THE ÜBERTRONIC TANGO

(By way of clarification, this particular piece was written on foot of my experiences as a warehouse operative in a few multinationals back in the 90's.  Beyond that, it's all completely imaginary.  No real warehouse operatives were injured in the writing of this piece...)

The night was clear, the moon was full,

The stars shone bright and chill,

And in the town of Limerick,

The sleeping town of Limerick

The grim, grey block of Übertron

Was dark and grey and still.

And in the shadow of the warehouse in the cold night air

Things moved and crawled and rustled

Little creepy creatures scuttled

in the shadows on the tarmac darting swiftly here and there.

But none approached too near 

that place of menace and of fear.

Among all those creepy creatures there wasn’t one would dare.

And as the midnight hour drew near, clouds flew before the moon

And an eerie silence crept across the sleeping town

The dogs of Limerick ceased to howl

The cats all ceased to yowl

And a weird sense of something –

An otherworldly something about to happen very soon

Crept across the denizens of that strange town beneath that witching moon…

Within that block called Übertron
the  Übertronic  clocks all ticked…

With electronic resolution the seconds were all picked

Keyed off, packed out and labelled,

Configured when required,

QA’d and shipped into the past

To make a history uninspired.

Second after second, every minute of the day,

The lives of those who pass these doors are packed in this one way

An endless stream of empty dreams sent into yesterday

By the relentless ticking of those clocks

As they Pick, Pack, and Q A.

But now the clocks have ticked and tocked

Their way around the hour

Their metal hands combined now stand

To form the Midnight Tower.

And in the heart of Übertron

Strange magic starts to stir

And a crackling and a sparkling

Breaks through the silent air.

A light flares in the darkness

Strange music starts to swell

And from the hidden heart of lunacy

Comes the Ringing of a Bell….

And down the aisles come dancing the shades of those who toil

Day in, day out, in Übertron with little cause to smile

Led by a figure in a tracksuit and a crimson baseball cap

The motley crew come dancing through the Ubertronic trap.

The midnight hour has fallen

The witching hour is come

It’s time to start the carnival

Of the manic and the glum

The maniacs who work within the walls of this weird hole

Are here to sing and dance tonight, and sell their very souls.

ACELLERANDO

The lights go down and darkness falls

Tension creeps along the aisles

A spotlight flares and in its beam

A single shiny tracksuit gleams

And into the light a pair of glasses smiles

Here’s your M.C. for the evening

The CEO of Übertron

The Boss is here so let’s all cheer

And let the show go on!

He stands in solemn splendour

Face and tracksuit all aglow

As the warehouse rafters echo to the roars and adulation

The king has come among them and His subjects want to show

How much his presence means with an Ubertron ovation.

PIANISSIMO

At last he raises one calm hand and at once the clamour dies

And everyone strains eagerly to hear

What pearls of wisdom or of wit 

will come from one so wise

At the end of this last quarter of this last fiscal year.

“I’d like to say”, His Lordship says, “how much it means to me

To see how well this company has done –

And it’s obvious to anyone who cares to look and see

That it’s clearly MY intelligence 

and MY unique strategy

That generates the energy that makes this business run.”

“I’m really proud,” he goes on, “of the way this crew combined

To clean up each location until each location shined –

We polished up the warehouse

And scrubbed down all the racks

We packed and shipped out orders

And watched them come right back.”

“We counted all the power cords out,

Then we counted them back in

And just in case we’d got it wrong

We counted them again!

Then we moved them onto pallets from the pallets where they’d been

And we counted them a fourth time for our sins!”

“Now, when I say we did it,

            I mean the real work was mine

Because someone’s got to organise and plan

True lunacy can only run along well laid out lines

The crapwork can be done by any man,”

“In other news,” he says, and here his smile grows wide,

“I know we promised you a raise,

            And when we did, we lied.

The wages that you get, we feel, are fair remuneration,

And, at that, we think you do damned well,

 don’t get above your station.

Remember that all promises

of future wealth are lies

-you’ll never be as rich as me,

 but you might be half as wise.”

