Erotic Refugees Are Go!

Hurrah! After an unspecified volume of blood, sweat, tears, semen and coffee, my dick-lit novel Erotic Refugees is finally on the kindle ebook store!

Writing the bloody book was a walk in the park compared to working out how to publish on the damn kindle store. At some points it was like magic. I mean, who designed this rancid, stinking system? It was insanely hard to use and hid vital information at every turn.

Anyway, now it’s done. So welcome to the humorous and sexually invigorating adventures of Eoin Kelliher and Rob Maher, two love-hungry expats in Stockholm who decide to make a dating website with a nasty twist. With lots of expat jokes thrown in. And shagging, naturally. And Guinness.

So go on, my precious readers. Do the decent thing and give something back for the years of cutting commentary I’ve been handing out for nothing.

If you have a kindle, you can buy it directly from the device. If you don’t you can still read it using the kindle reader app on smartphone or iPad or Tab or whatever you have. However, you’ll have to first buy the book on the amazon website, and when you start up the app, it’ll download it for you.

And hey, some glowing reviews would be very nice too. Assuming you like it. Which you will.

(Here’s the link, if you missed the two up there:

Erotic Refugees

)

/ paddy

 

Tintin And The Massive Tit

Occasionally an article in a newspaper makes me so mad I just … just want to … dammit.

And here it is. And here too. And here in English. (Warning – it’s from The Local.)

This enormous cockwallop is the “artistic leader” at Stockholm’s culture centre (big building, middle of town, can’t miss it). And he has decided, in his beardy wisom, to remove all books that have “racist or homophobic” bits. Starting with Tintin.

Well, regardless of your view of Tintin and colonial literature, here’s some news for the sideways-cap wearing wonder. Which, as a “culture leader”, he damn well ought to know. You can’t ban books. I repeat. YOU CAN’T FUCKING BAN BOOKS. This is the one golden rule that we may never forget. You ban books, you’re a fucking dictator, or a fanatic.

However, this dopey-eyed git thinks he can, because it’s all in a “good cause”. He’s doing “the right thing”. Yeah right, like nobody has ever thought that before. And now he’s got his staff running around like his little minions and scouring the shelves for books that don’t fit his fucking defintion of “okay”.

Sure there are racist bits in old books. But surely they have to be written with racist intent in mind to be really racist? And perhaps instead of banning them, we could use these books to start a discussion? Explain to kids: “here’s how things were back then but now we see it like this. What do YOU think?”

But God forbid that people would be asked to decide for themselves. Instead this little hispster emperor will fix it so that no children or parents without money can make up their minds for themselves. Nice one, your majesty.

I have a serious plan to get a bunch of people together, buy all these “forbidden books” and sneak them back onto the shelves, one by one. Because we DON’T FUCKING BAN BOOKS to protect the poor innocent woman and children from their evil ideas. We just fucking don’t. Not now, and not ever.

And, let me add, none of this has anything at all to do with this cock getting exposure for his “music career”. He is a “rap artist” apparently. And I bet he’s just excellent. Really, I do.

/ paddy

 

The Lady And The Gadget

I just learned a fascinating fact which is definitely worthy of a blog post, or of a whole film. And luckily, there is actually such a film.

In Victorian Britain, ladies were sent to doctors suffering from “hysteria” - chronic anxiety, irritability and abdominal heaviness. (I’m quoting as well as borrowing from this article in the Guardian). A very common treatment was for the doctor to administer a ”pelvic massage”, performed manually with the fingers, until the patient reached a “hysterical paroxysm”. The doctors found this boring and so put their Victorian minds to the task of inventing a range of machines to do the job for them. And in the 1880s the first electromechanical vibrator was created, years before the electric vacuum cleaner or even the electric iron.

It became a huge hit and was advertised freely with ads like this one, from a 1906 issue of Woman’s Own magazine:

“It can be applied more rapidly, uniformly and deeply than by hand and for as long a period as may be desired.”

