Sweet sixteen, ain't that peachy keen?

I should assert my paternal paternity. I should get all patriarchal and dominant. I should reef the offending dvd from the player, insert Barry Lyndon and press that big old play button. I should strap Riker into a chair and having purchased one of those Clockwork Orange hold your victim's eyes open devices off of Ebay, make her watch the whole splendid 184 minutes. Because I swear to Jebus himself that if I have to watch her watching either High School Musical or High School Musical 2 even one more time I will fucking scream. Or sigh. And I'm not sure anyone can take any more Gimme sighing.

Both films are truly hideous pieces of deeply sick popular kid propaganda. We're talking about the HSMs here, folks, not the Kubricks. Did you get that? You probably got that.

Here are the lessons to be learnt from three hours of this Disney vomit:

If you are male you must play a sport.

If you are female you must look on adoringly as the boy who plays a sport discovers his soft, sensitive artistic side, and then if you're really good and you promise to give up your goodies you can sing a quick duet with him right at the end.

If you are male and you start off with a soft, sensitive artistic side and do not play sports, well then you're either a fucking pussy or a fucking crazy.

And if you are female and are not pretty or are lacking the potential to be revealed as pretty in the closing scenes, then you can fuck right off. Go on, out you go. Aren't you fucking listening? Get off the fucking screen. We've had our scene where we sneer at your ugliness and clumsiness so fuck off please. Thank you.

It's time to start mashing up movies, I reckon. Snoop Dogg vs Grease is just peachy for your musical needs but let's take the next step and starting mixing up the mighty motion pictures. And let's begin with High School Musical. And let's mash it up with Gus Van Sant's Elephant. Nothing would bring out the hidden depths of this dreck like a couple of rampaging loners armed with AK-47s and hunting knives. Nothing would clear up the underlying homo-eroticism between Troy and Chad like an artfully shot shower sequence. And nothing would make me happier that seeing all those poor rich popular kids die with the word 'why' on their lips. I'll tell you why, you fucks.

Because. That's fucking why.

We can call it 'High School Elephant'.

Girls' faces formed the forward path, from phony jealousy

For Savannah, on her birthday. May she forgive me my lack of focus.

The homicidal bitchin' that goes down in every kitchen

Here come the Irish Blog Awards, folks.

So clearly I'm going to win Best Blog. But outside of that we are only permitted to focus on one category. And how the fuck are we supposed to do that? I am the most humorous. I am the most personal. I am certainly the best newcomer. I do the occasional sporting post. I'm constantly spewing about technology fucking me in the ass. I could clean sweep the motherfucker if only I was a group. Decisions, decisions.

I'm only kidding really. I know exactly which category in which I wish to triumph, where my undisputed talents are best displayed.

Folks, I give you: 'Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog': Ní fhuaireas féin aon suan ná séan, ó chuaigh i gcéin mo ghile mear

Really folks, who the fuck is going to beat 'nuachtflash dickwadinní'? No body, no how.

At the risk of alienating the voting panel, what the motherfuck is that fucking category about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's the Irish Blog Awards and all but aren't there more people in Ireland now who speak Polish? Or even fucking French? Let's have a 'Best Use of Yugoslavian' category. Or 'Best Use of the Word 'Cunting'. Just a suggestion.

You might as well fuck off and do your nominating now.

No more blue songs, only whoop-dee-doo songs

Oh how fat I'm going to be. How very, very fat. Oh yes, soon I will be the fattest fit fucker you ever lay eyes upon. And all because of evil, evil automotive transport. That and a couple of penchants: an old one for snickereses and a new one for full fat milk soaked cocktails.

I did it folks, I fucking drove to work. No mean feat this for a guy who still can't really drive with even a modicum of competency. And you know, it all went reasonably spiffingly on the way over. I had intended crossing the city via the toll bridge but realised early on that I had omitted to put my carefully gathered coinage in a place from where I could simply extract it. I did not put the €1.55 up my ass but so buried was it in my trackie bums that I might as well have done. So I just thought 'Fuck it' and drove into town. The fuck was I thinking? I was thinking 'Fuck it'. But like I say it went fine. The traffic gods smiled upon me. I cut out only once, and there was nobody behind me to get pissed off about it. I should point out that I only stopped twice. But still, right?

