A Copy of Reality

The SOPA and PIPA laws have been defeated, but Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “an alternate reality“, and somewhere there’s a reality where they’ve actually been passed…

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It was another cloudless, scorching day in Greystones, proof already that we are in an alternate reality. Above the whirr of the air-con, as it struggled to lower the temperature in our house castle (sure why not) I heard our doorbell ring. I went to the door to find two men dressed in suits as black as their sunglasses. One of them flashed a badge briefly (very briefly, it could have been a Tesco Club-card for all I saw of it), then looked down at an official-looking  piece of paper.

“Mr Real-name-inserted?” he asked.

“Pardon?” I said. He looked momentarily sheepish. “Sorry,” he said, “we only know you as Tinman. We don’t know your real name.”

“Then how do you know where I live?”

“GPS in your pacemaker,” said the other one.

“Look, who are you? ”I asked.

“You can call me Mr Sopa,” said the first one, “and this here is Mr Pipa. We’re with the US Government.”

“And what are you doing here?” I asked.

“We’re here in Yerp to stamp out Foreign Intellectual Property Piracy,” said Mr Sopa.

“And you think I’m a foreign intellectual?” I asked (slightly proudly, I must admit).

“That’s the kind of thing we’re here to stop,” said Mr Pipa. “That joke’s already been used in a comment on Janie Jones’s blog.”

“I know,” I said. “It was my comment.”

“Nevertheless, it’s on a US website now,” said Mr Sopa, “so it’s under copyright in the US. You could be fined up to fifty thousand dollars.”

I was stunned. “I don’t have that kind of money,” I said.

“We don’t like hearing that,” said Mr Pipa.

“I didn’t like saying it,” I replied.

“And that’s only the beginning of your troubles,” said Mr Pipa. “You’ve stolen the three words ‘worth’, ‘doing’ and ‘badly’ from a Mr Gil Chesterton.”

“You can’t steal a word,” I said.

“Ever heard the expression “can I have a word”? Well, if someone can have a word then someone else can steal it.”

While I was trying to construct a smart retort built around the phrase “have a crap” he continued. “Worst of all,” he said, “you’ve stolen the name ‘Tinman’ from, well, the Tin Man.”

“He’s not actually a real person,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” said Mr Pipa, “but he’s an American not-a-real-person.”

I looked pleadingly at Mr Sopa. “Can you talk some sense into this guy?” I asked.

“Sorry,” said Mr Sopa, “he’s on a higher pay-grade. I have to answer to him.”

I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it. “You mean you’re Pipa’s bum?” I said (and I know I shouldn’t show this -> photo either, but let’s face it, I’m in enough trouble already).

“That’s insulting a Federal Officer,” snapped Mr Pipa. “You’re under arrest. Sopa, read him his rights.”

Mr Sopa began to read from a book. “You have the right to remain silent -”

“Hang on,” I said, “did you write that?”

“Er, no,” said Mr Sopa.

“Then you’re breaching the copyright of whoever did,” I said. “You could be fined up to -”

“Yes, yes, we know,” snapped Mr Pipa.

“Keep reading me my rights,” I said calmly, “if you can afford it.”

Mr Pipa stared at me for a long time. “You really are a foreign intellectual,” he said (this is, remember, an alternate reality). “Come on, Sopa, we know when we’re beaten.”

The two of them turned and got into a long black clichéd limousine. I watched it drive away and kept watching until it was out of sight.

“Hasta la Vista, baby,” I said.

Uncle Don

I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was at a wake, that peculiarly Irish tradition where a person is laid out in his own home the night before his funeral.

Once you’ve spent part of your evening sitting in the same room as a deceased person in an open coffin then any jokes you were planning to write seem a lot less funny.

He was Mrs Tin’s uncle and yet he wasn’t – he and his wife were close friends with her parents, and back when we were young such people were commonly referred to as Uncle This and Auntie That (there is a couple, now living in Canada, and if I met them tomorrow I would call then Uncle Bill and Auntie Julie, though their relationship to us consists entirely of the fact that for three years in the 1960s they lived in the flat above us in Tottenham).

Nowadays, of course, my real nieces and nephews, from the eldest (32) to the youngest (7) call me simply by my first name.

