An article in yesterday’s Irish Times was headed “How Nintendo can help your child with Maths”. I didn’t read it, because it was very long and I have the attention span of, er, sorry I forgot what I was going to say there, but anyway I’m sure they are right. Here is the Department of Education’s first ever Nintendo-sponsored maths test:

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1. Tinson2 queued outside Xtra-Vision till midnight on Monday last to be there for the release of Call of Duty 4. How long did it take Mrs Tin to wake him for school on Tuesday morning?

2. You ask your Grandmother for a Nintendo DS for your birthday. She buys you a nice warm jumper instead. By what percentage does your love for her fall?

3. On a scale of one to fifty, how ridiculous is Mario’s moustache?

4. Before Tinson2 went to school on Tuesday morning, he hid his new game (which in fairness he hadn’t even taken out of its wrapping) so that Tinson1, who’s off this week, couldn’t play it while he was gone. How frosty, in degrees celsius, has their relationship been since?

5. The highest you’ve ever got in World of Warcraft is Level 13. What level is it acceptable to tell your friends you are on?

6. Your father is trying to learn the solo from Smoke on the Water on Guitar Heroes. How many times will he play it badly before your mother leaves him for good?

7. You buy a game for 90 euro and trade it in three months later for fifty per cent less. How is this different from what Liverpool did with Robbie Keane?

8. Draw a Venn Diagram of the 25 people  in your class based on the following information: 10 of them have a Wii, 22 have an X-Box, 19 have a PSP, and 2 have none of these things, but occasionally have a suntan.

9. Why don’t they bring back Breakout, the video-arcade game from the 1970s, and the only game Tinman was ever any good at?

10. Your uncle and you are playing Table Tennis on the Wii. Your uncle says to your aunt “you should try this, you could do with the exercise”. Just how far up his bum does the doctor have to stick his hand to get his console back for him?

When I was at school Geography was the educational equivalent of the Big Mac gherkin, unloved and discarded by virtually everyone.

This was because it was unrelentingly dull. We were a given a light snowfall of information about a number of countries, none of it deep enough to actually stick. Generally speaking we were taught the name of the capital city and the chief exports. As far as I can remember the exports always included wheat, maize and grain, and these three words featured in the first sentence of every exam answer I ever gave (“the chief exports of Ireland are wheat, maize and grain”…. “the chief exports of Antartica are wheat, maize and grain”… “the chief exports of the Sahara…” etc, etc).

Doing “projects” meant being a handed a map of Ireland stripped of all characteristics other than an outline of the counties, and being asked to fill in the names. This was as exciting as Geography got.

And because it was so dull, we all ended up forgetting about half of what we learned. I presume that’s why, although I can tell you where the North and South Poles are, I haven’t a clue about the whereabouts of the East and West ones.

When people slag Americans for how little they know about Europe, they assume it’s because they never learned about it. In fact, they were taught about it, but just couldn’t be arsed remembering. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, the same goes for us in reverse. One night in my local we managed to name 48 of the 50 US States. I was told to find out which two we were missing and returned the following night to report that we were actually missing five, since one of the ones we had listed was actually in Canada and two others weren’t States at all.

But somewhere along the way Geography upped its game. I think it began when the six-nation Common Market evolved via a series of leaps and bounds into the 27-nation EU (well, to be strictly accurate, 26 and Britain, who were given Free Trial Membership back in 1973 and still haven’t fully decided whether they like it or not). Suddenly Geography was no longer a dead, fixed subject, like Latin, it was changing all the time.

The collapse of communism halved the number of Germanies, while the number of Balkan countries exploded, often explosively. The roll-call of world nations changes with a rapidity that keeps atlas publishers in Ferraris and World Cup organisers in therapy. And climate change and global warming means that the very shape of countries and continents is changing.

The Burren

Tingirl is doing Geography and has three projects to hand in by Christmas. These are on the Burren, earthquakes and tornadoes. The Burren is a wild and lovely part of County Clare, earthquakes are strictly speaking Geology and tornadoes are just weather, but all three are more exciting than drawing the path of a river or a relief map of a fjord, which is the kind of crap homework we used to get. As a result kids these days love Geography.

Everyone has a Trivial Pursuit achilles heel. I’m sure you’ve guessed mine. I’d slide my wedge-filled pie-dish into the very centre, my fellow players would say “geography” in unison, I’d be asked some baffling question containing the word “scree” or “delta” and I’d retreat in humble embarrassment.

Hopefully the kids of today will be spared that humiliation.

