Had enough of the deep freeze

Normal service will be resumed from warmer climes when my fingers defrost.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Oh, except to the lunatics who overtook me in freezing fog, at temperatures of -15C on the M7 motorway on Christmas night.

You don't deserve to live, and the way you're going about things, soon you won't be.

On which note of imminent death, let's be human and check on the elderly neighbours, eh? Make sure they're warm, have food, and so on.

No one wants to be the scumbag watching the emergency services bringing the oul lad next door out of his house on a gurney. So Christmas spirit all round. Check on the neighbours.

See y'all soon.

Enjoy the holidays

Seriously, do.

Eat, drink and be merry. Be nice to family and friends if you can. Get over the cloying schmaltz of the season and roll with it. Allow yourself to be suffused with fellow-feeling.

Because I am fearful that this could be the last opportunity for some indulgence for a little while.

Next year we'll see jobs lost. Many of them. Houses repo-ed. A spike in the dole, the homeless, deprivation and poverty in general.

The credit bubble is over and now the bill's arrived. Many people literally won't be able to pay.

It would be nice to think that as a society we can look after the less fortunate in hard times. But that's not the sort of society Ireland is today. Perhaps it was once. If so, that was quite a while ago, and to be honest, I don't remember.

After a decade of gombeen government and PD-brand Thatcherism, we're all out for ourselves now. I've already overheard conversations between people discussing where they hope to buy repossessed houses on the cheap. It's sickening, but that's life today in Ireland.

It will get worse before it gets better. That's the nature of these cycles.

I really hope people throw themselves into Christmas this year, learn to reconnect with each other and get a perspective on true value in society. It might turn out to be the difference in how we survive this depression.

I also hope that people push the boat out one last time this year. A little irresponsible indulgence on top of the already preposterous national credit bill won't make a massive difference. And it might keep a few people in jobs who'd lose them otherwise.

See ya next year. Be good.

Happy Hogmanay

Yes, it's been a while.

Sorry about that.

I was busy though, if that helps.

During my blogging mini-hiatus, I became aware of the following facts, which I will offer to you without further comment:

1. Ryanair claim to be the world's 'on-time' airline, but they only achieve their on time targets by adding forty minutes to the scheduled journey, to account for the fact that they are invariably a half hour late leaving.

2. If people try to kill you by blowing themselves up near to you, chances are that they are determined enough for another of them to try a second time. Change jobs, up your security and leave the country. Don't hang around for an election you won't live to see.

3. We's all in big economic doo-doo now. I expect housing to fall calamitously in price in 2008, especially in micro-bubbles like Northern Ireland and the commuterland in the Pale. Sell now, or remortgage on a fixed rate if you haven't already and don't plan on moving for half a decade, when your house will be worth half as much.

4. I don't care how many times they do it, or where they do it, or the fact we're all supposed to feel warm and gooey inside when they do it. Everytime I see Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness gurning their hideous grins at each other like smitten teens, I feel nauseous.

5. Writing a book is solitary, boring, and takes a helluva lot of hours out of your free time. It also requires discipline, inspiration and a functioning computer.

6. I got a sat-nav for Christmas. But what I really wanted was one of those electronic devices that emit noise only gangs of surly ne'er-do-well teenagers can hear.

7. Texting people is not the same as calling or writing a card or letter. I'm a bad and cheapskate friend in this regard.

8. Big open plan houses are expensive to heat in a rising oil market. So is driving a large family saloon. So why did I only start doing both this year?

9. A chest infection is a handy way of clearing your lungs of all the gunk that smoking normally deposits in there.

10. My peers all started having babies in earnest this year. Fourteen years into my own parenthood project, I'm not inclined to start from scratch again. I admire the courage and energy of my friends, but having seen the road ahead of them, I don't intend to walk it twice.

Happy Hogmanay. Let's all meet up here again next year for pints, right?

Print your own money!

Running a bit short for Xmas? Why not print your own money?

Just be sure not to get too stroppy when people who know what proper money looks like, such as, erm, bank tellers, decide not to cash it for you.

Better off going with lower denominations and passing them in Tesco like everyone else, dude.

Oops, I've said too much...

Twelve things I hate about Christmas

12. Christmas music: the nadir of music. "Santa Baby", "Jingle Bell Rock", "When a Child is Born." I rest my case.

11. Christmas carols: what a load of maudlin twaddle most of them are, and in bizarrely archaic language too. "Here we come a-wassailing." What does that even mean? Try wassailing near me and I'll box the head off you.

10. Christmas Trees: let's all mow down junk forests and store them in our living rooms till they go mouldy. Not to mention all the other waste and excess. Drinking twice your blood volume in alcohol in a fortnight? Nice.

9. Christmas Cards: twee overpriced Hallmark visions of Victorian England have what exactly to do with the birth of a Jewish religious leader in Palestine 2000 years ago? And why is it such a fucking insult if I don't send one to someone who I haven't spoken to in five years or physically seen in over ten?