Uncle Don was a sweet man who never really got over the death of his wife Doris, a real fireball of chatting, laughing energy, just three years ago.

He leaves one daughter, Gillian, a girl who I first met when she was 24 and who is now 50 and has suddenly risen to be head of the family.

I couldn’t go to the funeral today because I’m back to work but I hope it all went well for her and her three children, who all had to give readings.

I was thinking about them this morning, and will be thinking about them in the days ahead.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Red

This week’s photo challenge is, simply, red. There is joke in there somewhere that I’m not going to make, even I have standards.

Mention the words “photo” and “red” to any male of a certain age and the famous Farrah Fawcett swimsuit poster comes to mind, driving absolutely everything else out of it. Just showing the poster, however, is not entering into the spirit of the Weekly Photo Challenge, it has to be an actual picture that I took myself, so I’m showing the poster purely in case any of you don’t know which one I’m talking about (and for you, Grandad, as one of my few male readers).

I have thought a lot about what to use. I finally went to our local Tesco (where three or four of their customers now think I’m mental) and have finally settled on this.

Now I know what you are all thinking, you’re thinking “bloody hell, not only is he a crap photographer, he’s colour blind as well.” Well, yes, I do know that the liquid in the bottle is more brown than red, but not to us Irish.

In all other countries lemonade is a clear whitish liquid. We have that too, but we call it White Lemonade. There is no such drink in Ireland as vodka-and-lemonade, there is vodka-and-white.

Because ask for lemonade here and our default is to the stuff in this bottle, and believe me you don‘t want vodka-and-that.

It’s called Red Lemonade, sold only in our country. It is as uniquely Irish as leprechauns, Riverdance and the kind of whiny song that you can only sing with one hand cupped over one ear.

It’s an extraordinary drink, essentially e-numbers in liquid form. I can’t tell you what it tastes like, because it is so fizzy that with the glass (never a cup) to your mouth all you can taste is that fizz, while tiny bubbles burst gently on your face.

And we all grew up on it, every generation since it was first invented, possibly as something to pour off the parapets of castles onto invaders below. It’s what gives us the ginger in our hair, the freckles on our skin, the redness we call suntan.

It’s part of what we are.

The Future is Coming

Make a prediction about life in 2021, asks WordPress

• The word “ohmygod” will be officially recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary.
• A house will cost €4000, but no-one will be able to afford one.
• Films will be available in 4D. As the fourth dimension is time, this means that if ten years pass during the story you will come out of the cinema ten years older.
• Do not watch Demolition Man in 4D.
• Ryan Giggs, then aged 47, will sign a further one-year contract with Manchester United.
• Twitter will have a shorter version, Twit, with a maximum of 20 characters, 10 of which will be !!!!!!!!!!
• In the event of an emergency Ryanair will have a €50 charge for sliding down that rubber chute (I’d pay it, too, it looks like fun).
• Gillette’s new razor will have 11 blades.
• Walkers Crisps will bring out a range of retro flavours such as cheese-and-onion and salt-and-vinegar.
• There will only be three people left on the planet who have never been contestants on the X-Factor, and they are the three judges.
• After four-door cars and five-door cars, there will be six-door cars. The sixth door will be in the floor, so that you can stick your feet out and drive a la Fred Flintstone, because
• Petrol will be €400 a litre, because
• People will still not have financed my invention of a car that runs on baby-sick, a never-ending resource.
• Boyzone, now all in their 40s, will be forced to change their name under the Trade Descriptions Act.
• Their latest song will be one of those featured on Now That’s What I Call Music 492.
• When pacemakers came out first they were the size of hockey pucks. My current one is the size of a cigarette lighter. My next one, due in about eight years, will be the size of a button, but will run on a nuclear battery powerful enough to reduce County Wicklow to dust if I burp.
• Fizzy drinks will be banned in County Wicklow.
• As all the seas are toxic and fish are poisonous it will be permissible to eat meat on Fridays, according to Pope Laura.
• A hideously-aged portrait of Cliff Richard will be discovered in his attic.
• The investigation into fraud at Anglo Irish Bank will be ongoing.
• Having got smaller and smaller through the 80s and 90s and then bigger and bigger as more functions were added, the mobile phone will now be the size it was in 1984.
• At a press conference it will be announced that Karaoke, Wii Fit and Super Mario Brothers will all be recognised sports in the 2024 Olympics.
• The TV programmes on Dave will have reached 2002
• Bloggers will be venerated, and will be invited to give blog readings, for being able to write articles of more than 500 words.
• Lady Gaga, having been decorated by the Queen (yes, the same one, her mum lived to be 102 after all) for services to music, will now be know as Lady Lady Gaga.
• Kylie will be 49, and will still have a great bum.