PRESTO

“Well, that’s about enough of that,

‘cause it’s the end of Quarter

And every one of you is here

To show your loyalty and cheer

The managers who organised your year

With our peculiar brand of torture.”

“It’s time,” the boss shouts, shiny faced,

“to start the rave, and so,

Uninhibited and demented

Contorted and tormented

Confused and re-invented

I give you one

I give you all

The Übertronic Tango!” 

And once again, the lights go down,

And a drumming fills the air

            Then eerie wisps of vapour start to rise

Lasers start to strobe and pulse

And strange colours start to flare

And the place is filled with otherworldly sighs.

Through the drifting clouds of dry ice a figure now appears

Dramatic silhouette  against the laser light

He poses for a second, then to screams and shouts and cheers

In a cherry picker’s cage, he is raised up to a height.

Is it Bono or Bob Geldof?  Is it Elvis?  Is it God?

Andrea Corr or Shane McGowan or Sinead or even Van?

Or a bizarre mixture of them all making something yet more odd

Never seen before by any man?

He is wearing a white jumpsuit and a single spangled glove

He’s Moonwalking and Flashdancing, there’s grace in every move

He’s clearly seen now in the light

The Übertronic Barry White

It’s Roy Gorman and he’s doin’ it on the the Picker there above

He’s doin’ it for Ubertron and he’s doin’ it for Love!

Now Gladys had her Pips and Diana Ross had The Supremes

And history tells us Jagger had the Stones

But of all the bands we’ve ever had

You never dreamt of one so bad

Not even in your deepest darkest dreams

As the menagerie of the weird, the zany and the mad

The depressed, the dejected, the deluded, and the sad

We have Ragin’ Roy Gorman and the Manic Übertones!

Bob Reilly, Joe Lynch, Monica and Sue

Are providing backing vocals now for  Roy

But Roy is doing “Get It On”

While Sue is singing “Sliabh na mBan”

And Monica’s doing a medley from U2

While Bob and Joe are making sounds

That would raise a lustful answer from a passing caribou

Bill Green is playing air guitar

And Jack Burns is on the drums

Bing is on the bongos

And Des is doing sums

Steve and Paul are out there

Making noises with their phones

Gerry’s on the bander

Jim Brown looks slightly stoned

George Cullen’s got a rhythm section with a stapler and tape measure

Barry Mac has disappeared in search of personal pleasure.

 PRESTISSIMO

And now begins this Mardi Gras

This Riverdance beyond belief

This collision of the Twilight Zone

And Michael Flatley’s feet.

But the Michael Fatley here is Podge

Cossack dancing down Aisle J

And the chorus line that comes behind

is a nightmare gone astray

a delirium tremens vision from a hell of rum and gin

stout and beer and vodka, rock and roll and sin

High kicking down the aisles they come

Tap dancing through the night

In time to that relentless drum

Short skirts and legs in tights

The Uberdancing Chorusline

Would put the stoutest heart to flight.

Just close your eyes and try to see

If your courage stands the test

An image of these faces

In Jean Butler’s tights and dress!

Here’s Philip, Ger, and Mikey

Joe Connor, Roy and Bing,

Rocky, Con and Barry, and Psycho on the wing

Their feet are flying fierce with pride

It’s an Ubertronic thing!

Podge Flatley’s feet are blurred and fleet

As he clatters down Aisle J

A thunderous staccato beat

Of Latin fire and Celtic heat

That forces into mad retreat

What little sanity dared stay.

Relentless, now, the dance drives on

A choreographers fever dream

Not so much a Riverdance

As an Übertronic scream

Sweeping all before it in a strange psychotic stream

The dancers form a circle

And at the circle’s core

Joe Brown is doing Disco

Like it was never danced before.

He’s doing John Travolta

By way of Tarantino and Pulp Fiction

But Brownie and Travolta

Are a mind-boggling contradiction.

Whatever drink this man has drunk

It was a powerful potion

It has given whole new meaning to

The idea of Brownian Motion!

