Let the catch-up begin!

To begin, one of my favourite quotes:

“He who burns books will, in the end, also burn people”

- Heinrich Heine

Has the world gone MAD?  It has been obvious for a while now that we all have our priorities a little out of whack but surely when it gets to the point of having bookshops without books we need to sit down and have a serious re-think?!

I was pointed in the direction of this article, and while it’s nice to read about the world around me sometimes on this occasion I wish I hadn’t.

A little background information. I love books. I love books the way most people can only truly love other living creatures. Not that I don’t also love living creatures, people, etc., but I have a passionate love for the written word which I know to be alien to many. For as long as I can remember books have been my sanctuary, and bookshops have been my temple. I would, naturally, rather stay away from the bigger “chainstores”, but the sad fact is that they have already done too much damage to the proverbial Little Shop Around the Corner and now if you want books you go to Waterstones or Hodges Figgis and try to pretend they’re not both run by the same person.

Now the news comes that the aforementioned ’same person’, who also miserably runs HMV, is ruining everything. Not content with commercialising literature rather hideously - I do love getting 3 books for the price of 2 but would really love if they weren’t all in the bestsellers lists already - these people have now decided to abolish it altogether.

Well, not quite - but close enough. Apparently “acamedic and humanities” books will no longer be stocked in-store. The supposed redemption of this plan being that “they will still be available online”. In an age where we worry about reading levels because children are reared by games consoles, THAT is going to help? I know I’m a purist, and I know most people are happy to download music and don’t need to browse for hours flicking through ‘actual’ albums before making a choice. In fact I know that the music downloads problem is a significant factor in the reasoning behind the re-organisation (I’ll be polite) of Waterstones’ priorities. But it still makes me want to cry.

I don’t care if google et al. scan every word of every great book ever written and/or printed and it’s all available free of charge online - I still want, nay NEED, to be able to walk into a shop, and hunt down the history section, and pull out three or four books on obscure ancient civilizations, and smell the paper before I make my purchase…

How can it be so easy to shelve (by which I mean de-shelve!) such a huge swathe of knowledge? How can little men in a boardroom somewhere in London sit down and decide “no, the PS3 isn’t selling well enough, let’s cancel academia”. Isn’t it bad enough that the heads of our universities are betraying the humanities, without every high street book seller jumping on this particularly comfortable bandwagon!???

Visions of a future reunion

A few hours ago, while wandering happily from a café to a bus stop, I met a girl I knew once. Or rather, she screamed across the road at me and came running. She was a living stereotype, and it scared me a little.

There’s a common scene in all of those films about returning to ‘the town you grew up in’ - a concept that seems to hold much more weight in America, land of movies, perhaps because around here you never really get to leave the town you grew up in!! The scene plays as follows:

Cynic returns to small town they grew up in. Strolls casually down main street pondering all that they left behind, and being glad of their departure.

[SupposedOverAchiever]: “Hey! Cynic! Cynic? Cynic!! It’s me! Supposed OverAchiever!!”

[Cynic]: *groans*

SupposedOverAchiever trips over themselves to dash across the street, waving maniacally while squeaking

[SupposedOverAchiever]: “Oh my GOD Cynic McSarcalot how have you been?! You look great, just like you used to, what have you been up to?”

[Cynic]: “Not much, same old same old. You look different with your hair like that. How are things with you?”

[SupposedOverAchiever]: “Oh well you know how it is, I’m so busy, I must look a mess - I’m just on my way back from my pilates class, and I’ve just been promoted so work is busy too. It’s my second promotion in three years, you know. They just can’t keep me in one place, it’s been crazy. And I’ve just bought a house with my perfect fiancé, and things are great there, he earns so much that the mortgage will be paid off in no time and then I suppose it will be time for the kids!”

[Cynic]: “Great”

[SupposedOverAchiever]: “Gosh so I can’t believe you didn’t recognise me, I mean you look exactly the same, almost like you haven’t changed at all!”

[Cynic]: Is that supposed to be an insult? “I did recognise you. I just said your hair has changed. It’s darker.”

[SupposedOverAchiever]: *insert randomly hysterical laughter*

[Cynic]: “Anyway… I better be going…”

[SupposedOverAchiever]: “Oh okay so where are you headed, do you want to grab coffee?”

[Cynic]: “Can’t, stuff to do”

[SupposedOverAchiever]: “Okay well hey I guess I’ll see you soon?”

[Cynic]: “Yeah. Sure” Never.

I lived this scene today. For the record, I was the Cynic (and possibly not for the first time).

There are people in the world who will arrive at this scene and try to list every positive moment in their lives for the past X years. There are others who will (rightly) think “Oh look, a complete stranger I knew X years ago. Goodbye”.

