The Plastic Cat

17.06.04

There is nothing more vile that that ad where a moderately attractive young lady is transmogrified into horsey granny hands wart-face Sarah Jessica Parker just because she's rubbed a particular brand of liquid soap into her thigh. It makes me want to retch.

Would you like a free illegal Mp3 from an up-and-coming Irish artist? Please choose one from below and I'll put it up later on, for as long as my bandwidth holds:

1. Simple Kid - Truck On
2. Snow Patrol - Run
3. The Frames - Hollocaine

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11.06.04

Today is the European Elections, at least in Ireland. Exciting isn't it?! No. For the past few weeks the state has been blanketed in a crisp covering of cardboard posters, ranging from Avril Doyle having a shit to Clifford T. Reid stopping the paedophiles in his tanktop. It's also the 1st time the new EU members get to stick their oar in, & they bring a special flavour of their very own to proceedings...

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10.06.04

I'm still recovering from what was perhaps the raunchiest weekend of my life, & I'm not even going to mention what took place in the hotel room. While I was asleep. The raunchy remainder was provided by pearly-toothed garter-wearing cigarette-smoking Timberlake-cheating ex-virgin ex-Disney clubber divorcee Brrritney Spears.

If the aura of fame & unimaginable wealth pulsating from the stage was not enough, Britney managed to wow us all (especially the little fat girl in front of me), with her CD-quality vocals, erotically charged dance routines & bass-player matchmaking skills. Although she tossed off an occasional Ireland-specific comment, Britney flew the flag for globalisation by offering us an identical product to the one she delivered to a group of Pashtun militants in a small settlement on the outskirts of Afghanistan in the mid-90s.

Britney's climax came toward the end of our stay at the Onyx Hotel, where male dancers in Y-fronts touched their crotchular areas in time with the music while silhouetted couples performed indescribably filthy acts upon one another. "So where are you from?", the host asked a little girl in the front row. "England", she replied, to be met with a chorus of boo's and jeers from the audience. Hopefully, we are now that bit closer to a united Ireland, thanks to Britney.

As we were checking out of the Onyx Hotel, Britney fled the stage, to agree to act as midwife for the birth of Julia Roberts' twins (live at the Oscars), to assist Angelina Jolie in the digging of botox repositories for Iraqi celebrities living in LA and to donate gold-plated shopping trolleys for Beverly Hills' first Tesco.

Celebrities spotted: Brian from Big Brother, one of the guys from Queer as Folk, an ex member of a failed Irish pop band.

Celebrities telephoned at 4am in the morning: An ex member of a failed Irish pop band.

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09.06.04

I'm angry about all of this (Free reg. required)

School was ages ago now, which is always a pleasant thing to be reminded of. Not that I had a particularly horrible time; there were moments, but on balance it was probably fairly regular. I didn't really enjoy that whole powerlessness thing, a group of grey world-weary adults attempting to shoehorn their narrow view on things into a whole class of pupils. Not all of them were like this, but education in this country does have a particular flavour. The Catholic Church will never leave the schools of Ireland without a brutal & bitter fight and, if they do, their drones will continue teaching away for another generation or so.

So the Catholic Parents Association, following closely on the heels of this one, have come out with their usual delicately coiffured bullshit. They are up in arms about ... a survey, regarding homophobic bullying. Such bullying, they say, is a "matter of school ethos". I doubt they would acknowledge that gay kids exist at all, never mind being bullied, since such types live in that special separate world out there somewhere on the telly or wherever. Ignorant irritating homophobia from one of our revered institutions is easy to ignore for what it is, the death rattle of irritating ignorant increasingly irrelevant losers. I don't have the energy to get bothered by their shit. I just suck their education system dry, to the tune of several thousand euro, and then withdraw my labour to another country just to spite the fuckers. But this lot actually have influence, over schools and policy and who kids have that they can talk to.

These hateful sorts implicitly sanction the bullying of kids who are gay, or perceived to be, and the brushing away of issues that do not chime with their received wisdom. Having had no less than three training sessions (communion, confirmation, debs ball), we had better all get married like they did, and become a doctor or a dentist or an accountant, and live in a white bungalow with 4 children and a plastic swing. And kids can never be gay, not their ones anyhow, and if they are they'd better shut up and keep it to themselves.

I hate all that gay political shite; it shouldn't be a political issue at all, governments should mind their own business. And similarly parents (at least the crazy ones) should mind theirs, and not believe they have some absolute right to fill their children full of beliefs that fly in the face of reason and reality, and that help make life even more difficult for kids who are gay. I mean, me and most of the people I know had it fairly easy with all this stuff. For the rest, it's all terribly depressing, and pisses me off somewhat.

