There’s nothing quite like being left alone in the kitchen to slowly and quietly prepare some good grub. It is deeply relaxing and one of the greatest and simplest pleasures of life.
However there is a force loose in the world which seems determined to undermine this calm and pleasant activity and turn our kitchens into a chaotic whirlpool of over-boiling pots and burning pans. This insidious agent of disorder is the phenomenon of parallel cooking propagated mostly by authors of the world’s cook books and the scores of celebrity chef shows which seek to convince us that a kitchen should be a highly pressured environment.
I wanted to write something to articulate how I felt about the handing over of seven gazillion billion trillion dollars by the banksters at the US Federal reserve to a slush fund to bail out their Wall Street friends.
I wanted to say it was plain criminal and how any bail outs should actually be given to the people who pay taxes and are and will be getting turfed out of their homes due to mortgage debt.
But why bother when congress woman Marcy Kaptur says it much better:
It been a funny old year, first the housing market starts to collapse, then talk of recession, then oil prices start heading into the stratosphere while the dollar falls into a bottomless pit. Bear Stearns collapses, then Fannie and Freddie the largest mortgage providers in the US gets nationalized to prevent collapse, effectively making America the largest council estate in the world. Then Lehman Bros a bank which survived the Great Depression goes under closely followed by AIG which gets nationalized as well, meaning the US government now provides insurance to itself for all the houses it tookover by nationalising the mortgage industry, making it apparent that US now has a de facto policy of taking the bad bits from free market capitalism and state capitalism (aka soviet style communism) and melding them into a new system where the profits are privatized but the losses are socialized.
This activity of course is mirrored across the globe with Northern Rock and HBOS in the UK, and house prices just about everywhere going south while fuel and and food continues to climb skyward (the current downward blip in oil prices is just that a blip).
In the last couple of months I just switched from doing a daily 22 kilometer round trip bicycle commute to work to living a stone’s throw from my job and cycling to work in under five minutes. However, after a year and a quarter of long distance urban bike commuting in Ireland, I have some opinions on the subject that I feel the need to share.
The first thing I have to say is that it’s not an activity I can easily recommend. I had no other option really and while I love cycling and wish I lived in a world where urban bicycle commuting was a safe option I have to conclude that by and large it isn’t. I say this not because of the volume of the traffic on Irish roads (that actually makes it safer due to the slowdown it causes) but because of the mindset and general aggression of motorists towards cyclists.
It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..
When I set out to have a baby I had no idea that there was an international conspiracy of parents who are all sworn to uphold the terrible secrets of parenthood. Once sworn in we are duty bound to pretend that all is rosy, make a few anecdotes about lack of sleep and say how wonderful our children are lest we put the continued viability of the human race in jeopardy by telling the awful truth.
I have however decided to break this silence and I think the best way to do it is to tell my own tale. Unlike the few vacuous books concerning fatherhood in bookshops (there’s usually about two stuck in the back somewhere amidst the 50,000 books on motherhood) I want to try and detail the internal processes that went on in my mind as fatherhood unfolded rather than just recount some tale like a story told down the pub couched in football analogies and bravado. This is what the few books I read attempted to do and they were useless to me especially given that I know nothing about football and comparing things to the offside rule just bewildered me even further.
So to kick off (damn thats a football reference isn’t it) I thought I ‘d go right back to the beginning ….
I just got back from a two week holiday attending various Science fiction conventions. Actually I got back on Tuesday but between being so tired and having to go back to work, its taken until now to be able to write about it.
I’ve been to lots of SF conventions before, but this holiday was a first on two counts. It was my first time attending a really big convention outside of Ireland, and my first time attending a convention with a child in tow.
Ron Paul is the best thing since sliced bread, the great new hope, the beacon of freedom for a new America. At least thats what you’d be led to believe if confined your political education to YouTube. Thankfully I haven’t.
For those who don’t know, Ron Paul is a Republican candidate running for the 2008 presidential elections. However he’s not the usual “I want to murder innocent foreigners to line my pockets and I hate fags” type of Republican. In fact he’s actually a “Libertarian” (using the grossly inaccurate American capitalist application of the word rather than the more accurate left wing application commonly used in Europe) who seems only to be in the Republican party because he believes there’s no way to achieve anything significant in American politics if you’re outside the two main parties.
He also different to most politicians at that level because I reckon he is actually principled and is not in it just for the power. He believes in something and wants to get people’s support so he can achieve it and he won’t dilute his beliefs just to win votes.
In line with “Libertarian” thinking he’s against America’s continual belligerent interfering with the rest of the world and isn’t afraid to say so and spell out what America has been doing to other countries.