Here's a fucking thing, take a note of this. Took me half an hour. Takes me 26 minutes on Rosie, folks. I ask you, what's the fucking point?

So I stretch some slappers out, I work out some wankers. Who the fuck goes to an exercise class on the December 29th? The only thing you should be training on a day such as today is your fucking liver for New Years Eve. For fuck's sake.

And then I got back in the car. I'm tired. I'm still a little hungover from two nights ago. (I dropped a day, folks, did you see me drop a day?) And I'm fucking starving. So perhaps my concentration is down. Perhaps my hackles are up. But either fucking way it turns into a horrible nightmare. And quickly too.

Early on hesitancy almost causes me to be hit by a van. Nearly never fucked a cat, I guess. Maybe it isn't that close. But that makes fuck all difference, because from this moment on (and it's the whiny Jimmy Sommerville version, folks) I am a bag of nerdy nerves, an out cutting monster of the roads. There's panicking, there's multi-restarting, there is even, right at the end, some beeping. I have to draw a veil, folks. I'm too embarrassed and sickened by it all. Nobody died or went to prison or was delayed by more than forty-five minutes or so. So let's move on.

We move on to my quick trip down to the shops for a little extra full fat milk. On Rosie naturally. On the way back I have to go into the wind for all of thirty seconds. And I have me some realisations. I realise that tomorrow I will have to cycle into this wind for 26 minutes. Then I realise that no, in fact, I don't. I realise that I own a car and can if I so chose, put myself through what can only be a consistently dwindling state of fear and drive to work and back once again.

It's fat I'm going to be folks, oh so very, very fat.

The jukebox has to take a leak

It's post Christmas twitter from a post Christmas twit, folks. It's post Christmas posting of posts to boost a post count. For fuck's sake.

I like a bit of variety in my Christmas drinking folks. Ans so I give you, in order of first consumption, a list of the drinks that I have drunk in the last 36 hours:

1) Port

2) Fake champagne

3) Red wine

4) Vodka

5) Tia Maria

6) Beer

7) Sherry

8) Gin

9) Baileys

And I think that I will now have a can of

10) Guinness

Hic.

God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're all bored with my Christmas carping, my Yuletide mewling. But folks, I have one more so dear to my fucking heart Crimbo related raging to ratchet up. Here, hear:

The Bridge Crew, Common Law and I hit town early Saturday morning. We mugged Santa in the Jervis Street shopping centre, bought Lush shit for anyone not possessed of a penis and finished off with a little hardcore book buying in Eason. Bish bash bosh, fuck you Christmas, you will not fuck with Gimme.

And as we struggled in a laden down, children dragging manner towards the nearest taxi rank we passed the privileged children from Belvedere College on their yearly sleepout in front of the GPO. Common Law and I made our traditional jibes about the fucked-upness of all this, making note of the €200 sleeping bags and this year's addition of gym mats for the poor lambs to lie on to soften their two nights of craic on the streets. For fuck's sake, I thought, as usual.

We crossed O'Connell Street and noticed some army types erecting a tent-like structure on the central boulevard. I assumed that there was to be some class of Christmas parade and that the dignitaries would be sitting their fat asses under this tent in case of rain.

'Maybe the army are there to protect the rich boys from the scobies,' Common Law joked. And how we laughed.

That evening I was once again passing through town on my way to meet the newly returned V. And unbelievably, in a move that put the entire situation way past satire, those 'sleep out' fuckers were underneath the cunting tent. All bunched together on their gym mats, in their sleeping bags. The gaggle of admiration-fueled, high-booted, short-skirted teenage girls hanging out nearby were doing a better job of replicating homelessness that those snuggled up toastie tossers under the tent.

We all know that Gimme is an horrendous hypocrite, folks, but I learnt from the fucking masters. If the Catholic Church are the Inter Milan of hypocrisy then the Jesuits are Ibrahimovich, leading the line, getting the goals.