The vibrator remained in doctor’s offices (and the doctors were rather busy) until the 1920s when it became obvious what was going on. The vibrator went underground, then emerged again in the 60s. But, as the article points out, even in the 60s:

“… only 1% of women had ever used one. This was perhaps unsurprising, given that most vibrators by then were modelled on a very male notion of what a woman would want – a supersized phallus – replicating, in other words, the very anatomy whose shortcomings had precipitated the invention in the first place”

This is brilliant stuff. The most interesting things being that:

1. The past is full of unexpected surprises.
2. The past is very rude.
3. The Victorians were nuts.

What a filthy and excellent world.

/ paddy

 

Women Holding Big Swords

I do like a bit of science fiction, and I do like a bit of fantasy too. And thanks to these interests I am exposed to a lot of cover art featuring women in far too few clothes for the job at hand.

This is a bit odd as science fiction is actually an excellent genre for showing females as strong characters and not just dumb stereotypes. From Kaylee and Zoe from Firefly to Janeway from Voyager. Not to mention Uhuru in the original Star Trek, the first black actress to play a major TV character that wasn’t a servant.

Fantasy, though, is worse. And fantasy cover and game art is the most tragic. Although Game Of Thrones has given us a slew of strong interesting females, the average female on the cover of a fantasy novel always looks cold and uncomfortable, and liable to be killed by the first badly aimed arrow shot in her direction.

So it’s a refreshing change to see this collection of female fighters dressed in a reasonable and very arse-kicking way. (Click on the button at the bottom of the page to see the other pages, 13 of them in total.)

It confuses me greatly why people would think the usual simpering twits on offer (example up there at the top of this page) are hotter than these no-nonsense sword-thrusting ladies with a brain in their heads and a fucking fire in their hearts.

Or maybe that’s just me.

/ paddy

 

All Kinds Of Awesome

What, is it that time of the month already? Okay then, hang on. (Checks pockets and under bed.) Oh yeah, here’s something! The most happiness-inducing thing I’ve seen in years. (Click here if embedding is disabled.)

Isn’t that just the best? Aren’t you grinning like an idiot? These people are the true individuals, the ones who really dare to be themselves, and have a whole world of fun doing it. Glasses raised to them, and to Pink who made this excellent song.

In fact, glasses raised to all true nerds everywhere. The future is ours, people.

/ paddy

 

Harry Potter and the Snobs of Culture

Today I read what was possibly the most pretentious, culture-snob hackery I have ever come across. It was a “review” (in Swedish) of the latest Harry Potter movie, a movie I am very much looking forward to. But also a review made by a mental midget who should have his title as “culture reporter” revoked, rolled up tightly and inserted into his bottom.

Culture snobs? Where?

This guy is clearly from the snob school of culture. These are people who only regard some things as culture, fine things that they themselves once did a fucking paper on in culture-wank academy. You see these people everywhere, and they are almost always being snide about “lesser” cultural things. Things like science fiction, fantasy, or anything they don’t see as “clever” and can’t be bothered to look into because it might somehow demean them to read a book without a pompous “The” at the beginning of its self-important fucking title.

These people irritate the crap out of me. Well let me inform them – culture isn’t what a group of MacBook-owning (and come on, of course they all have MacBooks) and big black glasses-wearing idiots deem it to be. Culture, my snobby mate, is what people actually consume. I would even go as far to say that ballet and opera aren’t culture. They are museum pieces with very limited appeal, only kept alive by huge chunks of tax-payer’s money. Football is more culture than opera (and I don’t even like football). And Star Trek (despite being rather crap) is hugely more culturally relevant than some Nobel prize-winning tosser with his angsty shite that people will only buy because the slab-head won a Nobel prize with it.

Where does this reviewer get off saying that it isn’t important that he’s not seen the other movies? In what other movie review would this be okay? Perhaps reviewing the Kieślowski movies while only having seen the Red one? Or slashing “The Godfather” based on part 3? My arse it would be okay. And so why is it just fine with Harry Potter?

And then he belittles the book’s plot with his “Oh you all know how it goes” bullshit. Because he couldn’t be arsed to read the books or even see the other movies, it’s fine for us to be just as ignorant as he is. And his other point seems to be that you put enough ack-thors in a movie and throw a swanky enough director at it, then even mediocre second-rate shite like, oh, Harry fucking POTTER can look like a “real” movie.

