Watching Glen Hansard write songs

I never saw Once before. It's very pleasant, except for the fact that Glen Hansard is a Grafton St. busker in it. I hate Grafton St. buskers. I never liked them much, even when I was younger and just used to traipse around Grafton St. for fun. But as I got older and often had serious business to transact on the street, they became a positive nuisance.

In particular, I remember going for some counselling sessions in a second-or-third floor office on Grafton St. and having to listen to buskers outside while trying to collect my thoughts and come up with something useful to say about my life and my relationship with other people and the world. I remember wanting to go outside after the session and shout at the buskers in frustration, because they just make so much bloody noise.

I'm not often in a hurry when I'm in town these days, and I don't mind buskers so much. I'd mind them even less if they were all like the young lad who plays drums with a couple of plastic bottles.

Still not crazy about unsolicited music in some public places though. Particularly in the Long Hall. Fuck off with that shit.

The Office romances. (May contain spoilers for those watching on Comedy Central in the UK)

One of the things I love about The Office is that the characters in it who go out with each other actually like one another and have things in common. Just like real life! In most other sitcoms I have seen, not only are the friends constantly trying to fuck each other over in a way that makes you wonder how they ever became friends at all, but the couples have NOTHING in common. In fact in most cases it is from this lack of common ground that most of the "situations" that give rise to the "comedy" emerge.

The differences between Ross and Rachel, to take a popular example, are staggering. They're always trying to hide things from each other, get out of going to one another's work events, or avoid having to take part in each other's hobbies or pastimes.

Jim and Pam, on the other hand, support each other, laugh at the same jokes, and want the same things out of life. So do Michael and Holly, and Phyllis and Bob Vance. Even Dwight and Angela, when they were together (and they will be again) shared a love of Birkenstocks and being horrible to other people. Furthermore, the few times they have put incompatible couples together on The Office, it has worked out horribly, rather than with hilarious results. Mrmonkey still can't watch Melora Hardin in anything, because Jan Levinson gives him the fear so much.

Local election special!

So, having busted his ass and spent a fortune on getting elected as our local TD, why is Thomas Byrne now trying to get out of national government and into Europe?

To date, I've had approximately 14 pieces of election literature put through my door (including one from the terrifying-looking Joanne Finnegan, who is running as an independent now, instead of as a Sinn Fein candidate, as if we might forget she ever was one), and only ONE actual candidate/canvasser calling to the door. He is local Duleek publican Seamus O'Neill, and he is, so far, my number one preference. Why? Because he is not a member of a political party, he told me he has a woman lined up to work for him who has 25 years of experience in getting stuff done in politics, and when I told him the things I would like to see done, he wrote them in a notebook along with my email address and phone number.

He also had the good grace to laugh at my joke about the annual ritual of the Placing of the Bin on Laytown beach, which happens on the first Monday in May every year. A JCB comes along and places The Bin on the path leading down to the beach. The Bin remains there until the first of October, when it flies south for the winter.

Yes, okay, I'm easily pleased. But I have to vote for someone, and it might as well be him.

Dammit Jim!

So, after looking forward to Star Trek for months and months and months, myself and Mister Monkey snuck out the other week to go and see it. Well, it kind of felt like sneaking out because we probably should have gone into the city centre to see friends, and because we drove for an hour each way to get to Liffey Valley, which contains Ireland's biggest cinema screen.

It was completely worth the hassle. The film was AWESOME. The only reason I haven't blogged about it before now is that I don't really have interesting to say about it. I just sat there with a stupid grin on my face throughout the entire thing (except for that Willy Wonka bit with Scotty, that was just kind of annoying), which was exciting and fun and kind of sexy and... well, I have one reservation. And yes, it is a bit "Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film...", but I think it's valid. It was all a little bit gung ho, wasn't it? Just a tiny bit militaristic, maybe? The beginning, when all the cadets were getting on their different ships and they were all excited to be going out into space just seemed to be a little bit too much Starship Troopers and a little bit too little Wrath of Khan for my liking. I'm not saying I want 90 minutes of discussion about the Prime Directive in every single Trek movie, but it is that soul that has always set it apart from other sci fi, and I don't want it to get lost in among the frankly amazing action sequences and the whole, beautiful look of the thing.

Other than that, I loved it. Everything about it was bright and shiny and positive and forward-looking, and the cast was just wonderful, particularly Karl Urban as Bones. He really sets the tone for the others to follow, pitching the performance somewhere between impersonation and original interpretation. For once I even see the point of Zachary Quinto.