What is it about us, that we insist on this one-up(wo)manship? Worse still, and as Morag Prunty’s column in the tribune this weekend pointed out (yes, I do need to start buying a wider selection of Sunday papers!), we have long-since placed the emphasis, and the value, on all the wrong things. Is it just so we can list them at times like this?

Yurk.

Brief & To the Point

I got sent this link. And I loved it. So I’m sharing it.

Really, DON’T stand so close to me!!

I don’t understand what bus stops do to people. In the sense that they get a little crazy. They flock like wild beasts of some kind; they grunt equally incoherently; they develop strange techniques for queue skipping..

Worst of all, they forget the basic laws of nature as regards breathing space.

I’m not anti-human-contact in the slightest, quite the opposite, but today a young… gorilla… with a long red beard and army jacket… decided to involve himself in my personal space while we waited at the same bus stop. Bear in mind, there were only four or five others at the stop, the path was not crowded, he had many other options in terms of where to stand. But he decided to stand two inches in front of me.

Initially he had his back to me, so the discomfort was less obvious, except when he decided to take a slug of his drink and needed to throw his head back into my face. Then he turned to watch for oncoming buses, stepping on both of my feet with one of his in the process. I tried to put on my best “increasing frustration bordering on pure rage” face but to no avail, he wasn’t looking. He was too busy scratching himself, though given the proximity he could as easily have been trying to scratch me. It was not pleasant.

The scary thing is that this happens all the time. What is it about leaning against a wall/pillar waiting for a bus stop that makes you invisible to passers-by and fair game for random encroachment on my wellbeing?

Maybe there should be some sort of behavioural code for bus-stop behaviour??

The sun going out on… well, all of us!

Last night I went to see Sunshine, and I think I am now officially suffering from sunstroke.

The premise is simple enough (for a sci-fi!) - sun is dying, and if it does we all die too, so let’s go eh… kickstart it.  If you’ve ever seen a film set on a space mission you should be able to guess what happens next. For the first hour you’ll be be right, no matter what you guess, and especially if you’ve seen 2001. After that… eh… I don’t really know what to say.

I’m not going to spoil the ending, or the middle for that matter, but they do some crazy stuff to mess with the audience’s head… and that’s before the real “crazy” starts.

Anyhoo, it’s a good film for the most part, definitely worth having seen, even if it manages to avoid any real concentration on the fact that the sun will in fact die some day - and so will we…

The nurses thing

I’m trying not to snap completely about this, which I know would be out of character, but the situation with the nurses’ strike is driving me round the twist.

Let’s look beyond the facts such as what they’re asking for (shock, horror, a 35 hour week! never!!), and the response of the government (fairly typical level of not giving a cr*p) and take a moment to observe the responses from the public.

Randomer 1, “I really didn’t notice a difference, the nurses were still doing all the most important work, still clearly caring for their patients as much as ever and to be honest if not answering the phone is what they need to do to get fair treatment then so be it.”

Randomer 2, “I was waiting 6 hours to be even seen whatever about being treated, this is an absolute joke, the nurses have no right to disrupt the health service like this. They’re a disgrace”

We’ll call Randomer 1 the “Nurses Rock” approach, and Randomer 2 the “Deluded person who hasn’t been near a hospital in the last three years”  or “Clueless Begrudger” approach.

The Nurses Rock approach observes a few key issues that many seem ready and willing to ignore. Firstly, that nurses do rock (it really is that simple). They work their asses off, they do the kind of things most of us can’t imagine, and most of all they look after us when we’re at our weakest. Even if it’s just coming and bringing you a glass of water. As someone who had the grand misfortune of being hospitalised not once but twice last year, I can categorically state that Nurses Rock.

On the other hand, Clueless Begrudger is the embodiment of what the government must surely be hoping for. Rather than antagonising the electorate into voting the current lot out, this could go horribly wrong. What if everyone who visits an A&E department in the next month seriously believes that the delays are because nurses aren’t answering the phone? Bertie must be soiling himself with glee at the idea of getting away with what is tantamount to murder (in the dreadfully literal sense) and managing to blame it all on the nurses. Damn them.

Not to mention damn those unions. Unions are the cause of all the problems in the world, don’t you know. A few days ago someone tried to convince me that Dublin Bus was a dysfunctional  and pitifully unreliable service ‘because of the unions’.

Uhuh. Yup. That’s clearly the problem.

As of tomorrow, the nurses will step up their campaign by having a one-hour stoppage in two hospitals. “Certain elements within the media” (I do love that euphemism) will go mad, and claim the whole country is being held to ransom. These ‘certain elements’ will overlook the fact that they will of course still attend to emergency cases, and that they will of course do everything they can to ensure the welfare of their patients is not affected. Why? Because Nurses Rock.

