Teh Festival of Teh Bangers

We had kids round to the house this evening for Hallowe'en, as so often happens at this time of the year. One of the groups of kids had two Spidermen in it. "Is one of you evil Spiderman?" I asked.
"No," said the oldest kid in the group, "evil Spiderman wears black. He's Spiderman 1 and he's Spiderman 2."

During the ad break for Corrie, I noticed...

... that Peelers seems a strange product name for an Irish cheese company to use. Nevertheless, Calvita Peelers are now available.

Also, I know my house is never exactly clean, but the women in the Cillit BANG!!!! adverts are right mingers. Some of those stoves are positively unhygienic.

Alexander

Mother of god, what a mess of a film. I'm not even sure I can wtch it all the way through. The acting is awful, the story is all over the place, and Colin Farrell both looks and sounds ridiculous. He looks like Club Tropicana era George Michael, and sounds awkward, as if he's putting on a fake Irish accent. Don't talk to me about Val Kilmer. Woejious. I still like his horse, though.

New nemesis

You'll be glad to know that I have a new nemesis, because no dog walk is complete without a certain level of tension. While they're building the footbridge, it's difficult for me to access the fields up around Mosney, so I no longer get to see my arch nemesis, The English Guy With the White Van Who Has the Dog That Attacks Other Dogs On Sight Yet Is Not Kept On a Lead.

Luckily, I can now direct my dislike toward The Woman Who Walks Her Boxer By Driving Up And Down the Beach in Her Giant SUV While the Dog Runs Behind. The dog is perfectly nice, which is fortunate, because periodically it gets tired chasing her giant car and decides instead to play with whoever it finds on the beach, because it is lonely and sometimes needs a rest. Today it followed me as far as the main road, and I had to walk back down to the beach with it and kind of shoo it off. She was parked a good way off, or I would have said something to her. Silly cow.

Majority of people satisfied with their health care experience?

For some reason I can't find the link to the actual story from this morning's news, but I seem to remember waking up to the seven o'clock news to be told that the Taoiseach, although sorry for poor Susie Long, nevertheless wanted to remind people that a recent survey revealed that most people are happy with the care they receive in the health service.

I would like to remind the Taoiseach that this survey was carried out on Irish people, who are notorious for bitching to one another about what shitty service they're receiving in a shop/restaurant/public service, and then when asked directly by someone in authority "is everything alright?" invariably say "yes, everything's grand".

This just in...

Anne Enright is IRISH! And she won the Booker Prize! And she's IRISH!

God bless her, your honour. With her IRISHNESS. God bless her.

Theatre Festival fun

Yesterday I took in the last two shows of my theatre festival experience for this year. I did a lot better than last year, because I actually managed to see almost half of the shows for which I bought tickets, as opposed to last year, when I think I saw maybe two plays, largely because of medication-related illness. This year, I managed to miss plays due to bus not coming, traffic being bad on match day, being ill with an incredibly bad cold and deciding I just couldn't sit through four hours of Eugene O'Neill.

All of what I did see was excellent, though. I will get around to reviewing them all in depth (I bet you can't wait) at a later date, but for now, here's the list.

Radio Macbeth in the Project: I always enjoy the Project, and it has the best seating of all the venues I went to, for me anyway. Nice, straight-backed seat, banquette style so that if it's full you can all budge up, but if it's not so full you can spread out a bit, as a kind of reward for supporting less commercial theatre.

Fragments in the Tivoli: Amusingly, the Tivoli seems to be playing a Beckett-style joke on audiences with its seating. It looks very comfortable on the face of things, being proper old-style cinema seats, but then, when you try to sit down, you realise that there is so little leg room that you have to scrunch yourself right up into a ball and wedge your legs firmly into the back of the person in front. Neither Queenie nor Mister M would have been able to sit through this show, and I almost didn't manage it either. If it had been longer than an hour, there would have been trouble.

Road to Nowhere at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College: Functional seating, but no points to whatever bright spark decided to book a show that would attract an audience of seniors (many of whom would, obviously, have mobility issues ranging from the slight to the severe) into an auditorium where the toilets are on the second floor.

Saturday picks up after a rubbish beginning

My friend called me this morning to ask if I would go to the theatre with her this evening, because she couldn't get a babysitter and anyway there were sporting events her Mister wanted to watch. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what's known as foreshadowing. Sporting events, see?

At first I thought, well, it's a long way into town, but then I thought, fuck it, what else am I going to do with my Saturday evening? And it's always good to see her. So I said yes, I'd love to.

Cut to me sitting in traffic at the Port Tunnel (because I decided to really treat myself and drive into town, you see) for half an hour because yes, as you all remembered but I forgot, Ireland are playing (I want to say Germany?) in Croke Park this evening. So I had to phone friend, make a highly illegal Uey on the M1, and head home again.