Seedy Story

Many of my post ideas start with lunchtime discussions. This one stems from a remark that one of the girls made to the effect that if you eat too many poppy seeds you can fail a drugs test. She says that a doctor friend of hers told her this.

Since virtually all bread, burger buns, etc are covered in Sesame seeds these days, it should be possible to open doors without actually touching them.

Try this with the doors of your local supermarket. It really works.

All in Good Taste

A blogpost in its early stages is like a toddler, gleefully waddling towards a particular destination before becoming distracted and suddenly veering off in a totally different direction.

Yesterday’s was one such post, a tale of lunchtime in the office that suddenly decided to poke fun at Irish food, poke a stick at porridge and end with a example of mischievous parenting from the last decade.

Anyway, as I started, we were in the kitchen trying to explain crubeens to two of the girls from overseas. One of them, a French girl, said that pigs’ ears were considered quite a delicacy on the continent. My face must have said “yuck” because the other girl said “no, they’re lovely, my sister’s dog loves to eat them.”

I opened my mouth to speak, closed it again and just sat obviously trying to hold in a laugh. They asked what was funny, and I refused to tell them. I refused to tell them that I had been about to say “yes, but your sister’s dog also loves to lick his own balls.”

I’m taking it as a sign that the derealisation is getting better. Six months ago I’d have said that out loud.

Twaz the Night After…

Good old Tinceslas looked out

On the Feast of Stephen

When the snow lay all about

Deep and crisp and even

He swore words like “poot” and “darn” and

even “sticks of fiddle”

When he saw to his delight

Rain began to pi-hid-le.

He saw snowmen melt away

In the local par-ark

Like those Nazis melted

in “The Raiders of the Lost Ark”

He went out and brought some bread

Milk and and sparkling water

Till today the shops had seemed

As far away as Mor-hor-dor.

He went to his local pub

Once he’d stocked his larder

Cos he’s hadn’t been outside

So he needed lager.

Well, Guinness really, but that rhymes,

And that seems to matter

When you write a post that’s

in Iambic penta-ma-hat-er.

A game was on the TV set,

Tottenham versus Villa

Lots of chances, lots of goals,

Really was a thriller.

Spurs’goals came through Van Der Vaart

Godsend to a blogger

Coz the jokes are far too much

I just didn’t boh-hoh-ther.

Though it still may freeze again

And the ice might harden

I’m just thrilled that that I have seen

Green grass in my garden.

Every day is one day more

Closer to the summer.

Never will we moan again

If it’s fairly duh-hell-er.

Bono Vox

I’ve just heard my own voice.

With normal people this would be of  “dog bites man” newsworthiness, not quite matching, say, the first moon landing or the fall of the Berlin Wall for its capacity to enthrall and grip. But I am not normal people, and it’s the most surprising thing that’s happened to me for quite a while.

I was in a shop just now buying a pencil (look, I didn’t say everything about this story is exciting) and the assistant and I both had a look at the label below it to see how much it cost. The label was partly torn, however, and I heard my voice say “it doesn’t help much, does it?”

And it was my voice, and when I heard it I realised that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve heard it. Instead I’ve just heard this muffled, far-away, could-be-anyone voice speaking my (admittedly still sparkling) words instead of me, as if I were a paramilitary being voiced by an actor.

Now, my voice is not pretty. Had I been the narrator of Under Milk Wood when it first appeared on radio it would never have become famous. If James Earl Jones retires I am unlikely to pick up his voiceover gigs. I don’t think I’m high on the list of people they ring when they want someone to play the Voice of God. On the other hand, if the person who does Olive Oyl suddenly drops dead they may well give me a call.

But today, just for that one sentence, my slightly nasal voice with its hint of a Dublin accent was back. And I’ve never heard anything so lovely.

It’s one more sign that the real world might be coming back.