The picking crew of Jack McCue are in their cherrypickers

With the forklifts and the pallet trucks, they slowly circle round

Like a locomotive conga line

They are moving to the sound…

Slow at first move Jacko’s crew

But they gradually get quicker

There’s something ominous about

Those conga-dancing  pickers…

FURIOSO

From the corners of the warehouse, the cherrypickers now advance

Their klaxons sounding loudly, their drivers in a trance

They’re locked on a collision course with the Bastard Son of Riverdance

The pickers and the dance collide

In one tremendous crash

Brownie’s at Ground Zero

And is Übertronic hash

The explosion blows out all the walls, the racks evaporate

The stacks of products and the lines all just disintegrate

The warehouse is an inferno – a raging ball of fire

And a mushroom cloud hangs over the Übertronic Pyre.

Sub-Übertronic particles are smashed and recombined

Little bits of  Office Staff and Warehouse atoms meet

Their previous existences are changed and re-defined

Podge particles are still dancing with microscopic feet

Bing-lets and micro-gimps and bollixed S3 bits

Are blown apart by micro-farts in tiny Psycho fits…

PASTORALE

Strange things start to happen and reality must change

The odd place that was Limerick has now been quite erased

Logic has completely gone and life is rearranged

And only God knows how the odd will be replaced

The seeds of tomorrow have been sown

And the future starts to burgeon in this place

In the heart of that explosion were possibilities unknown

Out of Limerick and Übertron will come a strange and different race…

FINALE (PIANISSIMO)

Twenty centuries have passed

Two thousand years have flown

And on the ruins of Ubertron

A strange jungle now has grown

A truly new environment

- the real Twilight Zone!

The night is clear, the moon is full

The stars shine bright and chill

And in the place that once was Limerick

The strange place that was Limerick

The images of Ubertron

Are weirdly living still

Strange mutant creatures prowl between

The mutant vegetation

Their cries and calls are echoes of

A long lost generation.

The particles of strange things past

Have mutated and combined

The things that once were slightly weird

Have been distilled and re-refined

(con dolore)

In the shadows of the jungle

In the cold night air

Things move and creep and rustle

Little creepy creatures scuttle

In the shadows of the branches

Darting swiftly here and there

In the long chill reaches of the night

You will hear those creatures sing

You’ll hear plaintive cries of “Bollix”

Or of “Gimp!” or sometimes “Bing!”

And if you look real close

Your eyes will find strange visions

And you’ll see with growing horror

The latest versions and revisions

Of things you thought long since condemned

To eternal perdition

You’ll see the Brownmac Buzzard

And the balding Senile Gimp

The slowly moving Bingchuck

And the Jimmyracing Chimp

And in the middle of them all

A Riverdancing Demon

- ‘Tis called the Cheerypodger

And it sends the others screamin’!

(con brio)

The bedraggled looking buzzard with Brown eyes is looking on

And every now and then, he shifts and mutters “Übertron”…

But the Cheerypodger rolls along the matted jungle floor

His cry is loud and confident –‘ tis  “Übertron no more”

V for Vendetta - a bit of a review

I started reading this book by accident back in the 80's. I picked up a few issues of a magazine called "Warrior" back then. I could not believe how good the ideas and the artwork and the writing were. Stories like Marvelman, Warpsmith, and the wonderful Bojeffries Saga were among the jewels in that particular crown, alongside an oddly realistic but surreal storyline called "V for Vendetta"...

 I only got a few issues, more or less by accident because that was how comics arrived in Ireland for most of my life - by accident. But the raw talent and intelligence that underpinned those stories was blindingly obvious in the few samples I got the chance to read.

 Coming up to more recent history, I finally got around to reading the full text of V for Vendetta in the late 90's. If you haven't read it and your only knowledge of the book is from the Guy Fawkes masks that have become totemic of the Occupy movement, then I can only suggest you go out and buy the book yourself.

Very strongly influenced by the great dystopian novels of the past, particularly Orwell's 1984, V for Vendetta manages to carve out it's own particularly bleak vision of a Britain that picks up in the darkest days of Thatcherism and marry them to a viciously successful version of the BNP to create a nightmarish fascist state with a distinctly British taste.