Screw this guy, and the rest of the pretentious self-satisfied culture snobs who decide it’s okay to look down on things because they happen not to know anything about them. And a tip – next time, if you’re going to review a movie then put the fucking work in. If you don’t, then at least don’t bloody tell us in a “I didn’t bother and that’s okay because I don’t need to” kind of way.

And keep in mind that nobody gives a shit who you stood beside at some football game. Yeah?

/ paddy

 

That Friday Song

The web has been in a frenzy the last couple of weeks over a song from a wee girlie. Rebecca Black (aged 13 3/4) sings some other people’s song and gets engulfed in an amazing tsunami of rage and ire. It’s a bit hard to understand why. She didn’t bomb another person’s country, she just let some guys record her singing a tune. Sure, the song is shite, and auto-tuned to hell and back, but it’s catchy and not as shite as a few other songs I could name. She could have skipped the rap in the middle, though…

Now it’s easy to go online and say things like “U sukc” or “omg i hat u” and so on. And about a billion people did, helping to remind a 13 year old girl just how crap she is. (And on a side note, you would think that today’s kids would have better spelling, since they essentially live in a word-based medium, with spell-checkers on everything?)

But you know what’s best about this whole thing? Not the negative stuff, but the positive stuff. What people actually did with that half-assed song – used it to create some great things.

Like this one, made by slowing the thing down by 5 times and making it sound like something edgy from 1990s Iceland.

There was this one, where the whole thing was, shall we say, given a bit more oomph.

And this one, where the rather brilliant Matt Mulholland makes it sound like a real song, an amazing achievement it must be said. Go Matt!

And finally, here is the best version I have found. It’s a bit edgy, and was removed from YouTube pretty fast. But I managed to salvage it from my cache and pop it up somewhere for you to enjoy. So, yeah, enjoy, while you can, and forgive me if it’s a bit… too much.

So there you go. And just to remind you all, today it is Thursday, yeah? Which means tomorrow is… well, I’m sure you can work it out. Or maybe I’ll sing it for you.

/ paddy

 

No Goths No Glory

Last night I paid a visit (in fine company) to Vampire Lounge in Stockholm. The reason was to get our hands on some of their fine ice-cream cocktails. And to admire the trying-slightly-too-hard interior. As we sat there a thought occurred to us. “This would be a fine bar for goths,” we mused. Looking round we realised that there was not a single person there who wasn’t dead normal.

It occurred to me then that I hadn’t seen an actual goth for ages. So what the hell happened? Did they go extinct in the wild? Did they all move to Berlin? Or did they all, in protest at Andrew Eldritch not stopping while he was ahead, get jobs in banks and bury their long leather coats in shame?

Crusties, indie kids and synthers are still around. The goth’s furrier and cosier cousins the Gothic Lolitas still show up from time to time in their frilly umbrellas and teeny tiny little hats. But good old-fashioned goths just aren’t seen any more. It’s like they were ethnically cleansed, and removed from reality.

As sub-cultures go, I’ve always liked the goths. They look damn fine in their corsets and top hats, and definitely seem to represent the more cerebral side of rock. Also I knew a lot of goths in Dublin in the 90s and they were all very nice people. Unlike some of the rockers who’d nick your pint as soon as look at you.

So what happened to the goths? Is this a Swedish thing, or are they still seen in other cities? Has anybody seen one lately? Have they gone to a much cooler place that the rest of us just don’t know about?

In order to straighten this out I proclaim this goth-spotting week. Keep your eyes open people, and report all sightings to me. And if we can’t find any, perhaps a captive breeding program must be established. And for this I wholeheartedly offer my services.

/ paddy noir

 

SciFi Things That Shouldn’t Be

I do like my science fiction. I also don’t see a problem calling it “SciFi” unlike a great many anal people out there. Call it SciFi, call it SF, or whatever you like. Just as long as you don’t call it “SyFy“, because that’s plainly fucking stupid.

But yes, the point. I am prepared to give SciFi a wide latitude when it comes to ideas, and rules, and breaking those rules. I will accept most things, as long as the consequences of those things are logically extrapolated. Books are good at this, and even if the premise is wild it is generally followed through logically. But there are four things in SciFi movies that I find to be unforgivable.

