I said: “So me auld buddies, we’re reachin’ the end of the Bush administration.”

Tommo: “Ye wha? Does that mean that the ladies won’t be keeping it tidy down there any more - like those big mucky German porn stars?”

I said: “Ya daft prick Tommo, I mean George W is finally going to be gone.”

Tommo: “Ah Lad, I was only being funny. I’m not that stupid ye know.”

Johnny: “Bit rough there Lad, Tommo had a wee moment of glory and you ruined it for him. I guess your 5 minutes are up now Tommo?”

I said: “Fair ‘nough, perhaps I was a bit snappy but this whole tide of political and economic woe has really gotten me down, haven’t even been on the internet for ages, trying to save a bit of cash.”

Tommo: “Yeah, what about that Palin one? Fine bird. Imagine her leading the invasion of Iraq. Proper politics that is - some bird! Pity about the auld geeser she’s running with - he doesn’t look like he’ll last long. All the same they couldn’t be worse than the last lad.”

I said: “No wrong there Tommo, sure you know what they say, ‘A bird ‘n’ old man is worth two of them Bush!’”

Groan…

To say that I’ve been closely following the US presidency run-in would be a lie, so I won’t say that I have. However, watching the snippets that I have been around to see, I have to say that I don’t like the Republicans one bit. If I had a US vote, it would be going behind Obama without doubt. What really got on my nerves recently was this lost video footage of McCain coming back from PoW camp - hadn’t been seen in 40 years or so they say and magically it appears before the election and with an incredible amount of screen time for Mr. McCain. Moon landing here we go again!

Now, as Tommo says, Vlad the ImPalin has a lot goin’ for her in the States. She’s easy on the eye, an ex beauty queen and the American Dream; sure why wouldn’t everyone vote for her? She’s what every little American girl wants to grow up to be. However, like most beauties there’s a fly in the ointment that comes in the form of “let’s get books out of the libraries” and “let’s teach creationism”. Sorry love, you lost me at hello.

Biggest problem for Ms Palin is that folk aren’t voting for her but from an outsider’s perspective I think she’s doing damage to the McCain campaign with some of her statements and beliefs. Then again this is America we’re talking about, they’re probably lapping it up like kittens at a saucer of cream. McCain himself recently had a go at Obama over the economy and the banks collapsing in the US, said his politics would worsen the situation. Obama calmly responded that thanks to the Republicans being in power for the last number of years, was the reason that the banks were allowed to collapse. 1-0 Obama - take that Grandpa!

What will happen come voting day I really can’t predict. It looks like it could go either way as they say. Personally I feel that America needs a change, somebody who’ll stop them fucking with the rest of the world until they sort out their own shit and I don’t see that coming from the Republicans. The only good news is that we will have seen the end of the worst leader that America has ever seen, in my opinion. Doing the Lord’s work and all that shyte that he carried on with - had he been left much longer me thinks that God would have been speaking once again through a burning Bush!

Yours in Politics,

Lad

WARNING: This message may contain ranting and/or language that requires parental awareness so that children can be informed on how exactly one should pronounce fuck.

I was sitting down talking with an old school chum there recently, catching up and all that lark. We were lamenting the arrival of uber-political correctness and how less funny movies were these days when you couldn’t insult every ethnic race on the face of the planet equally. Then we moved onto health, safety, and the general concern for the psychological well-being of everyone by those who see danger and offense in everything.

“What the fuck is going on with this world, Lad?”, said Gav.

“I know man. It’s feckin’ ridiculous!”, I said.

“Went to bring the kids to see a movie there a while back. That animated one, Kung Fu Panda. There was a notice on the sign saying to beware, that the movie may contain light martial arts. I mean what the fuck like? It’s called Kung Fu Panda! If there were no martial arts I’d be asking for my money back!”, said Gav.

