Retired, you say? But it was only just getting good! The three months of silence has been some of your best work!

Yeah, you all say that, but you don’t mean it. You want more. You need more.

Nah, that’s bullshit. You probably don’t. But if you do, it’ll be here: http://insertingpotatoes.com/

Now in blue and in a WordPress theme that I don’t like as much. But some asshole once said that change was good. And I seem to be at the whim and mercy of assholes. Such is life.

And a few things annoy me. Well, many things, but they’ve all been said. Many, many times over. Read a paper if you enjoy a milder form of self harm. They’re cheaper then razor blades anyway (and they still haven’t gone down in price since the recession — Movemeber is just a ploy to get people shaving, it’s nothing about prostates).

You see, in my day (which is now) the country went to complete shit because the higher ups (who grew up alongside you in your day) spent most of their time wandering around long halls, employing people to do stuff for them that either didn’t need doing, should have been done by someone else, or needed redoing because the previously employed person in that job (who has since been promoted into a new job, with much the same criteria as his/her last job) didn’t do that job right — for example, were I to hire someone to make sense of that last sentence for you, because it is overly long with too many words, commas, bracketed asides (which can quickly become confusing), will probably need to be reread to be understood fully and perhaps just the simple fact that the first full stop in this whole paragraph, which is roughly 150 words long, has only just come along now.
That’s something I should do myself. But I won’t. Put it down to being set a bad example.

So, imagine that incompetence, and multiply it by 40 billion and few barrels of red paint and eggs — that’s the kind of mess we’re in. But we know that. RTE tells us this, the helpful souls that they are, in all our days.

But what I worry about in my day (now) is that in your day (then), were the same arguments for sucking up the pain used by people who had different days (way back then). And will I be using the same argument for when the world gets screwed over again in my children’s day (which is way over there)?

Isn’t the point that we should be progressing as a human race? That the sacrifices that our parents made and their parents made are appreciated, but should never had have to be made again? Many people died before medicine began to save lives. A lot of people died before we realised that pyramids aren’t perhaps the most efficient way to honour the dead. A whole season of Joey had to be persevered before we decided that it was inhumane to humour Matt LeBlanc any further.

The point is, shouldn’t we be trying to further ourselves as a human race here? Why should we have to suffer old problems just because our parents did? We’re adults now, give us the opportunity to suffer new problems, to make new mistakes, to throw our country into a new well of shit so our own children can dig us out of a new mess — a shitty mess indeed, but a mess that has a least progressed from the mess past generations had to suffer.

These are old problems, that have their roots in obvious moral, ethical and incompetent incompetence — that’s what pisses me off. And the danger is the whole country will be on the backfoot because of them. These are old problems, that have already been suffered (and we appreciate that, we honestly do), but we shouldn’t have to suffer them again.  There are a lot of things that we should put up with and shut up with, but not this retarded mess —it would be irresponsible of us as a generation to just ‘put up’ with this mess.

So, can we, at the very least, retire this flawed argument and move on here? No more crap about it on Midday, The Frontline, or any more damn newsprint? Bill Cullen may well be a long way from penny apples, but so is everyone.

And yet, despite all this, I have just heard, for the 3rd time today, Eminem making puns about window pains as he shouts his way through another ‘song’. As low an art form as rap is these days, has it just finally given up? Has rap finally just squatted down, overbearing weight on its unsteady knees, and given gastric flow to puns? WINDOW-BASED puns?

For those that haven’t heard it…

If a window metaphor is so vital to your song, how about rhyming defenestrate and penetrate? See? Just off the top of my head.
Or just saying them consecutively, shitty words flowing into each other as you shout your way through another hit, artfully relating the act of throwing someone throw a window with the act of shagging some tasty hoe.
That’s only slightly less shit then your lyric, and I just came up with it there. I don’t even have a tattered notepad.

