Well it's been an uneventful week apart from the odd terrorist attack and two harebrained lunatrons lunging through the check-in door at Glasgow Airport shouting "Allah". Tut tut. One got par-grilled in the process which won't do him any favours when he gets to the prison gym. It can't all be to do with the profligacy of the West and sluty women wearing Gucci glasses instead of eh, those face curtains. What makes these Babylonian mud-monsters so impractically angry? There's obviously bog all chance of those government-funded left wing organisations who try so hard to be conciliatory with extremists, getting through. Of course it would be unlike me to suggest something right wing, but there are still a few unpopulated areas of the planet that could be used as deportation hubs; parts of Siberia, Borneo or deforested patches of the Amazon where crazed killers could relocate and rip one another's skin off. And as women are so hated, they wouldn't have to breed anymore and could arse around, shrieking at the sky, and eventually a meteorite might come. Back in the civilised world, I'm trying to rid the last of my work so that I can get down to business with this book as publisher person wants to rendevous in late July. After many months of lethargy and farting green lentils, I am ready to get stuck in. There's also another 'biog' book on the cards too, so I'm off the booze and trying to ditch the soap operas. Recent episodes of Eastenders might just be the antidote as Dawn, in the midst of giving birth, hollered out: "I'm guffawing like a bison", so really whichever script writer is on crack cocaine should get hauled out and forced to continue working life in a London Underground coffee kiosk. That, and the fact that Dawn's newborn baby was sitting up with its eyes open and smiling, at two days old. There has to be some accountability for paying a TV license fee. Add to this Charley from Big Brother puking into a bucket on TV tonight and I'm ready to unplug the TV for a minimum of six months and take up reading again after a break of 10 years. The weather has been delightfully shit which keeps the cider-spides in their holes even if the global warming goblins are claiming it as a coup d'état, proof that the fragility of the planet isn't just a biblical conjecture. Either way, I don't mind. Rainy nights in bed are always welcome, even moreso if I'm not alone. Today, munching my toasted tuna sambo in Clements I was deeply disturbed by a picture in the Irish Times of a hybrid horse/zebra yoke that looked too insane to be true. Apparently it was an 'unplanned' rendevous but a white horse with a zebra head made me feel markedly unsafe in the world. How can I go ahead and have a child when there's equine perverts sharing the same airspace? My mate Anita, aka 'lesbian with the lump' still hasn't been to the doctor and I found out today via an amiable transexual friend of ours that she's had stomach pains for three years and the 'lump' is spreading like a forest fire. I'm deeply disturbed by the fact that she's so in denial and/or too scared to go to a doctor, so I've invited her to Belfast for the weekend in two week's time. She thinks she's coming here for an unscrupulous weekend of cocktails (minus the cock of course), but I'm going to do her head in to drive the message through. I've already been to one close mate's funeral this year that rattled my world and I certainly don't want to see another friend submerged in clay four decades too soon. It's been a bizarre year that way in that I know or have heard of a fair few young people falling seriously ill. It makes no sense considering my parent's generation who lacked even basic nutrition throughout the war years and went on to delight in bad marriages, decades of chain smoking and guzzling fat from cow's arses, live on till they look like extras out of MJs Thriller video. On that note, I am off to the mock 4-poster for some Zzzzzzzzzzzzzs.
Saturday 30 June 2007
Thursday 21 June 2007
Maggie's alive & well
Bloody hell, the spirit of Thatcherism is alive and well. The two-bedroom apartment the McCann family rented in Praia da Luz where Maddie was snatched from went on the market for £75,000 last week, just half its actual value. A British couple offered the asking price within days and they have already completed the deal, according to Portuguese newspapers. The UK Sun said the market rate for similar properties was £150,000. Some audacious Northerner with an eye for a nasty bargain got in there, regardless of the horrible going-ons. The same week that a Francis Bacon 'self portrait' (never quite got the concept of that, it's a bit masturbatory isn't it?) sold for €32 million smackaroonies & my landlord put the rent up by £40. Money really is a type of sickness, although a brand of malaise that makes life easier. I don't mind the landlord putting up the rent a tad though. This 3-bed house in a lovely area of Belfast is still a lot cheaper than my 1-bed 380 sq ft. apartment was in Dublin. Ownership of property no longer matters a toss to me; quality of life is what's important... waking up somewhere decent, having space to think/live, enough room for friends to stay and the odd orgy of course (I have a red canopy 4-poster bed, yum!) In a strange mood overall this week. I should oft to bed now for lusty dreams involving cling film & melted white chocolate. Will report back tomorrow on my findings. Verdant frogs need to get their beauty sleep too. PS. There's a frog & toad study group (for real) in Australia...www.fats.org.au who profess to have a genuine interest in frogs and tadpoles, so at least I know I can rest easy in the knowledge that barmy strangers care for me. They even have a dedicated Frogwatch Helpline which is more than Victim Support gets in Ireland, so it makes you think. The group reckons there's a big decline in global frog numbers related to climate changes (yawn, what else!?) and widespread atmospheric pollution. I think it's more a case that we're all fucked, whether you eat monosodium glutamate-laden cup-a-soups, have unprotected sex with 196 people in one year or holiday on a geographical fault line. Which brings me back to the beauty of going to bed and switches off for a few hours. Ribbid. Croak. Burp.
