Bill Gates causing chaos

Head Rambles Posted on by 6

I like the quiet life.

The Gods however in their infinite wisdom decide every now and then to throw me a right wobbler.  This week the Deities decided to have a right laugh at my expense.

A friend of Herself was to call around on Tuesday but she didn’t turn up.  This was the first hint of trouble as I had had a message to say that a bloke was coming to finally fix my fucking stucking gate on Wednesday.  Now said bloke was going to be in the gateway all day and he had a car and trailer to park as well.

Sure enough, Friend turned up just after the gate bloke [his name was Bill, and when I went to enter his name into my phone as ‘Bill gate’ to remind me who he was, the smell checker insisted on calling him Bill Gates so I left him as that].  Anyhows there were two cars and a trailer [and my own car] now so things were getting a little crowded.  I had to manoeuvre Friend into next door neighbour’s gateway – I knew Neighbour wouldn’t mind as he lives in America.

Then I had a frantic call from Daughter wanting me to pick up her kids as she was in court all day.  I pointed out that I couldn’t get in or out and anyway why hadn’t she warned me a day or two earlier as she knew her case was coming up.  She said she would arrange something and thanks very fucking much.

Shortly after, a friend of Daughter’s called to collect my copy of Daughter’s key, and she promptly backed her car into the hole that had been dug for the new gatepost.  Bill Gates wasn’t too happy about that.

Next the heath visitor arrived to add to the confusion.  I had run out of space in the garden, on the lane and neighbours’ gateways so I had to ask Friend to shift so Visitor could have somewhere to park.

Eventually things quietened down.  Friend and Visitor had departed and for the first time in ages we have a gate that works without putting my back out.  Peace settled upon the Manor.

Yesterday Herself had a hospital appointment.  She was a bit worked up about it so I got up to make her a soothing cup of tea.  No fucking electricity!  The Gods obviously hadn’t finished with me yet.  Sure enough, a visit which would normally have taken most of the day was over in an hour, so we had to go back to our powerless house where I had to boil up kettles on the camping gas stove for the rest of the afternoon.

We eventually got power back just before six which was a blessing as Herself gets very twitchy if she doesn’t get her daily dose of Judge Judy.

It is unbelievably quiet today.

Bliss.



I love being old

Head Rambles Posted on by 19

Or as the politically insane would probably call it – youthfully challenged.

I can sit back here in my mountain retreat and watch the word sink into a morass of political correctness, political interference and a level of weirdness that even the most imaginative of science fiction writers in the past failed to foresee.

The latest of course is Manchester University and their desire to abolish clapping – as in applause – because it might frighten people.  I saw several mentions on the Interwebs yesterday and frankly thought it was a joke, until I realised it wasn’t whereupon I collapsed laughing.  Yes, I think it is hilarious.  These are supposed to be the cream of the crop, future captains of industry and God help us, future politicians and they are worried that people might be frightened by some clapping? Sweet fucking divine, but that is brilliant!  I would almost like to live long enough to see what happens when they grow up.  Almost.

I feel sorry for the science fiction writers of today as they grapple with future scenarios as who can predict insanity?

For some reason, snowflakes don’t like being called snowflakes.  I have seen articles in the past where they expressed their anger and anguish at the name.  It makes them feel isolated, diminished, frightened and angry.

Tough fucking shit.

God help ’em when they hit the real world.

Fucking snowflakes!

Overheard

Head Rambles Posted on by 13

I had the extreme misfortune to hear a bit of Joe Duffy today.

Our Joe is a bloke who does a phone in programme every afternoon on RTE radio, and frankly I cannot stand the programme or Duffy.  People phone in with their pet peeves and of course the phone lines are then jammed with others who have the same peeve.  Duffy then patronises them until someone else phones in with a different peeve.

Now I happened to up in the attic doing some tidying as Doc is due to call later and the radio was on as always.  I was doing my best not to listen at all but of course some of it sank in between the other noises I was making [such as complaining that Joe Duffy is on while I’m in the room, but Herself loves it for some masochistic reason].

Anyhows, the programme opened with some woman complaining.  Surprise surprise!  Her complaint was along the lines that she was in some café or train or pub or somewhere and that she overheard people at the next table talking about ADHD and how they reckoned it was a load of bollox and was probably down to bad diet.  Our friend was incensed by this as she had some relative [daughter?] who was Autistic and was apparently a right handful to manage.  I missed a lot of it [thankfully] but said woman was positively incandescent that others should treat the subject with such flippancy.