So, and this is what kills me. This is why we stand in clubs, sit in bars, pints in our hands and naggins wedged between our buttocks, screaming. Screaming our amusing anecdotes to each other into ears, in the vain hope that sound will travel from globs of spit, hurdling through the air, into an ear canal (any ear canal) and directly to the brain. This is why? This is music now? This is why I have to hum a catchy chorus to myself all day, while inbetween I just reel of a list of horribly bad puns, as if the entire cast of a Carry On film had a reason to hate their parents and somehow combated this by shouting? I’m waiting for the next hit, where Barbara Windsor sings a chorus that revolves around cocks crowing, while in between Eminem verbally abuses small children, “you can’t go pop-ping more pills, Mom! I guess that’s why you lean on win-dow, sill… Ly.”

Why do you shout Eminem? Why must every song be shouted in the same monotone way, verbally forcing a rhythm into housing features, or housing features into a rhythm?

I didn’t mind you know. I could’ve honestly said I could take or leave Eminem before this moment, before this lyric. He wasn’t my kind of thing, but whatever — he may have mistaken rapping for shouting about himself, but at least he didn’t have gold smelted onto his teeth, or shout about some bitches’ booty, or other forms of thinly veiled rape.
But you’ve jumped the shark on this one, and now I can’t take anything you’ve done, are doing, or will do, seriously. I’m sorry Eminem, but you’ve just lost a disinterested — but ultimately respecting — consumer.

If this is just a rumour, then it’s the strangest rumour I have ever heard on a reputable Irish news website. But if it’s true? I for one am delighted.

First up: I think that Paul Galvin is a thug who shouldn’t be let near a football pitch, never mind a classroom. Justifying anything he’s done as ‘passion’ belittles every other passionate player who happily go through a whole season without being suspended. And if what he does is ‘passion’ then maybe if he played slightly less passionately, we’d all talk a lot more about his obvious skill and talents rather than his rampant stupidity.

But Xposé? Now that’s something he could sink his teeth into. Literally, maybe. I wouldn’t put it past him. Interview through blood-letting and pant-wetting. He might become one of the most feared and respected entertainment journalists of our time. A Dennis Pennis character, only very much real, very much abusive, very much a man who would rob your gates and sell them back to you.

He has the characterized dishevelment of journalists of old – rumpled suit, shaggy face growth. He’d slot right in — the perfect ointment for the arse piles that is E!, TMZ and the rest of the star-lit studio perfection that’s rammed down our throats everyday. This is a man that could get the real story from Mel Gibson, by sitting him down and going on a two week bender with him, hiding the bodies of hookers in bags of cocaine and chalk dust. An entertainment journalist in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson and the Gonzo Journalists of old. Fear and Loathing in the Dingle Peninsula: A Savage Journey into the Heart of Irish Gombeenism.

Paul Galvin and his harem of Xposé totty — them travelling the globe to feed us with the banal, Galvin travelling the globe, sending in disconnected streams of prose and video reports, half remembered journal entries and envelopes full of celebrity blood and hair. And we will love every second of it. The realism, the truth, none of the airbrushed, breast-tweaked lies that are intravenously given to us through billboards and Sky News. Interviews and photos where black stars are still black.

Galvin could then becomes a celebrity himself — an Irish poet, a recluse who yet gets the story everytime. One who punches first and asks for a quote later, one who’s never afraid to fish hook his way out of situation. Paul Galvin: The Man Who Knocked Obama’s Dossier Out of His Hands.

I still won’t watch Xposé though. I’ll wait for the Paul Galvin spinoff.

Warning: Sarcasm abounds.

Whoopi Goldberg on The View: “I know it wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape. He went to jail and and when they let him out he was like “You know what this guy’s going to give me a hundred years in jail I’m not staying, so that’s why he left.”

Whoopi, Whoopi, Whoopi. Rape-rape? Honestly, rape-rape? Wouldn’t it of been easier just to walk away? Just walk away and leave us with our Neanderthal views of not separating rape and getting a 13 year old drugged and drunk and then having sex with her?

Obviously, that was just a mild raping. Much like a mild decapitation, a mild elephant infestation or mild Jason Byrne. To throw this rape into the pot with, I dunno, rape, would be doing the crime of rape an injustice.