Tuesday 19 June 2007
Big Bollix
Big Brother really is a pile of yack this year, isn't it? Worse than ever before, I reckon. Young women frantically studying WAGology and celebrity tag-ons musing their minges off about the testosterone stampede than inevitably awaits them when they're released from the house. I had to laugh at Johnaton last night; intelligent capitalist geezer with brown eyes - he thinks he has the dim-witted twins sussed - that they are a shrewd marketing duo playing with the public's head. After all, they can't be that thick & at University? The twins hadn't a breeze what he was talking about when he broached their game-plan in the bathroom. They reverted to all things pink and giggled. "Genius!" he said, smiling. He really doesn't get it. Millionaires often don't.
The collective light-headedness is repetitive to the extreme. Tracey is a cool geezer-girl, Carol is at least adult even if more boring than her audition tape suggested, Laura is bright too and Johnaton is a breath of fresh air. The remnants should've been guarded from birth by trampoline-strength condoms. Did you ever hear anything 'loike' that bug-brain Brian: "I loike kinda loike going shopping en stuff", when asked what he does with his life. "I'm just loike an ordinary geezer, gettin' pissed en stuff." Rock on. Billi looks like a ghoul from the Rocky Horror Show, who pays for coconut baths and has taken the art of self-absorption to new frightening highs. And the grotesque way the new men are commodifying the totty in the house makes me gag. "There's no-one left to getta hold ov en ere", said scholar Brian.
I have to admit that it was also a culture shock when I left Pope-licking Ireland in 1988 for London. For a while I was mute and uncommunicative out of pure shock. I remember thinking, "it can't be this way, it can't be this easy?" Everything in Ireland was stiff and rigid like a Bishop's knob. There were no jobs, no prospects, no hope. In London the employment agencies were spuing down with jobs; they did exactly what it said on the tin. I took the first one that came along and just sat in silence listening to the office chat; mostly it was moans about money, new paint colours, car insurance (young people had cars!), divorce, costa holidays, sex, jewellery. There was such similitude in the national psyche that all the women came back to work after X-mass with the same present (albeit with some amount of variability): gold dolphins. Sold en masse in H. Samuel at the time I was convinced Margaret Thatcher had bugged the proletariat with these dinky gold dolphins to see what was really going on in the furtive underground of chav Britain. "Oh, you got the Dolphin earrings, gorgeous, I got loike, the loike, dolphin anklet.... and Gillian got the Dolphin necklace".
University was of course moderately different, the people were more zany, fucked up, interesting.... a Muslim mate who ran away from her four abusive brothers, a posh cider-swigging girl from Devon, a homeless Brighton girl who hadn't seen her family in six years, Richard who often slept in wheelie bins, a Vasectomy from Sheffield, a right-wing lesbian who changed her surname to 'Queen' & denounced all men including her son, etc etc etc. I had a ball, ate drugs, got seduced by a woman under a fish tank in Tottenham (tellingly, she's now a professional actress), fell in love with a Sikh man who'd been married and gay and a cocaine addict all at the same time. Life was colourful even if somewhat confusing. It was a jumble of materialism and mayhem, but compared to Ireland, it was a piss in the right direction.
Now, I thank my fluky stars I didn't stay on and have a kid there. What is accessible in terms of infrastructure, ethnicity, work, opportunity, equality, etc., is all great, but the "culture" is totally barmy. If little girls can grow up to believe that being an adjunct to a brainless footballer's cock is a career, and young men believe that going shopping in the local multiplex and shaving their balls on a Thursday night [Brian alluded to this in last night's BB episode] constitutes the modern world, bring back the Blitz, the miner's strikes & the race riots of the 1980s. Anything has to be better than this brand of barrenness?
The collective light-headedness is repetitive to the extreme. Tracey is a cool geezer-girl, Carol is at least adult even if more boring than her audition tape suggested, Laura is bright too and Johnaton is a breath of fresh air. The remnants should've been guarded from birth by trampoline-strength condoms. Did you ever hear anything 'loike' that bug-brain Brian: "I loike kinda loike going shopping en stuff", when asked what he does with his life. "I'm just loike an ordinary geezer, gettin' pissed en stuff." Rock on. Billi looks like a ghoul from the Rocky Horror Show, who pays for coconut baths and has taken the art of self-absorption to new frightening highs. And the grotesque way the new men are commodifying the totty in the house makes me gag. "There's no-one left to getta hold ov en ere", said scholar Brian.
I have to admit that it was also a culture shock when I left Pope-licking Ireland in 1988 for London. For a while I was mute and uncommunicative out of pure shock. I remember thinking, "it can't be this way, it can't be this easy?" Everything in Ireland was stiff and rigid like a Bishop's knob. There were no jobs, no prospects, no hope. In London the employment agencies were spuing down with jobs; they did exactly what it said on the tin. I took the first one that came along and just sat in silence listening to the office chat; mostly it was moans about money, new paint colours, car insurance (young people had cars!), divorce, costa holidays, sex, jewellery. There was such similitude in the national psyche that all the women came back to work after X-mass with the same present (albeit with some amount of variability): gold dolphins. Sold en masse in H. Samuel at the time I was convinced Margaret Thatcher had bugged the proletariat with these dinky gold dolphins to see what was really going on in the furtive underground of chav Britain. "Oh, you got the Dolphin earrings, gorgeous, I got loike, the loike, dolphin anklet.... and Gillian got the Dolphin necklace".
University was of course moderately different, the people were more zany, fucked up, interesting.... a Muslim mate who ran away from her four abusive brothers, a posh cider-swigging girl from Devon, a homeless Brighton girl who hadn't seen her family in six years, Richard who often slept in wheelie bins, a Vasectomy from Sheffield, a right-wing lesbian who changed her surname to 'Queen' & denounced all men including her son, etc etc etc. I had a ball, ate drugs, got seduced by a woman under a fish tank in Tottenham (tellingly, she's now a professional actress), fell in love with a Sikh man who'd been married and gay and a cocaine addict all at the same time. Life was colourful even if somewhat confusing. It was a jumble of materialism and mayhem, but compared to Ireland, it was a piss in the right direction.