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02.06.04

I've teased my hair into girlish pigtails, hiked my skirt up and tied the front of my white blouse into a cheeky knot. This Sunday, having been bought a ticket while prancing about in China, we attend the biggest cultural event this country has ever & ever will see ever. Here's some quotes from Britney:

"The cool thing about being famous is traveling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff."

"I always call my cousin because we're so close. We're almost like sisters, and we're also close because our moms are sisters."

"Sundance is weird. The movies are weird. You actually have to think about them when you watch them."

"There's a lot of cute guys here. Who knows, maybe if you're really lucky I might marry you."

"Maybe I'll go to college someday, for that knowledge, but I definitely think making music always will be the most important thing in my life."

"Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about."

"I did not have implants, I just had a growth spurt."

"I know not everyone will like me, but this is who I am so if you don't like it, tough!"

"For the first 2 year period, interest would be charged at 5.39%, i.e. 24 monthly payments of €269.50." [Britney's quote for a fixed rate mortgage]

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31.05.04

I really really hate Harry Potter.

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I am now an employee, not selling diet pills & CDs for hyper@ctive kids unfortunately, none of those snobby jobs the recruitment bastards dangled in front of me, but a job I found, as always, loitering about the upstairs photocopier peering into someone else's pigeonhole. This has forced me to upgrade my position significantly on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

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29.05.04

An utterly camp high-pitched anti-refugee gay man, a homophobic Muslim former refugee from Somalia, a ex-army air steward gym-freak in a leopardskin thong, a militant feminist vegetarian Trotskyite jarvis-cocker-esque lesbian, a 6ft bald gay man in a trilby who only sleeps with straights, a porn-loving bisexual slag from Newcastle, a Portuguese post-operative transsexual virgin, a ridiculously arrogant vaguely attractive psychology student in a hair band, a buck-toothed Jade-like new age spiritualist yokel, an upper class posh bird who likes Glaswegian architecture, an alpha male token black character, and your bog standard attractive blondey sort.

The next 10wks are all set then.

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28.05.04

"The cleverest sequence comes when Mahmut frostily asks if Yusuf has seen a silver pocket-watch that has gone missing. Yusuf is not so stupid that he does not understand the implied accusation and shrilly asks if Mahmut has not just misplaced it. A close-up then tells us that this is indeed the case, but Mahmut will not admit it to Yusuf: his loneliness, his inability to articulate an apology and his tacit, internal admission of defeated pride are disclosed to us in one effortlessly simple take."

What a load of shite! That Guardian film reviewer is a pretentious old knacker - I prescribe: Pink Flamingos, Kill Bill, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake), Legally Blonde, Battle Royale, Freeway & Mommy Dearest. And there shall be no more knicker wetting over delightfully wry character studies surrounding the frosty pocketwatch-based relationship between two Turkish divorcees.

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25.05.04

Two drunks behind, woman with 6 kids in front, all spectators to my eternal naked wrestle with the Dole office, as they set ever more demanding form-based tasks that would challenge even Hercules himself. They have yet to set me the job of proving that I actually exist, though I'm sure that's next on their list. And nay a penny has crossed the perforated plastic shield that protects the guardians of the Social Welfare Payment and their chest of shiny silver. Where, I hear you ask, does this leave me on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? Let me show you.

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Oh no! Al-Qaeda put a bounty on Kofi Annan's head!

Thanks to the redbeast

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24.05.04

To do:

1. Learn to play popular tunes on the guitar, for so to piss people off at parties;
2. Teach myself to cook properly, with spices and such;
3. Finish my thesis (48,684 words);
4. Go to New Zealand;
5. Become nicer & nastier in equal measure;
6. Learn to speak Chinese;
7. Learn to say "Fuck You", and related obscenities, in Finnish, Catalan & Maori;
8. Do the Trans-Siberian expressway thing;
9. Write a dirty novel;
10. Become dangerously thin;
11. Experiment with different hair colours;
12. Spend a day enjoying 1 drink in each of the many bars of my home town;
13. Throw chewing gum in Jennifer Lopez' hair;
14. Stop trying to write serious weblog entries;
15. Skydive;
16. Learn J2EE/JSP/XSLT/SVG/STRUTS/CVS/ANT/XLINK/JDBS/JDO etc.;
17. Sleep with 1 person from each of the 25 EU states, except Slovenia;
18. Get a job.

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