But, you know, I trust Hollywood. Those people are clearly better thinkers then us, the movers and shakers of the world that get transmitted to our screens by lasers and pixies and stuff. So I guess we should believe them. After all, this is pretty much exactly like the plot of How Stella Got Her Groove back, isn’t it? And that sure worked out for the best.

So, Rape-rape isn’t just rape I suppose. Rape-rape must be like, giving the child Corn Flakes beforehand, in the full, premeditated evil mind that the kid doesn’t like Corn Flakes. And then, BAM. Rape-rape.

So, to clear up a few matters first before we go into details (the horrible, disgusting rape-rape details, with some happy-go-lucky rape details thrown in). Since the Hollywood elite (those crazy geniuses) feel that Polanksi should not go to jail for a rape (of a minor) 32 years ago, we define rape-rape as something like, you rape someone, then steal their pants or perhaps, you sit down to watch Xposé, and then follow that heinous act with a little bit of rape.

That is, you rape someone, then you do something that warrants jail time.

And so rape must be, something like, I dunno. Something like rape-rape, but less, rapey? At what point is rape not rapey? Does the fact that some of the rape happened in a jacuzzi take off some the rape-edge? That it was champagne he gave her, and not a crate of Dutch Gold?
I dunno, still sounds pretty rapey to me.

But then, what kind of punishment does rape entail when we compare it to rape-rape?
What punishment could be doled out? If even a punishment should exist? After all, considering what rape-rape is, and Whoopi (and friends) believe he shouldn’t go to jail, then I suppose we should take other offences into account. Some sort of list where we can see what gets jail time (rape-rape) and what doesn’t (rape). For example, we could take into account that stealing a handbag can get you jail time, so, therefore, this particular raping of a 13 year old is not as bad as stealing a handbag.  Or, closer to the point, if, after raping, he forced her to cuddle after wards –that could be seen a kidnapping, a death sentence in some states, but leave her on her merry way and we may move to France, conscience clear that only a little bit of rape was committed. Much like that time you didn’t cut the grass when you said you would, or when you clicked ‘yes please, porn me up Mr. Internet’ when you were only 17.

I refuse to believe that Hollywood and the world in general is being lenient because he made a few good movies. Cos that would mean I could never watch another movie again.

But anyway, it’s all alright. Because later, Whoopi clarified the matter, saying she wanted to “make it clear that she was talking about the legal charge against Polanski at the time.”

Yup. Clear as a filthy jacuzzi.

Next Week: Paul says the word ‘rape’ 20 times in something he wrote in the early 90s.

What’s a paywall? You bell end. How dare you ask such a question. You should be informing yourself on a daily, nay, hourly basis, on all new trends in online news and how it is/will/maybe changes from being merely directionless, Wi-Fi Cancer rays to being beamed directly into your brain via glossy, contemporarily designed websites.

But you can’t, of course. You can’t inform yourself, because of the PAYWALLS. Giant walls, constructed purely from pay and san-serif fonts, stopping us from reading about the news. The news, you see. The NEWS.

The Times over in England is now charging us for its online content, (€1.50 a day or €3 a week) and essentially, it’s playing the part of the budgie down the mines, only with an above average number of people wanting this particular budgie to die a horrible death – choking on a gas that for this metaphor, I will call “a lack of subscribers willing to pay for online news”. Read my beautiful prose.

So, does this even matter to us? Of course it does. Paying for stuff always matters. The Times wants us to reach for our wallet, take out our cards, type in some ridiculously long digits and then do it again because you made a typo. And then they’re gonna take €3 a week off you (€156 a year) for the pleasure of reading off a laptop screen. Are we ready for this? Are we ready for purely digital content, that at the end of the day is disposable? I can’t bring myself to pay for music that doesn’t have a CD attached. Buying games off Steam still seems strange to me. I have cupboards, I want to fill them with shit. Shit that I own, shit that will probably just gather dust, but by God, at least it has the physical capability to gather dust. I still like something tangible, something that’s not just 1’s and 0’s that exist on a server in India. Something that I can lick, had I ever the desire to do so.