Now, I thank my fluky stars I didn't stay on and have a kid there. What is accessible in terms of infrastructure, ethnicity, work, opportunity, equality, etc., is all great, but the "culture" is totally barmy. If little girls can grow up to believe that being an adjunct to a brainless footballer's cock is a career, and young men believe that going shopping in the local multiplex and shaving their balls on a Thursday night [Brian alluded to this in last night's BB episode] constitutes the modern world, bring back the Blitz, the miner's strikes & the race riots of the 1980s. Anything has to be better than this brand of barrenness?
Saturday 9 June 2007
Bon Voyage!
Bon voyage! I am off to a corner of the Costa for some white fish & rosé wine & a cheerful book about a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Lover says I better not do his head in "rabbitng" on the beach as he wants to lie there, motionless, like a forgotten turd in a motel toilet and let the sun lolly its cancerous tongue all over him. But I find sun and sand and the usual aquatic accompaniments boring after about half an hour, so will probably melt his brain big-style. Yeah!
Yesterday I braved a journey into Belfast's Primark, which is always ransacked by chavs (I know in my bones, right now, there's a tech-savvy person out there inventing a Chav-nav satellite system, some funky hand-held PDA device that shoppers can use to direct them away from the looped earring masses). I have to say there's a peculiar essence at work here, where 'mums' compete with their daughters until they both end up shaking chrome clothes racks and storming off in pouty huffs towards the door where other mothers who've just had the same experience are chain-smoking. There were a good few 'mother & daughter' duos, dressed identical, tight jeans, yuck yellow tops, shite belts & silver pumps... and the daughters were goading, saying things like, "ach, d'ye think this will suit me Ma? Ye know, with me good figure an' all?" And the mum in this case glanced down at her own body, grabbed the manky sun-dress off her daughter and said, "I think I could get into that...". This is the type of grotesque parental immaturity that fills me with dread and would make me Nilfisk a child from my fanny rather than emotionally abuse them all the way to adulthood.
The 'sundress syndrome' is usually only attributed to women who have their kids too young, before they're grown up themselves. Where do they get off? Anyway, I fear I will only be able to limp my way to the beach & back to the apartment as the hip is now TOTALLY frogged... degeneration has been as swift as a US army plane landing at Shannon without the media noticing, and I can only imagine I will be flat on my back sponging up the morphine soon. The pain is now so chronic, that even sitting down hurts like hell. Sigh. After an anger fit last week re: health & lack of wealth, I'm in post-denial mode now, realising that the entire process has to be taken on the chin again in order for the best possible long-term outcome. I am frogging myself about the next hip replacement operation & the long recovery afterwards where you smell of piss for weeks on end because you're told not to have a shower, and really, rubbing your nethers with a face cloth, achieve little. I've been there.
I registered with a doctor yesterday (after a year, tut tut) and he's sending off a referral letter to some orthopaedic people in Belfast who are great at bone stuff having fixed up lots of bullet recipients during the Paisley-Adams years. He was surprisingly thorough, wanting to know all kinds of gruesome things like smear tests and boob tests and blood tests and can you put your wee wee in this bottle for me and how much do you smoke and what is your diet like, etc. The NHS is changing. In the late 1980s GPs throughout Britain prescribed Sudafed for all ailments whether it was an infected toenail or life-threatening TB picked up in Stratford Tube Station. But aside from all that malarkey, this Tuesday will be another flight from Malaga to Madrid for the conference.
I will boot along late, as usual (this time it's flight times, not me being inept) and when all the hi-tech stuff is done, I'll race to the sauna and steam myself until all my sins explode and the Baby Jesus thinks I'm pleasant again. I fell out with my divine father frog when he insisted I be the recipient of genital warts from my first 'ever' boyfriend on Valentine's Day, 1989, and since then I haven't really taken the bearded git seriously. But obviously, like everyone else, I'll turn back religious when I'm old, just in case there's any truth in it.
I've worked out that the life cycle in general works like this: innocent & fairly harmless till about age 10 or 11, then a scheming, hormonal shithead up to about 19, then relatively amiable for a few short years when laden with curiosity & a will to learn, there's not that much room for being a bollix until the self obsession era from about age 24 to 33. Then other people suddenly become noticeable again from age 34 to 42 especially if you're looking for a life partner or are desperate to get up the duff. From 43 to 55, a ruthless mudderfrogger who will cut off at least a few family members, fire a few minions, walk over a few people's graves, ponder why you hadn't this power years ago in your 20s, then from 56 to 66, there's a period of intense philosophical debate within yourself, probably change partners or kill one off or do another University course, start lecturing to younger family members now that you're so wise and have had at least two cancer scares, superseded by the 67 to 77 stage, where you fall over a lot and talk about how much technology is hindering you, the shallowness of young people, how obnoxious middle age is, etc., and about this time, you'll let God in. Any age after that is really just getting the last word in constantly, saying "I remember" a lot, even when you don't, fear of maggots and thoughts about other planets. Well, after that, doesn't bear thinking about. Anyway, I'm off on a brief hol. Cyber-see you all when I return.