They and almost everything they do still makes me fucking sick to my stomach.

If you're the best, the worst, longest immersed

I have a reasonable post frequency record folks. I'm no Old Knudsen of course, no Manuel me. But I have yet to drop below the twenty posts in a month mark. The pressure to retain this record is seriously fucking on.

So you can expect a whole load of filler posts like this one over the next few days. You may even get yourselves a Your Tube clip or two. You lucky, lucky fuckers.

Like this one:

A cracked polystyrene man who just crumbles and burns

I love that my beard makes me scary.

I have Data in the trolley, in the local supermarket. The Christmas spirit is alive and kicking, kicking out at anyone who moves slowly, anyone not in a panic state of ‘must consume, must consume’. It’s busy, it’s frenzied. And look who’s coming...

It’s some balding, suited cunt who I feel deep in my bones was born on the same day as me, in the same year, perhaps at the very same second, who is rushing through the supermarket trying to get to the comically embedded off-licence section. He is hassled, he is harried, but he is a king of the world in his mind. He has bottles of wine to buy for colleagues who have unexpectedly bought him bottles of wine.
Yes, prick, I thought everyone hated you too.

We find ourselves, this king of crap and I, me and this monarch of the mediocre, in something of a Robin Hood/Litttle John type scenario. Yes, it is the height of the holiday season and yes, the schools have just ejected the children but still they stock the shelves. More, more produce thrown upon the bonfire of our innoncence, more stuff-rope with which to hang our sense of perspective, our very morality.

So with space for just the one of us to move down the aisle, we lock eyes. My instinct in these situations is to gesture expansively and allow the lady or indeed the rare supermarket shopping gentleman through. And if they don’t smile and say thank you then I shriek ‘You’re welcome!’ because I am a cunt.

But I know this guy and I want to move to the being a cunt thing that little bit earlier because yes, I know him but more because he thinks knows me as I’m in my deadbeat dad uniform and I’m pushing a toddler around and I’m doing grocery shopping and this fuck thinks that he is better than me and prebeard I might have agreed with him and dropped my gaze but not today, not with my facebadger, I hold the stare and he suddenly he looks genuinely terrified and waves me through.

‘No.’ I say. ‘No. After you.’ And I smile. But my smile is bearded and dead, a rotting stinking corpse of a smile and he knows it and he edges past me mumbling ‘Thank you’.

‘You’re welcome,’ I hiss.

It’s Christmas trying to fuck me folks. But I will not be fucked.

I don't have a husband, he don't play the trombone

Cunting Christmas.

Let's break this bad boy down just one more time. For two years in a row I sang the bass line of 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (and fuck you waster women)' every night but Sunday from December 1st to deep into February. Oh, how I tickled February's g-spot with my young Scrooge shenanigans. Except I didn't fucking sing the bass line of the aforementioned carol, because I can't sing. Instead I sang the melody out of tune and a couple of octaves below everyone else. Such was my dedication to depth that I believe I may have slipped into 'Old Man River' on occasion. The rest of the cast were embarrassed for me. I was embarrassed for myself. Reason enough to hate Christmas, you might say. But there are more reasons, folks, there are more. I offer a tiny, barely representative selection:

I have guilt. You know that I have guilt, oh such guilt that I have. Guilt about the spoken, guilt about the unspoken. Guilt about what I have done, guilt about what I have failed to do. Guilt about all those lies and all those truths. So the last fucking thing in the world I need is a letterbox full of Christmas cards to add to this already crippling emotion.

Why fake liking someone once a year? If you fucking like me call me up on the phone. Of course I have caller id, and if it's you then I probably won't answer, and if you block your number and it comes up unknown then I definitely won't answer. But nevertheless, how about we dispense the fuck with this meaningless, forest-decimating, guilt inducing tradition? How the fuck about that?

Of course I wouldn't have the guilt if I sent Christmas cards myself, but I'm not that class of hypocrite, (my hypocrisy scales higher heights than that) and more importantly it would involve being arsed. And folks, I am not arsed.

