He's leaving home.....

After 300 posts the time has come for a change, not a big change, just a little one, been having difficult logging on to blogger so I've moved to wordpress.

For more of the same random meanderings turn on, tune in and drop out to:

http://kirribilli.wordpress.com

Same bat time, different bat channel.

Words on a bench

Found this written on a bench by the canal, makes you want to know more about the story and what happened next.

Desert

Desert. That’s what she said to me, we were just talking about I don’t know what and all of a sudden she says “desert”. We hadn’t been talking about deserts yet that’s what she said. I must have looked confused, she said she looked at me while we were talking and the word “desert” just popped into her head.

We were at a mind, body and spirit thing so I’d spent a few hours looking at some interesting complementary medicine and raising eyebrows at some of the more outlandish therapies and while her friend painted pictures of angels she had seemed relatively normal but I just can’t help but wonder what she meant by “desert”…

Had she said “dessert” then I would have felt she was being insightful, mmmm dessert….

He's lost control again

As a moody teenager nothing gives you more pleasure than depressing music that you can dance to. Fortunately I grew up in the eighties so there was a whole wealth of possibilities to choose from. I was an undercover goth, revelling in the misery of Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus and Fields of the Nephlim but there was one band that long before goth mastered the the concept of dull, depressing with a beat, Joy Division, and not only that the lead singer had killed himself when it got too much, what more could a teenager want?

Despite listening to Joy Division often enough and loudly enough to have my parents wondering if the "phase" would ever end, I never knew much about the people who made up the band so when "Control" came about I was curious. The music brought it all back, apart from the almost poppy "Love Will Tear Us Apart", I hadn't listened to the music in years but the revelation was the story and how it treated Ian Curtis as a character, despite his bad behaviour and strangeness you cared from this man and saddened by the end of the film.

Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll

There’s a new study that reveals that music makes you happy and that listening to music that you enjoy will release goog stuff into your system giving you that natural high that sex, drugs and chocolate provide.

Think of the best gig or concert you were ever at, remember the buzz, the excitement, the energy coursing through you and how long it took for you to calm down afterwards.

If music can the same effect as sex or chocolate, does this mean that you can become addicted?

Unable to start your day without a burst of "I Will Survive", start work without "9 to 5", prepare for a date without "You Sexy Thing", seduce your loved one without "Let’s Get It On"? You may have an addiction….

Do you like scary movies?

Think of a movie, the baddie breaks into your house, you run to the kitchen, desperate for a weapon, pulling drawers open, scrabbling through the cutlery and implements until there it is, the biggest knife in the house...

They always go for the knife, the sharp and pointy solution to the problem. Let's consider this, the baddie is bound to be bigger, stronger and faster than you, he's well able to defend himself against one knife, after all he's a baddie, he's probably done courses..

You need something to even the odds, something to make quite a dint and make the baddie reconsider the whole endeavour. May I introduce you to my wok? Unlike those flimsy light woks you see from time to time, this is cast iron and packs a whallop, capable of breaking limbs and cracking skulls open, it's the only form of defence you need!

Oh and you can cook with it too.....

A day

Lethargy

Warm bed and a long way to work

Twenty swans on the Tolka

Warm pastels behind the Pigeon House

A few hours at the coal-face

A long drawn-out beautiful sunset, starting off with streaks across the sky and slowly degenerating into a ball of ruby redness eaten by the surrounding inky-blue

Warm bed

Sleepiness

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to...

Consider the scenario:

In order to be able to work as an IT contractor I (Party A) set up my own company where I am the only employee of my company.

My company (Party B) then sells my services and skills to other companies for a fixed daily rate.

Currently I am working through a recruitment agent (Party C) who adds on an additional 100 euro to my daily rate and charges his client that new rate.

His client is a consulting company (Party D) and they have sold my skills on to one of their clients (Party E), adding on 350 euro to the previous daily rate.

So for very every day I travel in to work in the offices of Party E, money flies off to all corners of the city, my company gets it’s daily rate, my agent gets 100 euro, my client gets 350 euro and Party E gets the benefit of my years of experience.

Or so the theory goes….

The reality is somewhat different. If you were paying so much money for someone, you’d want to work their fingers to the bone and squeeze the most amount of value out of them, wouldn’t you?

Apparently not.

Most days I do next to no work, there’s nothing for me to do, I cannot do anything until the requirements for my project are decided and signed off, I’ve been waiting two months for them already and they don’t seem to want me to do anything else in the meantime!

In memoriam

Take a stroll up our main boulevard, past the GPO, past Jim Larkin and his raised arms, across the Luas lines and around The Liberator and his flock of angels and onto the bridge that spans Anna Livia.

There once was a clock under the waters of Anna Livia and unlike most clocks it ran backwards, counting the ticks to the great millennium but Anna Livia was offended by this alien artefact and sought to obsure the flashing digits.

The people of the city listened to her wishes and the clock was removed, leaving Anna Livia with her collection of shopping trolleys, traffic cones and discarded bicycles…

If you stand on the bridge there spanning our glorious river goddess, you might find a plaque that says:

THIS PLAQUE COMMEMORATES FR. PAT NOISE ADVISOR TO PEADAR CLANCEY. HE DIED UNDER SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES WHEN HIS CARRIAGE PLUNGED INTO THE LIFFEY ON AUGUST 10TH 1919. ERECTED BY THE HSTI

Think of your own city, think of all the monuments, statues and plaques you pass each day, all the ones that you barely spare a glance for, the ones dedicated to people you never knew or even heard of but they were important to someone and should be remembered.

Only there was no Fr Pat Noise and he certainly didn’t die when his carriage plunged into the river.

When the Millenium clock was removed from the river, there was a control box on the bridge which was also removed, leaving a gap for many years.

Someone, seeing the gap decided that it was a shame to have an ugly gap in the middle of such a proud and grand bridge and created the plaque.

If something new was added to a significant landmark like O’Connell Bridge, you’d notice it wouldn’t you? Maybe not immediately but quick enough?

The plaque was there for 2 years before someone investigated who this Fr Pat Noise was and it hit the newspapers but the story doesn’t end there….

After much discussion in the Dublin City Council, it was decided to leave it there.

Innocents Abroad

It’s common to find books where the main character is thrown into an alien environment and the book explores their successes and failures in adapting to and integrating into their new environment. There are some writers who turn the concept on its head and write about visitors to an environment that is perfectly normal to us but alien to them and either makes a fool of the visitor or satirises the life we lead, these are difficult books to get right and many a writer fails terribly.

I’ve been learning a little about people with Asperger’s Syndrome recently and sometimes they can take what is said a bit too literally so phrases like “painting the town red” and “like a house on fire” will only confuse them. I think this is the problem with some of these books about innocents abroad, they read like the main character has Aspergers but what’s worse is that while a lot of people with Aspergers and autism are quite intelligent, the characters in the books seem to be stupid people with Aspergers.

This sledgehammer approach to satire is not enjoyable, a measure of subtlety is required.

You’ll find that subtlety in the hands of Eduardo Mendoza. He’s not a big name in the English-speaking world since most translations of his books are out of print, I’ve spent years looking for a copy of City of Marvels, it seems to be quite elusive, if only my Spanish was good enough to read the original?

I did come across “No Word From Gurb” hidden away in the science fiction section of a bookshop over the weekend, it looks like maybe a reissue of his work may be on the cards, I might not have to perfect my Spanish just yet!

An alien spacecraft lands covertly in Barcelona in an effort to learn more about our world and our culture. When one of the aliens doesn’t come back from an exploratory mission, the other has to venture into the unknown city in an effort to find his shipmate…