 Alan Moore was the author of this book, and his writing was beautifully matched by the artwork of David Lloyd. I read the first few instalments in black and white, and was powerfully struck by the graphic style. Lloyd eschewed conventional comic book techniques and opted instead for an almost photographic realism, evocative of some of the work of Jim Steranko, but distinctively different at the same time.

 Lloyd's work had a kitchen-sink grittiness, a sense of the shabby reality of life under the heel of an oppressive but culturally withered autocracy that spoke directly through the eye to the heart. I have read the full book in colour, but as with classic movies of a certain vintage, my heart belongs to the stark beauty of the original black and white artwork.

 I'm not going to expand on the plot. Anyone who is familiar with Alan Moore's ability to chart a devious and ingeniously labyrinthine narrative while punching home his own particularly dark musings on the inner workings of the human psyche will know what to expect - or, more accurately, will know that whatever you expect, you will still be wrong-footed.

 But if you are prepared to deal with the awfulness of the logical outcome of the thinking behind so many modern government policies all over the world, then get your hands on a copy of V for Vendetta. It does hold out a small spark of hope that in the face of overwhelming authoritarianism, something positive can arise from the pit.

IN MEMORIAM

Last Saturday, my Dad passed away, sometime around nine o’clock in the morning in Cork University Hospital. He had been unwell for a long time, having survived several heart attacks, two major strokes, forty-plus years of diabetes, and a cancer diagnosis. It was his heart that finally gave in.



Last Sunday, Valentine’s Day, he came home to be with us in the house he had shared with my mother for the last forty years.



He stayed with us overnight. The next day he was taken to the funeral home, and on Tuesday we had the funeral mass and burial. He was laid to rest in Shanballymore cemetery beside my brother, his son who was buried there thirteen years ago.


I’m still not sure I believe it happened. He was supposed to be coming home to us, maybe this week or next week, or maybe even in a month if rehab had been required. But he came home last Sunday for the last time.



I owe my Dad a lot.



He was a religious man, but he respected science. He was an Irishman of the old school, raised on nationalism and republicanism, but he fed me no bigotry. He loved the Irish language and was a fluent speaker, but was also fluent in Latin and Greek and he gave me a love for the correct and elegant use of any language.



He gave me books. He introduced me to Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, to P.G.Wodehouse and Flann O'Brien, and to Alistair Maclean and Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter. He bought me the Look and Learn books when I was about six years old and sparked my interest in science and dinosaurs and nuclear energy and castles and sharks. He was my constant source for the Beano, the Dandy, the Topper, Sparky, Whizzer and Chips, the Victor, and Roy of the Rovers. Because of him, I met Superman and Batman and Spiderman and Daredevil and the Incredible Hulk. He sat with me through Star Trek and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Gunsmoke.



My Dad was a Kerryman. He moved from the Kingdom county to live in the People’s Republic of Cork, but he was a Kerryman to the core. On Munster Final or All-Ireland day, if a Kerry team was playing (and they usually were), the afternoon was punctuated with roars of “show them the hammer of it!” or “h-anam an diabhail!” right up to the final minute. Normally a quiet man, gaelic football or hurling brought out a rabid fanatic side of him.



He was a teacher. His classes were in Irish, Latin, History and Geography, but his involvement was always far more than official hours required. He helped establish a student’s council in his school, organised debating and drama teams, was a founder member in Mallow of a pilgrimage group that raised funds to send disabled or sick kids to Lourdes every Summer, was a regular participant in or organiser of anything that involved the Irish language or Irish music, and was instrumental in founding Mallow’s first Gaelscoil – a primary school where Irish is the first language for all purposes. I met a past pupil of his at the funeral on Tuesday who told me that the only words he could use to describe my Dad were “an t-Uasal” – an Irish honorific which simply means “gentleman” or “noble” when used with it’s original intent.



He told really awful jokes – usually Kerryman jokes.



My parents have shared fifty one years of friendship and love, and I was privileged to be there for most of those years. If you can tell anything about a man from the people who love him, then my mother set the gold standard for my father. Together, they gave us everything they could in terms of love, support, and opportunity.