Hey. Since when the fuck did we become American? And since when did blue become a Christmas colour? Fucking Americans, with their brashness, their cultural imperialism, their taking two years to elect a fucking president. But most of all their fucking Christmas lights. You Yanks have been dong this shit forever though, right? These gaudy displays of disposable income, these tacky tasteless trinkets dripping from every exterior nook and cranny, every branch and bush, they've been around since back in the day for you guys. But it's a relatively new Celtic Tiger inspired phenomenon on this fair isle and folks, how it fucks me off.

To begin with, this was confined to the suddenly rich poor folks and I could shake my head and smirk condescendingly. I'm good at that. I've got a good line in smirks, and the best sellers are all about the condescension. But now, now they're all fucking at it. Our property developer next door neighbours, and not too coincidently, our landlords, have a flaccid string of these eerie Christmas blues dangling from a tree that intrudes on our gaff.

These are people of culture and enlightenment, their children are well mannered and play a wide variety of musical instuments in a stunningly inoffensive manner and yet still, come the Yuletide season, they are overwhelmed by the compulsion to turn both their mansion and by extension our gatekeeper hovel into something more akin to a Miami brothel. Poor fuckers, poor mindless Xmas automatons.

You'll be wanting me to think about the excitement of the Bridge Crew, folks, those cries of joy that will emanate from their little mouths when they see the vast range of crap that will be sitting in piles on the couch. But this joy will be tainted in my mind by the memory of the stress, the queueing, the overloaded plastic bags digging into my poor patrician fingers, pulling on my undertrained biceps. And those sickening moments of panic when it looks like this year, for sure, I have completely fucked it up and left it too late to get that heart's desire present that was ordered from Santa many a week ago.

Surely the happy children will be enough? Na hah. They won't be happy for long. Soon they will be crashing down from their Christmas Coco Pops high and there will fighting and wailing and possibly gouging. And even if they stay happy all the live long day there is still the matter of the karaoake machine that is Riker's main present. Riker sings like me folks, but she doesn't know it yet. The poor, poor child. It all comes back to the singing as she will soon discover.

Am I being too negative? Perhaps. But I have no enthusiasm for positivity. I have no enthusiasm for it because, in case this is not clear, this festive season brings me down, bums me right out.

To restate: cunting Christmas.

For every point you make your level drops

Here's the fucking thing. Once the novelty wears off and I start to feel like I might be achieving something, that's when I generally just give the fuck up. Why fucking bother, like? My inner hedonist insists that if it's not bringing me instant gratification or at least a little shiver of pleasure then whatever this it happens to be is clearly not worth my time. My outer hedonist finds himself in complete agreement. They're good mates, my two hedonists. They see I to I.

And so I am faced with the following question: proper post or Pro Cycling Manager?

You fucking guessed it, folks.

Most of '81 passed along those lines

I went to my Christmas party. That sounds like a neutral statement, right? You don't know how it went yet, do you? But you're wondering was it as bad as the bowling, aren't you? If you haven't read about the bowling you might as well go and do that now. I couldn't be arsed being expansive so if you want to get your money's worth you should really go and read about the bowling. Also, it will provide you with a valuable frame of reference for when you're discussing the latest offering from Gimme at the watercooler.

Let's take it all the way back to the neutral statement, folks. I went to my Christmas party. But let me be clear. This is not just a party for the employees of the august establishment in which I ply my pimpish trade. This party is also for the members. And I mean members in at least two senses. Tell me this, folks. Who, of a Black Friday, at the peak of the Yuletide party season, considers their best festive piss up option to be the member's party at the gym they have paid huge money to attend really fucking sporadically? You needn't tell me after all, I fucking know. Fucking no life losers. That's fucking who.

Does this seem a trifle unkind? A utty butty bit nasty? Better get used to it, folks. After six weeks of being told that it is the season to not be a cunt it finally tis that fucking season and I'm all not being a cunted out. I'm saving any remaining fake Christmas spirit for the children so you can expect bitterness, schadenfreude and general gloom all the way to the Epiphany. Problem with that?

