The prominent Irish monuments weekend

At the weekend, our pals Aldo and F were over from the Big Island, because why not, right? In the past, this is the kind of weekend I've always slightly dreaded. What the hell do you do with people who come over the for the weekend? Where do you bring them, how do you entertain them?

It turns out what you do, especially if your friends are staying in the Mespil, is go to Birchalls in Ranelagh on the Friday night. Then, if you are us, you get back into town way too early for your bus and go to the Gresham for a cocktail while you wait (at €5.15 for a pint of booze drink, it's far too expensive, but is at least comfy and warm and not full of wankers at 10.30 on a Friday, which is a big deal). Then you leave them to their own devices on the Saturday, and have them come out to your house on Sunday morning on the excellent Matthews coach service.

At 9.40, we met them off the bus and went down the beach with the dogs, who were their usual stand-offish selves. We had a stroll around in the freezing cold, then came back to the house and had happy breakfast, before piling into the car and setting off to Newgrange. Aldo and F got on a tour immediately, and we hung about the centre. We found a comfy bench in the sun and out of the wind to sit on, and we watched the Boyne go by and smiled at the tourists and generally had a cheery morning. The tea is terrible in the visitors' centre, but the cake is lovely. If you're bringing visitors and not planning to go to Newgrange yourself, though, I'm not sure you really need to see the exhibition. Certainly we paid it little attention as we walked round it, because Aldo and F go to this kind of monument all the time, so they were able to tell us things that weren't written on the posters.

After that, we paid a visit to Mellifont Abbey, where some guys in their twenties, pissed off that our arrival meant they couldn't freely throw stones at each other any more, left. We wandered around there and saw the stones and drank in the quiet and examined an early wasp before getting back in the car to go to Monasterboice to look at the round tower and the high crosses. Monasterboice is great, because the graveyard is still in use, so there's a feeling of it being a proper centre of the community, despite the fact that there are very few houses around the place. The tower and the crosses and the rookery are all atmospheric and creepy and olde worlde and the view of the countryside around is relatively unobstructed by Southfork-style ranch houses. By then, though, it was absolutely freezing, so it was home for a bit of vegetable soup and more coffee and a bit of a sit round in the warm before putting the others on the bus again.

Not a very exciting story, you might think. But it's interesting to me, as someone who has, almost all her life, lived in an area that people come to visit, to have places I can bring people. It gives me more confidence when I say "you should come and visit us", because I know there is stuff on offer that you will like. Of course it helps if, like the Aldos, you are fun and happy to go along with whatever entertainments are presented to you, and you like both dogs and cats.

So, you should come and visit us.

Edited to add: Excitingly, Aldo has come up with a real product that Mister Monkey can put up on the Slard website: chocolate-covered bacon.

Back to the shop

Yesterday I had my first ever shift as a volunteer in the bookshop on Parliament St. It was a pleasant afternoon, featuring nice chat with tourists, someone still looking for the Viking Museum despite the fact that I think it got rolled into Dublinia (must check this; people will ask me this every week from now till November), and a few young lads who tried halfheartedly to rob the till and get into the back room. Thanks to the managements' new (or since my time, anyway) security procedures, however, their efforts were fruitless. Take that, tossers (or rather don't).

Books bought: JPod by Douglas Coupland, which is kind of annoying and trying too hard, and Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, which was recommended to me last summer by Queenie. Result.

A public plea to the people who run the Irish Entrepreneur of the Year Awards

Please stop playing your poxy ad on the radio. Please. Please stop it. It's on every hour during Morning Ireland, and has been for what feels like over a year. Will you just be running it continuously now, forever? Well, please don't. We're sick of it. We couldn't give a fuck about entrepreneurs. In fact, we hate them now, thanks to you. If one my friends suggested to me that they were thinking of entering this award, I would hate them forever.

Just stop. Really. Stop.


Seriously. I'm not messing.

Check out my IT guy's mad skillz!

Look!

http://www.accentmonkey.com/

Mad!

health check

A couple of conversations I had at the Monkey Parents' 40th anniversary party at the weekend suggested that a) more people read my blog than I thought and b) that I scared the bejesus out of some people by my post about my panic attack.