Ah well. After that rubbish start, Saturday evening is actually picking up. There are certain advantages to Mister M not being here. Guilt free popcorn, for a start. With butter and maple syrup on. Then there's the fact that the other half bottle of red wine, the half I didn't put in the chilli, is still there for me to drink. And there is Strictly Come Dancing on the telly and two good films on the expensive bit of telly. And one of them, even though I've seen it before, has Paul Bettany in. Well, you can't ask for much more on a Saturday night in, can you? It's almost as if somebody 6,000 miles away was watching out for me.

Trish, what have you been doing all day?

I've been staring at this lady, as have all my Internet chums. You can either see her going clockwise or anticlockwise to begin with, and then you can make her swap and go the other way.

You'll also be glad to know that she has nipples. You can look at them.

Michael Clayton

Last night Mister M and I did something we never do. No, not that. The other thing. Yes, we went to the cinema. We were in town and it was a crappy night, so we figured, why not?

We saw that film Michael Clayton, which has that bloke in it who women want to be with and men want to be like (apparently). In it, he plays a fixer for a law firm who has to clean up the mess left behind when his friend (and, it seemed to me, mentor) has a bipolar episode while working on a really long-running class action suit against a major chemicals corporation. With hilarious results. Well, no. Actually slightly predictable results, really.

Some things about this film were just great. George Clooney, for one. He just looked grumpy and out of sorts throughout the entire film; his performance reminded me of Bruce Willis's in Twelve Monkeys, as if he had been given strict instructions not to do The Look, or The Twinkle, or any one of a number of little things he does to try to exude charm. I liked his relationship with his son, and indeed his family as a whole. It seemed kind of normal. I also liked Tom Wilkinson, because who doesn't? Also the overall seventies downbeat nature of the film is great. It's not funny, there are no jokes, there's no snappy dialogue, it just tells the story and that's kind of it.

However, it's nowhere near as good as everybody says it is. It's simply one of those films that is as good as films should be. Tilda Swinton's character has a major flaw, which is telegraphed from miles away. There are several things that happen that kind of don't make any sense. Above all, the character of Michael Clayton himself is a textbook example of told-not-shown.

I don't want to undersell it, though. I certainly enjoyed it and it was in no way stupid or too long or annoying in any way. It's just that maybe it was slightly oversold to me.

Also, whatever you do, don't go to the official site looking for photos to put on your blog post. Jesus, talk about overdesigned.

Queenie update

Queenie is out of the pound and safe.

Lord Flashheart to the rescue

Last night I was finishing up some work for the week and I had a bit of a freak out. Not to do with volume of work or nature of work, but to do with the actual content of the journals and magazines I was reading. This week, two gems stood out for their utterly depressing content against the usual background noise of economics and politics and recommendations for acceptable levels of violence to use against offenders and rehabilitation of the massive U.S. prison population. One was a serious academic journal called Child Abuse and Neglect, the title of which I'm sure says it all. The second culprit was Onearth, which had its usual litany of ochón ochón the sky is falling articles, including a big article about bitumen extraction in Alberta--cheery stuff, I'm sure you agree.

Then, last night, I read this article in the New Statesman and I just got really upset by it. It was the last straw. So I left the work unfinished and came downstairs to immerse myself in the harmless world of movie trailers. And that's where I got my first look at Clive Owen being Sir Walter Ralegh. Look at him! And... AND! as if that wasn't enough, he's on a ship in one clip. You can see it too!

Winter is coming in

It's dark and cold. The sun isn't coming up till 7.30am and it's fecking off again around 7pm. Obviously, then, the time has come to fill our boxes with straw, write our names on our shells, and go asleep till next spring.

To that end, Mister M and I have made some Important Purchases, namely:

1) a 40" flat-screen high-definition television that looks something like the monolith from 2001 turned on its side
2) a high-definition satellite subscription, including movies
3) a new, luxurious sofa bed that will provide our sitting room with a more comfy main couch and provide our house with an extra bed should you wish to come and watch things that are highly defined

This is especially good news for me because Mister M is going away to the Mother Ship for two weeks soon and I will be on my own, so it's only proper that I should be able to have people out and offer them a place to sleep or, at the very least, watch television on my own in comfort and have somewhere in the sitting room to fall asleep should I decide (which I will, at least once) that going to bed is too much trouble.

ComedyB runs a marathon

So, my brother is running the Dublin City Marathon this year. He is hoping to raise €5,000 for Console, who provide counselling services for people bereaved by suicide.

If you care about people who are bereaved by suicide, or you would like to feel like you're betting on a really slow race that you simply can't win, perhaps you'd like to sponsor him.