The party differed somewhat from the bowelling that was the bowling. It was longer, more alcoholic and just slightly less stressful. But I still struggled to speak, to do anything in but a repeat performance of the inane smiling, no matter who was speaking to me about what. As a rule, I like to be down on myself, to focus on the overwhelming negatives. But there's nothing like a social situation to bring out the real, the true, the full full-on self loathing. Oh, how I irritate myself as I smile and nod, how I fuck myself off as I faux pas it up.

But as much as I wish that I wasn't myself, I remain very relieved that I am not many of the other people who attended this knees up, this dance of the desperate. The single salsa kicked in early on and how I inwardly laughed to see these poor people manoeuvring themselves from target to target, weighing their options, assessing their chances. Too drunk, not drunk enough. Pretty but a little too dumb. Handsome but a little too malodorous. Brilliant and witty but brown paper bag ugly. Decisions, decisions. I used to do all this. I sigh with relief that I never have to do it again.

It's conclusion time, folks. I conclude that I hate Christmas parties, I hate other people. I hate fucking Christmas, I hate myself.

Like I said, not expansive. But conclusive.

Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi bobbidi boo

They're back. Yes they are and I'm back on the bike, drug and alcohol free. No more snooker for me, no more midday vodkas. No more gut wrenching Alien baby vomiting.

From what I gather the Bridge Crew and their adult companions had a good time in the Land of the Crazy Fridge Freezer Fascist. They ate naught but sugar and ketchup soaked chips, they drank nothing but Fanta and well, ketchup. Straight from the sachet in Data's case.

And so dripping with hideous Disney merchandise and hepped up on these disaccharidian goofballs they wandered from glitzy attraction to nauseating ride. Riker went on a whole load of insane upside down vertically plummeting through the dark crap to which wild horses would not drag me. Data focused mostly on the terrorising of the unforunate, and unfortunately named, 'cast members'. Word has it that she introduced herself as 'Data the Princess'. Perhaps if she now turns from the dark side, keeps her nose clean and studies really hard then one day she can be a Disneyland Resort Paris cast member too.

'Would you you have liked to stay another week?' I asked Riker, who was at this point dressed in a High School Musical hat, a High School Musical t-shirt and High School Musical socks. 'Only if you were there, Daddy.' Ha! Oh, she knows the buttons to push that one. Eight and three quarters and already more manipulative than her mother. I haven't worked out what she's trying to get out of me yet but it's probably, I don't know, attention or love or something.

And Data? She keeps coming up and throwing her arms around my legs. Maybe she thinks I'm that little known Disney character 'Mr Bearded Miserablility'. Or perhaps she's trying to tackle me to the ground so she can go through my pockets to get change for the vending machines in the hotel lobby to which she has become so accustomed. Or maybe, just maybe, she missed my gruff, grumpy ass as much as I missed her whiny, tantrum having one.

Three days is all that it was. The fuck is it going to be like when I send them to boarding school?

I wish I had all the money we used to spend on dope

I know, I know, they be closing Luke's Hospital, they be burning fossil fuels, they be oppressing the oppressed. So you can go off on your march, you can change all your light-bulbs and stick stickers on SUVs, you can even try to be a little less oppressive, but before all that folks, I got a real campaign for you to take up, a genuine cause célebre.

Make Tom Waits No. 1 for Christmas. Find reasons, like you need any, and methods here.

And find a live version below.To hear the far superior, stunning original version you're just going to have to fork out your 99c. But don't shoot your wad yet ladies, gents cool your jets, save your repetitive Waits buying for between Friday 14th and Thursday 20th.

We can do this folks, we can make Christmas a better place to be.

And whether he wins or whether he don't, I always bite me eyeballs

How the gods of doing nothing have smiled upon me this afternoon. Which is dead nice of them after they spent most of yesterday holding me down and gang raping me as I tried so hard to vomit that I was making the noise that the baby alien makes after it bursts from John Hurt's stomach. Eeeeeaaarch! Breathe, breathe. Eeeeeeearch! Breathe, wait, here it comes, oh god please, not again, here it comes.

