Lately it seems fairly impossible to spend more than two minutes in Dublin city centre without having a can of Red Bull Cola thrown at you by zealous marketeers. I’d dodged them all til now - they have rubbish aim and I’m frisky like a mountain goat - but today I discovered that they’ve infiltrated deli counters and they’re handing them out with pies. And I’m a man who likes a pie.
I presume they’re looking to drum up sales through word of mouth, so I feel obliged to record my thoughts.
Pros: Pleasant whiff of ice cream float when you open the can. Free.
Cons: Lingering aftertaste of cheap vodka as filtered through a hobo’s bladder. Can looks like it was designed by Maurice Pratt on his lunch break.
Would go well with: I don’t know, I was going to buy a Yorkie but I got kind of disoriented.
Verdict: D+, would not drink again.
So says the Herald. Word on the street (I checked at lunchtime) is that the GCSEs were in Dublin for a stag do and overheard the JC making some disparaging remarks about the UK education system. Needless to say things kicked off pretty heavily and according to onlookers our boy went down “right quick”.
Reports of tit-for-tat attacks in London by roaming gangs of the Leaving Cert remain unconfirmed.
I want in on this traffic spike.
I hate them so very, very much. Listen: if you want to set up a system whereby people can have their password reset or sent to them, then there is one way and one way alone you should proceed, and that is to have them provide an email address. If you ask them to put in a Super Secret Question!!!!! then don’t be surprised if some irate customer ends up throwing you under an elephant marching band.
I’m setting up an account now, and the options I have are:
- Last four characters of driver’s licence
- Father’s city of birth
- Mother’s maiden name
Are these secure? No they are not. So as usual I’m going to put in some random nonsense answer, then I’m going to get drunk and forget everything and be locked out forever. And sure, I could cut down on my drinking or write down my passwords or whatever, but that shouldn’t be my responsibility, and I resent having some website sitting there judging me on my failures. So webmasters, please… help me out here.
Some notes about the music, I suppose.
Guy Garvey is a class act, and one of the best frontmen going, but he’s a hard man to track down. Security tend not to accept a 6-pint jug of cider as valid identification. Should have gone with the pints, obviously, or pulled some Manchester variant of the potato man routine… the plotting continues.
Going into this thing I had resigned myself to missing out on my usual Sunday evening fix of balding middle-aged men with mullets and walrus moustaches wearing suits and doing karate kicks, so imagine my delight when Grinderman turned up. As a bonus, there was a sentient beard flinging percussion instruments around the place and playing a tiny, tiny guitar. Mortal men would have just looked silly.
Much as The Sex Pistols did… either they’re hell-bent on becoming the most nonsense thing in human history or they’re just acting out Primary School: The Musical. In whatever case, when you come in from a day spent with Henry Rollins and Nick Cave - men with actual testicles - John Lydon gets pretty old pretty quick.
You know you’re there when you pass by a stall selling kangaroo burgers and into a gauntlet of strange men peddling novel ways to urinate. It’s a boom market, because no one seems in any hurry to make festival bathrooms any more pleasant.
This year they’ve graduated into the realms of cruel social experiment. Portaloos have a bad reputation but at least they leave you to your own misery… as opposed to this metal-shack-over-festering-pit configuration they’ve plumped for in our campsite. It’s like looking into the mouth of hell. You expect to see faces forming in it. It’s hard to look away.
Someone must be paying attention, because some proper jacks sprout up during the night. Not that this stops us just using the wall, which is right there and frankly asking for it… but the gesture is appreciated.
I have had an idea. It’s a dangerous one but what the fuck. See, I have two 750ml bottles emptied out and ready to go for transporting booze to Electric Picnic. My original idea was to fill them with sweet dependable Buckfast… but here we go: what if I loaded one with Jaegermeister and the other with Red Bull, stuck some duct tape around them and lashed in two straws? What we have there is an improvised explosive, a jaegerpipebomb…
The consequences, of course, would be bleak and horrible and I would never forgive myself, but the fact is I’ve had the idea now, it’s out in the open. The choice is no longer mine. There’s a historical imperative in play… simply put, now that this has been posited, someone at some point in human history has to do or have done it. I am merely an agent of destiny.
Who’s going? We are, and we’re towing the monstrosity that is Wayne Manor.
You wouldn’t know it from the camera trickery in his films, but Christian Bale is actually 70 feet tall. Also, there’s an entire wing of the tent cut out of the picture. It’s seriously massive. We reckon it’ll hold in the region of 500 people but obviously we’ll need to run stress tests, so feel free to shanghai some friends and head along of an evening. (If you’re on Facebook, you can even make it official.)
There will be signposts.
Other late-night entertainment includes Antics in the Fosset’s Circus tent, which will be a good old dose of sweaty indie choonage guaranteed to get your gizzards in a right dancy funk. The silent disco is always a laff riot too, if for no other reason than it’s great fun trying to figure out what channel everyone’s on. What else? Oh I don’t know, but one thing about EP is that you’re never more than five feet away from an intriguing mash-up of fire, juggling, jazz, citrus fruits, unitards, flare guns, sparklers, swizzle sticks and drug-crazed Hungarians. Good times are rolling.
I remember journeying home from France as a child, being awake for around 18 hours, and my brother saying how he wasn’t tired because he’d “passed the wall”. There does seem to be some kind of backup generator that kicks in at a certain level of exhaustion, because I wasn’t tired at all for (most of) yesterday. I was practically hyperactive in the morning and cruising nicely in the afternoon.
On the other hand I’m properly banjaxed today. I would have typed this post earlier but lifting my arms seemed like too much effort. The decent enough amount of sleep I got last night pulled me up out of whatever wild-eyed rockstar mode I was pounding along in and replaced it with… well, you know that way you feel like you’ve been injected with lead sludge (as opposed to molten lead, which would be much too exciting).
The body is a curious thing, is my point.
In certain tipsy corners of the world there exists such a thing as a “hogbomb”. This is a cheap and somewhat less tasty alternative to a jaegerbomb, assumably served on a base of Red Hog rather than Red Bull. It is perhaps the case that you should avoid such things.
Surprisingly spry this morning. No doubt this will change when the last of the alcohol leaves my system. I shall keep you posted.
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