Chips are down for Racist Harvey Norman

Sofa* so not-so-good. Furniture retailer Harvey Norman wishes it hadn't entered into the Irish market. Since entering the market, sales haven't sat* well with chairman Gerry Harvey and with the downturn in the economy things are going from bad to worse. Bitching about trading difficulties in Ireland, Harvey had this to say: "Just imagine you opened in Ireland; you’d want to go and cut your throat. The potato famine, someone said, the return of the potato famine in Ireland!".

What a stool*!

For a start, he should have blamed the nasty design or bad quality of his product. Just because his more tacky countrymen buy his gear in bulk doesn't mean we will. Doesn't he know, we're practically European over here!

What really bugs me is his choice of language. Doesn't he realise how many millions died in the so-called "potato" famine? Couching* his business troubles in this kind of language is an insult to the Irish people. Can you imagine if he went to Israel and used Holocaust references?

I'd suggest a famine-era response, namely a Boycott, but I think our superior taste has already pre-empted that.

Get out of town, Harvey Norman. Your spuds are roasted!

* See what I did there? !

Apocalypse Now or Never?

The End is Nigh! Or so we've been told for millennia. Of course, it hasn't happened yet so that makes a mockery of the word "nigh". Nigh, it seems, isn't so nigh. Or perhaps the real mockery should be at the expense of those who expected "the end" to come sooner. Many religions feature doomsday prophesies - some even with specific dates (with the Seventh day Adventists being particularly hilarious). None, obviously, has been correct thus far. Yet, in spite a rash of failed prophesies, humanity still anticipates some kind of "big finish" to our time on earth. What is it about the human condition that makes us contemplate our collective demise?

And it isn't just the crackpot religious people. You just have to turn on the TV to see how fixated everyone seems to be with all this. From Survivors, a drama set in a post-apocalyptic UK, to Dead Set, a zombie series set on the set for Big Brother, the telly keeps telling us that something truly awful is just around the corner.

Beyond the realms of a faith-driven Armageddon and science fiction, it seems that the natural world is conspiring against us too. If you've been watching the documentary Catastrophe on the origins of life on Earth, you'll know that a sudden disaster isn't all that unlikely a proposition. Nor is a slow, painful one either.

Of course, the difference between religious and non-religious people is that one group genuinely believes that this would be The End of The World.

Here's a short Irish comedy on the same theme.

Help or a Hinderance

Last December, I had my wallet stolen at a club*.

Today, I got a package from An Post containing the same self wallet**.

Is this their idea of a joke?***

*It was in Bukkake: a club where, sadly, I know or am acquainted with the majority of people around me. Or at least vice versa. In other words, someone who knows me stole my wallet.

**The wallet arrived sans cash. Clearly the perpetrator cleaned out my wallet and put it in the post box. How helpful! At least that way, I get my sentimental photos and ID cards back.

***Assuming they posted the wallet into a post box immediately, the idea it took An Post almost a year to open the wallet, check with my bank/college/DVD rental store for my address and mail it onwards is not just frightening. It's incompetent.

The Un-bear-able Lightness of Being

That's Debby. She's a Polar Bear. And after the one in The Golden Compass or the one on top of a Fox's Glacier Mint, she is one of the most famous Polar Bears in the world. Debby is famous because she is considered to be the oldest Polar Bear in the world. I say "considered" because we can't know if that's true*. We haven't met all of them. And they don't register their births. But we do know that she is the oldest Polar Bear in captivity. At least she was until she died this week.

Debby had a degrading kidney condition (Don't we all?) and was a "guest" at the Assiniboine Zoo in Winnipeg, Canada for many years. She was forty-one years old when they "euthanized" her. I'm hoping that was a lot longer in Polar Bear years. Not just for personal (age-related) reasons. You see, I've actually met Debby.

I lived in Winnipeg for a couple of years in the early Nineties and during my stay there I paid a visit to their rather large zoo. I was visiting because Ling Ling and Wong Wong** the Chinese Pandas were on a state visit but I did make it over to see the Polar Bears. And unlike our pee-stained yellow Polar Bears, the Canadian ones are actually white**. This is possibly because they are from up the road (and not from the Phoenix Park).

Either way, I hope you had a happy life Debby. You were way more interesting than the Pandas. And you'll make a nicer rug.


*And only religious people are that certain of anything.
**not actual names or colours.

Answering nature's call

Scientists are losing their shit over sightings of a rare Whale Shark having a dump. It seems that these sharks tend to do their "business" in much deeper water - presumably because human scientists are such voyeuristic freaks. The scientists even collected the poo to take it home with them, claiming that studying the animal's poo will help them understand it better. Hmmm.... That's the same logic I used when I brought some of Twink's excrement home from RTE.

Staying with the voyeuristic: George Takei (who played Sulu on Star Trek) is appearing on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and he's fallen foul of the show's rules on where you can answer nature's call.

The actor (who is gay and therefore clearly unable to follow any rules whatsoever) was caught on nightvision cameras going for a wee within the habitation zone for the campers. Apparently that's a no-no as it attracts rats and then snakes and then aliens from outside the space federation.

Dirty skanky Sulu. What would Dr. Spock say?