It’s only at funerals that you get to meet people you should have made the effort to meet and hear the stories you should have heard years before. I’ve spent the last week meeting my Dad’s extended family and friends and discovering just how wide and deep his legacy runs.



I spoke for my father at the funeral, and I hope I managed to say something that was worthy of the man. I know I wanted to acknowledge how much his family meant to him and how much they had done for him – all of the Browns and the Barrys and the O’Farrells and the Langfords and the Kissanes and Cashmans and the Hanafins and Nelsons and Tavolieris and others who had been such an important part of his life. I wanted to thank all of his friends. I wanted to say how proud I was that such people had called him their friend.



My Dad was not an artist, but he gave me a love of art. He was not a writer, but he gave me a love of books. He was not a scientist, but he gave me a love of science. He was no comedian, but he gave me my sense of humour. He was a quiet and unassuming man, but he thought me the value of love of people. The only thing he didn’t give me was a love of money. I think, on balance, I am all the richer for that.



He is at rest now in Shanballymore cemetery, along with my brother Ciarán, my uncles Kevin, Des, Bill, and Cormac, and my Grandmother. A sod of Kerry earth is in his grave with him.



Slán abhaile, a Dhaid. Táim cinnte i m-anam agus i mo chroí go bhfuil tú slán sabhailte agus sásta anois.



Go raibh maith agat.

Captain, My Captain

On foot of the publication by our beloved former leader of his true, unexpurgated, non-revisionist, and completely unembellished autobiography, I felt it was an appropriate time to post this picture I sketched a few years ago. Truly, a legend in his own mind, he can claim credit for so much of what we see around us today...

Credulity and credibility, credit and the incredible, creeds and greed…

The past few months have thrown all of these words into sharp focus in my mind. Not that they weren't fairly clearly delineated there anyway, given my Irish Catholic childhood and schooling, but the governmental, financial, and clerical shenanigans of the recent past have given them that bit more prominence than hitherto.

The more etymologically inclined among you will have spotted that "greed" is the odd one out in the opening lexicon, but those of a more philosophical and cynical mind will realise that they really do all belong together in any realistic theory of human society. In fact, they underpin most of what we think of as the pillars of our day to day lives.

Let's face it. Whatever our pretensions, rationality is not exactly a driving force in a world that goes through the boom-bust economic cycles or that elects a George Bush to the presidency, or that wages implacable hate-filled war in the names of men who preached love and peace. We all talk a good fight about our sensible, logical approach to the world, but an unbelievably large proportion of our decisions are predicated on blind faith rather than logic. We are, by virtue of herdity and environment, herd animals.

Don't get me wrong here, we can and do act reasonably rationally a lot of the time, but the whole thing of "faith" does underpin our behaviour. Faith is just another word for belief - and it's the fuel that burns brightest in the infernoes of stupidity we perpetrate on ourselves and each other .

Look at the whole economy thing. It is, after all, nothing more than a shared delusion. Money only has a value because we all agree it has a value, and the jobs we do are often only valuable because we believe they are valuable. I'm not suggesting that a doctor or a teacher or a binman don't do valuable work, but the agreed rates of pay are based on an arbitrary set of values set by the market at a given time under the influence of a particular zeitgeist.

What does "confidence in the economy" mean, after all? Just that enough people believe in or don't believe in the value of a currency, which is nothing more than an illusion in the first place. If the human race disappeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow, the entire concept of money would go with us. It is only an artefact of Human belief.

Creeds and credibility and credulity and greed. Whether we're talking about NAMA or Fianna Fail or the Catholic Church or Creationism or Organic farming - as a species, we take so much on trust from those in whom we repose that trust. Priests and politicians, lawyers and scientists and teachers and doctors - they have all been entrusted with our lives and livelihoods.

That's an awful lot of power to hand over to people who are fallible, venal, silly, and weak. But that's what we do for no better reason than that we have chosen to "believe".

Did you ever notice that "lie" is in the exact centre of "believe"?

Shomewhere, Over The Rainbow...