After every failed purging of my entire stomach wall I was hit by a wave of brutal, searing, crippling and of course nauseating pain that washed through my head from back to front. A pain to make me weep if I hadn't already been too busy letting off my next eeeeeearch.

Three hours of that. Many more hours of slightly less intense misery. Me time, as it's called.

But today is another day. And today these gang rapist gods have brought the greatest gift that can be granted to the potentially bored slacker. A meaningless but extensively televised snooker tournament.

What greater joy to the couch bound stoner than a long drawn out game of rhythm and flow and snug litte tuxes emblazoned with garish ads for online gambling websites. All this and the Terminator-like presence of referee Jan ver Haas.

As a youth I used to weep in butchers' shops and as a unemployed childless actor I used to flake out with the good kind of smoke within easy reach and watch the Snooker World Championship, and the UK Masters and any other shitty little competition that an increasingly desperate BBC Sport could find to transmit. Don't tell Common Law, but I turned down a job rather than miss the closing week at The Crucible.

This dedication, this marijuana fueled stubbornness led to my being witness to a magical sporting moment.

Observe, ignorant Americans, clueless Canadians, naive Nicaraguans. It is sporting perfection, the snooker equivalent of the pitcher's perfect game, the bowler's 300. And this one is the fastest ever too.

Enjoy that? Oh, don't try to fake me out, losers. You didn't fucking watch it, did you? I know you didn't, don't fucking lie. You don't know what your missing.

Now pipe down, mid-session interval is over, Ronnie's on the table and any kind of shit could happen.

Marge murmurs, Maude croaks, Lisa Buddhas, Homer tokes

Sometimes what I want to write has already been written so I'm fucked if I'm going to write it again.

From Martin:
'You'd think I'd be in pretty terminal shape by now, what with the rum and the dope and all. But not me. No sir, not this baby. you recognize the type by now? Some people get sleepy when the drink a lot, but not us. When we get drunk we want to go out and do things...Never do anything is the rule I try and stick to when I'm drunk. But I'm always doing things. I'm drunk.'


From Manuel:
'I spent Thursday in bed with the bizarro dwarves, coughy, sicky, sweaty, horny (always a strange hangover side effect), depresso, shaky, and hallucinationo. It was awful. "Oh sweet Jebus take me now" sort of awful. Song lyrics were going round my head, the same song lyrics over and over and over again.'


From Me:
'There is nothing that takes place on this good green Gaia that cannot be directly and instantaneously linked to my own personal pain. From the menace of Mugabe to my mother's adult measles, it's all about me and my suffering.

I sicken me.'

It's two thousand miles I roamed just to make this dock my home

I already feel paralyzed by the possibilities, folks. I have before me, gleaming like a piece of misplaced modern architecture, three days without children or work or any other life sucking, grey hair giving responsibilities.

The Bridge Crew are going to Disneyland Paris, little Celtic cubs that they are, and they're dragging Common Law and Common Mother-in-Law along with them. I am a little jealous and a little sad that I won't be there to witness what will undoubtedly be the highlight of their lives thus far but not so jealous and not so sad that I haven't spent every waking moment since the announcement of this trip fantasizing about all the possible hedonistic activities with which I might fill this unprecedented length of free time.

72 is a whole fuckload of hours to use up in the pursuit of enforced relaxation when one is used to at the most three or four hours in the evening and those always with that overhanging seven o'clock rise and the inevitable spin class the following day. And so my first plan, the original and quite possibly the best, had the virtue of simplicity. It was timetabled in my head thusly:

Sunday 2.30pm: Commence drinking and smoking drugs.

Wednesday 2.30am: Cease drinking, drug smoking. Sleep until return of Bridge Crew twelve hours later.

Good, huh? Elegant, you might say. But I did a little White Russian warm up last weekend and I have a sneaking suspicion that non-stop drinking and poor quality dope smoking is going to get a little tired, and if I stop half way I'll get a little tired and the whole experiment will turn into a drearily depressing waste of these precious precious hours.

