Ragtag Giggagon

In the latest of a long line of celebrities to change his image, Prince William Duke of Cambridge has a great new hairdo! Like crue-cut Miley Cyrus and an inky footed Harry Styles, the second in line to the throne has a radical image change that is perfect for the summer months. His Majesty has been keen to develop the new look for some time, trimming back his hairline over recent years. Now, what experts refer to as "a monk's tonsure" might just mean that Wills is keen to show that he isn't intimidated by the thought of becoming Head of the Church of England when he becomes King. As you can see in this one quarter royalty-free picture, Wills is being greeted by a bishop, indicating he's got some tough work ahead of him! Meeting bishops and high churchmen of all kinds is par for the course for HRH Wills, and he seems keen to show that he appreciates what his future duties will be! Even though most Protestants don't take their religion too seriously, Willia...

There's a performed reading doing a bit of a tour in the east of Ireland at the moment. It's a play called Guaranteed! and its timing is perfect, with the release of the Anglo tapes, where bankers are heard laughing. Guaranteed! is about the banking crisis in 2008, and the bank guarantee that locked the Irish exchequer to the failing financial institutions. Fianna Fail was the dominant party for the last century in the Irish Republic. They were the main party in charge back in 2008 when the poopeedoo hit the air ventilation system. To give you a brief idea of the competence of Fianna Fail, parties to the immediate left and right of them might manage to scrabble and hold onto power for a few years before FF are returned to rule (often with a smaller coalition partner - a runt that usually gets hammered come the next election for being associated with the FF brand) for a decade or more. In the brief time periods that the other parties gain power, you might get flashes of good stu...

A 46 year old man has died after cinema management switched the regular Coca Cola beverage that he had purchased at the theatre's front of house snack-shop with a Coke Zero. He was among some fifty movie goers who fell for what was intended to be a "healthy jape" - employed by cinema staff - who had replaced all of the Cokes served to the audience - with the diet alternative. Coke Zero has been running the cinema campaign for some time, using audiences as guinea pigs in their taste tests. The diet drink is one of the big success stories in the history of the cola wars. Coke Zero has been chipping away at the market share of the more sugary Coke since the younger brand's launch in 2005. Using clever advertising to highlight that Coke Zero is nearly identical in taste to Coca Cola seems to be working so far. Coca Cola management are trying to find a reasonable advertising response - but they seem desperate. "I want Coke Zero DEAD! I want his family DEAD! I want his...

An Early Childhood Chapter 26 Part 3: A Visit to Middlesex An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan is a mock surreal autobiography, narrated by a fictional Irish war hero, champion bodhran player, and television presenter. Its first chapter is here . It parodies misery memoirs (such as Angela’s Ashes by the late great Frank McCourt), as well as time travel adventure, pop culture, and literature of various kinds. Continued from Chapter 26 Part 2 .                 “Better?” asked the drummer.                 With a smile and the transformation complete, Dyll clicked her fingers, the band started up again, and she sang huskily into the mike:                 “Bippity bop bip bop bamboozle!”             ...

An Early Childhood Chapter 26 Part 2: A Visit to Middlesex An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan is a mock surreal autobiography, narrated by a fictional Irish war hero, champion bodhran player, and television presenter. Its first chapter is here . It parodies misery memoirs (such as Angela’s Ashes by the late great Frank McCourt), as well as time travel adventure, pop culture, and literature of various kinds. Continued from Chapter 26 Part 1 .                 Outside of the jazz club, didn't I only see a consumptive little fella, with a bad skin ailment as he spent all his time out of doors. He was a scruffy ruffian of a thing, coughing and wiping his scrabby, scabby face and hands. He had a little tray in front of himself, with matches and cigarettes for sale. He looked at me and coughtered.                 My heart went out to the little chappy, and I had some oint...

I don't know on which comic book series Man of Steel is based (none, apparently), but there is much to like as well as plot elements that are questionable in this damn piece of vile blasphemy. Henry Cavill is a very good lead, with a face that looks part Tom Welling, part Christopher Reeve. Amy Adams is a strong Lois Lane, Costner and Crowe are great father figures. According to the movie's plot, on Krypton, there is a seeming unwillingness for most of its inhabitants to accept that they could leave if they chose to do so - before the planet's demise. The movie also features a death toll on Earth that must be in the tens of thousands. Now, Superman wouldn't have allowed that to happen in the early 80s, Shirley? On Krypton, there's also a caste system coupled with a jingoistic dogmatism of which Zod appears to be the prime manifestation. These faults in Kryptonian society can explain Jur-El's noble willingness to accept the planet's destruction, as daft as i...

