Curry Chips

This is a cautionary tale of what happens when public transport contrives to bring two volatile elements into close and perilous contact.

Let's just say that I commute from one side of the city to the other. Let's just say that I have a love/hate relationship with my morning bus ride, since it brings me that little bit closer to my fellow basket cases.

This morning, as I attempted to leaf through a history of Attila the Hun, a nice gentleman (let's refer to him as "Mook") sat behind me and took twenty five minutes to really get going on an apple. Allow me to don my Sherlock Holmes hat. Golden delicious, I'll wager, due to the amount of emergency slurping which followed each bite.

Mook did make the effort to eat it quietly, but that just exacerbated the unpleasantness. I would also wager that Mook was suffering from a nasal blockage since HE CHEWED WITH HIS MOUTH OPEN (i.e. plenty of "nyoh nyoh nyoh" instead of "nyom nyom nyom").

If you're one of the many unfortunates in society who find themselves burdened with something approaching a sense of taste, you may well have missed out on the fact that ITV and TV3 are showing nightly instalments of a rather bizarre experiment which is currently underway in a secret location in the south Pacific.

Over a dozen individuals were lured to a "sun-drenched paradise" where they would spend weeks "cavorting with beautiful members of the opposite sex" with the promise of "a completely overhauled public profile to facilitate a smooth progression into the world of C-list celebrityhood".

Little did they know what they were getting into. Sponsored by Cadburys, "The Lurve Island of Dr.Moro" is one hour of eye-watering lo-jinks.

Begob but this year's bogball champeenship is getting fierce exciting all the same.

Frustrated by years of defeat at the hands of smug culchies, Dublin have emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the 2006 championship. All thanks to the herculean efforts of one man...Ciaran Whelan.

Time to take a look forward to Ciaran's preparations for the inevitable all-Ireland final...

A good samaritan recently forwarded me this most important missive, which I now feel compelled to share with the most important people in my life. That'd be you and yours, potatohead.

Strap yourself in, because this will shock you to your very core. At the very least, you should feel some ripples in your outer erogenous zones.

[deep breath]

Butter Vs Margarine

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter.

Having seen the laugh-a-minute funfest that is "The Magdelene Sisters" over the weekend, I decided that it would have been much better if it had been done as a musical.

Scene 1
It's new year's day 1963, and young Theresa gingerly approaches her father in the living room of their small house in Ballyconker...

Theresa: "Da? Da, I have to tell you something."
Da: "Muh? Wassafug. Readin' Farmers Journal. Shagoff."
Theresa: "Da, this is important. Da!"
Da: [silence]
Theresa: "Maybe you'll listen to me if I sing it then."

I am 16 going on 17
last night I was naive
when uncle Ray said
come to the hay shed
to celebrate new year's eve