For the first time since 1996 the adults in the Tinhouse outnumber the children. The number of children has dropped from three to two, while the adults have increased from two to three.

Tinson1 is eighteen today (Tinson18, I could now call him, but won’t). He is legally an adult, allowed to drink, vote, buy over-18 video games and watch X-rated movies. A whole new world is therefore opening up to him, since he has never voted before.

One year and a day ago I wrote this post about the day before he was born, and about how our life changed forever. How quickly the 18 years since that day has passed, and how wonderful it all has been. He’s been a ridiculously happy baby, a winning though occasionally scarily angry toddler, a successful and popular schoolboy, and then, although he’s referred to in our house as GT (Grumpy Teenager), he’s been a very personable teenager.

I know I sound laughably blinkered and rose-spectacled in this post, but it honestly is true. He’s a super kid, and will make a super adult.

Today we’re celebrating. It’s half past two in the afternoon, and already we’ve drunk Buck’s Fizz (thanks to his Godmother) and are heading out for a meal soon.

He is young, clever and charming. I envy him, I admire him, I’m proud of him.

We love him.

It’s time I came clean with myself.

I keep deluding myself that I have Bloggers Block, and can’t think of anything to write about. That’s not really the problem. I have plenty I should be saying, and just don’t want to say it.

The simple fact is that I’m quite down at the moment about how slowly my getting better is going, and have refused to put that in writing. After I first went to see my shrink (a sentence I’m still astonished to find myself using) I felt that I was actually on the road to recovery. Of course I knew that one visit and a couple of days of new drugs weren’t going to cure me overnight. Of course I knew I had a long road ahead, but still felt really hopeful.

And, thus wearing my happy head, I’ve produced about six weeks of cheerful bloggery, some of which I’m really quite proud of, and was looking forward to continuing in this vein until my declining years (declining what, I wonder? Drink? Cigars? It?).

Of course (again) I knew there would be times when I’d feel frustrated at my slow progress, and vowed to recognise that frustration as a good sign in itself, a sign that the derealised drifting from day to day was giving way to more awareness and emotion about my illness, and therefore more awareness and emotion about life as a whole. And in general I have, even though I’ve started waking at four a.m. again, and once that happens the days just become daze. But recognising that there will be setbacks and accepting them when they come in one thing, but being happy all the time about it is enough.

So I’ve had nothing funny to say (yeah, yeah, I know), and should have been saying this instead. After all, this is my safety valve, an outlet for my frustrations, angers and fears as much as for my desire to be entertaining (one of my strongest needs, I have to admit). But I’d been enjoying writing the lighter stuff, and just didn’t want to go back to, well, whinging.

And I know you won’t all look at it like that, and I know you’ll be concerned and supportive, and I hope you all know that your encouragement really, really helps me, but I just didn’t feel like putting you all through it again.

Which was wrong. You’ve all stuck with me this long, I should have realised sooner that I could dump on you all again.

That’s what friends are for, and that’s how I think of you lot.

And I’m gonna hit publish now, before I get embarrassed about that last sentence.

In Dublin on Saturday there was thunder and lightning, accompanied by a short torrential downpour that brought flash flooding to some places.

I love thunderstorms, so an event like this should have been a Godsend to a blogger instructed to write about the weather whenever he can’t find anything else to write about.

But I don’t live in Dublin, I live in Greystones. And, although it’s only 19 miles south of Dublin, we had no storm, no lightning, no rain. We just had an overcast sky the colour of our town’s name, and I didn’t hear about any of this until lunchtime today.

I could have had a field day. I could have written about the wonderful smell that accompanies thunder. I could have said how much I love that really heavy rain. I could have talked about how much more thrilling lightning becomes when your chest is part metal and your knowledge of the effects of being struck by lightning comes mainly from superhero comics. I could have done all of this, had it not rained on my parade by, well, not raining on my parade.

Now, I’ve always accepted that I will never be able to write a decent autobiography since I had none of the disadvantages that are such an advantage in a truly interesting life-story. My parents were not poor, not alcoholics and showed no inclination to beat us. I was not one of seventeen children. I was not forced to start work to support the family from the age of ten. I did not then put myself through college at night, earn and then lose a fortune by the age of 22, lose part of an ear in a bar-brawl in Barcelona, spend a year as a ghost-writer to Jackie Onassis, wake up hungover one morning with a tattoo of Betty Boop on my left buttock or end up in jail due a case of mistaken identity.

Other writers have that kind of luck, and I envy them. All I have is a couple of mildly interesting maladies and a trio of currently less interesting children.