I'm feeling a wee bit bardic today. That's possibly because I've just realised I missed National Poetry Day there a few days ago. Who knew there was such a thing as a National Poetry Day? It gives me a little pang of pride in what could be confused with my patriotic core to think that my country, which is in so many ways a bit of a banana republic, still has the touch of soul required to have such a thing as a day dedicated to the muse of rhyme.

Of course, I live in a city that gave its name to an entire genre of poetry, although the Limerick is not generally regarded as being on the same level of artistic credibility as the work of Seamus Heaney or W.B.Yeats. Still, I'll seize on any crumb of fame by proxy that's going around.
Coincidentally, I notice that this year has now supplied us with an unlikely confluence of rhymable words in honour of the day. Brian Cowen has given us Nama, America has given us Barack Obama, and, just this week, our traffic news gave us three goats and five Lamas ( of the hairy,hooved, grass-eating variety - no Tibetan clergy were harmed in the weaving of this tale) loose on the Dual Carriageway outside Dublin! What a bonanza for any amateur versifiers lurking in the undergrowth.

I'm going to fight the temptation to delve into the world of rhyme for the very good reason that my abilities in that direction have been muzzled by the Geneva Convention. Instead, I'm going to cast my web of words over the related but altogether different subject of music. Given that my own musical ability is actually about on a par with that of my spaniel, some might say that that's akin to a blind blacksmith taking up golf. I'm not saying that they'd be wrong either, so prepare to see some deep trenches in the musical fairways.

Music, basically, is an art form reliant on sound. It's made up of pitch (which, in my day, would control things like melody and harmony), rhythm, which seems to be waaaay too powerful nowadays, and the sonic qualities that connoisseurs describe as timbre and texture. The word derives from the Greek word "mousike" which translates more or less as "art of the Muses",( and has nothing at all to do with moussaka, which features aubergines and tastes really good.) (Aubergines are a kind of vegetable and are in no way related to the word "aborigine", just to be absolutely clear on that.)

I think it was that modern Gilbert-and-Sullivan-type team of Ulvaeus and Andersson who gave us the immortal line; "thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing." What Benny and Bjorn actually meant was "thank you for the demographic which constitutes a spending population with enough cash in pocket to drive our income into overdrive", but that probably wouldn't have scanned as well lyrically as the accepted text does. Also, it would have been hard to dance to. Personally, I was young enough to be part of the Abba generation, which is to say that I was a bog-standard, acne-ridden, adolescent male who laid claim to coolness by listening to Bob Dylan and Neil Young while shamefacedly hiding the Abba Gold album at the back of the meagre collection of LP's. It goes without saying that my coolness was entirely in my own mind and completely evaded the notice of any of my peer group.

The thing about music is that it's so rooted in our psyches that we are not, for the most part, aware of how all-pervasive it is. As far as I know, some of the deeper thinkers among us reckon it's older than language as a formal method of communication, which makes a certain kind of sense. After all, birds get by with singing and chirping, so I have no qualms about the idea of a neolithic version of Bruce Springsteen belting out a few lines of "born to run" as a signal that the hunt was on. He could not, of course, sing "Born in the USA" as that great nation had not yet been discovered by any of the ethnic groupings entitled to discover countries, regardless of whether they happen to be occupied or not. The idea of a Jurassic Barry Manilow, on the other hand, sends chills down my spine.

The great minds also tell us that the rhythm component of music can be traced back to the sound of the beating heart heard by the embryonic infant in the womb. That steady pulse forms part of the background subconscious landscape of every vertebrate animal - it is, literally, the rhythm of life.

In the past, music was a vital component of the working and worshipping world, as well as being an intrinsic part of the social fabric of life. Working songs and sea shanties set the pace for many tasks that required close co-ordination by a number of people - hauling sails or digging trenches or reaping the harvest. Spiritual music and hymns gave that extra filip to the whole religious experience. And of course, no shindig could happen without a few jigs and reels and waltzes or polkas.