Yesterday I braved a journey into Belfast's Primark, which is always ransacked by chavs (I know in my bones, right now, there's a tech-savvy person out there inventing a Chav-nav satellite system, some funky hand-held PDA device that shoppers can use to direct them away from the looped earring masses). I have to say there's a peculiar essence at work here, where 'mums' compete with their daughters until they both end up shaking chrome clothes racks and storming off in pouty huffs towards the door where other mothers who've just had the same experience are chain-smoking. There were a good few 'mother & daughter' duos, dressed identical, tight jeans, yuck yellow tops, shite belts & silver pumps... and the daughters were goading, saying things like, "ach, d'ye think this will suit me Ma? Ye know, with me good figure an' all?" And the mum in this case glanced down at her own body, grabbed the manky sun-dress off her daughter and said, "I think I could get into that...". This is the type of grotesque parental immaturity that fills me with dread and would make me Nilfisk a child from my fanny rather than emotionally abuse them all the way to adulthood.
The 'sundress syndrome' is usually only attributed to women who have their kids too young, before they're grown up themselves. Where do they get off? Anyway, I fear I will only be able to limp my way to the beach & back to the apartment as the hip is now TOTALLY frogged... degeneration has been as swift as a US army plane landing at Shannon without the media noticing, and I can only imagine I will be flat on my back sponging up the morphine soon. The pain is now so chronic, that even sitting down hurts like hell. Sigh. After an anger fit last week re: health & lack of wealth, I'm in post-denial mode now, realising that the entire process has to be taken on the chin again in order for the best possible long-term outcome. I am frogging myself about the next hip replacement operation & the long recovery afterwards where you smell of piss for weeks on end because you're told not to have a shower, and really, rubbing your nethers with a face cloth, achieve little. I've been there.
I registered with a doctor yesterday (after a year, tut tut) and he's sending off a referral letter to some orthopaedic people in Belfast who are great at bone stuff having fixed up lots of bullet recipients during the Paisley-Adams years. He was surprisingly thorough, wanting to know all kinds of gruesome things like smear tests and boob tests and blood tests and can you put your wee wee in this bottle for me and how much do you smoke and what is your diet like, etc. The NHS is changing. In the late 1980s GPs throughout Britain prescribed Sudafed for all ailments whether it was an infected toenail or life-threatening TB picked up in Stratford Tube Station. But aside from all that malarkey, this Tuesday will be another flight from Malaga to Madrid for the conference.
I will boot along late, as usual (this time it's flight times, not me being inept) and when all the hi-tech stuff is done, I'll race to the sauna and steam myself until all my sins explode and the Baby Jesus thinks I'm pleasant again. I fell out with my divine father frog when he insisted I be the recipient of genital warts from my first 'ever' boyfriend on Valentine's Day, 1989, and since then I haven't really taken the bearded git seriously. But obviously, like everyone else, I'll turn back religious when I'm old, just in case there's any truth in it.
I've worked out that the life cycle in general works like this: innocent & fairly harmless till about age 10 or 11, then a scheming, hormonal shithead up to about 19, then relatively amiable for a few short years when laden with curiosity & a will to learn, there's not that much room for being a bollix until the self obsession era from about age 24 to 33. Then other people suddenly become noticeable again from age 34 to 42 especially if you're looking for a life partner or are desperate to get up the duff. From 43 to 55, a ruthless mudderfrogger who will cut off at least a few family members, fire a few minions, walk over a few people's graves, ponder why you hadn't this power years ago in your 20s, then from 56 to 66, there's a period of intense philosophical debate within yourself, probably change partners or kill one off or do another University course, start lecturing to younger family members now that you're so wise and have had at least two cancer scares, superseded by the 67 to 77 stage, where you fall over a lot and talk about how much technology is hindering you, the shallowness of young people, how obnoxious middle age is, etc., and about this time, you'll let God in. Any age after that is really just getting the last word in constantly, saying "I remember" a lot, even when you don't, fear of maggots and thoughts about other planets. Well, after that, doesn't bear thinking about. Anyway, I'm off on a brief hol. Cyber-see you all when I return.
Friday 8 June 2007
Who you calling a Nigger?
The subject tag of this blog is taken from the Channel 4 website from the 'black and Asian history' map.... an article by writer Maurice McCleod that in its own words: ''. presents a worrying picture of inter-racial relations in today's Britain. He is referring to a documentary aired by the channel in 2004 of the same title.
If Channel 4 is so offended by this word and not just sucking off the advertisers, should they not have the sordid word seared off like an unwanted tattoo from every far-flung remote corner of its company, even dusky holes in its cyber-cupboards? On that same page there is another article by Satinder Chohan (a Skikh writer) entitled: 'Whitey Blightey'... which if read over sensitively by a susceptible white person could be taken up the wrong way to imply that white people are a blight on modern day Britain. Now of course, that's quite petty as 'Blightey' is slang for England, but as a thick honky bitch, I may not have known that...you can see how easy it is to get carried away with language.
When I lived in Britain for 7 years in the late 1980s to mid 1990s... I was several times called an "Irish bastard" (once by my boss in an insurance company for getting a task wrong but from others usually following IRA bombs and so on. The inference being that even though I was 18 and left Ireland because there was fuck all jobs, I was personally responsible for any acts of terrorism my countrymen lauded on English soil). There were all the usual jokes about Irish people being "thick" and I was lovingly called a leprechaun occasionally too, because I'm 5ft nothing. The British stereo-type of what it meant to be Irish had lingered around for so long like bad farts, that it never even occurred to me that it could be offensive.