Now there are a couple of things I would have pointed out if I were Duffy [God forbid] but he quietly encouraged her to waffle on about Autism.

The first thing is that ADHD isn’t Autism.  There are those that would say it’s part of the autistic spectrum and who am I to argue, but the two are different?  My theory is that ADHD is more down to the way that kids are brought up these days where the child is king of the family and must be treated as such.

The second thing I think is the most important and I am surprised that Duffy didn’t mention it.  What the fuck was she doing earwigging at other people’s private conversations?  Have we reached a state where we have to guard everything we say in case someone is listening in?  Can a private conversation be publicly called out on national radio?

Personally I would have just told her to mind her own fucking business.

The Gates of Hell

Head Rambles Posted on by 6

All I want is a gate that will open and close.

Is that too much to ask of life?

It would be nice to have one that detects riff-raff and keeps ’em out but on the other hand I refuse to go with one of those fuck-off electric gates.

I got my gates around eighteen years ago and they were fine.  They were good solid heavy hardwood gates that did what they were supposed to do.  They opened and closed and let people in without letting the dog out.  They are fine gates apart from the one slat where a neighbour reversed into it.  He did a fair repair job though so that’s beside the point.

Some years later the trouble started.  The fucking council in their infinite wisdom engineered the road so that all the water from the lane pours into my garden at one of the gateposts.  It rotted.  The post tilted.  The gate jammed.

A friend of mine – I’ll call him Ed [because that’s his name] – replaced the post with a fine lump of eight by eight, embedded in concrete.  All was rosy again.

Eventually though the post moved a fraction and despite my best efforts the gate started jamming once more.  I didn’t mind too much because it was the side that I only have to open to get the car out.  It just meant lifting it and carrying it open.  All was rosy again.

Now the other post has rotted.  And I mean really rotted and the bolts that hang the gate have lost their grip.  Now that gate is stuck and has to be lifted open, and it is damned heavy.

I phoned around a moxy load of carpenters and gate erectors and got nowhere.  They weren’t interested or they never phoned me back.

I did end up with two quotes though.  The first agreed to replace the entire gate and pillars with a metal gate.  It would cost at least €1,500.  The second quote was from my friend Ed.  He said he would replace the post but it would cost me a bottle of whiskey.  That left me with a bit of a quandary – €1,500 or a bottle of whiskey?  It was a hard choice as whiskey is precious.  I decided to go with it though and gave Ed the green light.

Ed is a brilliant worker and does a great job.  He does have a slight drawback though in that he is very hard to nail down.  I have sent a couple of very polite text messages [threatening to drink his whiskey] but there is no sign of him yet.

So if you want to call to the Manor, just lift the gate latch and then lift the gate.  It requires a sort of waddling movement to open it while carrying it.  Don’t open it fully though as it will then fall down completely, probably breaking your foot.

Think of it as a great bit of exercise.

 

The Great Conundrum

Head Rambles Posted on by 11

Grandson the Younger called in the other afternoon.

He had a project to do about family trees and wanted a bit of help.

I brought him out to the gardens and pointed out the tree that my sister had planted and the trees I had planted but he said with an element of scorn that he meant grandads and grannies and that kind of stuff.  I like winding him up.

So I put on my serious face and told him about his great grandfathers and great grandmothers, an even tossed in their parents too.  He was delighted and wrote it all down [why do kids stick their tongues out when writing?].  However the one thing I didn’t tell him about was The Great Conundrum.

When his Ma came to collect him I told her about The Great Conundrum and she freaked out.  She couldn’t get her head around it.

So what is The Great Conundrum?

Some time ago I did a fair bit of research on family trees.  I was lucky enough to have pretty comprehensive documentation on both my mother’s and my father’s side.  One of the things I knew about my father was that he was a cousin of John Le Mesurier, the actor [Dad’s Army and all that] and the Le Mesurier name cropped up in abundance in the tree.

But then I came into possession of my mother’s tree, so I started working back on that.  And there, lo and behold was mention of the Le Mesurier family.  So I cross referenced the two trees and sure enough there was a connection.  Abraham John Le Mesurier lived in Gurnsey back in 1748.  He was my Great Great Great Grandfather on my father’s side of the tree.  But he cropped up too on my mother’s side where he is my Great Great Great Great Grandfather.

