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.

How to end clamping

A Frenchman told me tonight how to prevent clamping from taking hold in your neighbourhood.

Buy superglue, and keep it on your person.

The next time you see clampers immobilising some poor bugger's car, just wander past the clamper van and squirt a whack of the superglue in the lock. Do as many doors as you can.

According to the Frenchman, in his town (he didn't specify and I didn't ask, sorry), when they introduced clamping, everyone armed themselves with superglue.

Within a matter of weeks, the clamping was cancelled, due to the cost of replacing locks on their own vehicles.

Obviously, this is not legal. And I'm not suggesting that the spineless citizens of Dublin should follow suit in defending their liberties against clampers as the French have.

But wouldn't it be fantastic if they did?

Trapped in Dublin

Are they trying to trap us here?

First the security chimps at Dublin airport go on an unofficial work to rule, preventing nearly 100 passengers from getting to their flights before they departed.

Then the main train line to the North mysteriously falls into the sea.

And there is a strike on at Dublin Port that could start affecting passenger ferries at any time.

Already it costs money to leave Dublin via motorway, and of course, with the Greens in government, that will keep rising.

Are they trying to stop us from leaving so that we'll be forced to pay their preposterous new taxes in the Autumn?

Overcrowding: Third World style

In the Third World (as we used to call it before we decided they were developing), the most popular beast of burden is not the horse, the ox, the yak or the llama.

It's the combustion engine - specifically a two-stroke motorbike, often adapted into a three-wheeler tuk-tuk. And by goodness do some people work those little engines hard.

When I was in India earlier this month, I used to play a little mental game to ease my nerves while being propelled through the mass deathwish that is Indian traffic.

Basically, I couldn't shut my eyes to the perpetually imminent risk of horrific accident, so instead I'd try to distract myself by counting the people perched on the back of motorbikes or in the seat of a three-wheel tuk-tuk.

I soon developed a mathematic theorem to describe the maximum number of people per vehicle by reference to the number of wheels. Basically, 2 to the power of the number of wheels is the maximum.

For the innumerate, that means 2 X 2 (4) on a motorbike, 2 X 2 X 2 (8) in a tuk tuk, and 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 (16) in a car.

However, I was soon proved wrong. Within days, in Jaipur, I saw a tuk-tuk (which is built to carry three people, including driver) carrying TEN people in total. And five on a motorbike became a regular sight. And I never saw more than four or five in a car (because cars in India are for the rich and they don't like to be crowded out.)

I was in Cambodia in the past too, and they're also big fans of overcrowding their metallic beasts of burden. But I can honestly say I never saw eight people on the back of a bike before.


But there you go. Four adults and four kids (plus a bag of shopping and large tin of something heavy looking) all on one little motorbike. If you squint you might see some of it between their many legs.

It's a chastening thought for anyone sat alone in their car in Ireland, giving out about the traffic.

Mystic Skinner foresees again

You thought I'd forgotten, didn't you?

There I was, getting all carried away with my new Axis of Evil. I'd gone and forgotten to make my 2009 predictions. Nope. I hadn't. It's just that they're so depressing I was in two minds about posting them.

Make no mistake, this isn't going to be the best year for the vast majority of people on the planet. There will be economic upheaval, recession, war, famine, epidemics, poverty and the continued denial of human rights and democracy.

But specifics. You want specifics, right? Okay.

1. A severe crash in the housing market of Britain and Ireland, even worse than what's already occurred. The governments forced to intervene with banks to prevent massive scale repossessions and defaults.

2. The credit card lifestyle bill finally lands on the mat. Plenty of people with no assets other than a few payments on a 08-D car are going to find themselves defaulting on some very expensive credit loans. The problem of arranging refinancing, from semi-bankrupt banks who themselves cannot get credit, for these unsupported loans is going to stretch the banking sector beyond breaking point.

3. Multinationals use the excuse of recession to relocate to Eastern Europe. Cue 100,000 redundancies next year in Ireland.

4. Euro or no euro (and given that 40% of our trade is with the sterling zone even today, the euro is not currently helping), we might actually have to call in the IMF if the government cannot raise the funds to deal with their income shortfall AND that of the banks, especially if the credit card bill arrives too.

5. Empty shopfronts in high streets. Cars with for sale signs. Travel agents, estate agents, motor retailers all going bust.

6. A general election in Ireland after either the Greens grow stones and pull out of Government or they lose a crucial Dail vote, an election which Fianna Fail lose quite significantly to a Fine Gael-Labour coalition.

7. Obama's Clinton re-run presidency gets off to a poor start with a series of foreign affairs crises that even Bill and Hill can't solve for the noobie. For potential flashpoints, think Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Indonesia and as usual most of Africa.

8. Britain definitely starts pulling out of their occupations. Troops to start leaving Iraq and Afghanistan. As recession bites, there will be a further round of culls in the Northern Irish public service sector.

9. Chelsea for the league, with Liverpool nipping their heels in second. United a distant third. Fergie to quit at long last. Perhaps Wenger to join him in walking from the Premiership.

10. The beginning of the end of low cost air travel. As airlines consolidate, and routes decrease, and more and more craft are parked in the Nevada desert, the consumer ends up with the worst of all worlds - prices like the luxury days of the 1970s with service of contemporary Ryanair.

Gary Glitter's new runaround

Apparently, Gary Glitter has now agreed to return to the UK, after faking a heart attack to avoid his flight and trying to flee to Hong Kong instead.

Now that he's accepted he must return to Britain, he's already gone and bought a new motor. If you're in London any time soon, look out for the new glittermobile:

Finding a filling station

Looking to fill up your car with petrol in Ireland? I wish you the best of luck.

Never mind the long-standing suspicion among motorists that the majority of filling stations operate cartel pricing practices.

It's simply finding a petrol station that's becoming the problem these days. The Consumers Association is becoming concerned at the lack of competition in the petrol market, and their concern is mild compared to that of motorists.

Ten years ago there were 2,500 petrol stations in the Republic of Ireland. Today, there are fewer than half that number. And that's despite the fact that an average of 170,000 new cars have been registered in Ireland each year since 1999.

So, if we have many more cars on the road, why are there fewer petrol stations, rather than more?

One reason is property speculation. The ever-spiralling cost of property in Ireland has led many petrol station owners to cash in on the large footprint of their forecourts.

You'd be hard pushed to find a single station left in large swathes of the south Dublin suburbs anymore. They've all been sold off for development into yet more boxy apartments.

But here's another reason. Shell and Statoil are currently involved in taking up to €400 billion of gas and oil resources from the Irish people. They struck a deal with our corrupt government to take all of our natural resources and pay nothing in return. What a deal! Some might call it stealing, but to Shell it's just the deal of the century.

Now when some people in Rossport, concerned at the safety or otherwise having a high pressure gas pipeline running past their living rooms, started protesting this decision, Shell and Statoil did what any greedy multinational would do.

They sacrificed their forecourt operations in order to safeguard their mammoth offshore freebie windfall. They sold off their petrol stations, in other words, because protests and boycotts were beginning to happen.

Much easier to dispose of those troublesome assets at a profit rather than face down the legitimate anger of the Irish people whose wealth and future security they have taken for nothing.

So the next time you're cruising the streets, your fuel guage in the red, desperately looking for a petrol station that's open, remember who is responsible and why.

Blame property speculators, blame the scumbags who ran Statoil and Shell, and blame the current government for this appalling Corrib deal which stole this country's natural resources wealth and gave it to Norwegians instead.