So yes. A resounding success. I welcome our new Trek overlords.

Why did I open this article, why?

Of course I knew no good could come of it.

Sweden, here she comes

On Tuesday we got our first bull terrier foster, a staffie cross called Kaya. Despite the protestations of the nice lady from the rescue about her lovely personality, I was initially apprehensive about her coming here. I am, I'll admit, a teeny bit nervous about bull breeds and their reputation and their physical strength. I was slightly concerned that she would accidentally hurt one of the other dogs, or that she would get loose and attack the cats, or something.

In fact, the nice lady from the rescue was completely correct. Kaya was a total sweetheart in every way. She loved her cuddles, she LOVED playing with Lulu, she stayed where she was put, slept through the night, made no messes, and was friendly towards everyone she met while she was here. She also has a slightly wonky face because her jaw got broken when she was a puppy (or an even younger puppy than she is now), which makes her even more adorable and highly drooly.

We will miss her tremendously, even though she was only here a few days.

Chuck me, NBC

Chuck has, over the course of its second series, transformed from being a mildly enjoyable show that contained a few pleasant geeky elements to being one of our very favourite shows here at the Monkey House. Everything about it is fun, light-hearted, just smart enough to be unpredictable, and incredibly geeky.

It's also built up quite a following on the blogs and so on.

Nevertheless, NBC have chosen to leave us Chuck fans guessing about the fate of our beloved Buy More employees and kick-ass NSA/CIA operatives. Oh sure, they've renewed Heroes, despite it being unwatchably bad, and Parks and Recreation, despite it being nothing but a pale imitation of The Office, but no word on Chuck.

A cancellation for Chuck would round out an already sucky week for us and our love of decent U.S. television, what with those losers at FX deciding to drop Colbert (one FX employee on Twitter said that it was because the show was expensive and didn't get many viewers. I say if you want viewers, don't bump your show from 11:30pm to 00:05am, IDIOTS).

I hope Chuck doesn't get cancelled. I do love it so.

OMG! It's nearly time...

...for new Star Trek.

From trekmovie.com via the AV Club:

Tonight Paramount pulled off one of the coolest stunts in fan history. Promoted as just a 10 minute preview of the new Star Trek to show along with The Wrath of Khan, tonight fans in Austin, TX were actually shown the entire new Star Trek movie. The event included surprise guests, including the original Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy.

And then, surprisingly:

According to a friend who called in to TrekMovie after the event, the audience reaction was very positive.
Gosh, really? Because I would have expected people to want their money back.

On a positive note

I have two pieces of important dog news!

The first is that we have decided to keep Lulu (because it's always good to make Important Life Decisions when you're depressed, right?). Some lovely people came to see her on Friday, but decided that she wasn't quite the right dog for them, even though they did think she was fabulous. In all of that, though, we realised that the upset we go through every time a dog leaves this house into someone else's care is just too much for our fragile spirits to bear. So we decided to keep her. The rescue was unsurprised to learn of our decision, especially since we had already rejected two perfectly good homes for her on the grounds that they would want her to sleep (gasp!) outdoors. No dog of mine sleeps outdoors. Unless it is a malamute or some similar breed that would bake if left in a kitchen overnight.

In other good news, the labrador we rescued off the beach last Sunday, with no collar and no microchip, was reclaimed from Meath pound on Monday. The dog went missing early last Sunday morning, so the next day the owners rang around the pounds and the warden said "yes, I've had a call about a dog like that, I'm collecting him this morning, you can pick him up this afternoon." Hilariously, however, the dog turns out to live in this very estate. Hopefully the owners have had enough of a fright that they will put a fecking collar on the thing. But see, sometimes it's okay if you have to send a dog to the pound, even if it goes against everything you believe in.

I have entered a period of depression

Not the personal, unable-to-get-out-of-bed depression (which is a relief), but the more broad what-is-the-fucking-point-of-people depression. This tends to be easier to live around, but worse overall, because I can't magic it away with tablets.

It is brought on by reading things like The Economist, or watching things like Darwin's Dangerous Idea on the telly, in which Andrew Marr gives a potted history of humans fucking up the earth in the name of profit, left right and centre, from the Industrial Revolution right up to the present day. You just look at it and wonder what the point is? What is the point of me recycling anything, or not driving my car, or cutting back on air travel? It's too little and it's too late and me and all the people who work even harder than me to actually live some kind of green existence are up against too many forces that just don't give a shit about anything at all other than making money for anything we do to ever make the blindest bit of difference at all.