But maybe I’m a Neanderthal. I fully admit that. I’m a Multimedia graduate, online consuming digital native who craves all sorts of online technological crap. But I also have cupboards. That I like to have filled.

It’s a strange one really. Some sites being pay only, other sites being free, all sites seemingly regurgitating the same shit from newswires and press offices anyway. Course The Times might have the right idea. If it can create actual, good, original, content (that’s hopefully 3D and gives me seizures) then people might actually be willing to pay for it. After all, it’s cheaper then buying the actual paper. And if it engages in actual investigative journalism, then people might actually pay for the scoops in an otherwise scoopless world without paywalls. Because this stuff costs money. Which can only be gotten by asking us to clamber up a paywall and toss some coins through a payslot, supposedly.

But then, there’s talks that if newspapers forgo print versions, the huge savings in producing an actual paper will save them. There’s also talks that if online newspapers actually engage users and create communities, then the information gathered will mean huge gains in targeted advertising (the way Facebook is using your information as we speak to give you ads about what YOU want, i.e., fucking and beer).

But you don’t give a shit do you? This has been going on a while now, and most of you probably hadn’t even noticed. Which is most of the problem. Rupert Murdoch (he owns The Times, Fox and a large part of 4th circle of hell, in case you really don’t give a shit) needs to learn that for the most part, this is still an issue that journalists and public relations folk are worrying about while the rest of us get with filling our cupboards and laughing at cats.

What was wrong with the traditional 5-star system of haphazard public appreciation? I may enjoy man gets hit in face by football somewhat. I then may stumble across man being bludgeoned with wet fish, and enjoy that slightly more. But to say that I ‘like’ both, with equal measure, suggests I just stalk through the Internet, purely travelling through broadband cables listening for thumps followed by groans.
And I don’t. Honest.

‘Like’ is such a useless, meaningless word without context. I like curry. I like chips with curry more. I like wellies when travelling through mud. Without mud, wellies are just sweaty and uncomfortable. HOW DO I FEEL ABOUT WELLIES, INTERNET?

More to the point, maybe I would like to follow updates from George Bush, Bulmers Pear, or I dunno, rampant discussion on that feeling when you think you’re about to sneeze but then don’t. But I don’t want to romp around the Internet, saying I ‘like’ any of these things. George Bush was a fool, anything Bulmers make is only fit for violent colonic irrigation and who actually ‘likes’ that ‘need to sneeze but can’t’ feeling?

180,997 people actually like one of the most annoying feelings ever

When did liking become a substitute for having an interest in something? Has the Internet become so swamped in bad ideas that it’s just latched onto whatever is the current buzz word?

But no. No. It’s not the Internet is it? It’s Facebook.

It’s Facebook’s insistence on deepthroating every website out there with its business model suiting terminology until we all gag like the whores that we are, blandness spluttering out our mouths in long, goopy strands. Thanks to all knowing Facebook, I can ‘like’ countless banal shit and then inform people who probably have no interest in what I actually ‘like’, about what I ‘like’. And then clog up their already gushing newsfeed with useless information about how I like every single thing that observational comedians have been saying for years, along with how my level 83 Cow is killing zombie mob bosses. AND PLEASE, READ MY HOROSCOPE.

But that was always the way. I was used to this. Clever use of hiding and defriending helped me get over this. But now, every conceivable webpage or article is getting a ‘like’ button. Facebook is trying to be everything at once, and because of this, is resorting to a shitty, catch-all system – trying to blend what it began with doing (standard social networking) with Twitter, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, Digg and Reddit-style ranking systems, replacing YouTube’s admittedly shit but still far better 5-star rating system – the list goes on, – into a kind of all encompassing one stop website.

And it’s trying to do this with one, 4-lettered word. Even the ability to dislike is something that needs to be forcibly hammered into it. I see an ad for something – I can only ‘like’ it, or ignore it. Unless of course I make a new ‘community’ page or somesuch nonsense so I can loudly proclaim to the world how “Paul Kennedy likes disliking New Shitty Indie Band 2010 LOL!!!”

