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Stupid thick, luxuriant hair

Published
by
Colm
on 4 November, 2009
in Misc.
. 4 Comments

Hair: I have a lot of it. I mean, just a ludicrous amount. I remember going for a trim as a child and coming out an hour later, the hairdresser sweating buckets, muttering to herself about rainforests and staring into the middle distance.1

I leave a trail of loose hair wherever I go. I don’t need to buy blankets, because it only takes ten minutes lying down to achieve full three-inch coverage. Cleaning up after a shower is a nightmare – tiled floors like, whose idea was that? My first house is going to have a black shag carpet in the bathroom. And I am never, ever going to look at it.

(Do you know, incidentally, how awkward it is picking up strands of hair off a men’s room floor? Because you know that when people see them they’ll know straight away whose head it came off, and they’ll be all “Ugh, that guy has a body, with things on it”. I personally have no idea how awkward that would be, but I imagine fairly. It’s probably almost as awkward as having someone come into a men’s room while you’re standing there in the middle of the floor, whistling, with your hands in your pockets and a bunch of god damn hair all around your feet.)

I would worry that I’m going bald, but this has been happening since I was 13 with no sign of any thinning. I tell you what, I’m not even sure I have a scalp under there. There’s an expedition going in this Saturday to see what they can dig up. Pray for them, internet. Pray for them.

  1. Saw her the other day actually. I was like, Check her out, all reintegrated into normal human society! It was nice to see, you know? [↩]

On the metaphysics of customer service

Published
by
Colm
on 1 October, 2009
in Fun with words and Misc.
. 8 Comments

Got a text message from NTL there. Oh hey NTL, haven’t heard from you in a while! What’s happenin’, bro?

In Regards to a recent Termination – Cancellation on your Chorus/NTL account please be advised that despite numinous attempts we have been unable to contact you to collect our equipment.

Man, whatever. I mean, let’s not get into who tried to contact who, and who got through first time and arranged to pick up the equipment, and who nevertheless didn’t bother to turn up. Let’s not get into how maybe you’re coming off a little pissy right now, NTL. No. There are much more interesting things we could talk about.

When I first glanced over the message I read it as “despite numerous attempts”. But that ain’t what it says.

From Wikipedia: “Numinous (from the Classical Latin numen) is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity.” Dear Mary. So that itch I’ve been getting on and off just behind my ear, is that them deploying their mighty powers to try to communicate with me? Perhaps my rock-solid rationalism has prevented them getting a clear signal. I shall clear my mind and meditate, and we shall see if we can sort this matter out once and for all.

… nope, still just trying to flog me a landline. Dammit NTL. Such a waste.

Scenes from Cork

Published
by
Colm
on 14 August, 2009
in Foreign parts
. 8 Comments

postit1

postit2

postit3

Somewhere in Cork, right now, there is a man with 2.6 gigabytes of Van Halen on his laptop. Did Van Halen even record 2.6 gigabytes of material? Who knows! This man has it anyway.

The depoxening

Published
by
Colm
on 13 August, 2009
in Misc.
. 3 Comments

Those of you who checked back here over the past while (cheers, incidentally) will have noticed there was some villainy afoot1. Firstly, to get the ringing-my-exes bit out of the way: scary warning notwithstanding, the site has been clean since 31 July, but if you accessed it in, say, the week before that, you might want to download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and give yourself an old scanaroonie. To be fair, you were probably already riddled anyway, so this is long overdue.

Secondly, thanks to the hosting ninjas at Blacknight for helping me sort this out. Hey, looking for a hosting plan? Try Blacknight! They’re ninjas.

Finally, I actually had stuff I wanted to post in that time. I know! So keep an eye out for that.

  1. Of which full details here. [↩]

One bottle of Prosecco later

Published
by
Colm
on 16 July, 2009
in Misc.
. 10 Comments

Writes L in Belfast:

If you could live in any century, what century would that be?

envelope

Logic will break your heart

Published
by
Colm
on 16 June, 2009
in Misc.
. 30 Comments

There is a riddle, you see. I knew the answer, and I knew how to arrive at the answer, and yet even after roping in two other people it still took the guts of half an hour and at least three beermats to reverse engineer the riddle itself. So you are going to read it and you are going to enjoy it.

Three people are standing in a line, facing forward. Like so: A -> B -> C ->. Person A can see Person B and Person C. Person B can see Person C. Person C is kind of staring off into space, perhaps pondering the merits of dogs vs. cats as household pets, or idly doing some mental arithmetic.1

Now then: hats. Each of them is wearing a hat, which has been distributed from a pool of two white hats and three black hats. They don’t know what hat they’ve been given, although of course they can see the hats of those in front of them. They are asked to say, without guessing, what colour hat they’re wearing.

A says nothing. B says nothing. C says, “I know what colour hat I’m wearing.”

What colour hat does he have, and how does he know?

  1. They all do this. They’re very logical people, you understand, and that’s how they get their jollies. Even that bit about the dogs and cats is just a mental exercise. Do you think Person C would ever actually want to have a pet? You fool. [↩]

For god’s sake cowboy up

Published
by
Colm
on 7 May, 2009
in Music and Stupidity
. 11 Comments

I was listening to t’wireless the other night, and that new Lily Allen song was playing. You know, the jaunty number about an otherwise lovely relationship being spoiled by shoddy times in the bedroom. The one that can in no way be construed as an attack on all men.

Aha, though. Because it would appear it can. As soon as it finished the DJ jumped in with a remark about her “tales of woe,” and I wonder if a man released a song like would he get away with it, hmm I don’t think so somehow ha ha, but sure aren’t we men useless at everything anyway, and it’s 11 o’clock and here’s the news.