The follow-up, then, is that I started taking anti-depressants, and now I feel much better. In fairness, there's a chance that simply admitting I was having anxiety issues in the first place might have made me feel better, but despite a recently-published study that suggests they don't work, the anti-depressants feel to me like they're working. Interestingly, according to Bad Science editor Ben Goldacre, the really interesting finding of that study is not that anti-depressants don't work (apparently that's not really what it says), but that drug companies continue to bury the studies they don't like, and are able to get away with it.

In any case, I only intend to take them for a few months in order to get my act together a bit. I'm thinking of trying cognitive behavioral therapy. It seems like a good time.

Rawr! (do not read if you have not seen Cloverfield)

Here are some things I really liked about Cloverfield:

It's short, and it cuts out all that crappy character development and hugging and learning that really messes up otherwise perfectly good monster movies.

It's loud enough all the way through that even if people are talking in the cinema, you can't hear them.

It's very exciting and genuinely bloody scary. It's also kind of sad. The party scene at the beginning is only short, but it's well written and well acted enough that you accept the basic niceness of the characters. Also, the fact that Robert goes through all that stuff to get to Beth makes you think that maybe, just maybe, they might get away with it, although you know they won't, because of the movie you're watching.

I also love the modernity of it. In the early days of movies, certain signifiers had to be included in order to make films easier for people to follow. If someone was leaving one location to go to another, you would have to see them leave, then see them travel, then see them arrive, because otherwise the audience would be confused about where it was or what was going on. The increased sophistication of audiences is something that Abrams's team has played with in their major TV shows: in Alias, they switched from one place to another with very little explanation of what was going on a lot of the time; in Lost, they switch between the present, the past, and the future with very little warning; in both cases, they simply rely on the audience to keep up or not care that they can't keep up. Cloverfield is the same. Why is there a monster? Don't know don't care. Where did all the other people from the party go? Don't know don't care. How did they get off the Brooklyn Bridge so fast, considering it looked so crowded? Don't know don't... actually, Mister Monkey did wonder about that a little bit.

What they've done is create the spine of a story, and rather than flesh it out themselves, they're going to let everyone who comes along later do that. In a similar fashion to the Max Brooks zombie books, I'm sure there'll be a massive outpouring of Cloverfield spinoff projects that will show up everywhere. It could be really good.

They also resisted the urge to throw in some monster movie tropes, despite setting the scene for them so clearly. Listing building with gaping open windows looking down toward the ground? Surely a great excuse for a fire, or rescuing a child, or a puppy. But there was nothing. Scrambling across the roof with the monster only blocks away? Surely someone is going to end up dangling off the building in a moment or two. Nope. No time, no time.

Also, some critics have complained about it playing on people's memories of 9/11 by using the images of frightened New Yorkers, covered in dust and milling about, as part of its scare tactics. But isn't that kind of what a good monster movie is supposed to do?

Here are some things I didn't really like about it:

The camerawork did give me the nausea a little bit (although that was maybe a function of the enormous, delicious, and hastily eaten Chinese meal that took place beforehand).

I couldn't understand why, the instant the monster hove into view, the women all turned into useless eejits while the men (one of whom, let's not forget, had been in love with the same woman for years and years and never managed to cowboy up and do anything about it) suddenly became all decisive and brave. Other people also have some race issues with the film (where are all the black people at? Oh, they're looting the electronics store), so maybe the movie could have less hidebound in both of those directions.

Sadly, I probably don't ever need to see it again, except out of pure academic interest. But it was a really enjoyable experience. I thoroughly appreciated the way they ended it with the scenes at Coney Island as well, given that the film is more like a fairground ride than anything else.

Eventful week!

So, where were we?

Well, after last week's exciting panic attack in the car, I went to the doctor and we had a long talk, and now I'm taking anti-depressants for a few months in order to get myself together a bit. So far I can honestly say that I've failed to exhibit any of the potentially terrifying side effects that I was told to expect, but I am a bit giddy and quite anxious a lot of the time. Also very sleepy. I believe this is similar to the way that antibiotics make you feel sicker before you start to feel better.

Then, on Friday morning, I had a run-in with my archnemesis. Her dog followed me again, like it sometimes does, and she went off to park somewhere far away, expecting it to run back to her. Except that she had parked out of sight, and the dog didn't see where she'd gone, so it didn't know where to run to, so it just followed me, with Milo and Cody barking at it the whole time (they're not as crazy about other dogs running up to them uninvited as they used to be when they were younger).