Stick to what you were good at, Facebook. Try to sell me shit if you want. Use my public information to give me targeted shite that I’ll still ignore. Screw it, as long as you keep it anonymous, sell it if you want. We put that shit up, it’s our fault if we don’t opt out and you use it.

But don’t seep into every orifice the Internet has. If I truly want to show my affection for something, I’ll put it up on Facebook myself, along with comments I want to make about it.

At least when Google takes over and makes robot clones of us (that do nothing but buy products and murder), they’ll do a damn good job of it.

Fill some meaningless, unrelated criteria  and you might even be able to ‘like’ this blog. But God help you if you do.

Well, fancy that. He does have a point, I suppose. If the Dáil is to get the extra TV coverage that it wants, then it might have to sex itself up a bit. The times I’ve masturbated to The Oireachtas Report’s mostly tedious, wobbly-jowled visuals is far lower then Play TV, TV3 Flagship Cancelled Show.

Strange that.

But, relevant to what? Television? Other below average masturbation aids? He says that that it doesn’t appeal to his channel’s audience. So, taking TV3’s audience as the kind of people who watch Xposé, Ireland AM, Man with Debilitating Head Problem, then I take that to mean, calling up all my TV and Entertainment experience, is that what the Dáil needs is a green-screen, some Sybil MulCahy, and a large dose of irrelevant shite that’s of no real benefit or entertainment value to anyone.

Which is ironic.

However, obvious gaps in logic aside, if TV3 were to deliver some kind of Dáil coverage that needs to be fresh, compelling and dare I say, “Punchy,” then I have a few ball dropping suggestions; laying the groundwork for a show that could run and run, as the plebs gape on in a strange mix of fear, awe and pity.

You’d have to bring in some new talent, some new faces, young, hip, sexy, y’know the kind. Maybe you hold this talent search over the course of a few weeks or a month, some kind of national star search, and then televise it weekly or even daily? Some contestants could form, like, alliances or groups, or something like that and help each other win the approval of the nation.

And then, at the end of say, a 5 or 6 show run, you could have some kind of national phone in, or a kind of census, where we can all decide who has the most star quality. Well, I say all, but it’d have to be over 18 of course, it’s gonna be a pretty sexy, “punchy” show.

Michael Bay could direct, he’s just gotten into reality TV, and I got a couple of tins of green paint and a Multimedia degree, so I can definitely do some Xposé style green screen techniques. Anyone up for some floating 3-dimensional talking heads?

Get on to me, David, I’m full of ideas. The Steven Seagal Sequence and Van Damme’s Vapidy Veto are still up for grabs.

Firstly, the boring, boring, boring establishment of my stance on the whole thing: There’s hardly any proper (if any at all), actual evidence of after effects that are as a direct result of these drugs. That’s not to say that evidence doesn’t exist, or that they are completely harmless, but until we have some actual studies then anything written about it has the same veracity as Aunt Faye’s charming anecdote about how she was the one who stole Hitler’s missing testicle or how one user ripped off his scrotum while under the influence of this Mephedrone.

One of those stories was actually reported. Both are equally bullshit.

So, the fact is that little to nothing has been proven. Those self interested parties that are always tottered out don’t count by the way, nor any of that ‘research’ that’s been done by self interested parties. (Listen to BBC April 10th Media Talk Podcast for some actual talk on the subject)

The enemy here, if one exists, is boredom, and the disease is the self perpetuating cycle that boredom induces. The art of ‘doing nothing’ is something that is regularly thought about, regularly given out about, yet still strived for. ‘Hobbies’ used to be what we did in our spare time, now it’s nothing. And since no-one is dying because of this (until proven), why should the government be telling us there’s a difference?

The Internet has merely helped this, with everyone having an opinion (irony noted) and then wanting to be ‘friends’ we just have more and more of nothing to do, all beautifully designed as ‘something’.

So, we’re doing nothing. that’s our hobby, and that’s our problem.  Bollocking about on the internet, all just useless web surfing. Mindless trivia and endless funny cats. And why should a government be telling you that that’s any better then traditional hobbies, like collecting stamps or playing an instrument?