Now, where am I going with this? Well, it's just this. The twentieth century has democratised music beyond the wildest dreams of any mop-headed twelfth century troubadour. Radio, the gramophone, vinyl, television, the cd, the dvd, the hd, the MP3, the iPod, the mobile phone, the laptop - access to music is all-pervasive. Even when you don't want to listen to msic, it's right there being broadcast over PA systems, or being played too loudly by some guppy with headphones and no sense of the social niceties. Music has become more like that really annoying wallpaper in the bathroom than the fabric of life it once was. Any suggestion of quality control seems to have been disposed of as being somehow an infringement of the democratic right of every half-arsed idiot with a set of drumsticks and a completely unjustified ego to inflict his (or her) latest effort on the unwary listening public.

Of course, a large part of our problems might have been avoided if the parents of the last few generations had refused to give any pocket money to their little darlings. The teeny boppers of the past forty years or so were the fuel that fed the inferno of musical muppetry that has been the bane of so many curmudgeonly ears like mine.

We now have American Idol, the X Factor, Pop Idol and the generally bone idle on our screens around the clock, on top of the plethora of music television channels, local idiot broadcasters, and the curse of viral Youtube stuff. Moses might have thought he was being a bit rough on the ancient egyptians with his various plagues and whatnot, but I'm of the opinion that frogs and locusts run a pretty poor second in the nuisance division when compared with Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh and Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan and (God help us ) the Hoff.

And, as a salutary warning, we have seen Mamma Mia, the musical achieve cinematic status in the last few years. Don't get me wrong. As I confessed earlier, I actually like Abba, even when Pierse Brosnan and Colin Firth are mangling the melodies. I went to see the film with my wife, and, despite being one of only four males in an otherwise solidly female audience, I thoroughly enjoyed it. ( I was actually the only man there when we arrived, and I think it's a tribute to my security in my own masculinity that I didn't suddenly remember I'd forgotten to wash the dog when we walked into the theatre half an hour early and found it already half full of the fizzy and giddy giggling brigade. Five minutes later, another guy showed up in tow to his girlfriend looking even more sheepish than me, and two more trickled in shortly after that. We spent the evening giving each other the manly thumbs up across the darkened aisles…)

The point is, Mamma Mia is just a film built around Abba's greatest hits. It's the thin end of the wedge. What next? Think about it. Do we really want to see Stock, Aiken and Waterman's eighties output given the same treatment?

Or what about Bananarama- the Musical?

Or suppose we get "Shorry - Boyzone, the Shtory Sho Far."

Think on it and tremble. Dark days lie ahead. Now I know how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Homo Sap? Get wise.

Elsewhere in my bloggery, I have paid tribute to two writers who had a huge influence on my earlier reading career - namely Messrs Wodehouse and Asimov. But more recently ( and by recently, I mean in the last ten or twenty years - when you get to my advanced decrepitude, you count the passage of time in decades...) where was I..? Damn those parentheses ... Oh yeah, more recently, I was saying, I came across the work of one Terry Pratchett.

I confess that I had ignored the books of Pratchett up till then, largely on the basis, and I hope I can be forgiven for this, of their covers. The early books were encased in the artwork of Josh Kirby - a fine artist, and much admired by many, but his style was not attractive to my eyes. I thought the books were juvenile looking, and the garish colours and gnarly, distorted figures did not appeal to my sense of humour or aesthetics.

However, when I was on holidays in Majorca, lo, these many years ago now, I was stuck for something to read. I am a confirmed bibliophile and the prospect of a holiday in the sun without something papery and print-covered struck fear into my heart, so an emergency expedition was launched and I discovered an Oxfam shop in the nearby town. And in that blessed place of trade, I found "Feet of Clay" by one T. Pratchett. Desperation whispered in my ear, saying "go on, give it a go." The only other option that presented itself was a shelf of Mills and Boon and a solitary dust-coated copy of Arthur Hailey's "Hotel". I heeded the voice of desperation.

I never looked back. Once bitten by the Pratchett bug, I was a confirmed addict and embarked on a quest to redeem my previous sin of omission by collecting the complete works. For those of you who haven't read any of those books, I can only say you should also try at the earliest possible opportunity to correct that error.

The background to all of his stories is fantasy - but he has re-invented a great many onventional monsters in his own unique way. Dragons, golems, vampires, witches and wizards are all here, but they all march to a slightly different drum and have acquired an internal logic that is delightfully credible and entertaining. I won't bore you with the details of how he does it, 'coz half the fun of reading his books is waiting to see what he'll do next.

