Via pingulette

“A man just lay down behind a stationary, parked, steamroller, had a bit of a shout then walked off. I love Dublin”

You’d have to love the Dublin wit and the propensity for random acts of nonsense

Arsa an fear eile … “Ní ceapaim”. [Via Reddit] ]]> http://www.lecraic.com/2011/09/02/its-the-way-i-tell-em-joke/feed/ 0 http://www.lecraic.com/2011/08/29/to-the-gentleman-in-the-fast-food-restaurant/ http://www.lecraic.com/2011/08/29/to-the-gentleman-in-the-fast-food-restaurant/#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:51:34 +0000 aj@lecraic http://www.lecraic.com/2011/08/29/to-the-gentleman-in-the-fast-food-restaurant/ You looked so respectable sitting there on the stool drinking your tea and reading the Irish Independent. I’m guessing you are stalwart of the rural community you live in. You might even be that most revered of local figures – the bank manager. Yes, you have the look of a bank manager. You probably do the collections at mass on Sunday as well. Genuflecting at the altar of God must be a relief for you after prostrating yourself before Mammon from Monday to Friday. What a way to make a living. No. Not a bank manager now that I look at you again. You’re just a regular old gentleman.

A man who has had a life but who is only defined now by age. Now I think you might be in the restaurant spending a long time over that cup of tea so you don’t have to go back to an empty home. A home you once shared with a loving wife who made the most wonderful apple tart. The restaurant apple tart isn’t a tart at all. It’s just a pocket. A pocketful of apple with the faint taste of what used to be. It’s something to go with the tea, so you make do. I wonder how you can concentrate and read so intently with all the noise around you. You must be hard of hearing.

A lifetime of working in a factory probably did that to you. You’ve left the wife at the supermarket to do the weekly shop as you can’t stand shopping. And now it’s time to collect her. Up you get to go to the loo before heading off. You come back too soon though. No man your age can relieve themselves so quickly, not with a golf ball sized prostate.

I see you have a jacket on now and you’re holding your left arm close to your side. It’s the newspaper you have hidden inside your jacket. It’s the way you’d carry a newspaper if you were shielding it from rain. It’s not raining today though. You’re shielding it from… I don’t know who exactly, but you clearly think it’s a big crime. Nobody would have noticed if you brazenly walked out of the restaurant with the paper in full view. You could have riverdanced your way out the door singing “I took one of the customer newspapers” to the tune of God save the Queen and people still wouldn’t have looked up from their happy trays of food.

I noticed though. That must mean I’m weird.

The question was asked on Quora:

“What’s it like to have your film flop at the box office?”

One of the answers came from Sean Hood (professional screenwriter and director) who describes what it’s like with particular reference to his work on Conan the Barbarian 3D.

I think we can all identify with the emotions he talks about. That feeling of being totally invested in a project or cause and seeing hard work not pay off. The creeping self doubt. The self talk to keep spirits up. The “what do I do now” question.

It really is a fascinating insight. I absolutely loved the story he told about his father and I’m putting it here as it’s so good.

“My father is a retired trumpet player. I remember, when I was a boy, watching him spend months preparing for an audition with a famous philharmonic. Trumpet positions in major orchestras only become available once every few years. Hundreds of world class players will fly in to try out for these positions from all over the world. I remember my dad coming home from this competition, one that he desperately wanted to win, one that he desperately needed to win because work was so hard to come by. Out of hundreds of candidates and days of auditions and callbacks, my father came in….second.

It was devastating for him. He looked completely numb. To come that close and lose tore out his heart. But the next morning, at 6:00 AM, the same way he had done every morning since the age of 12, he did his mouthpiece drills. He did his warm ups. He practiced his usual routines, the same ones he tells his students they need to play every single day. He didn’t take the morning off. He just went on. He was and is a trumpet player and that’s what trumpet players do, come success or failure.