We’re filling our time with Nothing. Meaningless drivel about nothing that makes you think about nothing for a little while, until you find that next little bit of nothing to nibble on, but not too much! The more you nibble, the more a stray thought or opinion you might form on it, so quickly now, move on to another nothing and glance over that for a few minutes.

And we’re striving for this. Aren’t we? We do it anyway, do it regularly. And these legal drugs are just another nothing to fool ourselves into that we are doing something. Without proper evidence to show how dangerous they are, then we might as well ban everything else that might not be seen as ‘constructive,’ be it drinking, Facebook or poorly designed hand driers.

Why must we always be constructive? Isn’t that what work is for? Whose to tell me how meaningless my hobby is? That’s for me to decide.

So fuck it, why not pop down to a Head shop and grab a Tibetan Shitflop? At least it’ll get you out of the house.

And not just destructively hijacked and ploughed into something, but worse. Constructively hijacked by the Patty’s Day Brigade and made bigger; an inflated leprechaun that’s been force fed stereotypes and then ignited. And as we totter backwards on our bar stools, luminous green leprechaun entrails raining down upon is, all we can ask is why the shit did they dye their river green?

Ireland is green, fucking awesome, but not to the point of grabbing Mother Nature and pissing on her face, “MAKE SHIT MORE GREEN, LIKE IRELAND!” they presumably say from their brown suburbs and when she inevitably chokes from shock, they resort to human measures and start spraying E-numbered colouring around like children with not nearly enough good examples.
Green in the pints, green in the rivers, THIS ENEMA NEEDS MORE GREEN.

No, no it doesn’t. All our shit that’s green, it’s supposed to be green. We don’t paint it, we don’t round up the leprechauns at night and send them out with wheelbarrows full of green dye and an insatiable hunger for screwing with nature.

Patrick’s Day is about celebrating Irishness, supposedly, and the only way people seem to be able to do this by drinking what they can’t handle and tinting everything green. Well, I’m sick of this oh-hum, diddle-le-i version of things; this Disney-inspired stereotyped rape of our already sodomized isle.

So, the solution I propose: Bushfest. We bring things back to the start again, and celebrate like they did when St. Patrick was still pissing off snakes.
Drinking, in bushes, watching the endless sheep, endless sheep shit and endless stony soil. We bring it back to when it was a horribly miserable, disgusting life where the average person lived to about 7 and there were no kebabs.
And then see how the world copies us poorly.

For one day.
And see how they hijack it then. Let them realise how this quaint version of Irish life really would’ve been like. Let them see our bloated parades of sheep and famine, the mostly straw-based diet and the constant feeling of death crawling up your evolutalised hairy legs. The hair that is the only thing saving you from frost bite; the only thing preventing the badgers from biting clean through your leg at the first chomp. Let them watch us relive those days of invasion and boar attacks.

For one day we’ll live how St. Patrick lived himself, only with easier access to stout and the awareness of a failed political system spurning us on.

For one day, cities will close, the ESB will turn off the generators, transport will halt as we make our way to the country, rolling the beer kegs with us. Beer kegs that will be opened with nothing but hard stone and ailing thirst.
Other nations will watch on as we pour our only sustenance into drinking troughs and we’ll drink out of horns. Parades around the world will halt as they look towards Sky News in bewilderment. Reporters will flock towards Dublin Airport looking for answers. Brendan Gleeson will axe every one of them, stony gaze upon their feeble frames as he growls, “This is OUR day.”

The entire country, for one day, one 24 hour stretch, will turn feral. We’ll piss in the fields, drink in the bushes and get scurvy. Any shamrock shapes in our pints will be SHAMROCKS. Rotting, green shamrocks that we’ll pick out with our dirty hands or maybe just eat as our livers plot self implosion and our brains plot feasting on raw cow flesh.

And for that one day, the 17th of March every year, the world will see Ireland as it was; when freedom wasn’t just a Mel Gibson quaintism and the fear of the banshee wasn’t something to be laughed at.

And maybe, just maybe, we might be able to ask for the day after Paddy’s Day off work too.