Seems drawing badass celestial bodies is a thing I do when I’m drinking. I see two problems here: one, my knowledge of astronomy is fairly limited and thus already running almost dry; two, I can’t guarantee Drunk Colm won’t eventually think rubbish puns about white dwarves are the way forward. So over to you: suggest something else I can doodle. Something that gets a bad press and needs an image overhaul. Something that will benefit from a good ol’ bitta tipsy PR. And please note that you will be paying for the necessary Art Juice. I’ll be right over here.
(Context for the upper half: a bar in Berlin, an ill-thought-out game of Guess Who. Bonus points: German tries to correct my spelling, realises I was right in the first place. WhuPOW.)
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.
Haven’t been doing much around here, have I? Lot of things going on the past week. For one I reckon I’m starting to get the most out of twitter. Like for instance the other night I found out that there were fireballs falling in Houston Texas, and the next day some guy I don’t know ate some meatballs in IKEA, and the cool thing is I knew about these events sooner than probably quite a few people. If you want to feel like a sci-fi supervillain just go to monitter.com, throw in some keywords and then imagine you’re absorbing crazy data streams out of people’s heads. It is not hard to do.
Secondly, there’s a project afoot. Uh. I’m not going to say anything about that yet.
Thirdly, I wanted to mention a nifty event I was at in Chapters on Tuesday – Neil Gaiman reading and Amanda Palmer ukelele-ing. Organisation was a bit dodgy, largely it seems because the staff were too busy shuffling awkwardly and going “Shucks, no one’s gonna turn up at our shop” to properly think it through, but it was a most enjoyable evening. Gaiman was reading from a book they worked on called Who Killed Amanda Palmer? and basically what you need to know is that his old school storytelling mixed with her gleeful sordidness makes for some top-notch material. Grimm fairytales but with hookers and crack, that kind of thing. You can see basically the whole show in five parts starting here.
And lastly, I’m off to Maastricht in… four hours. I’m typing fast here so I can stay awake. Exhilarating! There’s a carnival over there, you see, and I’ve been trawling Dublin’s various vintage shops (and River Island, and Tie Rack, which I don’t understand how they stay in business because surely cravats and cummerbunds aren’t exactly flying out the doors) so that I can bring the magic of Oscar Wilde’s Jakey Nephew to the streets of the Netherlands. On which note, either it’s bloody hard to get hold of a cane in Dublin or I’m just stupid.
As mentioned elsewhere, I got a call from my bank’s fraud department a couple of weeks ago. It seems that while I was in Italy in February I neglected to take the necessary precautions with my Laser card on one or more occasions. Some some ne’er-do-wells did no well and I’m down forty quid and a debit card.
Right, well, apparently some wires got crossed. Turns out the forty quid they mentioned was the total of my last two transactions, which were in Dublin, which is why their computer flagged the two transactions in Milan on the same day. The two transactions that burned me for seven hundred chudding euro. The hell, like? I was ready to write off €40 as charming roguery, but what arsehole takes €700? I tell you, as soon as that money comes back into my account I’m booking a ticket over and I’m going to personally slap every Italian in the face*.
In the meantime I’m going to mildly freak out about where this month’s rent is coming from, and try to console myself by looking at some Manbabies.
*Yes, I’m reverse-ripping off My Name Is Earl.
Rome is surrounded by mountains. This means that your ears pop on the train in. Which is odd.
Arriving in Rome is a shock after spending time in Venice. The noise from traffic (remember cars?) is loud and constant. Speaking of which: an awful lot of pedestrian crossings don’t have traffic lights at them, because that’s not how Italians roll. You’re expected to just face forward and step out into the stream of cars and mopeds, which will stop only if they can’t see a way to swerve around you. It’s actually a great feeling once you get over the initial misgivings.
Continue reading ‘Rome’
Venice is a strange place. Even though there’s constant blue skies and sunshine, it’s freezing cold this time of year. And there’s no wind, ever. The great majority of streets are narrower than a Dublin alleyway, with the rest not much wider, and when it gets dark it feels like you’re walking around inside an abandoned building.
Continue reading ‘Venice’
In my head this post is quite long and interesting. However, following a ten-hour wait in Ciampino airport and a not entirely friendly crash back into working life, it has retreated behind some rogue neurons and refuses to come out.
So, uh, yeah. Italy’s a very nice place. Like, really really nice.
More tomorrow.
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