I fully understand the views of the families of seriously ill people who quite rightly might be panicking, and getting angry, and trying to find someone to blame. I won’t try to get around the fact that some people may well be infuriated by what’s going on and I won’t try to placate that group of people. But those who are being slightly delayed in having a random benign mole removed, or having a few veins removed (hee hee) or whatever - give them a break. Give them an hour. Because they have given you a whole lot more.

Likeminded people (aren’t they great??)

On the below issue of Bertie-versus-the-Photoshopper, Nat King Coleslaw has gone a step further and outdone whatever poor eejit Bertie hired to do the job. Better yet, the Tribune got a hold of the story (and the images) for Sunday’s edition.

That’ll learn ‘em, etc.

Come on lads, stop taking the piss…

I can’t even begin to fathom the contempt dirty bertie seems to have for his constituents, let alone for the people he claims to lead.

The weekend before last, in the wake of the glorious ard fheis of soon-to-be-broken-hugely-expensive-promises,  they launched their lovely little next steps campaign. Oops, did I put the wrong link up? Silly me.

I refuse to besmirch my blog with links to that nonsense. So if you want to know what I’m talking about you may need to go to bertie’s website and check out his new poster campaign, if, that is, you’ve managed to avoid it thus far.

For the purposes of the following dissection I will be referring primarily to the poster featuring bertie and four “bright young things” (read modelling hopefuls and/or wannabe ógra leaders - worse still, a combination of the two?).  This is the one being used on the front page of the campaign website and the one I have been subjected to most often in my daily life over the last few days.

Bertie is pictured in the centre of the poster,  laughing at his own joke. That’s the only possible explanation for that bizarrly contoured face, the combination of mirth and smug self-aggrandisement. Now, look into his eyes - a scary thought, I know, but bear with me. Look where his eyes are directed. Somewhere near the brown-haired girl’s left eyebrow. What’s so funny about that, bertie?

Now look at the photo again. Mr. Blueshirt on the left (how ironic is that?) isn’t laughing. In fact he’s straining to get out of the photo so he can get back to watching the soccer. Ms FutureChicklitAuthor is smiling like her agent told her to, looking somewhere on the back of bertie’s head for a downpayment of €50,000 on her first novel. The aforementioned brunette seems to have passed wind in her brand new suit and is mildly embarrassed but hoping nobody will notice, and the last fella looks like a 13 year old boy stuck at his first ‘mixed dishgo’.

I’ll be the first to admit that these assessments are based entirely on the appearance of these relatively innocent bystanders and they’re probably all decent people even if they have been duped into believing that appearing in a very bad ad with ‘him’ would be a positive thing. But here’s the crucial detail - the undeniable fact. None of these four young people are laughing at bertie’s joke. Now, i’m sure this is not the first time bertie cracked a joke and nobody laughed - in fact I would argue he’s been at that for a decade - but this is a special circumstance, because this was an organised photo-shoot, and these people were meant to laugh along with ‘him’.

Here’s where it gets really fun. Take one last look at the photo (and then consider washing your eyes out with carbolic soap). Look at where bertie’s suit edges in front of Ms. ChickLit 2011. Look at Dishgo boy, how the outline of his face falls against the brunette’s hair. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Have you ever used a software package called Photoshop??

Yes, it’s true. They couldn’t get four people to stand in a room with him. They couldn’t convince four presentable young things to share a joke with him. So they found four random yung’uns, and the photoshopped them, one by one, smiling and looking in all sorts of directions, around a photo of himself.

If you take a look at the rest of the posters, they’re all the same. Himself and two elderly folk, pensioners who no doubt he’ll pass a few extra euro to so they can spend it on grapes when they’re sitting on a trolley in a hospital somewhere because he can’t be bothered fixing the health service. Himself  and a pair of young homeowners, gleeful at the prospect of being able to afford half a broom cupboard only 90 minutes from dublin on an island in the middle of a lake now that himself and his developer friends have decided not to help them out in the slightest. The list goes on. There’s even another version of the “young people” poster where Mr. Blueshirt has been magically removed, and better still brunette lady has been removed so that Dishgo Boy can get a bit closer to his apparent idol. Bertie may have plenty of friends, but it seems they all stayed in Manchester this week when he needed backup singers.

One last thought, and this to me is the best bit. All of these characters, these models, these FF enthusiasts, these poor eejits who can be seen on the back of buses (literally) all over the country - they at some point were called into a photographer’s studio, told to laugh and smile in a fairly bland way and sent packing with €50 in their back pocket. But bertie? He no doubt got a photography session all to himself. He got to stand, in his brand new suit with his brand new tie and his new haircut, in the middle of an empty photography studio, and he got to laugh at his own joke with nobody listening.

It’s a nice image, isn’t it?