Via SluggerO'Toole, I notice that a Belfast Professor had his building society account emptied by tech-savvy thieves who spent the proceeds on Thornton's chocolates. That's £15,000 worth of Thornton's chocolates.
They also bought £5,000 worth of Tesco vouchers, because every little helps, I guess.
Now, while my usual concerns about online and telephone banking apply once again - ie it's a scam operated by the banks to keep their overheads down and actually makes your money much less safe that it was when they had branches and human beings overseeing it - I am also bamboozled as to why the thieves would need so many chocolates?
And from BBC, news of another stingray attack on a human. When Steve Irwin, the Aussie crocodile worrier, died, we all were told how stingrays were peaceable creatures that never seek to cause harm to humans.
Well, this latest attack involved a stingray leaping on board a boat to stab the 81 year old captain in the chest, just off the Florida coast.
"It was a freak accident," said the local fire chief. Hmmm. Didn't they say the same after Irwin's death? For peaceable creatures, they've got some blood on their stings. Maybe the loopers who went out and chopped the stings off rays after Irwin's 'accident' were right after all.
This morning, I was tuned into 'Life! with Orla Barry' on Newstalk 106. Not my normal morning listening, I'll freely admit. But it was certainly a revealing insight into the concerns of a modern female radio listenership.
We had what seemed to be a 40 minute discussion about childcare in Ireland, during which not once did anyone make the point that if parents find childcare costs too high, they should consider having less kids or staying at home with the brood they've already produced instead of expecting other taxpayers to stump up.
"Even after the thousand euros, parents still have to pay 91% of the cost of childcare," bleated one creche owner. Erm, what were you expecting? That single, gay and childless taxpayers should pay more tax to keep other people's children being raised by third parties?
This was followed by a slot with a sex therapist about married people not having sex. Apparently, loads of married people in Ireland are having no sex because they're living busy lives and have the kids to deal with too. Not because they're turned off each other.
Perhaps this is why they're really seeking ever more money for childcare, it seems to me. What they really want is an extra hour in bed to canoodle.
However, as Orla has now threatened to foist Irish Times hackette Roisin Ingle upon my delicate ears, I'm turning her off. Ingle's pointless self-obsessed column is indicative of all that's gone wrong in Irish journalism these days.
She was once wonderfully satirised on boards.ie, and how she has the gumption to show her face in public after that, never mind keep writing more of the same is beyond me. Her 'column' makes me so angry that I fear listening to her live would be more than I could bear.
4 comments:
Roisin Ingle is some yoke alright. What the fuck is the point of that Irish Times column anyway? Does anyone actually read it? All she does is talk about her fucking friends and the fact she does no housework.
On the childcare thing; parents should, naturally, have to foot the bill for childcare, but I think what pisses parents off is the fact that childcare's so off-the-wall expensive they can't afford to stay at home and mind the babbies themselves. Yet the country needs working woman and babbies. I mean, we're not China or anything, you know.
Don't get me wrong. I love babbies. Mini-Skinner was a babbie before she turned into a tweenie existentialist with a love of drumming.
But I never expected Joe Taxpayer to stump up for my propagating the Skinner line.
Wasn't there some plebiscite about d'Ingle's name? She's witless and not the heir to Maeve Binchy that her editor takes her for. Say what you like about Binchy but she is really, genuinely interested in other people. Poor Roisin will have her day in the 'sun' (one rag's interchangeable for another these days) before her column inches are chopped in some pruning excercise.
We use the irish times saturday magazine to wipe our arses in our house, after we take it out of the recycling bin at the garage... if you buy that muck there'll only be more of it
Private Eye has had that breed of whining, layabout, lazy, lady journalist thing down for a long time...Polly Filler!
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