“Ah sure, tis the way things are going”, I said, “I love the food ones that tell you the product was prepared in a nut free environment but they can’t guarantee that it has no traces of nuts. C’mon like, either there are nuts or there aren’t? They’re trying to terrorise everyone with a nut allergy; playing russian roulette with a chocolate bar. What next, hazelnut ice-cream with a warning that it may contain traces of nuts; probably because Ringo’s been jacking off into the ice-cream mixture again, givin’ his own nut extract!”

Gav was right though. Imagine the genius who thought that it was necessary to put a martial arts warning on a movie called Kung Fu Panda. Some little hall monitor no doubt, fresh out of boarding school who’s still not sure if he needs to ask permission to use the loo. Feckin’ tossers! They’re ruining the world with little advisory labels about everything - even the feckin’ obvious!

Yours Advisedly,

Lad

“Another four years wait over and another fuckin farce for the Irish in d’Olympics”, said Tommo

“Ah don’t be so hard on the lads Tommo, sure didn’t the boxers do us proud?”, I said

“Yeah but what about the scandal, the knackered runners and the doped up horses?”, said Tommo

“Sure, it’s just not their game Tommo, we need to find our niche as they say and the horse, sure wasn’t your man hard done by?”, I said

“Hard done to be sure”, said Tommo, “why the jockey was held responsible for the horse shooting up at the back of the stables, I’ll never know, tis the horse who should be gettin a slap on the wrists!”

…followed by much chuckling…

What a month! The Lad has been away for a while, taking it easy and staying away from d’internet to give his head some peace. A month full of sport on the tele though, even if it was at obscene times in the early hours of the morning. How’s a man to concentrate on the tele after a night’s feast of the dark nectar? A little bit more thought in future please, Mr or Mrs Olympics committee.

I fairness to the Irish lads and lasses at the games, they did their best, sadly they just couldn’t rise to the standard of the other athletes and sure who could hold that against them? We saw an amount of world records, olympic records and all sorts of other things. To compete on that stage you’d need to not be carrying the burden of the Irish government’s ineptitude of positioning most sports facilities within Dublin when most of our top athletes are from outside the capital. Sure, that’s another day’s ranting.

Well done to the boxers though, good show lads. It’s nice to see that the fighting Irish still have a reputation abroad after these games. As for Michael Phelps, crikey! The man’s a feckin’ a dolphin or something - an incredible athlete, and an achievement that will never be beaten. Then we have the insane “Bolt” of lightening. I’m tellin ya one thing, if we had that lad patrolling the streets of Dublin there’d be no criminals getting away too fast. C’mon Biffo, givem an Irish passport and a job as a copper!

Now of course it’s all over and we have but our boxing medals to keep us warm in the next four years until the London games. Mind you all the medals probably have made in China stamped on the back of them and aren’t worth shit but sure it’s the honour is it not? The big question is what next for the Irish athletes now?Martin Cullen said it best when he said that we now need to focus on events that we are good in. Well done Martin! You’re earning your minister’s salary for sure. Focus on the events that we’re good in and there was me thinking that it was important to show that we can play sports that we’re shyte in, just to be seen to participate. Unless we see hurling in 2012, I fear we might be waiting a while for an event that the Irish are good at on this current international stage.

Yours in Sport,

Lad

Was out for a pint with Dave last night. Don’t even ask as to how his came up in conversation but anyway, he said he had heard something a while back on the radio that the Queen (not Helen Mirren, the other one) started dancing to ABBA’s Dancing Queen at a recent event. So I went to do a bit of Google-ing and there it was - feckin’ true (read here). Seemingly she likes the idea of her title in a song and gets up and boogies to the tune.

I rang Dave back later on and said “it’s a bit worrying isn’t it?”

He said, “what is lad?”

I said, “the daft bitch likes to dance around to a song called dancing queen, what the fuck is goin’ to happen if they start playing Freddie Mercury and the boys’ Killer Queen? It’ll be a short fuckin’ party, that’s for sure!”

Crickey!