When I got back to my car, she was parked next to it, texting away on her phone and making no attempt at all to look for her dog. So I put my two in my car, went over to her, and said, "you know anything could happen to your dog while he's down the beach on his own and you're up here." She assured me, in the snobbiest voice possible (she actually said "Oh no, I can assure you...") that he would not bother anyone, nor get into a fight with another dog. She considered my suggestion that all anyone had to do was throw him a piece of cheese and steal him completely laughable (she fake laughed at it), despite the fact that he is a pure bred, unneutered boxer.

Finally I said "well, the fact is that according to the law the dog is supposed to be under your control, and if you can't even see him, then he can't be under your control, can he? So maybe you should get out of your car occasionally and walk him."

She then informed me that she was very lucky, because she doesn't need to walk. I, on the other hand, clearly do, because I look like some kind of Michelin man. She then suggested that perhaps her dog liked me so much because he "obviously likes the smell". She invited me to call both the guards and the dog warden on her, and offered me her mobile phone number so I could be sure to get the details right.

The problem is that I can't call the dog warden, or even the guards. Everyone on that beach walks their dog off the lead, and several people walk restricted breeds off the lead, and certainly unmuzzled, so we'd all be looking at fines if the dog warden started showing up, and nobody wants that. In general, everyone knows which dogs get along and which ones don't, and we stay out of each other's way when necessary and everyone tries not to be a nuisance to everyone else, and it's all pretty peaceful. What can you do when one person just insists on ruining that setup for everyone else?

I don't think she would even care if I did steal her dog. Which, by the way, I am very tempted to do.

Anyway, then last night me and Mam went to salsa, which turned out to be really good fun and the least intimidating exercise/dance class that I've ever attended. Mam came and got me so I didn't have to drive on the motorway, so it was okay. Since I started the medication I've only been driving short distances, because I kind of forget what I'm doing a little bit sometimes. I'm not sure I'm ready for the motorway just yet.

Lousy start to the week

Last night, astute readers may remember, I was due to go to salsa class with Mam. Unfortunately this didn't happen, because I had a panic attack in the car on the motorway on the way there and had to turn around and come back. This was incredibly frightening, because my foot just lodged itself onto the accelerator and I couldn't slow down, and the car managed to get itself up to 130 kph, and I was hyperventilating and felt like I was on the verge of fainting (I've never fainted, so I don't really know if this was likely to happen or not) and couldn't figure out what to do, when the exit for Balbriggan loomed up in front of me and I was able to turn the wheel and get off, and the act of turning the wheel kind of freed up my foot to move to the brake, and I calmed down a bit.

Except of course then I went into shock, and had the slightly comic experience of sitting in crappy rush hour traffic in Balbriggan with tears streaming down my face, listening to some bloke on Matt Cooper's show talking about Cork GAA players and watching the traffic jam and thinking Jesus, imagine living as far out as Balbriggan and still having to cope with rush hour traffic.

Anyway, I got home okay and Mam came and sat with me and Mister M came home and it was all fine and we decided that I'm not going mental at all, sure, everyone has panic attacks now and then.

And now I have a monstrous toothache.

It is a bit of a shit start to the week. So, let's play Things to Look Forward to:
1) I have almost acquired Season One of The Wire, so we can finally see if it's as good as everyone says it is (I really hope it is).
2) Lost on Sunday. But not just Lost, oh no. HIGH DEFINITION Lost. You can come and watch it if you want, but you have to be very quiet and watch out for panicking motorists on the motorway.
3) Being a bit pissed off is always a good excuse to post a picture of Naveen. So here he is.

Are you anticipating?

(If you don't understand the picture, then you are not anticipating.)

WTF? Heath Ledger's dead!

So weird. Early reports suggest some kind of overdose. He never seemed particularly strange, did he?

He was only 28, too. Poor lad.

No Country for Old Men

Bless the IFI. They may like to keep their cinemas incredibly stuffy, and there's no leg room at all if you slump down in the seat low enough to actually rest your head on the back of it, but at least they had a lovely clean print of the film and the place was reasonably quiet. This is, as Ray pointed out, crucial to your enjoyment of this terse, spare, movie.