Elsewhere on the Channel 4 website, an article by Mandy Richards entitled: Why Nigger will never be the new Black! states that 'the flagrant use of the N-word in public by both black and white people is a growing trend led mostly by young Black entertainers, Black comics use the term extensively, and references to 'nigga' and 'niggaz' permeate many rap songs.' She is responding to said same aired documentary about the controversy surrounding the 'N word', citing examples like Shazia Mirza, a British Muslim stand up artist, who uses the word 'Paki' in her act, in an attempt to strip the word of its pejorative power. Owning words by falling under their umbrella, in other words, in the same way as lesbians have patented the word 'dyke' and gay men have sabotaged 'queer'. So herein lays the golden rule. If you're not in the sub-category, you ain't got permission to use the word, and the entire concept of freedom of speech is resigned to the gully of pre-PC times.
Another good example of this is when Ali G comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's Channel 4 show, 'Borat's Television Programme', was investigated by TV watchdogs following complaints about a sketch featuring an anti-Semitic song titled 'Throw the Jew down the well'... Channel 4 quite comfortably responded by saying: "Sacha Baron Cohen's humour is ironic and actually highlights bigotry and ignorance. The irony being that Baron is himself a Jew." So be warned, if you don't fall under the umbrella, you'll get very very wet. You could find yourself up against a Big Brother-type management team that will intervene and take appropriate action if you behave in a way that it considers is unacceptable. Unacceptable behaviour includes: behaving in a way that could cause serious offence, which could mean just about anything if you want to take offence... It's all very controversial and confusing, isn't it?
The thing that I loved about living in Britain back then was that so much of the 'race stuff' was under the radar, it wasn't debated to death, and thereby triggering a type of electrified self consciousness. Despite various problems (and there were always problems) multi-cultural Britain worked because it had no choice but to, and after a while even a honky blow-in like me didn't think about 'different races' anymore. But all this PC segregation and leftie rules leaves me in a bit of a pickle. What do I do next-time a bearded fundamentalist refers to me and all my ilk as 'Kafir', a derogatory word originally used very like the origin of 'nigger' to describe those enslaved and sold by their [Muslim] captors.... its modern day meaning is 'infidel' which is basically attributed to non-believers, i.e., anyone who isn't Muslim... all other religions, the West, etc.. What are my chances making a complaint to the Commission for Racial Equality and hoping for a mutually satisfying outcome?
I am full of all kinds of inventive ideas now that could be scooped out of the TV world and used to my benefit. I may even write to Channel 4 and say that I find Father Ted extremely offensive as it depicts my race as being nut job alcoholics with zero intelligence and I am getting increasingly upset at all these 'Oirish' conjectures.
Posh Emily Parr fucked up by using the devisive 'N' word as it's now known. However, she was in no way in the same category as the monstrous Jade Goody that we used to know and no longer love... when she bullied the life out of Shilpa on celebrity BB a few months ago. She did blurt it out in a bizarre manner, I have to admit, but Charley milked the opportunity, citing immediately in her media-savvy way what it would mean to the outside world, while admitting that she wasn't taking offence from it. She then proceeded to clandestinely discuss it with the entire house and the Chinese whispers started racing. And by the way, Charley also used the word 'Nigger' in the house, so why wasn't she booted out if the word is stand-alone-offensive as Channel 4 claims? I would argue that Channel 4 whisking Emiliy out of the house, without warning, in the middle of the night, was more traumatic than brazen chain-smoker Charley taking the N-word on the chin. The Galloway-clad debate that followed was also obnoxious with lots of sociology-type people ranting about slavery, etc. The station was obviously too afraid of being told off again by Endemol & Offcom and whoever.. beacuse at the end of the day that could result in loss of revenue, the biggest most dirtiest sin of all.
If we want to blame any subdued forces, why not put it at rap's door. Emily is a big fan and maintains that her and her black mates use the N-word in a musical context all the time. Channel 4 itself showcased plenty of said-same rappers on its "cool" late-nite music shows. Likewise, they've aired many films (Pulp Fiction, To Kill a Mocking Bird, etc.) that use the word extensively. So don't forget to ring up and complain. In fact, the only person on the planet who can say absolutely anything unhindered is Michael Jackson, ex-black man but currently-white and for a decade or two, a colour in-between; if he was in the Big Brother House right now, he could've called Charley a 'nigger' and Nicki a 'Paki' and Laura a 'honky' and no-one would've been able to say or do jack-shit. Now, where did I put my umbrella or did Chancer Charley steal it on me when I wasn't looking?
If Channel 4 is so offended by this word and not just sucking off the advertisers, should they not have the sordid word seared off like an unwanted tattoo from every far-flung remote corner of its company, even dusky holes in its cyber-cupboards? On that same page there is another article by Satinder Chohan (a Skikh writer) entitled: 'Whitey Blightey'... which if read over sensitively by a susceptible white person could be taken up the wrong way to imply that white people are a blight on modern day Britain. Now of course, that's quite petty as 'Blightey' is slang for England, but as a thick honky bitch, I may not have known that...you can see how easy it is to get carried away with language.
When I lived in Britain for 7 years in the late 1980s to mid 1990s... I was several times called an "Irish bastard" (once by my boss in an insurance company for getting a task wrong but from others usually following IRA bombs and so on. The inference being that even though I was 18 and left Ireland because there was fuck all jobs, I was personally responsible for any acts of terrorism my countrymen lauded on English soil). There were all the usual jokes about Irish people being "thick" and I was lovingly called a leprechaun occasionally too, because I'm 5ft nothing. The British stereo-type of what it meant to be Irish had lingered around for so long like bad farts, that it never even occurred to me that it could be offensive.