All sounds good right? So what are my issues with him then?
Many years ago I was in a relationship that went sour. In the beginning it was great, it was what you might even call classic, all daring adventure and star crossed romance. I remember rushing home in anticipation to share our precious moments together and then sitting up late whistling our song.
But at some point things started to go wrong. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think it was around the time they moved into a new phase and changed their look, joined a new generation if you will. I never liked their new clothes even then but I overlooked it in the excitement of it all. Maybe it was me that changed or maybe it was the new people that they started hanging around with that ruined it. I knew it was going south when Rick and Brannon started exerting more and more control over them and referring to our relationship as “The Franchise” and in a way they were right, we had very little spark or creativity or originality left, it was just about mindless consumption and I began to wonder why I was still there.
And so I drifted way, although there was some good moments towards the end, especially when our mutual friend Ron Moore helped make that last arc of our relationship so deep. Once we went our separate ways I was happy doing my own thing and I heard the other half had gone off voyaging somewhere far way and I didn’t care.
But then one day they walked back into my life and promised me it could be like it had been in the beginning, that we could have a fresh start and it could be gritty and real and we could make it work. I should have known better but they were irresistible and I fell for them again. If only I’d been stronger I could have avoided the pain of that failed enterprise, which was more abysmal than I could ever have imagined.
When we broke up that time I swore it would be the last time I would ever go back with them. I’ve held to that promise, but today I got a video message from them and I can feel it happening all over again, the tingle in my skin, the warm flush, my mind fading into the night thinking “what is this thing you call love” and waking up in a haze to find myself putting my boots back on.
I know its wrong, I know it won’t work but… but.. you see there’s this new guy JJ on board and he’s really cool and he says it ‘ll be okay and he doesn’t say “franchise” every second, so maybe it will work, maybe we can be happy again. Oh please let us be happy again, I can’t go through this again, let it be like the old days before they started wearing lycra unitards, before the 80’s PC blandness and, and before they started dressing like they were characters rented from FHM. Let it be like our glorious technicolor youth when plots were cheesy and skirts were short, when… real.. men… spoke… dramatically… or had southern accents or pointy ears and real women had subspace antenna or were just simply green.
Oh please… let it be like I remember… let it be good… oh please…
It’s that time of year again when, if you’re like me, you are most likely bursting full of festive cheer and about to start humming some carols. It’s at this point when you can be guaranteed that some festively-challenged begrudger will try to spoil it for you.
These grinchy types come in many forms, such as the post-modern too cool for school “Too Commercials” who usually reckon Christmas is too tacky, uncool and generally beneath them. They tend to say “Oh Christmas has got too commercial it’s all about money and gifts drone blah moan….”. Yes I agree Christmas has become very commercial but do they have to keep moaning on about it, I wish they’d just ignore Christmas or make their own Christmas less commercial, you know don’t spend a fortune on presents or maybe get those charity voucher thingies instead, but whatever they do I wish they’d just shut the hell up and stop being such moaning bastards.
The most common form of these spiritless Christmas-phobes however are “The True Meanies”. These are the people who like to say in pious tones “Now, let us remember the true meaning of Christmas…” and proceed to drone on about baby Jeebus or human goodwill, or whatever their fascistic one true meaning happens to be. Read the rest of this entry »
Occasionally people ask me why I don’t drive, especially here in Galway where I think most people are given cars instead of legs at birth.
Growing up not far from inner city of Dublin and living there most of my life I never really needed a car. My father never drove and my mother tried for a while but gave up after two cars in a row were stolen. Most of my friends families didn’t have cars either and all my friends and I walked, cycled and used buses without thought, practically no one in my school was dropped off in a car. Effectively I grew up in a culture that was not car dependent, all the facilities we needed to live were easily accessible without a car. Thats not to say Dublin is car free utopia, it’s not, especially so in recent years with American style suburban sprawl and population growth with little or no matching investment in public transport. Dublin has become a car culture but due to its density and the legacy of having some sort of bus system its still possible to live there without a car if you live somewhere within the city proper rather than the sprawl into Meath and Kildare. More importantly in a way car culture hasn’t fully infected the minds of a lot of people there, there are still lots of younger people who don’t have cars and don’t consider it to be a extra limb.
There’s nothing quite like being left alone in the kitchen to slowly and quietly prepare some good grub. It is deeply relaxing and one of the greatest and simplest pleasures of life.
Posted by monkeylogical 
Posted by monkeylogical 
Posted by monkeylogical 
It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..
Ron Paul is the best thing since sliced bread, the great new hope, the beacon of freedom for a new America. At least thats what you’d be led to believe if confined your political education to YouTube. Thankfully I haven’t.
