Les Acadiens et leur Musique

Or, in other words, Acadiens and their music. Having dined in the new and interesting surroundings of the Sheep's Head Inn in Durrus last night, and my tummy suitably full of scampi and whatever else I mixed in with the dark brown stout, over the road I tottered in the pouring rain to Ross's. Only the toilets are new and shiny in Ross's. The rest is pure Irish, which is a good thing, so it is. The people I was with included relatives and can't be named for some reason or other, but the thing is that they were smoking cigarettes. This is not what it used to be in Ireland and you have to go outside nowadays to smoke. I stopped about 2 or 3 years ago, but I did have some last night, it has to be admitted. Luckily, Ross's has the old canopy thingy that can protect from the sun as well as from the rain, so we were able to huddle and puff without getting soaked.

Anyway, as the night wore on and the laughing got louder, we noticed that there was live musique coming from the other room - the main bar. It sounded like traditional Irish music - which I do like, especially when the old head starts to loosen up and swing from side to side in a liberal fashion as a direct result of the amount of alchohol sloshing inside the brain that lies therein. That last sentence went on a bit too long, so I'll start again: It sounded like traditional Irish music, but it was being played not only very well, but also very quickly. The rythms were a bit different. Our toes were all a-tapping and we nodded our heads in unison and verbally acknowledged to one another that this was indeed fine music, so it was. (It was really a very civilised evening). I leaned my head over and used the 3/4 ful pint in my outstretched left hand as a counter-balance so that I wouldn't fall and do myself an injury, what with my head being so top-heavy with porter. When I was sufficiently leaned over, I was able to get a clear view of the musicians. They were slightly more tanned than your average Irishman. One had a squeezebox and the other a guitar. Two girls were sitting with them. I noticed that the fella with his back to me had a tee-shirt with "Tour du Monde" on it, so I deduced that they might be French. One of the girlies passed me on her way for a wee-wee (I assume; i didn't actually ask her to confirm). "Hey." says I to her in fluent French, "Are ye French, are ye?" "We are, says she, "...from Brittany, in fact. Are you French?" "I'm not," says I. "I just speak ye're crazy language fluently."
Anyway, without going into the whole conversation word-for-word, it turned out that the music they were playing was, in fact, Canadian - from Quebec province. She went and did her thing and re-emerged refreshed to sit beside her musical colleagues once more. In they lashed to another furiously-paced tune. They then downed their instruments and sang another emigrant's lament type song in mariner's style called "La Virginie".

Anyway, I'm going to stop now because my tummy is very sick today and I don't think that all the porter has fully cleared out of my head yet.

Circus's Nowadays

I've just been to the circus with "toute la famille" as they say down South.

Say what you want and scoff all you like, but there really is nothing quite like the excitement of the circus coming to town. I've seen a few over the last few years and many of them don't have much going for them in terms of quality of presentation, general hygene of the employees, lack of exciting and/or dangerous animals, etc. I'm happy to report that this circus was, however, just about the best one yet. Duffy's Circus is the nation's favourite and has survived the many problems that beset such a cost-heavy production in the modern Ireland. I suspect that many circus's find it just about impossible to keep the show on the road in these times, but Duffy's have adapted and rolled with the slow punches. They've teamed up with none other than the Chinese State Circus, so the quality of athleticism is fairly astounding, it has to be said. Last night, I witnessed a woman who put her arse on her head! - I am not exaggerating, and... ok, so it wasn't the most clever thing that she did in her performance (she balanced all sorts of stuff including a large quantity of lit candles) but it seemed the most anatomically impossible to me. In fact, I have no doubt, that if she wished, she could actually stick her own head up her arse. I imagine that sort of thing would go down well in the likes of Bangkok or certain establishments in Limerick, but not here. Anyway, although the arse-on-head trick represented the pinnacle of the show in terms of achieving the technically impossible, there was lots of other acrobatic amazements too. And, most important, they did have dangerous animals. Not one, not two, but in fact 4 tigers in the caged ring with a man and a woman. I didn't feel secure about the amount of snarling they did, particularly the more grizzled one on the far right. He always looked just one more poke of the stick away from turning the whole show into a bit of a bloodbath and although I looked around most carefully, I couldn't see any sign of a man on standby with a gun. Some youngfella who fancied himself as an Indiana Jones stuck his head in a crocodile's mouth.