And they are:

1) The Borg Queen – The Borg were a fantastic creation. A completely zombie-like race who shared a common mind and didn’t give a shit about you as long as you weren’t a threat. And all they wanted was your gadgets. Which they took. Plus those fantastic cube ships, showing a complete lack of imagination. Wonderful. Then what do the writers do? They thrash the idea by introducing, for dramatic effect, a fucking queen Borg, a move that destroys the best thing about them – their coldness and pure socialist ethic. And as much as I enjoy seeing Alice Krige in latex, the idea of a Borg leader is just fucking dumb. Goodnight, the Borg.

2) The second Star Wars trilogy – Oh don’t even go there. It never fucking happened, alright? Midi-chlorians my dangly hairy balls. Jesus. They should have done a trilogy of wookie coming-of-age movies instead. Or just six hours of backstage footage of Carrie Fisher squeezing into that gold bikini. Now that I’d watch!

3) The Independence Day virus upload – I love this one. Let’s fly to the Alien spaceship, hook up to their extraterrestrial WiFi (with a fucking iBook!) and upload a virus, to a system we have never before seen and don’t understand. It takes me half a day to set up my network at home, and that’s when all the parts have been produced on Earth. Nope, I don’t buy it.

4) And then we have the Matrix battery, the single biggest missed opportunity in SciFi movie history. Why did the machines keep the humans in slavery in those pods? To use them as the universe’s least efficient batteries? No, of course fucking not! They used their brains as the processing power for the Matrix itself! The Matrix hardware WAS in fact their brains, all of them, running that massive MMO, making them the slaves of their own minds. How the fucking hell was this plot point missed by the scriptwriter? I still shiver with anger when I see that scene, and it’s a black mark on an otherwise excellent movie.

Yeah, well, that’s it. And that’s the last thing I’ll ever feel the need to rant about, ever. From now on it’s all flowers, sunsets and  butterflies. And skipping through the tall grass while humming a happy song. Tra-la-la-la-fucking-laaaah.

/ paddy (who loves you all very VERY much)

 

Please Sir, may I have another D?

I must say, I quite dislike 3D. Not the universe, I mean – reality is fine in 3D, I have no problem with that at all. Not much anyway. Euclidean space (most of it) can rest easy.

No I mean 3D movies. I am, quite simply, getting sick to the teeth of them. The problem is that a 3D movie is built to be not a movie, but a 3D movie. This means that less time is put on things like plot and characters and more is put on the finding of new ways to thrown spinny objects towards the camera.

It’s getting to the point where the “in 3D!” tag-line is making me avoid movies completely as I know I will prefer to see them in flat-o-vision. And I know they won’t be as good as a regular flat movie, so what’s the point?

Plus I dislike the paraphernalia. The red and green glasses didn’t really cut it, and the new polarised glasses are not much better. For one thing, they make the image too dark and I always end up squinting and removing the things to make out any details.

The only movie I’ve seen worth a damn in 3D was Avatar, and that because it was an awesome movie. The 3D definitely added to it, but it would be just as good in 2D, and I know because I spent most of the movie with my glasses off, trying to see what the hell was going on. I mean, seriously, do we need long 3D scenes of people sitting around in labs and taking? Why, exactly?

There are of course many reasons for the sudden flood of 3D movies these days. I can think of a few:

1) To get us to pay more for cinema tickets.

2) To cut down on piracy.

3) To allows studios to tart up otherwise mediocre movies.

Note that nowhere in this list does “improve the customers’ experience” appear because we all know that is bollox. If the studios are giving us movies in 3D it’s because some cunt somewhere is making a sackful of money from it. And that sure as hell isn’t us, and it never will be us.

To prove my point, I ask you all to go see Alice in Wonderland in 3D. Then go and see it in 2D. You see? It’s just as shit both ways. And you didn’t even have to get a headache.

/ paddy (who, when the 3D porn starts coming, will probably just have to leave the planet entirely)

 

Towing the Earth

I mean, seriously, I can put up with a bit of technobabble, and stupid plot twists and over-the-top aliens and stupid coincidences because, you know, it’s Doctor Who, and that’s what you get, innit?