8. Christmas pudding: more calories than McDonald's, the constituency of dried vomit, the colour of a Guinness turd, made and left to sit for two months before consumption. Who eats this shit? And what the fuck is suet?

7. Christmas office parties, that begin in October and continue until February in Ireland, making it impossible to go out for over four months without encountering drunk loons wearing tinsel while making out with their boss.

6. Christmas telly: who really wants to see the same old films again? Various James Bonds, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, It's a Wonderful Life, etc, etc. Not to mention all the festively seasoned bullcrap like The Santa Clause and so on. It's groundhog viewing year after year.

5. People who fly back to Ireland from abroad just for Christmas. Are you mad? It's fucking cold and wet here in December! Come in August instead, you prick. And if we really cared to hear all about your life in San Diego, we'd have gone to visit. And we didn't, so shut up about it.

4. All the people you want to be working, like plumbers, government departments or GPs, are off work for a fortnight. Yet Tescos are open 24 hours a day so that you can buy extra tinsel or another turkey.

3. Eating turkey meat for three days straight. Is Christmas sponsored by Bernard Mathews or something?

2. All the pricks who light up their houses like an explosion in a fairy lights factory. Didn't you morons ever hear about conserving energy? And why has decking the front of your house in millions of stupid lights become like a cold war, so that people are now spending thousands on it just to outdo their equally moronic neighbours? Keep this shit up and we'll eventually all be visible from space, flashing different primary colours in a monotonous pattern.

1. Christmas presents. Kriss Kringle is such an obvious out for people on a budget that to suggest it is akin to admitting you're skint. Which leaves buying a ton of crap people don't want for a load of people you don't care about. Which leaves most of us skint and unfulfilled, but the retailers very pleased indeed at knocking out so many bottles of bad perfume, novelty socks and so on at a premium price.

So you lot can fucking keep Christmas. I'm off to Tehran or Islamabad this December instead.

Happy Christmas Shopping!

Spending on Christmas is set to grow by 7% this year, despite the economic downturn.

Remember, accrue more credit card debt or Santa and the elves will be displeased!

Kill off the marathon cult

Today I got penned into the house by a horde of marathon runners. It was a bit like being stuck in the house on the 12^th of July in the North, only without the sectarian banging of drums and alcoholism present.

However, the sense of smug and unwarranted superiority emanating from the sweaty, heaving throng of middle management jogging bores in shorts was just as potent as that which comes from an Orange Order march.

What is it that makes people, in this age of the combustion engine, want to run pointlessly for over 26 miles? Furthermore, why the fuck do they have to run past my doorstep and block the city up while they do it?

Fair enough, when Pheidippides first legged it from the site of the Battle of Marathon to Athens, he had a reason. He wanted to tell his pals that they had defeated the mighty Persians.

However, today’s numpties running in gorilla outfits or dressed as French waiters may be interested to learn that Pheidippides dropped dead on arrival in Athens.

No silver paper cape for him, no medal or commemorative T-shirt. No sense of palpable achievement. Just heart palpitations, the ironic words ‘Victory is ours!’ and then death.

Sadly, health science and medicine have improved somewhat in the past 25 centuries. Nowadays, even beer-bellied middle-aged men undergoing midlife crises can be cajoled to jog for 26 and a bit miles without death ensuing. More's the pity.

But that doesn’t mean that marathon running is good for you. It isn’t. The impact on the joints alone means that marathon running does more harm than good. Face it, the lesson of Pheidippides is that running for that distance is bad for you.

Of course, we live in a free society. If people insist on trying to add some challenge to their humdrum existences by running endlessly around various cities, who am I to try and stop them?

But can someone please explain to me the point of closing off the entire city for most of a day to let this cult of jogging loons have freedom of the roads?

It might be a bank holiday, but some people have work to go to, you know.

Others just want to go out and enjoy their day off without having to traverse their way through endless Garda diversions.

Diversions which have been judiciously placed to ensure freedom of the city for the jogging nutters and utter frustration for those who have lives and want to travel across town in order to live them.

In short, there’s no good reason to pen people into their homes in order to facilitate this cult of crazies in their lung-busting attempts to kill themselves slowly.

If there must be a Dublin Marathon, let’s have it at four in the morning over the Christmas holidays when it will cause least interruption to the rest of us.

Oh, and let the cars on the road at the same time. At least, with the addition of a goodly few festive drink-drivers weaving their way drunkenly at night and at speed through throngs of mongs in shorts, the Marathon might finally become a spectator sport I’d want to watch.

There'll always be an Ingle-land

There really will, you know. That's what I'm afraid of.

Some of you may recall I recently invited people to mail Ireland's laziest hackette with suggestions of what she could do with herself on Christmas Day.

After all, she'd gone public asking people to do her work for her.

For those waiting with bated breath to discover what all of our suggestions for La Ingle to do on Christmas Day led to, I can point you in the direction of the resulting 'article' here (if you have an Irish Times subscription.)