Once a month

I've realised that I can't save all the dogs or cats, but once a month I send money to a rescue to take one out of the pound and kennel it for a couple of nights (or get it vaccinated, or whatever).

Usually I pick dogs that look like my dogs or I think have a good chance of getting homed or dogs I wished I owned. This month, though, I picked Queenie, who was surrendered to the pound in Dunboyne. I hope now that there is a rescue space for her.

Of course, it's bad news when there's so many dogs in the pound that they start using names starting with Q.

One-bus-an-hour land

The problem with living in such a land is that if your bus doesn't show up (which I'd forgotten was even a possibility, it's so long since I depended on OBAH; not since I lived with my parents, I think) then you can't go and do whatever it was you were going to do all those miles away. So I missed Gavin's show, despite having bought a ticket and secured a pal to come with me.

The moral of the story is: don't arrange to go into Dublin on All-Ireland Final day, because public transport is all screwed up, and you can't even decide to take the car in, because there won't be anywhere to park it.

Culture Night in Dublin

Last night was Culture Night in Dublin, which meant that instead of Temple Bar crawling with hen and stag parties, it was heaving with oldies (like me) creeping about peeking in the windows of various establishments to see if there was anything free happening.

There was for sure free stuff happening in my old place of employment, which had live music from the bands of various volunteers, and a reading by up-and-coming author Kevin Barry, who gave a splendid reading of a story from his collection There are Little Kingdoms and donated some copies to the shop to sell.

One really nice thing was that I met a volunteer there who I first knew when he worked as a security guard at a Dublin radio station I used to frequent. He has since retired, and last year his wife died so he decided to start doing some volunteer work. He chose the shop I used to work in because, well, I used to work there. Now he's there all the time. I don't know how the guys who run the shop feel about that, but it was really nice to run into him. He actually thanked me for the fact that he found the shop, because he loves working there. It was very touching.

Tomorrow night I am going to Gavin Kostick's somewhat insane project for which he learned off all of Heart of Darkness. I am greatly looking forward to it, kind of.

The Reason Why

So, there were these two guys who were both dicks who really hated each other. However, they were incredibly brave and liked to ride their horses. And one day they were in a war in Crimea, where one of them lived in a tent and one of them lived on a yacht, and when they were given the order to charge one place at the side of a valley, they instead ran all the way down the valley, right into the enemy guns*. They both survived, but many of the people they took with them did not.

And then Lord Lucan said to Lord Cardigan "did you think I would leave you dying, when there's room..."

NO, that is not what happened!

The Reason Why is another amazing, tense, funny, descriptive, beautifully written narrative history from our heroine of history, Cecil Woodham Smith. It's a great book, which you might have been put off in the past because you don't care about military history and so your eye just glided over the pictures of beautifully turned out British cavalrymen on the front of it. In fact it's a wonderful social history that explains much about what the hell went wrong with the British army. It's great.

*except the slightly less mad of the two of them stopped halfway and said "bugger this, this is madness" and stopped.

Must get her book about Florence Nightingale now.

The real New Year

Everyone knows that the new year really starts in September, when the new academic year begins. There is no reason for me to feel this way anymore, given that I haven't taken an academic course of any kind since 1992, but I still get restlessness around this time of the year. Maybe it's a way of fending off the approaching darkness and cold of winter, maybe it's just that, apart from the two-week trip to Canada, I went nowhere and saw nobody all this dismal summer long. I don't know.

In any case, I have made New Year's resolutions for the academic year 2007-2008. I've bought tickets to things in the Dublin Theatre Festival, for a start. I said last year that I wasn't going to do this again, because things then start to happen which prevent me from going to the events for which I have booked tickets, but then, that's no kind of attitude, so I've bought tickets and I'm going to go (of course, I'm already in trouble with the tickets I've booked for Long Day's Journey Into Night, but that's another story).

I've also booked an Italian course for me and Mister Monkey, which will take me into town every Tuesday night for ten weeks.

And I'm going to Amsterdam.

And we're going to Glasgow.

And we're going to Rome.

It is a busy time, on paper at least. The real challenge will be to actually attend all the things I've paid for.

The chews that ooze? Are you people for real?

Mars have introduced a new sweet. It's part of the Starburst (nee Opal Fruits) range, and is called the Starburst Choozer. First of all, when are we going to get tired of "z" instead of "s" as a signifier for what is young and hip? Second of all, the, um, slightly menstrual quality of the dollop of "ooze" that falls on the man in the ad is enough to turn a person's stomach, and the fact that this is then followed by the policeman sticking his finger in the ooze and licking it off, well, it kind of makes you hope to avoid the ad altogether when you're having your tea.

Finally, the tag line. The chews that ooze? Sores and spots ooze. Dead union members strapped to radiators ooze. Sweets shouldn't ooze. It's not right.