Hey folks! I'm off to the British and Irish Lions' Tour where I'll be commentating from the box! Do you know what nickname they have for the Lions Down Below? "The Briddish un Oirish Loins!" But first a quick round-up of what happened at the last match I seen! It was out at a club near Donnybrook and UCD and RTE, and just a short taxi journey down the road from Doheny & Nesbitt's! Anyway, folks, spoiler alert - I wrote up my report and dropped it into RTE so it can appear in next issue's RTE Guide! Here it is: "At the end of the match, that line was being formed again now with the two teams lining up in a queue. And one of those lads might've skip the queue like what happened last time and jump up and snatch the ball. Folks, the queue, it was at the far side of the club house, way up the pitch. And to think, just thirty seconds ago, they were playing with the ball down the other end where the digger is parked just off the pitch, a good bit to ...

[TO BE PUBLISHED BEFORE THE SOLSTICE.] With Christmas just around the corner, here are some Christmas tips! PRE-CHRISTMAS CARVINGS FOR 100+ GUESTS With the relatives coming around, why not carve up the turkey BEFORE everyone gets there? If there's lots of relatives, there won't be a major turkey carving ceremony anyway - all the hassle of getting everyone into the dining room to watch the carving is more than just a little bit megalomaniacal! So why not chop up the turkey BEFORE? Remember to constantly hold the turkey by the neck when you're bringing him home from the Turkey Dispensary. If you don't hold him right, by the time you've got him home, he always sticks his head in so you won't be able to hack it off. (See picture above.) If he's flapping around on your lap, visibility through your windshield might be an issue. Simply roll down the window and hold him outside the car while you drive. He can flap all he likes when he's outside, ladies! After yo...

Justin Bieber recently paid a secret visit to ethnic cleansing hotspot Darfur in Sudan, where he played a gig to the United Nations Peacekeeping Force and a number of NGO workers stationed there. Bieber played a medley of his songs Baby , U Smile and Boyfriend in front of the crowd. Later Bieber visited a hospital camp in Chad, where victims of past attacks by the Janjaweed militia are being treated. Entering a tent, Bieber placed his hand over the fecund belly of a young woman who had been assaulted eight months earlier, now receiving pre-natal care - and declared his earnest wish that "this kid will grow up to be a Belieber. Yaknaumsain?"

An Early Childhood Chapter 26 Part 1: A Visit to Middlesex Continued from the end of Chapter 25 . An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan is a mock surreal autobiography, narrated by a fictional Irish war hero, champion bodhran player, and television presenter. Its first chapter is here . It parodies misery memoirs (such as Angela’s Ashes by the late great Frank McCourt), as well as time travel adventure, pop culture, and literature of various kinds. Avid readers of this autobiography - of whom there are none, as obtuse and abstruse and cutting edge and avant garde as great literature is, and it being too painful to read - will recall in a previous chapter the death of Eaglekins, an English hostage whom we had taken from Colonel Edward "Gold Bollocks" Tiptoft and had been run over by a train. Eaglekins had pined over the photo of his sweetheart, but with Eaglekins now dead, it fell to me to deliver the news to this wonderful young jazz singing lass. P ainfully so, I was ...

A list of the short stories that appear on this blog up to June 2013. Priorities The Body Electric  The Boy I Love Father Feeney's March of the Blessed The Deadly Legacy of Mister Villiers Ramsey and the Child An Exigent Need for Mosquitoes Matthew Won't Fit Plug-Hole The Whipping Boy

CHAPTER 25: THE BLOWING UP OF IRELAND (PART FOUR) Continued from Part 3 of this Chapter .                  However - as sure as God, hadn't the fuel tank only been practically shot out from under the engines? Unbeknownst to me, just as Ireland had exploded, a shcrapeen of aul granite from a yellow rood of rock had shtruck the petrol tank, and it had been leaking ever since. As I saw Liverpool in the distance, the plane began to splutter, lose altitude and make spurts and stutters and sputters and gasps.              This is how the plane ought to have looked when I touched down: However, in the unfortunate event, I got on the wireless quick to Auric Lennon International Airport. If you're wondering who Auric is, it was John Lennon's greatgrandfather - you'll have to remember that this is still around 1923, and it only became John Lennon International Airport many years late...