The plot concerns a man (Josh Brolin) who finds some money in the desert. Other men (Javier Bardem, Woody Harrelson, some random Mexicans) are looking for the money, so now they are looking for the man who found the money. One of these men (Javier Bardem) is a little more determined than the others, and is also a total psychopath. A chase ensues. Tommy Lee Jones is also there.

The first 4/5ths of the film are basically amazing. The domestic chat between Josh Brolin and his wife, Kelly McDonald, is beautiful; the way he goes about finding the money and dealing with what he's found is so clinical and everyday; everything--the amount of dialogue, the level at which it's spoken, the amount of movement exhibited by each of the characers--is dialled down to the bare minimum: there is a tool for getting this job done, and that tool is sparsity.

The problem is, though, that the film doesn't want to stop there. As Mister M points out, it suffers from the modern movie drawback of having too many endings. He also tells me that the book is the same, so it's not like the Coen brothers arsed it up or anything. The story stops, but the film carries on past it. This would be really annoying, except that Barry Corbin turns up at the very end, and everyone loves him, right?

Apparently the ending has sparked some debate, over what the film is really about, and who the main character is. Is the film centered on Javier Bardem vs. Josh Brolin, and should it therefore end when their story ends? Or is it about Tommy Lee Jones, in which case, should it end with the end of his story?

It's a valid question, and in theory I like the idea of the action-based story being a single event in a larger story, but I'm not sure it really works in practice, because it does just add time to what is already a long and intense evening in the pictures.

Still, it's pleasant to see a film that's worth a little bit of debate. Also, Texas looks wonderfully bleak in it, and I haven't seen anything so beautifully shot since Brokeback Mountain. Solid stuff.

All the Pretty Horses

Not read, but listened to, which still counts for the purposes of the New Year's resolution. I recently upgraded my eMusic account to include audiobooks, and have recently started listening to them while I try to tire the cat out in the mornings so I can get some work done.

This is an abridged version of All the Pretty Horses, read by Brad Pitt. He's an excellent reader for Cormac McCarthy, because he has that young but weary tone to his voice, which is ideal for telling the story of young men who cross the border from Texas into Mexico looking for work and getting into serious and grim trouble. This story has all the hallmarks of a Cormac McCarthy book (Note: I have never read a Cormac McCarthy book, I'm just going on what people tell me), including horses, trekking across inhospitable landscapes, feelings of loss and loneliness, and extreme and random violence. It's a pretty compelling story, and I'm looking forward to listening to the other two books in the trilogy, which are also available on eMusic for one audiobook credit. Pretty good value, I think.

God, this post really reads like one of those fake ones that people are paid to write to big something up, doesn't it?

The Office

Forgive me for being late to the party, but I've just started watching NBC's The Office on Paramount. Because they're showing two episodes a night and the first season is only six episodes long, I have missed the entire first season and came in at the fourth episode of season two. I liked it just fine; the characters are pleasant and the whole show is less cringey and comedy-of-embarrassment than the original version, so the fact that I wasn't laughing at it didn't bother me.

Last night, though, they showed "Take Your Daughter to Work Day", and either the characters have finally clicked with me, or it was genuinely a much funnier episode, because I laughed until I was almost sick. It feels a little like when The Simpsons finally realised that Homer rather than Bart was the star of the show; The Office seems to have figured out that, unlike the British version of the show, the will-they-won't-they relationship and the overpowering manager figure are not the centre of the show. The centre of the show is Dwight. I hope it keeps up like this.

Also, the great thing about watching it on Paramount is that I'll be able to catch all the episodes I missed when they run them again in a couple of weeks time. The only thing is that you can never, ever sit through the ad breaks on Paramount unless you want to see the same ad for Everybody Loves Raymond, That 70s Show, or some random bloody Lee Evans or Al Murray thing over and over again, every break, every show, forever.

The trouble with movies

Next week, all things being equal, Mister Monkey and I will take our first trip to the cinema in about three months. We never go to the cinema anymore, because I hate it, for reasons with which you will be well acquainted if you have ever met me.

However, I have agreed to go and see No Country for Old Men, the new Coen brothers movie, with Mister M next week. Mister M is a big Cormac McCarthy fan, and we both love the Coen brothers, even if there is some division in the Monkey House over what constitutes a great Coen brothers movie

(The Hudsucker Proxy is a bad one. Hey! It's my blog.)