Permit me to summarise for those too lazy or poor to access the real thing. In Ingle-land, you don't have to watch telly and eat too much on Christmas. You could go out and swim in the sea, or hillwalk, or do some charity work. But it's probably more fun to sit at home watching telly and eating too much.

As promised, no one else was credited with helping La Ingle to her state of Xmas enlightenment.

While perusing the full horror of the Ingle Christmas, I also accidentally encountered this fresh diatribe against New Year.

It's all so awful and reminds her of being dumped in Brum by some cider guzzler back in the Eighties because she was fat, or something. But fear not, Inglettes, she's spending this New Year in the Big Apple glugging champers, so that's all right then.

Pace Richard Delevan, who recently opined here that the Sunday Times Rich List has become the apogee of Irish journalism. This blathering nonsense, these postcards from the edge of Ingle-land, are the nadir, the perigee, of Irish journalism today.

Happy Hajj

Belated happy holidays to everyone. I had a suitably grumpy Christmas, and am now back online to rant again.

First up, though, let's move away from the Christian fairy tale for a moment to consider some other ones. Apparently six million people celebrate Kwanzaa in North America each year.

It's a week long celebration of pan-African culture that runs, conveniently for those seeking to extend their Christmas break into New Year, from the 26th of December to the 1st of January.

It's also totally made up. Some random Marxist invented it in the heady counterculture days of the late Sixties, because he reckoned that 'Jesus was a psychotic' that black people should distance themselves from.

Fast forward to today and George Bush is dishing out the patronising 'Happy Kwanzaa' wishes.

Maybe black citizens of the US and other places should pay more attention to their African origins (which are predominantly West African rather than the East African celebrations pastiched in Kwanzaa, incidentally). But spoof festivals made up by muppets who can't even spell in Swahili surely aren't the answer.

A much bigger party is set to kick off over at Mecca/Makkah though. The annual Hajj, wherein the world's Muslim population is encouraged to gather in a tent city in the Saudi desert and re-enact the trials of Abraham, is this coming week.

No doubt, the duty of a Muslim to pay this pilgrimage weighs heavily on many. And many save for years and dedicate their lives to the experience of doing their hajj. And equally no doubt, hundreds of those who attend this once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage will die as a result.

Surely it is time for someone, either in Islamic religious authority or in the Saudi regime, to stand up and say that it is no longer practical for a community that now numbers over 1.2 billion people to converge on a desert for a week at a time this year, all circling the ka'aba at once, all stoning the pillars at once, all listening to the sermon in the desert at the same time.

Of course, the full 1.2 billion Muslims do not all attend the hajj at once. But at least 2.5 million do each year, plenty more than the authorities can cope with. And the annual mass deaths that occur as a result of stampeding and crushing are the evidence that no infrastructure exists to deal with the movement of so many people.

Let's review recent statistics, kindly gathered by the BBC:

2006: 345 die in a crush during a stone-throwing ritual

2004: 251 trampled to death in stampede

2003: 14 are crushed to death

2001: 35 die in stampede

1998: At least 118 trampled to death

1997: 343 pilgrims die and 1,500 injured in fire

1994: 270 killed in stampede

1990: 1,426 pilgrims killed in tunnel leading to holy sites

1987: 400 die as Saudi authorities confront pro-Iranian demonstration

That's a lot of deaths for what should be a celebratory religious festival. One wonders how come people consistently die in their hundreds at the Hajj when 70 million can gather in the one spot for the Hindu Kumbh Mela in 2003 with only 39 deaths due to stampeding.

Yet somehow, mass deaths and the Hajj seem to go hand in hand, more years than not. So to anyone heading for the Hajj, I wish you all the best. Keep those elbows out and don't fall over, whatever you do.

For some, the real problem with the Hajj is that the lack of a quota system means that some affluent Muslims can fly in for the pilgrimage annually, while others never get a hope of going throughout their lives.

For others, it's putting their safety in the hands of the Saudi authorities, the same guys who have overseen all the stampedes listed above. Already there has been one large fire in Mecca, injuring 16 people. How many more will die this year?

Fuck off, Santa, we own you!

Doesn't the crass commercialisation of Christmas just fill you with a warm feeling inside? One of disgust and nausea perhaps?

No? I congratulate you on your childlike insistence on the magic of this special time of year. Well done.

But just in case you were languishing under the delusion that peace and goodwill to all men was in fact a universal trait, let us pause to consider the wonderful world of Disney (TM).

There's no way to gild the lily here, so I'll just give it to you straight. Disney threatened to throw some poor old geezer with a white beard out of one of their crappy themeparks just because he looked like Santa Claus.

On what grounds did they do so? Because they consider Santa Claus to be "a Disney character."

I wonder what other European saints they also own. Was there a Vatican firesale we didn't hear about?

They 'own' Santa, threaten old men in their themeparks and treat their workers so badly that one threatened to throw himself off a rollercoaster recently. Something to think about before you buy a little one you love a Disney DVD this festive season, perhaps.

Disney - a magical kingdom of fascist scumbags who treat their workers and their customers like shit.