Right.

Let’s, for a moment, ignore all the squabbly noncefights about who gets to be the equalest, and concentrate on what a colossal sackbag you have to be to make comments like that. And not just to make them, but to be so horrendously glib and passive-aggressive while you’re at it. I get that you’re insecure. I get that you grew up in the midst of a lot of change and uncertainty. But surely you realise how you’re coming off? Surely you could think things through a bit more? Because I would respectfully submit that if in order for you to see a personal insult in those lyrics, your knee has to possessed of a jerkiness rarely seen outside of late-stage Parkinson’s.

So and anyway. I guess if there’s a wider point to be made, it’s that it’s pretty embarrassing to be a man sometimes. There’s a line to be skated between  victim and apologist1, and it’s easy enough to fall off. But seriously fellas, could we at least refrain from taking a dive?

  1. Cheerfully, some people have nailed it. [↩]

The Beard Brothers

Published
by
Colm
on 23 April, 2009
in Misc.
. 8 Comments

Some fellers are fixin’ to get some information out of me. NotRuairi is (n’t?) at it, as is this hirsute hombre. Six things they want, which is a bit annoying, since I gone and did 25 of them on Facebook a while ago. Seriously, those are all the things about me. I have nothing left.

But then I read Andrew’s facts, and it occurred to me that they were awful familiar. Awful familiar indeed… for you see, I know this man – or rather, I knew him. We were a team, Andrew and I, before an unpleasantness forced us apart. Then a while later we were a team again, before a misunderstanding put paid to our relationship. Then after a couple of years we were a team again, and then we kind of got really really drunk, and I guess there might have been some psychotropics in the mix, and basically we haven’t seen each other since.

Many fine histories of our exploits have been written1, but here’s a few choice “behind the scenes” nuggets that tend to get left out:

1. While my favourite pen is a Bic biro, Andrew is a die-hard fan of Staedtlers. In order to minimise arguments and avoid needless destruction of property, we tend to write in pencil when in each other’s company.

2. You know where at the start of those Pepé le Pew cartoons the cat would squeeze under like a freshly-painted fence or something and then the skunk would chase her for ages looking to do the deed on her? Well, [excised at the request of the British Royal Family]

3. In the space of three minutes during a late-night/early-morning singalong in a Munich pub in the 1860s, we inadvertently invented the Eurovision, paracetamol and Cambodia.

4. Pork, as a meat, was much less delicious before we started hanging out together. We’re not sure why.

5. We wrote the preliminary code for Auto-Tune in 1971. It’s taken 38 years for someone to find a proper use for it.

6. The seven-day-week thing is one of Andrew’s most common boasts  but, as usual, he was only partly responsible. I recall it was a balmy Blurnsday evening back in the sixteenth century: myself and himself were pretty heavily into peyote at the time, as were the rest of the Tibetan aristocracy2, and in the middle of one of our lengthier binges I happened to make an offhand comment about there being seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye. Well, things got somewhat hazy, but when we came to several days later Andrew was clutching a sheaf of paperwork from the US Patent Office3. After several months on the road, and some characteristic mountebankery, we’d convinced the rest of the world to adopt the new system.

  1. q.v. particularly the following paragraph on Wikipedia: “In the course of history, men with facial hair have been ascribed various attributes such as wisdom and knowledge, sexual virility, or high social status; and, conversely, filthiness, crudeness, or an eccentric disposition, such as in the case of a bum, hobo or vagrant.” [↩]
  2. Long story. [↩]
  3. which office, ironically, we ourselves had founded less than two weeks earlier. [↩]

The secret of klassic komedy

Published
by
Colm
on 9 April, 2009
in Writing
. 14 Comments

This secret: I have discovered it. It’s all about third seasons. Black Books especially, but especially Arrested Development – the only way you could beat the jokes-per-second density of AD3 is by watching Airplane! on fast forward.

Which is not to say that writers should completely skip the first two seasons of a new show. Temporal logistics aside1, that would be depriving us of some fine material. No. But on the other hand, why waste your A-game? And why keep us waiting?

Clearly the only solution is to hire a technically competent team of writers who nevertheless lack that certain spark, and task them with writing the first two seasons. The original creators and true creative minds can write the third season concurrently2, with the lesser seasons being held back for release as a DVD extra.

I literally cannot conceive of any problems with this plan. Someone start writing cheques for me now, because I am on fire.

  1. Physics: ever the enemy of comedy. Well, except slapstick. [↩]
  2. Or maybe they’d have to wait a while, have a staggered start to the writing of each season… I don’t know, the bean counters can work it out. [↩]

A free thing for you

Published
by
Colm
on 3 April, 2009
in Fun with words and Writing
. 13 Comments

Spectacularly poor timing – I meant to post this much earlier – but I find myself in possession of a whole heap of blank postcards (for mysterious reasons!) and I’m looking for something to do with them. I’ve always felt bad when other people do mix CDs and whatnot because there’s very little I can give them in return. So here we are: send an email to post at emesq dot com with your postal address and maybe a word or a sentence on what you’re into and I’ll write a short story for you.1

I’m hoping this is a thing that will be fun for all concerned. If it goes well enough we may even be able to throw some capital letters on there and make it a full-blown honest to god Thing. I would like that. And so would she.

  1. Very short, mind, we’re talking about a postcard here. I’ll make up for it by throwing on a wee doodle as well. Maybe even in colour! [↩]
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