CHAPTER 25: THE BLOWING UP OF IRELAND (PART THREE)   Continued from Chapter 25 Part 2 .                 Let’s just say it was a very ugly, four-month-long execution, and Sean Tubridy O’Reilly and Tancred Moorphy M’Nally went through a great deal of pain before being dragged the sixteen miles across wet bogland on the back of a cart by rope. And thanks to Judge Rarely-Smyled’s vile and distasteful sentence on those two martyrs, Ireland is today generally regarded as a nation of bejudgers.                 Sean Tubridy O’Reilly and Tancred Moorphy M’Nally survived their execution, of course, and the Irish Civil War gradually got worse and worse, and the pro-Treaty side winning against the anti-Treaty side, but that deVilera remained on the scene, never one to be unspiteful and to let things go, and twas often that he was highly respect...

CHAPTER 25: THE BLOWING UP OF IRELAND (PART TWO) Continued from the beginning of Chapter 25 .                 The mountains, as legend has it, was the result of a build-up of humpty-dumpies from an Táin, the legendary livestock bull, which had been stolen by Queen Maeve, and the bull had been so furious by the kidnapping that he’d crapped all over the South of Ireland. The olfactory scale registered the smell in the area of that mountain patch was akin to the smell from the breasts of the Celtic goddess Caron, whose dilapidated tittery was rumoured to have resulted in an early famine followed by seven years of deadly plague and alas she was finally given the boot from ancient Gaelic mythology when legends Fionn MacCumhaill and Cúchulainn, in their first and last crossover episode, sent Caron packing to the edge of the solar system where she added a h to her name to give herself a more bitter and gutteral sound....

Former Massachusetts parish priest Father Robert Emmett O'Regan has clarified a statement made in his Worcester Observer interview in March. From the doorstep of his new schoolhouse in Bogota, Colombia, he called a press conference for a number of foreign correspondents at the behest of his former archbishop. His former archbishop himself While maintaining that he only abused girls, Fr. O'Regan has amended his admission by adding: "I want to make absolutely clear here this evening that I think that there is nothing wrong with molesting little boys." The priest had been vilified with the publication of the interview in March, with his statement that he "only liked girls." The change in tone today may be an indication that members of the clergy are finally coming to accept the social harm they have done. The upper echelons of the Church, meanwhile, have had more pressing problems to address in the last year. Pope Francis would appear to be taking a less liber...

Fabulous Nature Facts! The cheetah wildcat underwent a genetic bottleneck in its recent evolutionary history that was so severe that today - if a male cheetah mates with a female cheetah - he is effectively auto-eroticising his twin brother from ten years in the future. Phot o cour tesy of Fir0002/Flagstaffotos If a human was to receive a skin graft from another human, there is a very strong possibility that the second human's body would "reject" the skin. Transplant organ operations require suitable matches between humans that are genetically similar. Furthermore, medication is often required to reduce the body's ability to reject the new organ or skin. However, the cheetah's genetic relationship with its fellow cheetahs is so close that if one cheetah's skin is thrown at a second cheetah and lands anywhere on its body, the second cheetah's body will simply blend the new skin immediately into its own fur, in a gulping fashion. If the skin lands as fa...

"When David was at Eton, he worked in a newsagent's on weekends. One day, a young man walked into the shop. David was behind the till, the only employee in the shop at the time. The young man - dressed in hiking shoes and with a European accent - asked for a pair of scissors. He explained that his shoelaces were too long and in need of a clipping! David handed the young man the scissors, and then the young man's accent changed to a gruff and threatening Scots accent, and he screamed at David to give him all the money from the till or he'd slit the slimy little toerag's throat with the scissors. David opened the till, handed over the money, and the thief took flight." - One of David Cameron's former school friends, in 2007.  WAKE THE FUCK UP, DAVID! None of the quotes that appear on this page are genuine. BUT WHAT IF THEY WERE?

CHAPTER 25: THE BLOWING UP OF IRELAND (PART ONE) Continued from the end of Chapter 24 .                 Well, it wasn’t long afterwards that the whole War of Independence came to an end, with a cessation of the hostilities and the beginning of the talks in Londing. The Irish Civil War was its inferior sequel. That nefarious excuse of an Irishman, deVilera, who had gotten away with blue murther in the Easter Revolution stuck up there in his biscuit factory on account of his being a Yankee Doodle Dandee in real life – and the Brits being “diplomatically obliged” not to execute him – had sent over Griffith and Collins and the lads to London to meet with the Brithish government.                  The lads returned a few months later, after a spot of bother with the telegraphies, and they had a sheet of paper and a piece of rock. The Big Fellow, Collins, heralded the piece...