Ireland my Arse

You know, while all of us here are getting very excited watching what must surely already rank as one of the best fifa World Cup's in living memory (mine goes back to the 1978 tournament, by the way), we do have our national team playing a tour of Australia and New Zealand. In this case, the sport is rugby, of course. But you would hardly know that it was going on, because not only does it coincide with the much more exciting World Cup (and you'd really have to feel sorry for the lads on the team not being able to sit down in the evening with a beer in the hand watching the soccer), but it is also completely absent from the tv - from my tv anyway. I noticed that it's on Sky Sports all right. I mean, what is this shit? How can a private foreign-owned satellite tv company be showing my national team playing for my country? That they even have the right to do it without my express permission is bad enough.

Dump your Sky box - use it as a bin, if it's possible. Just switch off from these people ; they're evil and if you sign up, then you're just an ignorant monkey; you're their bitch who's keeping them in pocket and creating ridiculous fortunes and oversized egos for the sports stars that this system corrupts.

That's all for now. I'm not happy with the world.

Team Support Down Under?

I read in the papers that the Irish rugby team are doing a pretty good job down in the Antipodes (I believe you call them) - which is to say in New Zealand and Australia. Still, close is not close enough and it is extraordinary to think that the national team has failed to do what Munster have done (i.e. beat the All Blacks). I also read that Brian O'Driscoll says he is confident of beating Australia.

"I read"! This is gas, isn't it? I'm reading about it because it's not on television. I, as an Irishman, cannot watch my national rugby team play in this series of matches on national Irish television, so instead I'm reduced to reading about their exploits. Actually, the Irish team seem to play even better when you imagine them playing, but that's by the by. The main point of the matter is a far more serious one. This is a retrograde step indeed, where, unless I agree to pay a sleazebag foreign meglomaniac for the tv rights that he has hijacked and now monpolizes, I am reduced to reading about it in the papers and hopefully tuning in to a radio station that will carry it. Like some poor fucker in the 1950's. Some progress, huh?

Well, I do hope our national team does us proud. If they do win, at least I can read about it in the papers.

Too much wine...

Too much wine does make the old spin a bit, not to mention the tummy, churning away for days afterwards, as it does, like a dirty ould cement mixer.

Well enough about my alcoholic habits and more about the world in general. Did you know , for example, that there is huge interceltique festival (pronounced "fess-teee-val) held and to be held every year since 1971 in Lorient, Britanny. Lorient is a place that I've been in, so I have. It's architecturally naive, to say the least. In fact, it's definitely one of France's shit-ugliest towns, so it is, mostly on account of the fact that it underwent some refurbishments courtesy of American and Brit bastard bombings during the course of World War II. Of coure, they'll say that it was all a necessary part of liberating the country from the Nazi opressor and it's hard to argue with that, but how many of those young, wet-behind-the-ears bombardiers didn't drop that extra bomb just to satisfy their innate and inbred sense of anti-French? France is a country of many pretty towns, and no-one appreciates more than I do, coming from a country where all those important centuries were obliterated, leaving us with a cultural blank space from the 1300's to the early 1800's and not much else until 1916, so.... (and I apologise for the long bridge there) it is hard to comprehend the raison d'etre of a town like Lorient, where the streets are totally charmless, except for the lovely people that inhabit them. And they are lovely people, so they are. All nice and friendly and Irish-loving; my kind of people, even though I've just described 80% of the population of the earth.

Anyway, back to the grand festival. Well, i haven't been to it yet, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I did manage to get a press pass to the thing this year, so off I go and I'll tell you about it later.