So, the magic of circus-time is not gone yet. All the circuses need the cheap foreign labour to survive, it seems, but Duffy's has stolen a march on the rest by getting the very best there is in that market.

Roll up. Roll up.

The Boring and Invisible Ryder Cup

I had a horrible dream the other night. In it, I was being punished for doing something of which I was entirely innocent and for my punishment, I had to play golf. Now I consider that punishment enough for any man, but to make matters worse, I had to play against the devil himself. He was all afire and leaving worrying scorchmarks on the grass (or the "green", as golfers themselves call it, the boring bastards) where his cloven feet trod. I had to win in order to avoid further and painful punishment and the trouble is that I wasn't any fecking good and he seemed to have been practising - a lot. It was 2 against 1, though, but the nail in my punishing coffin came when I realised that my partner was Padraig Harrinton. Now, on the one hand I was glad to have him on my side because he's a top-class player (or so I'm lead to believe by the bores that watch this shit), but whether I'm or whether I'm wrong, I regard him as the epitome of boredom. Mr. Harrington is, to my observant mind, Tedium Personified. As we walked boringly, slowly from one "hole" to another "hole", Harrington was giving me an earache with his verbal hairy elephant dung, such as "I'm a fit guy - I like to stay in shape." and "I wasn't really comfortable standing over that hole", all delivered in that monotone drone of his with that miserable effort of a smile that seems to be fixed onto his face, tanned from walking around and spending his ridiculously huge pay on sunny holidays and the like. It's actually quite typical of the professional golfer, so it is - all of that.

All the while, the devil is ahead of us, getting on with the game and making great progress with birdies and eagles and pars and whatever else they have in this "stupida fucking game", to quote the Neopolitan hitman from the Sopranos. And the bastard devil is laughing at me and my predicament, struggling to cope with this travesty of sport and all the time being driven to distraction by this babbling idiot beside me.

To cut to the chase, the dream ended well, with me beating Harrington to death with the club and the devil joining in to deliver the final coup-de-grace, but I'm trying to address the issues raised in my reverie.

Perhaps I'm feeling a little insecure because I know so many people who think that golf is great and that the Ryder Cup coming to Ireland is the most exciting thing ever. But, what kind of a sport is it? It's not really a sport at all, in my mind: all that walking around followed by a slave. It numbs the mind and the fuckers are overpaid. Part of the reason why the greedy bores are so overpaid is because they sell the television rights to satellite tv companies who can get all the money back by sucking it out of the fans of this crap. I don't know how an Irishman like Padraig Harrington can hold his head aloft at all when he's involved in this skullduggery - part of bringing this big occasion to Ireland, where the national broadcaster can't show the stupid thing on television. Take the club to the Sky box and the satellite dish, then bring the remains to your dealer and say something like "I'm mad as fuck and I'm not taking it any more!!". That should do it.

Swimming wear for men

Ahh, yes! That old nutshell: the men and their swimwear debate. Yet another summer of puzzlement have I endured (and it has been, might I add, a really really nice summer in the Southwest of my dear country, so it has), staring aghast at the multitude of baggy shorts on men of the same persuasion as me. I have scanned the beaches for sight of proper, sensible swimming garments that are small and made of lycra, but they're now extremely thin on the ground. In fact, if anything, they're getting even rarer on our beaches. At least, on most countries on the continent, it's the youngfellas that wear the stupid baggies, while the more mature man - the man who's levelled off and comfortable with his sexuality - tends to go for the optimum option of the Speedos. But in Ireland, the disease of the baggies is well and truly widespread, entrenched as it is in the beach-frequenting culture of once-great Republic.

I'm afraid it's time to blame the Americans again. They weren't content with starting the trend of creating a flashy entertainment show to replace the news. Oh no! Now they've single-handedly started a baggy shorts revolution that has rapidly undone all the hard work of the sexual revolution of 40 years ago. I strongly suspect fundamentalist Christian labotamy-brained fuckwits, as I like to call them. Check out this website, for instance. Like, who in their right mind would (a) come up with such a business idea, or (b) actually buy the feckin things ? This can't be just "market forces" at work here; it's far too sinister for that. There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, so there is, so there is.

