Later, January 10th 2012

Technology is great. Progress is great. The super duper turbo on my car has shit the bed and is in the process of generating an eight hundred euro repair bill for me over at the mechanic’s. I have a super duper Hotpoint Aquarius dishwasher that refuses to contemplate any delph on the top shelf, let alone clean it. I have a super duper scanner that doesn’t work necessitating frequent trips to the office centre in town to, get this, use their fax machine. (Don’t forget to factor in here the mortification of asking someone for a fax number in 2012, you don't recover from that overnight). On the kids game console you can either have a black and white picture or sound, but you can’t have both. The two year old wedged a video tape in the VHS player (I know, I know) that cannot be extracted. I have a super duper geothermal heating system that does not generate any heat in 40% of my house. The fridge creates, all on its lonesome, a two litre pool of water in the bottom vegetable drawer every three days. I have a super duper motion sensing outside light that I can only turn off by getting up a step ladder and removing the bulb. I can watch something on YouTube as long as I’m within a four foot radius of the modem.(Uncongested broadband Mr. Eircom, are you quite sure?) The screen on my phone disintegrated, I can’t read anything on it and can’t use any of the spare ones in the house because they have all been locked by evil bastard other networks. The baleful machinery Gods are politely requesting that I show them more respect. And I have no choice but to comply.

January 10th 2012

Black Mirror.

Nothing on the telly? Embroidery circle cancelled? Click the link to go to the Channel 4 catch up site and have a look at Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's frightening three part take on now and the not too distant future.

December 30th

Context is everything. A couple of weeks ago the eight year old was messing about on the roof of my car. I was standing right there, overseeing every move. He’s not doing any harm, he’s not liable to break anything or injure himself; he’s just hanging out on the roof of the car. Yet the overriding compulsion is not to leave him at it; something about a kid on the roof of a car does not fit and the impulse is to move to correct it, to make him come down. The situation is perfectly reasonable and controlled, yet it does not appear that way when you are parked outside the school waiting to pick up the older kids. If we were on holiday parked at a beach it would look more rational and normal, it would acquire an appropriate level of frivolity from its setting. The child wearing only a swimming shorts would take it to another level of whimsy, would reinforce its harmlessness. What’s harmless at a beach is anarchy outside a school.

December 29th

Ar a leath uair tar éis a cuig tá sé in ám don Nuacht a léamh anocht ag Samuel L. Jackson.

There are grants available from the Department of Health for setting up support groups. I’m on the lookout for an appropriate trauma and qualified candidates; on average per week how many hours do you spend putting together IKEA furniture?

What's the collective noun for rakes? What ever happened the butter mountain and the wine lake? The Greeks must have got their hands on the latter, that would explain a few things. What the fuck is propane?

Twenty eleven, two thousand and eleven, two eleven. Twelve years in and no closer to a consensus. No wonder we're all fucked.

6% of ants are actually lazy bastards.

Do not enter. Scientists only.

Get In Line

Ron Sexsmith on Songwriter's Circle a few years ago

Grow Your Own Way

Growth is the mantra. Growth we are told is the key to everything. When economies stop growing through consecutive quarters we get recession and all the attendant shrinkage and hardship. Growth they say will make everything good again.

There are now seven billion people on the planet, unchecked growth can no longer be sustained. Growth implies spiraling demand for everything. For food, for consumer goods, for machinery, for housing, for infrastructure and the impact of all of that on the finite resources of the planet is not pretty. You can fill all the green bins in the world with cornflake boxes but deep down we all know, whether we acknowledge it or not, that this cannot possibly end well. With all the emerging territories the growth we can expect henceforth isn’t like the gentle, polite arc we have become used to in the western world. When the Chinese really get going they’re going to rage, consuming everything in their path. And they are not the only ones just getting started.

Then there’s the micro level, the human cost of insurmountable debt and misery that seems to be the only tangible legacy of the last growth spurt. What did this country really come away from the party with; a few new stretches of tarmac, a tram in Dublin, countless monuments to bad architecture and a million tales of overwhelming debt and desperation.

Essentially we are mired in a mindset whereby a person’s worth or usefulness is measured by how much shit they consume. A mindset which has been successfully created by latter day Don Drapers cheerled by politicians and big business. How often have you heard it said “we need to get people back into the shops and spending, that’s the only route to recovery” For who? As long as we collectively have a perception of each other as being inadequate if we don’t spend money we don’t have on crap we don’t need then this cycle never changes.

So how do we reconcile these two apparently opposing realities? We need growth to live comfortably but the same growth will kill us all quicker. It’s all a bit rock n’ roll really.

Growth is the only way forward. Spot on. Winter cabbage; below ground baby, below ground.

Pirate's Life

A track accompanied by hand drawn video from We Cut Corners