Elsewhere on the Channel 4 website, an article by Mandy Richards entitled: Why Nigger will never be the new Black! states that 'the flagrant use of the N-word in public by both black and white people is a growing trend led mostly by young Black entertainers, Black comics use the term extensively, and references to 'nigga' and 'niggaz' permeate many rap songs.' She is responding to said same aired documentary about the controversy surrounding the 'N word', citing examples like Shazia Mirza, a British Muslim stand up artist, who uses the word 'Paki' in her act, in an attempt to strip the word of its pejorative power. Owning words by falling under their umbrella, in other words, in the same way as lesbians have patented the word 'dyke' and gay men have sabotaged 'queer'. So herein lays the golden rule. If you're not in the sub-category, you ain't got permission to use the word, and the entire concept of freedom of speech is resigned to the gully of pre-PC times.
Another good example of this is when Ali G comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's Channel 4 show, 'Borat's Television Programme', was investigated by TV watchdogs following complaints about a sketch featuring an anti-Semitic song titled 'Throw the Jew down the well'... Channel 4 quite comfortably responded by saying: "Sacha Baron Cohen's humour is ironic and actually highlights bigotry and ignorance. The irony being that Baron is himself a Jew." So be warned, if you don't fall under the umbrella, you'll get very very wet. You could find yourself up against a Big Brother-type management team that will intervene and take appropriate action if you behave in a way that it considers is unacceptable. Unacceptable behaviour includes: behaving in a way that could cause serious offence, which could mean just about anything if you want to take offence... It's all very controversial and confusing, isn't it?
The thing that I loved about living in Britain back then was that so much of the 'race stuff' was under the radar, it wasn't debated to death, and thereby triggering a type of electrified self consciousness. Despite various problems (and there were always problems) multi-cultural Britain worked because it had no choice but to, and after a while even a honky blow-in like me didn't think about 'different races' anymore. But all this PC segregation and leftie rules leaves me in a bit of a pickle. What do I do next-time a bearded fundamentalist refers to me and all my ilk as 'Kafir', a derogatory word originally used very like the origin of 'nigger' to describe those enslaved and sold by their [Muslim] captors.... its modern day meaning is 'infidel' which is basically attributed to non-believers, i.e., anyone who isn't Muslim... all other religions, the West, etc.. What are my chances making a complaint to the Commission for Racial Equality and hoping for a mutually satisfying outcome?
I am full of all kinds of inventive ideas now that could be scooped out of the TV world and used to my benefit. I may even write to Channel 4 and say that I find Father Ted extremely offensive as it depicts my race as being nut job alcoholics with zero intelligence and I am getting increasingly upset at all these 'Oirish' conjectures.
Posh Emily Parr fucked up by using the devisive 'N' word as it's now known. However, she was in no way in the same category as the monstrous Jade Goody that we used to know and no longer love... when she bullied the life out of Shilpa on celebrity BB a few months ago. She did blurt it out in a bizarre manner, I have to admit, but Charley milked the opportunity, citing immediately in her media-savvy way what it would mean to the outside world, while admitting that she wasn't taking offence from it. She then proceeded to clandestinely discuss it with the entire house and the Chinese whispers started racing. And by the way, Charley also used the word 'Nigger' in the house, so why wasn't she booted out if the word is stand-alone-offensive as Channel 4 claims? I would argue that Channel 4 whisking Emiliy out of the house, without warning, in the middle of the night, was more traumatic than brazen chain-smoker Charley taking the N-word on the chin. The Galloway-clad debate that followed was also obnoxious with lots of sociology-type people ranting about slavery, etc. The station was obviously too afraid of being told off again by Endemol & Offcom and whoever.. beacuse at the end of the day that could result in loss of revenue, the biggest most dirtiest sin of all.
If we want to blame any subdued forces, why not put it at rap's door. Emily is a big fan and maintains that her and her black mates use the N-word in a musical context all the time. Channel 4 itself showcased plenty of said-same rappers on its "cool" late-nite music shows. Likewise, they've aired many films (Pulp Fiction, To Kill a Mocking Bird, etc.) that use the word extensively. So don't forget to ring up and complain. In fact, the only person on the planet who can say absolutely anything unhindered is Michael Jackson, ex-black man but currently-white and for a decade or two, a colour in-between; if he was in the Big Brother House right now, he could've called Charley a 'nigger' and Nicki a 'Paki' and Laura a 'honky' and no-one would've been able to say or do jack-shit. Now, where did I put my umbrella or did Chancer Charley steal it on me when I wasn't looking?
Tuesday 5 June 2007
Responsible Bulimia (well, not quite!)
It pains me to update at the mo because like the Green Party, I just don't know where to start. OK, so I got the Enterprise down to that inhospitable wheelie-bin that is Dublin last week sometime, to mind the old man, and visit me old Ma.
There's a black dude on the train all the time now, staff member, and while the generally well-educated folk in the 1st class carriages pay no heed, in the cheapo carriages, the N.I. aulones look him up and down with such disdain as he mills by with his tea-trolley, that it can only make you laugh. One of them 'snapped' back her change from him so quick and with such trepidation, you'd swear he was a portico for all the HIV virions in all of Africa [in her mind] somehow destined to dive into her Tetley tea. Nice to know sectarianism will never give up the ghost.
Anyhow, I wrote house specs on the train [for a change] which meant I didn't have to sully my retina with that hellish loyalist kip: Portadown and soon enough I was sitting in an internet cafe in Phibsboro waiting on boss man from the cop magazine to give me some editing work. In a cafe close to the office I trundled through the lives, ardour & concerns of what it means to be a modern day garda and then went on the hunt for the old man. As the Mater Hospital is so near Phibsboro, I knew he'd be skulking in a pub nearby, and found him in Doyles, all lemon-curd yellow and into his 10th double whiskey of the day.