I hadn't even noticed that baggies were taking over the world until my wife pointed it out to me and pleaded (actually pleaded!) with me not to go out on the strand wearing "those", as she called them. I think she associates them with pot-bellied middle-aged men. I might be approaching middle age, but I'm still blessed with a slim figure and fine arse (so the wife tells me - I don't know). But anyway, that was 15-20 years ago and people still haven't figured out that the emperor has no Speedos and instead is wearing stupid feckin baggy shorts that are as ... stupid looking as they are not aqua-dynamic. Imagine Pieter Van den Hoogendband (if that is his actual name) lining up for the next big race wearing baggy shorts! That's be the end of his record-breaking, I can tell you! And the end of his dignity. He'd be hard-pressed to get the ride that night, so he would.

So, men of Ireland, I implore you! Men of Britain, the same to you ! Men of France, Hommes de France, je vous en supplie! All the other men of Europe and the rest of the world, listen up! Burn the baggies! Be wearing your Speedos with pride! I'm considering mounting a campaign (after I've had a chat with my legal eh... team) of terror on unsuspecting baggy-wearers, involving pulling down these offensive garments, thus exposing the wearers to further ridicule in an effort to make them understand how ridiculous they are.

So get burning, donning and pulling down! The revolution starts now! Viva la Revolucion!

Rotten Apples

Deeply depressed as I was after Waterford hurling team falling short yet again, I turned my back to the assembled crowd of whinnying Cork fans in my local pub (I have the misfortune during these dark times of being a Waterford-born man resident in the County of Cork) and muttered to my wife to gather the children and drive me home... please. 2 pints of pain under the belt at that stage, so I couldn't take any chances, you understand.

Anyway, after a good old sulk in the scratcher and a fine square meal at home, I topped off my recovery with bottle of lovely Erdinger Kristall Klaar - beer of beers - and a game of soccer with the lads.

The point is - and I'm slowly getting to it, but it's been a traumatic day for me so bear with it - I was reading this article in the Sunday Tribune about the company called Apple and the fact that there's something rotten going on with it. Here's a company founded on instinctive hippy creativeness many years ago by college dropouts or one colleg dropout and his friend or similar anti-establishment sort of slant. And they're American, of course, like everything important in this world, and the college drop-out headhunted this sharp American-style capitalist bastard from Pepsi-co - just to make sure that Apple became really shit-hot and blew the competition out of the water - and, guess what? The capitalist bastard actually takes over Apple and turfs out the former college drop-out (who, we fear at this stage, has become the quintessential American capitalist by this stage anyway) on his ear on the "sidewalk" (as they say in the States) and, guess what again? Mr. Capitalist-former-Pepsi-bastard, having first fucked out the creative genius behind the company and got comfy in the pdg's chair, now proceeds to actually run the company into the aforementioned "sidewalk". Meanwhile, Jobs gets busy getting incredibly rich on spotting the potential of a little company called Pixar and makes a triumphant return to the company he founded in 1997. Well, there's no point in telling you what happened next. If you haven't heard of the Ipod and all of that, well, stop now and read something else.

So, now that they're really successful, they go and move their factory to China. The things are being made in sweatshops by people being paid a pittance in a country whose human rights record makes Cuba looks like a model of perfection. Quality suffers and so does their image. but, guess what? Apple doesn't really care any more.

I don't have an ipod but I have recently begun buying music on itunes. And, I have to say that I am mystified as to why there is such a poor selection online. They don't actually need a massive warehouse to store all the albums, so they should have a selection to blow all competition in planet earth-type shops way out of the water, so to speak. But, guess what yet again? They don't. The other day , I went looking for the Talking Heads album "Stop Making Sense", having re-discovered an old decrepid tape of the album. They don't have it. They have about 3 Talking Heads albums. This is a well-known, American mainstream group. There wouldn't be any point in looking for anything even remotely obscure and non-American-Brit-mainstream. In fact, I tried to buy Manu Chao's difficult 2nd album (not a patch on the 1st "clandestino", by the way). Not available on the Irish store (where "clandestino" is also conspicuous by its absence) and not available in it's French store. And, guess what? Manu Chao is actually French!

So, Apple doesn't impress me. It had everything at its feet and now it appears to be blowing it through not caring, disinterest, arrogance, and good old-fashioned corporate American greed.

That's it. I'm off to bed for an early night.