So I am descended from this bloke twice which makes me related to myself as some kind of distant cousin.  However the more astute of you will have noticed that the is an extra Great on my mother’s side which means I am a generation out of step with myself.  So I am either a distant uncle of myself or a distant nephew.  The problem then arises as to which generation I belong to.  Being my own nephew presumably means I am a lot younger that I thought, whereas if I am my own uncle I must be a lot older by a generation.

All of this of course applies to my daughter and to her sprogs.  I broke it to her gently that she was either her own aunt or, if she preferred, her own niece. 

That’s when she freaked out.

Edukashun

Head Rambles Posted on by 11

I have been doing a drop of thinking.

Like most kids, I went to school in my younger years.

My first school was a convent run by very scary nuns.  Fortunately that only lasted a couple of years, but the only thing I remember about those years was the constant repetition of our maths tables.  That is one thing that was of enormous benefit later in life even if it did give me a lifelong terror of any person covered head to foot in black.

From the nuns I was promoted to the male version of God’s storm troopers – the De La Salle Brothers, where I learned that physical violence against small boys was perfectly acceptable.

Looking back, I suffered a range of subjects and the shocking thing is that I can remember little that was of any benefit to me in my adult life.

English: Endless essays, poetry and Shakespearian plays, most of which had to be learned off by heart.  In my adult life I have never ever been called upon to recite Shakespeare, or indeed any poetry whatsoever.  I did learn some of the basic rules of grammar which is possibly the only thing which was of benefit.  The vast majority of my English learning came from incessant reading as I was a devoted book-worm, and still am.

Irish: More learning stuff by heart.  None of it any fucking use apart from it being a requisite subject for employment in RTE.

French: This is a weird one.  I hated French and failed every exam.  The only thing of note was that the French brother was a raving homosexual but I didn’t learn anything from that either, thank God.  However in later years I rediscovered that I must have picked something up as I was at least able to get a message across while holidaying in France.  In hindsight it was hardly an essential subject if it merely helped me out while on holiday.

Latin:  Fuck that.  A total waste of time.  All I learned there was that Caesar was fond of battles.

Maths:  A lot of time was devoted to maths – Arithmetic, Geometry, Algebra and Calculus.  I liked Geometry but that was it.  I was quite good at the others too [bar Calculus] but again, I cannot find any use in later life for most of it.  It comes in handy when measuring things but that’s about all.

Geography: I enjoyed Geography and in particular Geomorphology but again wonder what practical use it had in life.  So I live in mountains which are made of granite, an igneous rock and which have been heavily glaciated.  So?

Science:  I enjoyed that.  However, having learned that some things explode and others electrocute it was of little benefit.  Maybe I do know why I get frostbite when I accidentally spray my hand with lighter gas, but hardly an essential piece of knowledge?

Religion: Roman Catholics are the only people who can ever get into Heaven, and most of them will end up in Hell anyway because the are sinners!  Right.

The one thing I did get from school was my Leaving Certificate.  Big deal.  Even back then a Leaving Certificate was of little value when looking for a decent job.  It was merely a passport into higher education.  And when I competed that higher education, the stuff I learned there was stuff I never actually used in any of my later employments.

Looking back on those twelve or so years of unremitting torture and endless homework what exactly did I gain?  Frankly I can think of very little.  All the really important things in life such as dealing with banks, or how women work or how to bring up a daughter have all been earned by bitter [and in some cases not so bitter] experience.  I’m a self taught adult.

Maybe if they had just sent me to the nuns to have my maths tables beaten [literally] into me and just let be run wild I would have been just as well off.

Makes you think?

That is the wrong answer

Head Rambles Posted on by 9

Listen, you lot over in the UK.

Will you ever stop whinging and whining about this Brexit thing.  I am sick and tired of hearing about it.  I am tired of hearing about backstops, hard exits and soft exits.  I don’t give a shite whether exits are hard, soft, boiled or fried, all this nonsense has to stop.

First of all you failed to understand one of the fundamentals of the European Union, namely that democracy has been redefined to mean that you vote the way they want you to vote, and nothing else is acceptable.

They asked you if you wished to leave the EU and the answer was obviously a resounding NO.  How could you possibly think otherwise?  To vote any other way was unthinkable in this modern democracy.

In any democracy, people should always have the right to deliberate and vote again when they have gained access to new information or had a chance to understand more clearly the implications of a decision.