People say that important movements are built from the grassroots up. Anti-slavery movements, feminism, children's rights, and so forth. But these movements took hundreds of years to develop and very few of them have actually achieved their final ends yet. And environmentalism doesn't have the luxury of time. The world in this picture is not womankind as a whole, or children as a whole, or black people as a whole, but an individual person who is going to die unless someone does something really drastic really right now. But nothing's being done. Or rather, not enough is being done.

On a more focused level, there's all this business about Jade and Dunblane and so on. Normally I get to ignore this kind of thing by not reading the papers, ever, but now here it is, and it's all part of the same cycle, and it makes me, well, very depressed.

I have watched this three times

And it is still funny.

I am so mature!

Yes, 39 years old yesterday, and still happy to laugh at this line from The Economist:

President Obama spent much of his first week trying to push his gargantuan stimulus package through Congress.

Why I may not be watching Watchmen

First off, I never read the book.

Having got that out of the way, let's proceed.

Well, you don't get to see Billy Crudup much.
And ever since I saw Little Children and its incredibly disturbing masturbation scene, I can't ever look at this guy again.
Also, one of the lady Watchmen highlighted one of my problems with superhero comics and movies when she pointed out that high heels, corsets, and latex are very uncomfortable, and that if she was an actual superhero she would wear running shoes and sweat pants.
Oh, and I hated 300.

(Also, while I'm watching Film 2009, why can't Sarah Ferguson open her mouth when she talks? It would make her ever so much easier to understand.)

Last night, I dreamed...

... oh yes. Just as every newspaper columnist eventually gets round to writing a column about how difficult they found it to write their column this week, so every blogger eventually gets around to telling you about their dream they had last night.

Well, last night I dreamed I was having an affair with David Attenborough. Proper David Attenborough, as he is now, like, not some dream version of him where he is labeled "David Attenborough" but actually looks like Jon Hamm. I can think of several reasons why this is appealing.

First, who doesn't love David Attenborough? Would his voice not bring you out of a coma, if you were in one? And he's taken on a new, battling persona since the news emerged of the hate mail he receives from creationists. He's also the guardian of all animals in the world, as we know, and is on personal chatting terms with many endangered species, many of whom I'm very worried about at the moment.

David Attenborough is also the king (inasmuch as we believe in kings) of the non-speciesist humanists. He is always at pains to point out that although we appear, to ourselves, to be the pinnacle of evolution, we're nothing like it. It's this kind of talk that makes me more convinced than ever that people like Giles Coren are wronger than someone who answers "fourteen" to "what's ten plus two?" when they express the belief that pets are unnecessary and should be discarded.

I can get behind the point of activists like Peter Singer that it's wrong for their sakes to keep animals, but I am sentimental about animals (which I realise is a stupid trait, but hey, some people believe in God or football teams. We all have our coping mechanisms). I also believe that it's good for people, and indeed, other animals, to live with different types of animals. I believe it teaches you something. Even if all it teaches you is that you don't like people very much sometimes. Particularly when they send threatening mail to David Attenborough.

Word to your larium

Some of you may remember that I spent the summer of 1991 in Berkeley, California, living in a shared house with a bunch of Berkeley students, getting stoned, and watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is a summer that retains a very special place in my heart, even though, obviously, I can't really remember a lot of the actual details. Indeed, three or four years later, when myself and Older Brother Monkey went to Berkeley for the weekend, I couldn't find my way around at all.

In the last couple of weeks, I re-engaged with a couple of people from those days through the magic of Facebook. Even more excitingly, it turned out that one of these lovely people was going to be in Dublin for the first time ever for a brief visit this week, so he asked me if we could go out for a pint. Of course I agreed, but then, also of course, spent the time leading up to seeing him worrying that I had remembered everything all wrong and he was going to ask me for money, or even that I wouldn't be able to recognise him when I saw him.

Neither of these things turned out to be the case. He remembered that summer much as I did, and we told Mister Monkey some stories. Then we spent the rest of the night talking about Middle Eastern politics, American foreign policy, and behavioral science. Plus we had some good food.

All in all, it was a top night. Now I know how people who actually liked the people they went to school with must feel when they go to their reunions.

Glinner's right, you know.