So if God decides to liven up a Halloween Saturday by making the sky vomit enough water in just four minutes to fill Lake Windermere, is it too much to ask him to make it happen a bit further south?

Some of us have blogs to fill.

Two posts ago I mentioned that I was number seven in a Google search for “wombat sphincter”.

As Laughykate then pointed out, that post went straight into the chart at Number 3, but later in the day KickOuttheJams reported it had dropped to Number 4.

Did you see what demoted it though?

I was overtaken by WordPress’s Category Listing for “wombat sphincter”, even though the only actual post in it was mine. I feel like a burglar who’s just robbed his own house by mistake.

Their title, though, means they deserve to be ahead of me. “Wombat Sphincter – Blogs, Pictures and More on WordPress”.

Neither Laughykate nor I ever promised pictures of a wombat’s sphincter. And, since I presume they’re not readily available on Getty Images, I can think of only one way of obtaining such pictures, and believe me that won’t be happening any time soon. My digital camera’s not especially valuable, but that doesn’t mean I’m planning to stick it up a marsupial’s rectum.

And… “Blogs, Pictures and More”? What could “More” possibly mean?

Once when I was at school we had to write an essay about any topic at all. Since I was an impish fellow a smart-arsed git I decided it would be funny to write about “the full-stop at the end of this essay”, since every time I started a new sentence I was writing about a different full-stop to the one I’d been writing about in the sentence before. This gave me the chance to spout existentialist crap about the impermanence of all things, and about how unreal reality is in reality (aren’t you glad I didn’t have a blog back then?).

As if the teenage me doesn’t sound annoying enough I then ended the essay with something like “and isn’t it ironic that by ending this essay with a question I’ve effectively rendered the whole thing meaningless?”. It’s a tribute to my English teacher’s tolerance that I’m not wearing the essay-book internally to this day.

Anyway, the reason I’m dragging up this embarrassing memory from the past is that I’m doing something very similar here. Once I post this God knows what Google’s list will look like.

Back last Christmas I accidently produced a “Googleblatt”, a phrase that gives the search result “1-1 of 1 results”. Just by writing about it I made it cease to exist, of course, and I feel that I’m in the same time-warp, Doctor Who-ish, mind-bending area now.

I think I’d better end this post, before my brain melts.

So, my 400th post, and a chance to defend Wikipedia.

People warn you to beware of Wikipedia, telling you that the information on it cannot be trusted (there’s a great Dilbert cartoon where one of the charcters says “I once passed a gallstone so big it became Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration”, and when one of his workmates says “I find that hard to believe” he replies “Give me ten minutes than check Wikipedia”).

I have to say, though, that I’ve just looked up “400″ in it, and this is the opening sentence:

“400 (four hundred) is the natural number following 399 and preceding 401.”

Now that’s accurate. Not very interesting, maybe, but accurate.

I defy Encyclopaedia Britannica to do any better.

(As you’ll have gathered, I’m now reduced to writing posts based on what number they are. Expect a post about Levi 401s tomorrow).

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve finally found out where my blog stats are. They list the most viewed posts of today, yesterday and this week.

Obviously the more recent ones feature most each day, though sadly not in numbers that are likely to make me a household name anywhere except in my own house. Every day, though, my post Stuck On 99, written as my 99th post, gets eight to ten hits.

I used to wonder why this was, till I found a new section which lists what phrases people use to get here. Every day a number of people come here after typing in “Agent 99″. Again I wasn’t sure why they’d end up here as opposed to, say the Get Smart movie website. Then it occurred to me. I typed “Agent 99″, not into Google, but into Google Images, and the first picture of Agent 99 brought me to, well, me.

I’m not sure about this, but I think I read somewhere that the more hits something gets, the nearer the front Google will put it, so now that I’m in first place I will stay at the front in an ever-increasing circle of cause and effect.

Laughykate knows how this feels, as Google now recognises her as the world’s leading authority on the wombat sphincter, occupying both first and second place in their listings (I’m delighted to say that I’m seventh, though only because of a post in which I referred to her). One day Mwa will be recognised as the Queen of Gay Porn, and we will all feel proud that we knew her before she became a legend.

You don’t feel so thrilled to have had over 24,000 hits once you realise that a substantial number of the people who come here are only visiting because they wanted to look at pictures of an actress from the 1960’s. One can almost sense their disappointment when they find, not more pictures of Barbara Feldon, but some Irish bloke wittering on about the girls he fancied when he was young (the post does include photos of both Mrs Peel and Purdey from the Avengers, though, so hopefully that’s some consolation to them).