Lad

As seen in the Irish Times yesterday: Sarky Nicky from France, you know, the lad married to that Carla Bruni one is tellin’ the good people of Ireland what to do. As we all know there has been some upset by our rejection of the Lesbian Treaty and the French power people have been vocal in this respect.

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t take lightly to leaders of other countries mouthing off and telling us what to do in Ireland. We are a democracy and a successful one at that and to have a man whose own country rejected the EU constitution (effectively the Lesbian Treaty) only to be overruled by the governing forces who took the power to vote on the treaty away from the people, lecture us on how we must vote again on this treaty; well Monsieur Sarkozy, au Francais, tais toi et va te faire foutre! See that Sarky Nicky? I’m EU, I speak your language and I know of your existence and respect your country and know that your people were denied the right to vote on this treaty, now go feck off sunshine and look after your own land before you start mouthing off at us.

You know, hooking up with the “hot bird”, getting the top level government job and possessing a mouth that goes without reprimand - he might as well be fuckin’ Czar Nicky for all the attachment to reality that he has. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the French, great bunch of people they are but their new leader needs to pull his head back in or we’ll have to set BIFFO on him; teach him a bit of midlands respect. I’m so wound up I feel like ringin’ Joe Duffy tomorrow to tell him all about it.

“Joe, I’m livid!”

“Are ya, yeah go on”

“Joe, it’s a fuckin’ disgrace!”

“Ah now, now”

“No Joe, it’s a fuckin travesty that we have to listen to le prick!”

“Ah now, now”

“Joe, I just can’t understand it, it’s unbelievable; how can he do it?”

“Yeah, yeah; I know. So, onto our next caller: Mary, so what’s your trouble with your neighbour’s goat?”

À Bientôt,

Lad

Just spotted this on Bertie "The Fabulous" Ahern’s website. The site is known today as bertieahernoffice.org and it’s good to see he’s not making the same mistake of having his name as a porn site again. However, looking at the picture one can only think of captions. The way he’s looking up at "speeches archive" you just know that he’s thinking to himself, "Shite, archive of things I’ve said on record! Fuck! That’s going to come back to haunt me!"

“What was it your one said, you know that French one, when the peasants were revolting?”

“That there would be Marie Antoinette Tommo, and she said let them eat cake.”

“That’s the one Lad, she wouldn’t be out of place in today’s government I’m tellin’ ya”

“Too right there Tommo, too fuckin’ right!”

That dodgy French queen, no not some raving homosexual from Paris but rather the one that was recently portrayed by Spiderman’s Mary Jane, she’d be right in there at the heart of the Irish government these days. The recession is here and what do we see in the headlines? Well Bertie is spending a fuckin’ fortune doing up his poncy new office. Eur 220, 000, fuck! He must have had Laura Ashley there in person. As if that wasn’t bad enough the sneaky little shits ran through a nice big increase in their expense accounts the day before they decided to freeze public spending. And then, then they have the fuckin’ cheek to turn around and tell us it’s not all bad and don’t be talking down the economy. Listening to BIFFO yesterday you’d swear that we were all making this shit up or something; the reality is that we’re just living in a different world to BIFFO and co, it’s called the real world, something that those cunning stunts will never know.

Then after we rejected the Lesbian treaty we get our first kick from the EU with a further rate increase from the ECB (AKA the French and German bank). Ye, those lads are worried about curbing inflation in their own countries. Meanwhile upping the interest rates again is set to push inflation in Ireland up to six and a bit percent in the next while. Things are set to get very bad indeed: dropping tax revenues, unprecedented new live register increases and a shaky economic climate ahead, things are not being talked down, things are just bad. The Lad may have to look at emigrating or something - work will be getting hard to find in times ahead. But sure at least the boys in government have their bigger expense accounts to help them through the tough times and cover the cost of inflation and increased rents on their offices. The rest of us might be told to go eat cake but it’ll taste like a fuckin dog turd, probably because that’s the closest we’ll be to cake for a long time.