"What's going to happen to Ma?" he said, rubbing his bulgy eyes, and quickly the conversation moved to global warming being a scam, because according to my biological father, if it were actually true, our heating bills would be lower. So here we have the start of another day of scams in the life of the mentally dilapidated mad man. At the hospital, he ranted at her [again] about her brain tumour eating away at her head and causing the fall, that she got upset and had to ask him to leave. "I can't believe that lump of human excrement ever had a job", I snapped, as he left and I tried to lift her spirits a bit. "I was 8 out of 10 before he came in", she admitted, "and now I'm 2 out of 10". I know Ma, I said, but as always I feel a surge of anger too. "Promise me next time you'll be fussy & not just go for some inept geezer who happens to have a good job?" She agreed, in her next life, she will be far more wary. "I'd like to come back as a bird", she said. If you came back as sheep's shit next time 'round you wouldn't have as bad a life. But I kept my mouth shut.
It transpires that when my mother got weak in Finglas a week ago now, Father Frog held on to her, but then let her go to wave down a taxi and that's when she went on her snot and broke her ankle in two places. This is why there's so much alcoholic guilt (even more self indulgent than normal). It would be another day till she was moved into the semi-private ward, out of this 20-bed junkie bedlam. I don't hide my inverted snobbery at all - when it comes to education and hospital wards - I'm an interminable snob. And the next day, when a junkie with hepatitis and pistachio green hair that was probably blonde a decade ago was lounging all over my mother's bed asking her over and over where her wedding rings were, enough was enough... I yelled for a porter who very kindly wheeled her to the safety of St. Joseph's Ward on the other side of the hospital, compliments of her VHI policy;there was a big mutual sigh of relief.
Of course the little aulone she shares the ward with, I recognised, you can traverse Dublin all your life but as soon as you're in a cancer ward or a place where people's kidneys stop functioning, you will always spot an ex school teacher or a bus conductor who molested you when you were 12. Her ward companion is an old diabetic I knew from an incidental bus stop on my daily journey to a shite job over two decades ago. My mum had an accident in the night so I had to head into Penney's in Parnell Street and buy some spare nighties and big cotton knickers, no bother, and in Cuccini's Italian Restaurant afterwards, I made a conscious decision to puke up four of my dinners per week for the entire summer to help me lose weight.
The hips are so frogged at this stage and I simply cannot walk/exercise so there's nothing for it but to take on some responsible bulimic action so that I'm not a portly neurotic for my MA in Autumn and even more urgent, that I am not over the standard BMI to face Part II of the hip replacement that's imminent at this stage. Lover has been hinting about getting me knocked up recently, and I honestly don't think I could carry a lizard for long at the moment, never mind a sprog. I am kinda raging I didn't do this when I moved to Belfast a year ago, when I'd all the time in the world and money in the bank, etc.. Starting up a business right now and other pressing issues ahead make it as gauche as a paedophile in Disneyland, but I will take on what's ahead, regardless.
So there I was in Cuccini's, Parnell St., gazing out at the Tracksuit Catwalk, all those wonderful navy, blue, pink striped legs and zip tops... armies of young chav mothers wheeling their novice joy rider toddler sons and baby daughters who'd be fertilised before the Intercert was underway, and I wondered what the dead heroes of 1916 would think if they could see Dublin now. Would they die for pitbulls & Aldi & puddles of lumpy spit on the kerb? It crossed my mind that maybe the 'Nike tick' on the trainers bears a resemblance to the 'yes' tick on social welfare forms that gives you a free gaff for life as long as you smoke yourself to death and promise to only drink tinned lager & wear gold hoop earrings & re-produce every 16 months or so? I'm not right wing, honest.
A few hours later, the meal of fried vegetables & pasta swirls with house wine was puked up in the Jacks and I was downstairs in the sitting room listening to Father Frog rant about how Pearl Harbour was just as devastating as 9/11 and various other nuggets of psychosis befitting the terminally mentally ill, and I felt quite comfortable about the Bulimic months ahead. The idea is that I will give the food at least 3 hours to make its way from my stomach and any leftovers get thrown up until the weight starts dropping again. It's three years now since my health got bad & I've tried every sane procedure from cutting calories in half to buying gym equipment I'm not allowed use, and in the absence of not being able to walk, nothing has worked. I am not prepared to look like Friar Tuck's slut any longer, with a dodgy bob, thunder thighs and tornado tits... so three meals a week are being donated to the environment (the Greens will be pleased, if I'd left the food in packaging & not semi-processed it this way, it'd be a lot worse of a scenario).
I will log weight changes on here of course and keep you up to date with how it's going. Before I left Willow Park and despite all my misgivings about my father frog's inadequacies & how I'm supposed to be a proxy-feminist, I cooked the old codger some fish pies and a pot of chicken stew so he'd stop eating those monstrous 'tins' of Irish stew that smell like a bag of farts, as for the time being, it's best if he's kept alive… especially as he's the only one in the family with money & my mother needs a house to come home to. But pretty soon he will have to be placed ankle first on the crematorium trolley & sent to his demise & then I can cut short my career as a part-time bulimic and use this dead man's wages for a liposuction spree.
There's a black dude on the train all the time now, staff member, and while the generally well-educated folk in the 1st class carriages pay no heed, in the cheapo carriages, the N.I. aulones look him up and down with such disdain as he mills by with his tea-trolley, that it can only make you laugh. One of them 'snapped' back her change from him so quick and with such trepidation, you'd swear he was a portico for all the HIV virions in all of Africa [in her mind] somehow destined to dive into her Tetley tea. Nice to know sectarianism will never give up the ghost.