But please… towing the Earth?

Russel T Davies, my good man, you should just fuck the fuck off immediately.

Oh, he did? Did he really? Oh well that’s all fine then.

Carry on.

/ paddy

 

Happy 101 Sweet Friends

Looks like I’ve been memed, good and hard. Yessir, a good old-fashioned meming, none of your sissy modern sneaker-wearin’ latte-drinkin’ memings. A meme to put hair on your chest, in other words, or at least in close proximity to your chest.

Anyway the meme in question is Happy 101 Sweet Friends. No, I don’t know either why, just go with it, okay? The instruction from my tagger are as follows:

List 10 things that make your day and then give this award to 10 bloggers.

What, 10 positive things? No complaining permitted? But.. but… well…oh alright then. Things that make me happy. By Paddy. Aged 38 and a lot.

Fig 1: An example of a thing that makes my day

1. A cup of coffee while writing in the early morning when everybody else is asleep. The only way to make mornings bearable, I find. And I’ll be wearing a bathrobe too. Maybe even underwear.

2. Waking up in a whole new city. Feeling that tingle of excitement and not knowing what you’ll come across, and then forget the location of, and probably never see again.

3. Roquefort cheese. The best fucking taste in the world. EVER.

4. Wandering around second-hand shops. Like sifting through the flotsam of a very large and peculiar shipwreck piloted by people with no taste at all.

5. Running in the late summer when the sun is setting. That glow of orange and pink as you cross the high part of the bridge, with the water glittering underneath and the trees crowding behind and the twinkling lights of the city up ahead.

6. Standing in a good strong fresh wind. The kind that roars at you and makes your face change shape. The kind you have to lean forward in. Last experienced at the top of a Scottish mountain two years ago. More of that please.

7. Suddenly learning a new way to think. When the pieces fall together and that light goes on and you sit back and clasp your hands behind your head and say “Oooooooooh….right…”

8. A really nice cappuccino. Creamy, strong, the right temperature, and poured by a female barista with a pert arse and twinkly eyes.

9. Something that fits exactly in the place you had planned for it. A box on a shelf, a chair in a corner, a bale of hay in a trailer, a person in a bed.

10. A whole chunk of time with nothing at all to do. Just drifting, from whatever to whatever, with no plans, no appointments to remember, no people to coordinate with. Nothing more complicated to decide than where to have your next coffee or whether to turn left or right. Bliss.

That’s me. And now I have to tag 10 people (or technically, list 10 blogs that give me pleasure). I am choosing to interpret “blogs that give me pleasure” as “blogs that I read”. Note that some of these people are far too famous to bother with the likes of me, but I’ll list them anyway. What the fuck, eh?

1. Wynn and her adventures in post-student, pre-person land. Slightly more smutty than average.

2. Ecopunk and his adventures living the life that most of us don’t dare.

3. Kaia. Books, life, cooking, pondering. And I think she knits too.

4. Melliferax, the sharp-thinking lady with the bees and the killer dimple.

5. Earthpal, my green conscience. Plus always an entertaining writer.

6. Fellow Irishman Seamus who seems to be uncannily like me, judging from his bio.

7. Ryan AKA The Grumpy Owl, a man who is always tossing out fascinating tidbits.

8. My buddy Martin, gentleman and scholar, the only person I know who found a sword. And, more recently, a spoon.

9. The incomparable Graham Linehan, the man behind Father Ted and Black Books, whose funny links I have been passing off as my own for ages. Forgive me Graham.

10. And finally, the Everlasting Blört. I have no idea who is behind Blört, but they are definitely proud members of the reality-based community, and host the most astounding collection of time-wasting oddities you will ever see.

Many of these people will probably ignore me and my little tagging of them. And that’s fine, it is, really. Nobody has to do anything just because I write some silly article and I generally ignore memes myself. But it would be nice if one or two of you… you know…

And so here we are then, a whole article of just positive stuff without a single rant or swear word. Who’ve have fucking thought that, eh?

/ Paddy