Why is this story not enormous? A 12-year-old is accused of prostitution and assault, having been beaten to shit by some police officers? WTF?

Lulu update

I know that many of my younger readers only tune into this blog to find out how my dogs are doing. So, for those younger readers, here's the update:

Lulu is still completely adorable. She does still occasionally pee on the floor in the living room, and she will still shred cushions or whatever else you've got lying around if she's bored. But since we came back from Glasgow and took them out of the kennels, she insists on sleeping in the same bed as Milo, so we've had to take his small bed out of the kitchen and replace it with a larger bed so she doesn't crush him. She wrestles with Marvin, she's the sweetest girl to Mrmonkey, and she still comes back whenever you call her. We do NOT want someone to adopt her. EVER.

She particularly likes kids. Just in case any of you younger readers would like to make friends with a dog.

Economy's crap, isn't it?

Some friends of mine, who are married to each other, were recently laid off by a company they have worked for pretty much since they left college. This company is not in any financial difficulty whatsoever, it's just a slave to its shareholders, and it's gotten greedy. Bunch of tossers. That's the last one of their phones I'll be buying, that's for fucking sure.

Here in Monkey Mansions, however, things look a little bit more solid. Mrmonkey was informed that it is highly unlikely that his company will close its engineering office in Dublin, and I've actually got overtime on! I know!

We are celebrating this fact by getting some work done on the house before we do get made redundant, because I know if I do get laid off, I'd rather spend my period of unemployment sitting in a nicely landscaped back yard than in some scrubby back garden. Mrmonkey was slightly concerned that our neighbours would think we were flaunting our employed status (our next-door neighbour got laid off from his construction job some months ago and is now working a shitty night-time delivery job, which he hates). But if nobody hires anybody to do any work, then the economy will never get going again.

(I am right, right? How would you feel if you lost your job and the people next door to you were having their garden landscaped? I think I would only care if I was a garden landscaper and they hadn't asked me.)

No snow over Edward's house

It has been a cold winter here on the flat shores of Laytown. We had a lovely spell there where it was crispy cold, like I imagine it to be in more impressive countries that are something more than the plaything of the North Atlantic and its zephyrs. Now it is snowing everywhere, it seems, except over our house. While Dublin airport closed down and the radio predicted "heavy snowfalls and severe weather warnings over the north and east of the country" I would stare out my window and see only trees bent double in the ever strengthening wind. Because you can be sure, if you're having snow, we're having a knifing wind here in the 'town.

Secretly, of course, I'm glad. The only thing to recommend snow is that it makes for good photos, particularly if you're the kind of person who has turned to making her own cards because she doesn't knit and is therefore always looking for a good photo to put on a Christmas card. Actually, there's one more thing to recommend a heavy fall of snow, but it's slightly lame. And it is that it would keep mrmonkey at home from work and we could spend the day together, because I like that.

Also, the dogs bloody love snow.

Okay, so there are a lot of things to recommend it. But we haven't got any, so there's no point in delighting in the fact that there are no snowballs for the local kids to throw at us, and there's no chance of me wiping out on the path while walking down to the beach.

Sadly, however, our lovely crispy cold has been replaced by a horrible, typical damp cold that chilled me so much today that I had to stand under a hot shower for longer than is probably good for the environment.

I would take snow over this.

More crime books

I believe I may have pointed out before that I don't read many crime books. I had another go a couple of weeks ago with Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace. Eoghan gave me this book for Christmas 07, and I just got around to it now. That gives you an idea of the rate at which I'm ploughing through books.

Anyway, I didn't like Tokyo Year Zero. His writing style irritated me. It was too sing-song and repetitive; too much poetry and not enough prose. I know that's the point. I know it was probably supposed to signify something about feeling trapped and the claustrophobia of the destroyed city and the endless grind of being a police investigator, but it was too much style and not enough content for me. It also had that feature of crime novels that I hate, when there's some really important and pertinent piece of evidence that will tie the whole case together, and it's hinted a lot, and everyone knows what it is except the reader. That always seems kind of lazy to me, like using pure coincidence to drive a story forwards all the time.

So I gave it up after about 100 pages, and I decided that I would give the George P. Pelecanos book that I bought months ago a shot at the title. If I don't like this, I thought, that is officially it, I will officially give up on crime books.

And now I'm wondering why I'm sitting here blogging about this, when I could be READING GEORGE PELECANOS.