Anyhow, I wrote house specs on the train [for a change] which meant I didn't have to sully my retina with that hellish loyalist kip: Portadown and soon enough I was sitting in an internet cafe in Phibsboro waiting on boss man from the cop magazine to give me some editing work. In a cafe close to the office I trundled through the lives, ardour & concerns of what it means to be a modern day garda and then went on the hunt for the old man. As the Mater Hospital is so near Phibsboro, I knew he'd be skulking in a pub nearby, and found him in Doyles, all lemon-curd yellow and into his 10th double whiskey of the day.
"What's going to happen to Ma?" he said, rubbing his bulgy eyes, and quickly the conversation moved to global warming being a scam, because according to my biological father, if it were actually true, our heating bills would be lower. So here we have the start of another day of scams in the life of the mentally dilapidated mad man. At the hospital, he ranted at her [again] about her brain tumour eating away at her head and causing the fall, that she got upset and had to ask him to leave. "I can't believe that lump of human excrement ever had a job", I snapped, as he left and I tried to lift her spirits a bit. "I was 8 out of 10 before he came in", she admitted, "and now I'm 2 out of 10". I know Ma, I said, but as always I feel a surge of anger too. "Promise me next time you'll be fussy & not just go for some inept geezer who happens to have a good job?" She agreed, in her next life, she will be far more wary. "I'd like to come back as a bird", she said. If you came back as sheep's shit next time 'round you wouldn't have as bad a life. But I kept my mouth shut.
It transpires that when my mother got weak in Finglas a week ago now, Father Frog held on to her, but then let her go to wave down a taxi and that's when she went on her snot and broke her ankle in two places. This is why there's so much alcoholic guilt (even more self indulgent than normal). It would be another day till she was moved into the semi-private ward, out of this 20-bed junkie bedlam. I don't hide my inverted snobbery at all - when it comes to education and hospital wards - I'm an interminable snob. And the next day, when a junkie with hepatitis and pistachio green hair that was probably blonde a decade ago was lounging all over my mother's bed asking her over and over where her wedding rings were, enough was enough... I yelled for a porter who very kindly wheeled her to the safety of St. Joseph's Ward on the other side of the hospital, compliments of her VHI policy;there was a big mutual sigh of relief.
Of course the little aulone she shares the ward with, I recognised, you can traverse Dublin all your life but as soon as you're in a cancer ward or a place where people's kidneys stop functioning, you will always spot an ex school teacher or a bus conductor who molested you when you were 12. Her ward companion is an old diabetic I knew from an incidental bus stop on my daily journey to a shite job over two decades ago. My mum had an accident in the night so I had to head into Penney's in Parnell Street and buy some spare nighties and big cotton knickers, no bother, and in Cuccini's Italian Restaurant afterwards, I made a conscious decision to puke up four of my dinners per week for the entire summer to help me lose weight.
The hips are so frogged at this stage and I simply cannot walk/exercise so there's nothing for it but to take on some responsible bulimic action so that I'm not a portly neurotic for my MA in Autumn and even more urgent, that I am not over the standard BMI to face Part II of the hip replacement that's imminent at this stage. Lover has been hinting about getting me knocked up recently, and I honestly don't think I could carry a lizard for long at the moment, never mind a sprog. I am kinda raging I didn't do this when I moved to Belfast a year ago, when I'd all the time in the world and money in the bank, etc.. Starting up a business right now and other pressing issues ahead make it as gauche as a paedophile in Disneyland, but I will take on what's ahead, regardless.
So there I was in Cuccini's, Parnell St., gazing out at the Tracksuit Catwalk, all those wonderful navy, blue, pink striped legs and zip tops... armies of young chav mothers wheeling their novice joy rider toddler sons and baby daughters who'd be fertilised before the Intercert was underway, and I wondered what the dead heroes of 1916 would think if they could see Dublin now. Would they die for pitbulls & Aldi & puddles of lumpy spit on the kerb? It crossed my mind that maybe the 'Nike tick' on the trainers bears a resemblance to the 'yes' tick on social welfare forms that gives you a free gaff for life as long as you smoke yourself to death and promise to only drink tinned lager & wear gold hoop earrings & re-produce every 16 months or so? I'm not right wing, honest.
A few hours later, the meal of fried vegetables & pasta swirls with house wine was puked up in the Jacks and I was downstairs in the sitting room listening to Father Frog rant about how Pearl Harbour was just as devastating as 9/11 and various other nuggets of psychosis befitting the terminally mentally ill, and I felt quite comfortable about the Bulimic months ahead. The idea is that I will give the food at least 3 hours to make its way from my stomach and any leftovers get thrown up until the weight starts dropping again. It's three years now since my health got bad & I've tried every sane procedure from cutting calories in half to buying gym equipment I'm not allowed use, and in the absence of not being able to walk, nothing has worked. I am not prepared to look like Friar Tuck's slut any longer, with a dodgy bob, thunder thighs and tornado tits... so three meals a week are being donated to the environment (the Greens will be pleased, if I'd left the food in packaging & not semi-processed it this way, it'd be a lot worse of a scenario).
I will log weight changes on here of course and keep you up to date with how it's going. Before I left Willow Park and despite all my misgivings about my father frog's inadequacies & how I'm supposed to be a proxy-feminist, I cooked the old codger some fish pies and a pot of chicken stew so he'd stop eating those monstrous 'tins' of Irish stew that smell like a bag of farts, as for the time being, it's best if he's kept alive… especially as he's the only one in the family with money & my mother needs a house to come home to. But pretty soon he will have to be placed ankle first on the crematorium trolley & sent to his demise & then I can cut short my career as a part-time bulimic and use this dead man's wages for a liposuction spree.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
