in the world, apparently, can't do that. I asked, very politely, if there was some way I could register a complaint. The girl said yes, she took my name and phone number and said she had registered it.
So I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited.
At 5pm I phoned them again and got someone who could be based in Ireland, but let's face it, is more likely to be based in a faraway land. She left me on hold for 15 minutes while she checked where my package was. It turns out, right, that the driver had to return to the depot early and couldn't complete his deliveries today. So I would get my package on Friday.
Good thing it's not important, I told her. I then apologised to her for being abrupt, but said that I was pissed off and even though I wasn't pissed off with her, she was the one on the phone. She laughed and said that the despatch centre was very busy at the moment.
It amuses me that some poor woman who is possibly on the other side of the world is trying to make amends for the fact that Irish delivery guys just don't change. Just because White Van Man is now Brown Van Man doesn't make him any happier about sitting in heavy traffic on a rainy day.
All this over some stupid Christmas present that the person may not even like or want.
My humour is not good today.

Fat comic and the forces of sodomy

Post titles like that make me glad I don't have Adwords on my blog.

We went to see Dara O'Briain in Vicar St. last night. Whatever its limitations when seeing bands, Vicar St is a great place to see comedy, especially if you've got front row centre seats on the balcony, where you get to look down at the full house below you. Dara really is just a quality performer. Two hours of varied, hilarious, well-observed, clever comedy that never understimates the intelligence of the audience is hard to come by, but he delivers it.
My particular favourites are the image of some young person jogging along beside technology asking "what have you got for me today, technology?"
"Well, I've got a phone that you can carry around and call people from anywhere in the world!"
"That's brilliant! What have you got now?"
"I've got a phone with a camera attached, so you can take pictures of all your friends!"
"That's brilliant! What have you got now?"
"I've got an iPod that plays your music and stores your photos!"
"Oh shit, I've got a stitch. You carry on without me, I think I've gone far enough."
He breaks up the second half of the show very cleverly too. Having been invited on to the BBC's Room 101, he spends some time thinking about all the things he hates (opining that comedy is the ideal art form for petty things you hate. Broad strokes of emotion? Leave that to music. Irritating people you met on the train? Comedy!) but of cours they only used a few. So he has made a list of other ones, which he gets someone in the audience to read out. It's a good plan, because as soon as the interest in one topic starts to flag (assuming it does), he can just switch to the next thing. Smart.
He is just class, bless him.

All change

To the delight of people like Simon and Mr. Monkey, I've made the switch from PC to Apple. It didn't seem like such a big deal now that Apple will sell you a keyboard with a delete key on it, but it has meant big changes in other areas. I now use Safari for my web browsing, and my old blog provider does not fully support it. Sure, I can write a post, but I can't include italics or bold text and other basic, fun things. So I'm testing out Blogger to see if I like it.

This could take a while. I fear change.

Moving house

All the stuff from here down is in the process of being moved over from this blog:
Perfectly cromulent

It might take a while.