Why send me silly notes?

I've read one or two posts recently where people try and get to grips with the merits of Twitter. This one by narocroc pretty much expresses the same thoughts I have on the matter. I don't 'tweet', but if I did:




The mundane:



"Just heading to Tesco to buy some sliced pan"



Needy requests for advice:



"do I get smooth or crunchy peanut butter? help me fellow twitterers!!!"



"i'm thinking of going to morocco for my next holiday but my cousin says it's full of Arabs. Is this true?"



Too much information:



"There's corn in my turds again but I haven't eaten any for, like, a week now"



" I don't think any cream is going to get rid of this boil on my bum"



The cloyingly cheerful:



"OMG its not raining today!"



The mundane and cloyingly cheerful:



"Gerald Fleming says it's gonna hit minus 3 tomorrow. Woolly gloves for me then!!!"



The ill-advised honesty on a public forum:



"called in sick today and my tit of a boss totally bought it. another day of wanking for me..."



"ha, i'm totally plagiarising my way through this postgrad."



The drunk:



"i LOVe buRgerking cheeSBRGrs!%6"



The stating the bleeding obvious:



"New York is so much bigger than Wicklow"



The creepy:



"I just love women's arses"



"If the girl opposite me in the library would just bend over and tie her shoe I could totally see down her top."



The stalkeresque:



"This is the fifth shoe shop i've followed her into, doesn't the bitch need any bras today?"

Fibreglass Links

Leigh's Oscar sum-up. Useful to a curmudgeonly fucker like me who would never give up his sleepy time for an award ceremony of any kind.
I was very glad to see Slumdog Millionaire doing well. It had its flaws, but I can't think of a better film I've seen recently. And the scene on the train soundtracked by MIA's Paper Planes is just a glorious bit of cinema.

Madeley, a true polymath of our time, learns to play the banjo. Both Rob Brydon and Alan Titchmarsh have attempted to teach me the lute in the past, but it seems my fingers are too fat.

B will, apparently, pay you a tenner to violate his liver in the nastiest of ways.

Dan and Paul seem to be getting a little upset over some apparently nefarious goings-on at the blog awards. Glad it's not me attracting the ire of Mulley on Twitter and fuck-knows-what-else this time. That bitch has a sharp tongue. Dan's is particularly worth checking out just for the sight of Twenty getting embroiled in the most unbecoming of slanging matches. Gold.

And finally, I'd just like to congratulate my buddy Annie on winning Best Personal Blog last Saturday. She won it because hers is the best personal blog. If only all awards worked that way.

Cowper to The Green

Perhaps it's just me, but Dublin has felt like a spectacularly shite place to be in the last few months. But on blue sky days like today it feels like it might eventually pull out of its collective anxiety and become a decent place to live in again. Where people smile a bit more, keep drinking at a proper level, and manage to stop asking "Is your job secure?" for long enough to have a conversation about, I dunno, cats or something. Where a taxi driver's inevitable "Yeah, it's slow at the moment..." might just be followed up with "But sure, fuck it."

It takes the fortuitousness of having just the right change for the Luas in my pocket to set me on this tram of thought. Johnny Cash in my ears helps, too. Then when the tunes end I can still hear a guitar strumming, and turn around to see a Spanish bloke playing a guitar at the front of the carriage. No-one minds. I grin, and afford him one ear. He complements Johnny nicely.

This may well be the way to reclaim your city: filling it with music and scrawling love notes to it while curious passengers look over your shoulder.

Standing, staring

Just over a year to the day since my grandmother's death, my grandad gives my brother a birthday card. It's of the 'to our grandson from his grandparents' description. Except, inside he has crossed over any plural words in the card's cheerful patter and replaced them with the singular version. This may largely boil down to his famed pedantry, rather than a lonely old man's plea for attention, but I still find it deeply affecting.

It seems so sad that after lifetimes with their soulmates beside them, so many people are left waiting for their remaining years to peter out, missing the one thing that must have felt like it would always be there.

Friggatriskaidekaphobia

A genuine word, combing triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), with Frigga, a Germanic goddess who gives her name to Friday, to form a word meaning 'fear of Friday the 13th'.

Magnificent, huh?

I'd love to add it to my list of neuroses, but there are two Friday the 13ths still to come this year, and two entire days of fear sounds like a lot of hard work.

Funnily enough, I missed the freckles on her shoulder

Early blanking from Tony Fenton aside, Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip in Whelans was just the deadliest gig I've been to in a very long time. And that's not just because I don't go to very many gigs.

In other news, Captain Morgan is now my second favourite captain, sandwiched in between Birdseye and Smack.

You Know There's Nothing More Than This

It seems, since we got together, that there has been an endless stream of death for her to contend with. Two relatives, a treasured pet, and now a friend. It is all far, far too much within a few months.

I wonder, sometimes, how death feels for her in the godless world she inhabits. She doesn't even get to believe in a heaven filled with souls taken roughly or prematurely from this earth.

But then, I doubt that it feels very different to the world I inhabit, where God often feels like a waning moon. Or where, at best, I am constantly reminded of a line from a Wolf Parade song:

I always say it's in God's hands, but God doesn't always have the best goddamn plans, does he?