One the one hand, I'm kind of excited to see this film. Who doesn't love a critically acclaimed new Coen brothers movie? Many of my friends whose tastes in film I would endorse say it is great. Also, you can never have too much Kelly McDonald in films, nor Barry Corbin neither.

BUT! It could be really boring. A few people have said it was really boring, and the comparisons that people make with Blood Simple (a Coen brothers film I have to admit I find, well, a little boring) make me suspicious of it. Also, I don't like Javier Bardem. Like, really, in an irrational way don't like him.

We shall see.

Post-op smidger update

It seems to be safe to leave her alone for hours at a time now, without me worrying what that crashing noise was, or her trying to pull the collar off over her head and getting wedged with it half in her mouth (as she did yesterday; Tuesday she managed to pull it off entirely and give her stitches a good tug).

But really, this post is just an excuse to include a cute picture I took, in which she looks like a future space cat from the 1960s.

Post-op smidger

Rory went to the vet yesterday for her op. I haven't put a female pet through a spay since we had Layla, so I wasn't quite prepared for just what a major operation it is. Unlike bloke animals, where everything's on the outside and just gets whipped off fairly summarily (I was sent home with a buster collar for Milo, but he never needed it and never wore it), the smidge has to wear a collar for the next ten days, and her side is all shaved and has a small but deep scar on it, because everything has been taken out. This will be difficult, because her favourite way of getting downstairs is to climb between the bannisters, which she currently can't do.

The good news is that she bears us no ill will, and was up and about and eating and bumping into everything and sleeping on my lap again yesterday evening like a good 'un. Now I just need to look up the best way to wash her, or she will get manky and be upset. She's a fanatically clean cat, and even loves her comb. It will be hard for her not to be able to get at herself. Having said that, the inside of her collar is spotless.

Now Mister M and I and the fish are the only gendered animals left in the house.

Hot Dogs by Himself

When Queenie came home at Christmas, she and Himself arrived like the Magi, bearing gifts. A suitable book, the most excellent note cards (I keep opening up the box and just looking at them; I may never send them, they are too nice), a six-pack of Monkey beer, and a jar of home-made relish, courtesy of Himself.

This evening, this cold and rainy and miserable evening, I decided that the time had come to scoff the relish. So I took the weiners out that I had bought for Mister M, and I grilled them along with the veggie sossies I bought for myself. I also fried up some mushrooms and two types of onion. Then I split some hot dog buns and opened up the jar of relish Himself had made for us.

I was expecting it to be good, but I wasn't quite prepared for just how good it was. Sweet and crunchy. Everything a weiner could want. Of course, now we both have pains from inhaling the hot dogs so fast.

Thanks to Himself for brightening up a rotten winter evening. NOM NOM NOM.

Salsa!

I have just booked my mother and myself into a ten-week salsa/aerobics class, because I like dancing and I like the idea of being able to go to a dance class where I don't need a bloke.

Also, I am a fatass.

It might be fun. Right?

Birthday wishes

Wishes for happy birthdays go out to palzors Myles and Andrew today. Myles is one of several people I know who turn 39 this year. Next year is going to be busy with HUEG parties, I imagine.

Right Myles, right?

Andrew turns 23 again today. Bless him.

What cool presents did you get?

I got some cool things this year, such as the Solio, which is attached to the kitchen window as we speak, soaking up any piece of direct sunlight that happens to pass by. I also got this Cary Grant DVD box set, which is a thing of wonder, and this Radley handbag, which I have wanted very much ever since I first saw it some months ago.

Funny thing, I never cared about handbags before in my life. I mean, I like a nice handbag, but I never cared about brand names before Radley came into my life. I love the shape of them, and yes, they have a little dog.

I got two books only, but man, there's no Cecilia Ahern books here. Columbo gave me a book about Pinter, and Queenie gave me a book that I can only imagine must have screamed my name when she saw it. Fair play to her for listening, I am looking forward to it immensely.

Edited to add: I also got some cool jewellery from ComedyB (please don't rob my house, thks). If you are a chap, and you're thinking about buying jewellery for a lady, you could do worse than take ComedyB with you. He has good taste in the bauble area (see what I did there?).