Swine-y Todd, Flying Squad

Our company has a Swine Flu Committee.

We met for the first time yesterday. (Yes, of course I’m on it, that’s the kind of thing that always happens to me, though in this case I’m curious as to why. I spent a lot of the meeting looking at the six people in the group trying to figure out why we were the six specific ones asked to join. In my own case I finally decided that, as the virus is especially dangerous to both the elderly and to those with underlying health problems, they were covering both those angles by having me).

This is us...

I got quite excited when I was asked to join. I pictured us as a pseudo-scientist group called the Anti Coughing, Hawking and Oozing Organisation (ACHOO). We would wear space-suits with our logo (the Flying Snot) on the left breast. Whenever anyone displayed any symptoms we would burst in from all directions like the scientists in ET, and the offender would be dragged away.

Alternatively I imagined we might be more sinister and clandestine. If someone sneezed we would glance at one another, tap our (clean) nose with our (sterlised) finger, and the following morning the employee would be simply gone, his cubicle empty, and with HR having no record of him ever having existed.

The reality, of course, was a bit more mundane, though our name -we’re called the Pandemic Team – is way cooler than my one. We discussed different types of hand-cleaning materials, argued over which posters were too disgusting to put up in the kitchen, and five of the six made the sobering discovery that only one person out of the 110 in the company knows how to do the payroll (by God, whatever drugs are out there, they’re going to make sure I get them).

Then we went out and sent round a company-wide e-Mail about prevention, care and how to recognise the symptoms. One such symptom that we mentioned (and we cut-and-pasted this from an official document) is having a temperature of 28 degrees. It’s a measure of how seriously our e-mail was read that only GoldenEyes (who already has all the handwipes, etc, on her own desk, she’s convinced she’s going to get this) pointed out that this should probably read 38 degrees.

She is, of course, right. If your temperature is 28 degrees you are not a swine-flu sufferer, you’re a frog.

The Excitement is in Tents

Tinson1 if off to Oxygen this morning.

This is his “end of school” celebratory event. A load of the class are heading off to Majorca, and he was going to do that, but he came home one day and said “nah, it’s getting too messy” (and when a 17-year old bloke says that, you wonder WTF they were planning), so he opted for this instead.

This is his checklist, which I found on the kitchen table (sorry that’s it’s a bit hard to read, it’s not easy taking photos & uploading them at 5.30 am):

The list is apparently based on tips from the Oxygen website. The compilers, bless them, sound as innocent and naive as he does.

The second item, for example, says “something luminous to notice our tent”. Ignoring for a moment the construction of the sentence, which would lead you to believe that English is not Tinson1′s first language, a short reflection will quickly reveal the flaw in this plan. Attaching something luminous to your tent so that you can find it in the dark is a great idea, but only if you’re the only people doing it. I have a mental image of a load of half-asleep people wandering blearily around at 4 a.m. in a field eerily lit by a thousand luminous tents, the whole scene looking like a Sellafield housing estate being visited by zombies.

Item 6 – “Lock for tent” – is also touching in its innocence. It’s rumoured  that both the first and second of the three little pigs also invested in locks.

His proposed diet for the weekend is interesting. “16+ nutrigrain bars” and “canned fruit (must have opener tabs)” mean that at least he’ll be getting his five helpings a day, if in the least possible edible form. The second last item, though,  says “Jam sandwiches – keep for a few days!” (his exclamation mark). I fear he will discover that, while this may be true of the jam (there’s a reason why you find it in Tesco in an aisle marked “preserves”) it is unlikely to be true of the bread, and the only thing worse than eating mouldy bread is eating mouldy bread with strawberry jam on it.

I’m mentally blocking out the last line. It’s not just the word “vaseline” that worries me, it’s the “dot, dot, dot, question mark” that follows it.

(By the way, while I’m grateful that the list doesn’t include entries like “condoms” or “spliffs”, I have been a parent long enough to know that he might well have a second list).

I hope he has a great time, though, and I envy him. The line-up for the weekend is incredible (I’ve heard of more than half of the bands, which is saying something) and the whole thing will be a great experience, and hopefully great fun.

The weather forecast, for Saturday in particular, is absolutely shite.  It wouldn’t be a music festival if it wasn’t.