But what the fuck else is there to do? The movies! I never get to go to the movies unless its some post Pixar pish with poorly animated animal assholes. I was contemplating an Eastern Promises - The Golden Compass - annoyingly titled Jesse James movie triple bill, but Eastern Promises is gone already and if I am to believe all the reviews and reports I'm going to find The Golden Compass a huge disappointment. So just Jesse James, then. I gather it's about eight hours long so that leaves me, assuming a blissful ten hours sleep a day, with ummm, I don't fucking know, thirty something hours to fill with something apart from sighing about the missing children and the eerily silent, tidy house.

Help me out, folks. Suggestions that help me grow as a person will be accepted but ignored.

If I have one more pie a la mode, I'm going to need my own zip code

I have fuck all against fat people, folks. They're jolly, right? They're bouncy and buxom and bountiful. And Lord knows the large (did I say fat before? Apologies, the large) are now in the majority. I don't have the statistics to hand but I gather that 90% of the population now need those little car things to do their shopping. And good for them, it sure beats the snot out of waddling around burning calories that could be put to much better use in the digestion of cakes and biscuits.

But. But, but but. I'm going to make a statement here folks, put out what I believe to be a big fat fact. A big large fact. Shoot me down if you will, shoot me up if you want. Intravenous Gimme, that'll sort your Thursday blues.

Here we go: There are a number of, shall we say, physical idiosyncrasies, which are not entirely compatible with certain career paths. Blindness and bus driving, for example. Ageusia and celebrity cheffing. Dwarfism and NBA basketball playing. I'm not saying that these differentiated abilities and professions are necessarily mutually exclusive, just that there are perhaps more suitable choices to be made.

You can feel me going somewhere with all this, right?

There's a new fitness instructor at the gym, folks and he's fucking huge. Big boned? Quite possibly, though that's kind of difficult to assess what with the many layers of adipose tissue covering said bones. This gentleman is not just a little overweight. He's Mary Harney, he's Orca, when he's sitting around the gym, he's sitting around the gym. Twenty years ago, you would have assumed he was American. He's that fucking big.

I reckon that seeing as the majority of people join a gym with a view to losing weight, surely the person to help them achieve this goal shouldn't be themselves failing to achieve this goal in the most spectacular of fashions.

Can he demonstrate the chest press on a stability ball? I have no doubt that he can, though watching this happen would be akin to the unsettling experience that is watching a toddler sitting on a party balloon. Can he encourage and inspire? Perhaps he can folks, perhaps he can. Does he know his exercise physiology? Of course he does, or he wouldn't have been able to pass the rigorous multiple choice exam needed to attain the title of 'fitness instructor':

The knee bone is connected to:

a) the wrist bone
b) the leg bone
c) your arse
d) all of the above.

But even taking into account the potentially vast knowledge of this motivational man mountain, clinical obesity and the instruction of fitness just don't gel for Gimme.

Call me a fucking fat fascist folks, it has a nice ring to it.

And when they pulled her from the wreck, you know she still had on her shades

I've gotten one or two new readers the last couple of days, folks. But don't worry, we'll soon sort that out. The Yanks are going to be alienated and confused by two Ireland specific posts in a row and everyone else will have had their fill of me and my being full of me.

If one week ago you had tickled me with the following teaser, my answer would have been a resounding: 'Damn fucking straight. You betcha. Bring it on, and make it painful.' But now? With a situation full of reality and bedside vigilantes holding court? How do I respond to the repetitively self-posed question: 'Do I want Katy French to die?'

Does my hatred of this shallow slapper and her ilk allow me to get behind the concept of a young life, however vapid, prematurely ended? Am I so sickened by celebrity culture that I can live with the thought of a father waking up every day for the rest of his life without his darling daughter? How much of a self-righteous, self-important, self-regarding cunt am I?

Folks, I am fortunate to find myself with a ready-made cop out, a solution that allows me to hold my Hicksian head high without wishing death upon a relative innocent. If French were to die, the levels of affected hand-wringing, the weeks of tastefully tasteless headlines, the sight and sound of the meedja in full, gleeful mourning mode would be all but unbearable.

And so, I bestow my approval on the continued life of Katy French.

I am such a fucking softie.