Brendan Howlin

Now the leaders of our respective Labour Parties, Corbyn and Howlin [two towering intellectuals on the political scene] are suggesting you get a second chance to get it right.

This is precisely the way it works.  They assumed you were sensible enough to vote YES, but obviously you weren’t brainwashed informed enough so it not only right, it is essential that you vote again.  It is imperative that there be a second election, now that you have been told in plain English how to vote.

And for fucks sake get the answer right this time.

Blame the kid next door

Head Rambles Posted on by 10

I think I am entitled to give myself a wee pat on the back.

As some of you know, I look after quite a few webbing sites.  Some of them are mine [such as this one], some I host and look after for a pathetically small fee and some are pro bono, such as “Smoking – On Ethics“, “Martin Scriblerus” and of course “Nisakiman” and “The Anna Raccoon Archives“.  It’s hard to believe that a whole year has passed since the panic of restoring Anna Raccoon’s material?

One of the items I keep an eye on in those sites is their speed.  I initially had a target of three seconds.  Every site had to fully load in that time or else I had some serious work to do.  I think my greatest challenge was a site I took over that took around six minutes to load, but I did it [it now takes 0.74 seconds].

Anyhows, they [whoever they are] say that people bugger off if a site takes longer than two seconds, which is an incredibly bad reflection on our oh so impatient society?  So hence my little challenge.  Could I get all my sites to load in that time?

I finally achieved it this week.  It took a lot of tweaking, experimenting and a ton of research but I did it.  My slowest site now is 1.2 seconds and the vast majority are under a second.

“Ah here!” I hear you shout, “Rambles takes fucking ages to load”.  That’s as may be, but that’s not my problem.  Maybe the old Widow Cartwright down your road is hogging the phone line with her malicious gossip?  Maybe your next door neighbour has hacked into your home wifi and is merrily downloading gigabytes of porn?  Maybe your ISP is re-routing all your traffic through CIA’s servers?  There could be loads of reasons but as far as I am concerned, this site is banged out onto the Interweb in 0.96 seconds.

Okay, so all of this is boring, but it’s better than watching “Judge Judy” or listening to Joe Duffy?

Not welcome at the inn

Head Rambles Posted on by 5

There is an item in today’s Journal

‘They’re dropping like flies’: Why Cork pubs have been closing in droves

For some reason that I cannot fathom, there is no mention of the smoking ban.  There appears to be an attitude here in Ireland that the ban never happened, or that it was always in place.  I have seen a lot of articles bemoaning the loss of pubs here, and if the ban is mentioned [rarely] it is as an afterthought.

I have spoken to quite a few people where I mentioned the ban in passing.  The reaction varies, from “ah, sure what can you do?” through “it doesn’t bother me that much” to “yeah, it’s annoying but it’s the law”.  I only remember one occasion where a bar owner got quite angry and decried the law for killing her business.

I tried to leave a comment under the article but without success.  I don’t know if they have some kind of moderation in place.  Maybe all comments containing the word “smoking” are automatically barred?  It would certainly fit in with the general Irish mindset.  Don’t mention the war.

The comment I posted –

While there has been a steady decline over many years, statistics will show a sharp increase in closures starting in 2004 – the year the smoking ban was introduced – when overnight thousands of clientèle were told that they were no longer welcome in their hostelry. It’s strange how that is never mentioned?

They never warned me

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

There was a big fuss during the week about a storm.

Naturally they had to give it a name [Amy or Ava or something] and give it a colour code.  There were dire warnings about how we would all be killed by falling trees and power lines if we so much as set foot outside our door.

By evening, their storm had passed and the wind was down to a whisper.  Then they decided to cut our power!  Had the lines been brought down by the calm?  We’ll never know.

It was dark so I had to feel my way through the house to find a torch.  I then discovered the oil-lamp was out of oil so I had to brave the falling trees and power lines and fill the lamp from the oil tank in the back yard.  I battled my way against the slight breeze back into the kitchen.

With a bit of trouble I finally managed to light the lamp.  The instant the lamp lit, the power came on.  I swear they were having a laugh.

It’s windy again today, but they never warned me in advance.  There wasn’t a whisper.  Today’s wind to the best of my knowledge has no name nor colour; it is anonymous.

And this nameless wind has just torn a six inch diameter branch off one of my finest trees and it is now hanging on by a splinter.  Chain-saw time!

And on top of that the front gate has torn its hinges out of the gate post so no one can get in or out without physically lifting the damn thing.

Fucking nameless wind!