Now we’re all used to politicians living on a different planet at this stage, there’s nothing new there. However, it’s at these bad times when they’re all doing really well for themselves, giving each other “golden” pats on the back and feathering their nests that we have to ask whether or not the country is actually being run for the people or is it just a bunch of chancers hoping that they can enjoy the free ride for as long as it lasts? Personally I’m with the latter and it’s about time we had a revolt against “those fuckers” - BIFFO. Every other successful country had an uprising or two in their history, it’s about time we had a bit of a march on the Dáil and threw a few ministers out of the cabinet window and into the streets. Personally I’d love to kick a few of them off down Molesworth St and into the canal. Let’s do it boys, let’s revolt against the nasty little bolloxes!

Viva la Revolución!

Lad

“I’m moving Johnny!”

“Where to Lad?”

“I’m moving to the internet, the folk out there are much friendlier than you lads. That and it’s the only place that Eddie Hobbs hasn’t said is going to collapse into recession in the next few years!”

It’s been a whole month now since I sent out the first of me musings to the internet. I have to say that it has been quite an experience. When I first started on the back of a quick intro that Johnny gave me after he setup this site for me, I was thinking sure nobody will ever read this, what am I doing? But sure I gave it a lash anyways and blow me down, people found me and commented on things I had written. So a big nod to my new internet friends Le Craic and Thriftcriminal, thanks for the encouragement guys I’ve a lot to learn about this strange new world and also to Deborah and Maggie, I haven’t seen ya in a while ladies but I hopes ye’re still out there.

A few months back if someone had told me that I’d be drawing pictures and talking to people on the internet I’d have laughed at them but now, here I am, immortalised for the digital age (picked that phrase up off the telly, not bad eh?). Although I’m sure that I ooze professionalism through my super hi-tech site and what have ya, to be honest I still don’t understand what half this stuff does. I know where to type and how to click that button that says publish and Johnny gives me a hand with everything else. So, tip of the hat to Johnny folks. The thing that has really amazed me though is after I had got me first comments from Le Craic I clicked on his site and started to read and Jaysus there’s some load of people out there writing stuff. I’ve found a few good ones so far and made a few comments of my own, very proud I was.

So I was wondering, is there a place where the folk of the internet meet for a few pints of the dark nectar? How do folk get to know each other out there in the internet world? I was reading the comments on one site yesterday and crikey it was like listening to a conversation down the pub, everyone seemed to know each other. Perhaps someday I’ll be in the same group, still a bit green at the moment though.

Yours Appreciatively,

Lad

Diamond Dave was out last week, doing his best to pull a bird. A few quiet pints on, while meself and Tommo turned our attention towards the dark nectar in our glasses, Dave vanished out of sight…

He came wandering back after about an hour dragging the most unholy of hoopy-eared, caravan haulers with him. “Dave! What the fuck man?”, I pulled him aside, “What the fuck you doing? She’s a feckin hiace honey!”. “Nah, tis alright Lad, she’s no oil painting but sure I’ll take her on appro. She says she’s a nurse working in the local hospital”. “Dave, she might be a Ward sister but she’s no fuckin nurse!”

And so the Lesbian Treaty was rejected by the Irish people who for the first time somehow managed to make up their minds on their own despite every major political party telling them to vote YES. The question now however, is when this treaty comes back for a second chance vote just like the last one a few years ago. Of course Bertie isn’t around these days to tell the public that they didn’t know what they were voting on, oh where would we have been without the guidance of the incorruptible Bertie? Saying that BIFFO is around and perhaps this might be dangerous for us all; BIFFO will be on the hunt now tellin’ each and every one of us fuckers to vote YES next time or he’ll eat our firstborns. Ah yes, the wrath of BIFFO has yet to be seen but we can only hope that it won’t be as fuckin’ miserable as the arrogance of Bertie! RIP Lisbon Treaty, you’ve been shown the door now go fuck off forever - we don’t want ya!

Yours Humbly,

Lad