Less than a year later, he went on to win a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he played for three decades. Good thing he kept practicing.

So with my father’s example in mind, here I sit, coffee cup steaming in its mug and dog asleep at my feet, starting my work for the day, revising yet another script, working out yet another pitch, thinking of the future (the next project, the next election) because I’m a screenwriter, and that’s just what screenwriters do.

In the words of Ed Wood, “My next one will be BETTER!”

Image credit [cc]

Via Nextround.net

The icy weather has more or less dominated the news headlines over the last week or so. At the weekend we heard about the work of the DSPCA feeding starving horses at Dunsink. It’s horrible to think of all these beautiful animals being neglected like this.

An “overheard” conversation on Twitter prompted me to write this post. A well known Irish model replied to a tweet about the plight of the horses saying she had mailed the DSPCA “ages ago to do volunteer work and no one got back to me”.

I had to shake my head and wonder why someone wouldn’t follow up with a phone call about volunteering if they were really serious about it or simply just pick up the phone in the first place and talk to someone.

I see queries all the time on Twitter from people asking “anyone know if XYZ shop does XYZ product” OR “what time is XYZ restaurant open until tonight”. I just want to scream “WHY NOT FUCKING WELL RING THE NUMBER OFF THEIR WEBSITE AND ASK THEM”.

These are probably the same type of people that default to email for everything without realising that a phone call is a lot quicker. Probably the same type of people that get into a long drawn out SMS conversation to arrange a meeting rather than make one phone call.

There was a time when it was possible to function in the world without the umbilical cord of the internet. What ever happened to plain old common sense and intuition? Google/Twitter/whatever doesn’t always have the answer to the question. A lot of the time the answer is but a phone call away.

Image [cc]

Nice competition running on TV3 at the moment.

If you’ve ever dreamt of being a published author now is your chance to make it happen. The Morning Show with Sybil & Martin have teamed up with Poolbeg Press, Ireland’s leading publishing house, to offer you the prize of a lifetime -the chance to see your novel published and on bookshelves around the country

Full details on the TV3 website.

Image credit : Rutty [cc]

The Cliffs of Moher as seen on the Aer Lingus website.

Seriously like. Why does the web graphics person think it’s ok to flip an iconic scene like this? It’s even worse then they horizontally flip a persons face for the web or newspaper. It just looks weird…

Cliffs of Moher image by Beppie K [cc]

Posted via web from lecraic’s posterous

Fascinated this morning by an article in the Feb 15 & 22 edition of The New Yorker about mules. I’ve never given any thought to mules before and my knowledge of them is limited to two facts:

1) They’re like donkeys

2) I can be as stubborn as one at times

After reading the 6 pages and 14 columns of the article I now realise that mules deserved better from me. I really should have made an effort to get to know them better. I think you should too. So here are the best bits from “Riding High. Mules in the Military. By Susan Orlean”

• A mule will carry up to 136 kg, seven hours a day, twenty days straight, without complaint.
• Mules have an inviolable commitment to self preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth, it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats.
• Mules are the hybrid result of mating a male donkey with a female horse.  They have an uneven number of chromosomes and are therefore sterile. Every mule is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world.
• Once upon a time in America, a young man without mule handling experience would have been the exception.
• George Washington had a herd of mules – one of the first in the US. They were sired by an Andalusian donkey named Royal Gift, which he had received as a gift from the King of Spain.
• The mule population of the USA has been on a roller coaster ride since the highs of over 5 million in 1930. The Amish population explosion between 1982 and 2008 saw a big increase in demand for mules.
• A 2008 study of mule cognition at the University of Sussex fond that mules, over all, not only understood things better than either horses or donkeys but were also better at following instructions.

That’s the great thing about the New Yorker. You just never know what you’re going to learn from it, and when those little tidbits of information might come in handy. I know that next time some says I’m stubborn as a mule, I can say that, actually, it’s a form of genius.

Image above owned by argo 72 [cc]