Please don't mind me if I get a bit crude

Who the fuck watches 'The Late Late Show'? Me. I do. Gimme does. Once a fucking year. The Toy Show edition.

Tell me something, you year round Kenny watchers, you lifeless losers, is it always that horrible? That embarrassing? That completely fucking shit? Do the camerapeople get sloshed for just that one show or are we dealing with a weekly diet of back of the head shots, shaky crash zooms, and storm tossed ship inspired sweeps of the ugly, ugly audience?

Is it always lit like a funeral home or was that just for the festive period? Is it always directed and produced by people who appear to just not give a fuck? I'm not talking about malfunctioning toys folks, or comically collapsing sets that seem to have been constructed by the infirm and incontinent, but about simple things such as selecting the camera that is pointing at something relevant to the intended content, as opposed to say, the floor, or Pat Kenny's arse.

And speaking of Pat Kenny. Let us speak of him in tones that are hushed and reverential, for this man is clearly some kind of higher being because how fucking else could he be the highest paid broadcaster in RTE when he is incapable of even the simplest of televisual tasks? See that red light, Pat? That means that camera, yes, the camera with the red light, is broadcasting to the nation. Yes, I know they all have red lights but you see, only one of them is lit up. The four year old tarted up like a street walker gets it Pat, why don't you?

Yes. So when you turn your back to it and talk nobody can see your face. I don't know why they want to see your face, Pat, but they do. Yes, I know the audience in the studio can see you Pat, but the audience at home...that's right, Pat, it's just like the radio but with pictures...

And answer me one more question, loyal viewers. How is that somebody can work in the industry of television throughout the 1990s or indeed be fucking alive throughout the 1990s and still remain unaware of the pronunciation of the name 'Seinfeld'? And even if this pullovered prat had his memory wiped just before kick-off surely he could have asked some drunken assistant how to say the name of one of his two guests?

'Ladies and Gentlmen, Jerry Seinfield!' Seinfield, folks. Jerry Sein..field. Why are we paying this heroically ignorant tosspot a king's ransom to fuck shit up?

I told Common Law not to pay the TV license last year and she just ignored me. As she does. And she'll pay it again this year too, I just know she will. Le fucking sigh, folks, le huge fucking sigh.

Seems like folks turn into things that they never want

And now I see it looming frostily through the glass every time I walk down the stairs, whether it be ale tipsily at 11.30pm or blearily at 6.30am. (Really Data? On a Saturday? When I have to pull you kicking and screaming from under your duvet at 7.45 every weekday morning?) And before my slow slow brain train catches up with the reality of my newly grown up life I feel all violated and imposed upon. Because that corner of the eye dark shadow means we have a visitor. Somebody who is going to want to be fed, liquidized or liquidated and almost certainly talked to. Visitors, what a fucking pain in the tits, with their need to be spoken to with civility whatever the time of day or hour of mood. Visitors and their cars taking up my normally sweeping, barren driveway.

Because how could it possibly be my car? What kind of fucking sense would that make? Only adults have cars, adults who are part of the machine, servants of the man, earth destroying celtic tiger fucking fuckwits. All motorists? All car owners? Uh huh. Yesiree bob. You may be the nicest sweetest person in the world, fuck, you might even be Savannah, but once you sit behind the wheel of an automobile we are enemies, you and I.

And now I own a car. It may be old, it may have an element of quirk in its purpleosity, but a fucking car is what it is and a filthy stinking orc-like motorist is what I am destned to become.

And the money that has been paid to achieve this selling out, this self-rape of the soul. Surely a sell out should make me gain material wealth? Apparently fucking not. Money for the car, money for the insurance, money for the L plates, the car seats, the petrol, the washing, the crashing. Excluding cumulative expenses forked out on items like food, dope and nappies, this is by far the most money we have ever spent on anything. And it's on something I don't fucking want and barely fucking need.

I came very, very close to calling the whole thing off at the beginning of the week, folks, and now that it sits out there, lurking, with its little blinking red jap's immobiliser eye that I can see all the way from the kitchen table, I kind of wish that I fucking had.