I am quite proud, though, of the fact that if you type “Worth Doing Badly” into Google I’m now top, since there was a time when you had to add the word “Tinman” before I appeared at all.

Anyway, as I say, I discovered the truth behind people’s obsession with my 99th post today. It’s not all that interesting (no change there, I hear you say) and I wouldn’t have bothered to mention it at all, had co-incidence not intervened to give me a reason.

Because, co-incidently, this is my 399th post.

I’ve looked up Agent 399. You get nothing.

The title of this post may have led you to believe that it’s going to be yet another one about derealisation, and my life with a head permanently full of cotton wool.

In fact, it’s not going to be even as exciting as that.

In her comment on yesterday’s post about Bloggers Block, Mwa has suggested Mrs Moon’s solution to “start by writing about the weather and the rest will come”.

Since Mrs Moon is both a better and more frequent poster than I am I have decided to follow the advice.

I must start though by pointing out that Mrs Moon lives in America, a land which, not content with the traditional Four Seasons, actually also has a “hurricane season”. This gives American weather a certain advantage over Irish weather as a kick-starter for people suffering from blog-constipation. The opening sentence ”last night our neighbour’s car blew over our house” will always stir the creative juices better than the one ”last night it rained”. 

Because that’s what Irish weather is all about. We have just the Four Seasons – Spring (stinging hail season), Summer (sudden downpour season), Autumn (damp mist season) and Winter (driving sleet season). You’ll notice that none of them mention sunshine, or snow. Global warming apparently has homogenised Irish weather, turning it into twelve dreary months of monotonous sameness.

This  probably explains why a report in the Irish Examiner today states that 98% of Irish children have been abroad by the time they’re 16. Their parents bring them, terrified that they will get rickets or become goths from the lack of sunshine  and Vitamin C in Ireland. Indeed, it’s a wonder Edward Cullen (from Twilight, I had to ask Tingirl his name) and his vampire buddies don’t move here, they’d be able to go out both day and night (look, Mwa, I’ve quoted an article from today’s news and mentioned a well-known film character, this is actually working).

People from sunnier climes like Spain or, well, anywhere really, like to say things like “but we love your weather, it’s so varied”. They have no idea how this rankles with us. They  are the ones with the variety – they can be pleasantly warm, stiflingly hot, or in the pool having a dip to cool off. Wetness, on the other hand, is like virginity. There are no degrees of wetness – either you are wet, or you aren’t.

I’ ve wondered what they think is so great about our weather, and have come to the conclusion that they’ve heard our phrase “raining cats and dogs”, and think that we mean it literally. And while this certainly would add variety, it still wouldn’t be all that great. After all, it would be unlikely that thousands of cats and dogs would fall vast distances out of the clouds without at least some of them, er, relieving themselves on the way down, and a shower made up of dogs, cats and animal poo is the kind of thing that would have made the people in the Bible nostalgic for the good old days, when all they had to deal with was a simple plague of frogs.

In summary, as you’ve probably guessed, our weather is crap.

So there you go. Over 500 words, many of them different. Thank you, Mrs Moon. Thank you, Mwa.

Any ideas for tomorrow?

In a frantic bid to rid myself of Bloggers Block, I am posting this photo of three photos:

We found them over the weekend by the method by which most things are found in the Tinhouse, i.e., we were looking for something else. The three pictures were together because we had intended putting them into a frame years ago, but never got round to it.

The pictures, in order, are Tinson1, Tinson2 and Tingirl, and each picture was taken, in the same pose on the same armchair, on the day on which each baby was six months old. When Jo asks why I don’t show my kids my blog, it’s because I occasionally do things like this to them.

(Brief digression: just as I was typing that sentence, the guy on Sky Sports News was announcing that Everton’s striker Jo has been dropped to the bench for tonight’s match).

And that’s really all there is to say about the photo.  The really eagle-eyed among you might notice that Tinson2 has a photo of Tinson1 on the table beside him, and experienced parents among you will know that our babies did not always look that happy.

Any of you in the mood to be critical of our parenting might look at the size of Tinson2 and conclude that we fed him on a diet of Big Macs and lard. All I can say in our defence is that he didn’t stay that shape, and indeed now is so thin that I think he’s about the same weight as he was in that picture.   

So,that’s it. Nothing else to say today.

If I don’t think of something soon, I’m going to post pictures of their fridge drawings.

And you don’t want to see a six-month old’s drawing of a fridge, do you?