Ragtag Giggagon

Twelve months, and just 12 of the wonderful things that happened this year! 1. A golden eagle in Indiana breastfed a little baby lamb abandoned by its mother in January. 2. A dog licked a young man's naked butt as he leaned out of his bedroom window to have a cigarette in February, giving him such a fright that he fell out of the window entirely. His death generated plenty of laughs and good cheer! 3. In March, a man gave a waitress a tip. He wrote on a receipt: "Your lifestyle choice offends me. I pray that the Good Lord changes you sexually!" Some tip! So the people on the social media let the dog from the February video get at him. It changed HIM sexually. 4. A 10,000 year old pickle - discovered in a goatskin and clay cask of vinegar in Iran - was consumed by former Iranian president Machhhmoood Armoured-Dinnerjacket, while athletic Harvard lecturer and occasional Arizona rancher Professor Austin Seattle stood watching, at gunpoint, in April. Thankfully, the expected

Yesterday, the sole occupant of a house in Navan, County Meath, was killed by a blast caused by his attempt to open an electronic cigarette. It is the fifth such known explosion since the products were introduced onto the market in the Republic. In a phone call to the Tipperary-based supplier of the e-cigarette brand that is believed to have caused the blast, a sales representative was actively discouraging their purchase. "They don't have good reviews, these ones," he whispered. "Check online. There's been loads of fires from USB charges of them. You connect the e-cig chargers to the computers, and the laptops can't recognise the vapour as data. Can't handle it. Just starts going on fire. It does what the cigarette is trying to prevent, which is emit toxic fumes. We're not supplying them to the shops any more because they're all in dodgy legal territory. The chargers, the refills, the batteries, are all legislatively shady. We're laughed out

Continued from Part Two "Look at you," I could see him thinking. "You're here RIGHT NOW! We could go out and explore RIGHT NOW! Can you explain that one, Mister?" And sometimes he would bark at me. He didn't really like his dog food. He often ate on the go - he explored a bush at one point, and before I could stop him, he had consumed an entire spare rib bone that he had sniffed out. Job done, he wiped his little paws in the grass, as if coming into a house on a Welcome mat, and he sprang back out of the bushes onto the street again to continue on our way. Marie and Kathy at Dogs in Distress were very helpful. I probably spent more time detailing the dysfunctional dynamic that was developing between myself and my charge over email, than I actually spent sitting down with the little guy, telling him to behave. I should have been more common sense about it, as I said. I was messing the little guy up, when there were any number of things I shoul

Continued from Part One . There was no car accident. If there is, it's metaphorical. I learned a few things about myself when I took the dog in. I consider myself a patient enough individual. But when it comes to dogs, I need to be a bit less of the psychoanalyst, and more commonsense. For instance, I was instructed by Kathy at Dogs in Distress to ignore him when he barked at me. The advice paid off, and he would stop barking within a minute of realising I was ignoring him. It was a concern, as pets are frowned upon at my place, and he was taking too long to stop the yapping. Honestly, I have found difficult toddlers easier to appease than my little guy. But no toddlers have stayed as long with me as Hobo had. I had few answers that appealed to him, other than his insistence that we get out of the apartment when he saw other dogs in the park, or other curiosities to investigate further. Rolling a ball towards him indoors would be met with his own tokenistic chase after it, as if

It's SOAPBOX DERBY TIME!!!!! There was a discussion on Irish television last night that I don't even want to acknowledge. I will generalise here. I won't name names, or talk ill of specific bishops. But I don't get how a group of adults, or a figurehead, or a religious leader of any description, has the horrific audacity to try to explain to anybody else that they think that what they are doing is a sin - whether they forgive them or not. But how about I forgive YOU, for being a disgusting asshole, which is probably the terminology some of the people who AGREE WITH YOU would use to describe the very rectal regions of the people you attack? The Russian so-called majority, and the African government ministers educated by your missionaries, and their Christian competitors, in their schools? How about that? That anyone can suggest to others - in complete armchair sincerity - that their choices are actually flawed - if no one is getting hurt by those choices, and - actually

So I've heard a couple stories lately about the closure of a dog shelter in Ballymun due to the loss of its premises, and also, the far more (prohibitively expensive) medical assessments and treatments that will be required, on animals traveling to the UK from Ireland. I haven't seen anything further on this second story since I read a piece about it a few months ago, but the legislation coming in is in part because of the horsemeat scandal, and the faking of documents and passports for old nags that were being sent to the glue factory by unscrupulous burger people. Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo...I'm lovin' it! These new laws are going to have a major impact on the animal sanctuaries and charities and homes and pounds here in Ireland, because the British sure do love their pets. Hot dayum! I didn't realise this but a lot of the pets fostered here - after they've been abandoned or been found homeless - are often adopted by - I hate to admit it, so I'm gonna just look

In a recent series of exposés, it was discovered that a new Apple phone manufacturing facility established in Detroit Michigan just three months ago was staffed entirely by journalists during its first quarter. The reporters from a variety of media companies and publications - including Variety - were eager to establish if the working conditions in the factory would be on a par with the shoddy conditions that were exposed at a plant run by one of Apple's Chinese contractors in the Far East. Although people are still suffering at that plant, it's not even today's "fish and chips wrappers". If health and safety were to continue to allow the British tradition of chips wrapped in newspaper sheets, it would be the chip wrappers that are now at the hypothetical dump, under heaps of other detritus and waste that has been piled on top of it for the last six months. The Variety reporter - a screenwriter working on a movie trilogy starring Rutger Hauer and Fiddy Cent - wan

Seen in a bathroom: So I had to do a sh*t in the sink!