What sold me on Pratchett's writing is the ability the man has to tell a story from start to finish and leave you satisfied that the story has been told as well as it possibly could be told. There are far too many best selling writers who bring you from page to page in a breathless rush of steadily mounting excitement, only to crash through the last few fences ignoring or forgetting seemingly crucial plot points, and leave you wondering what it was all about. Pratchett doesn't do that. His pacing is perfect, and he plots as well as anyone I've read.

He manages in every book to find ways to dodge clichés and avoid repetition of old and hackneyed plotlines. His characters are flawed, but try to do the right thing, and he retains a strong moral core in all his books without being preachy or po-faced about it. The sense of humour that pervades all of his work is very Monty Python in the earlier books, and becomes more subtle as they progress, acquiring darker shades and carrying more gritty social satire in the more recent publications.

I won't go on too much more about this - it starting to sound a tad eulogistic. But the main thing that I like about this guy's writing is the intelligence and cynical common sense he brings to bear on so many societal assumptions. Human vanity is a regular target of his. Whether it's the concept of monarchy, hierarchy, patriotism, bigotry, religion, academia, or just plain self-importance, there's a Pratchett Pin for every foible's bubble.

The conceit I like best is one he has revisited himself several times - the notion of the innate superiority of the Human Race. I'm reading Richard Dawkins at the moment, and he has similar things to say in his own style, and maybe I'll vent my admiration for his work on another day.

Anyhoo, Prattchett questions the impartiality of the anthropologists who assigned the name "Homo Sapiens" to our species. It translates as "man the wise", you know. In fairness, if you look around at our various political and social pillars, how many times could you apply that term to the so-called great and good of our world? I mean, seriously now...?

Pratchett's thesis (which I understand is not unique to him, but I'll call it that) is that we are not exactly God's Last Word - unless God has a really warped sense of humour. That's hardly earth-shattering, I know, but I really like the idea that the whole issue of anthropological taxonomy should be revisited. That's what the bould Terry suggests in one of his books - that the scientific community should sit down and agree collectively to re-label the human race in a more appropriate manner.

Current evolutionary evidence tells us that we are most closely related to the Chimpanzee, or Pan Troglodytes as the boffins would have it. In fact, the general trend of scientific thought seems to indicate that our common ancestor is distressingly close in evolutionary time - distressing if you are a creationist, that is.

The principal thing that distinguishes us fundamentally from Pan Troglodytes is not our computers or our sailboats or rocket ships or racing cars. It's not even our opposable thumb, although there's no denying that it is very handy. (Sorry)

No, what distinguishes us is our linguistic skill - our ability to communicate. We do it all the time, obsessively and compulsively. By computer or television or radio or telephone, by the written or the spoken word, in cinemas and theatres and concert halls, in poetry and in songs and in paintings and in text messages, the biggest part of our lives is given over to sending and receiving explicit and implicit information. And the thing we do with all of these words and ideas and dreams is this - we tell stories.

We are storytellers - every one of us. It's how we make sense of the world. We build an artifice of information into a coherent structure that tells us enough to help us understand or deal with any issue. The story of the creation or of evolution or relativity or of Gilgamesh the King - they are all vessels for information that allow our brains to cope with the world.

That's not to say that all stories are equally valuable - Jeffrey Archer is not William Shakespeare and L. Ron Hubbard is not Einstein. You have to evaluate every story you are told in the light of all the other stories, and hopefully arrive at a sensible, workable set of conclusions.

Be all that as it may, and I'm not going to debate the relative merits of any of the forementioned here, the point is that we tell stories. We are narrators. And the name Pratchett mooted for our species and which I would like to second with all my heart is "Pan Narrans" - the storytelling chimp.

Oook!

Things to say in Dublin when you're dead - Philosophy 101

I'm in a philosophical frame of mind today. Imminent redundancy gives one furiously to contemplate one's own place in the universe, and I've been looking into the meaning of life, the universe and all that. I've done a bit of research, gazed at my navel introspectively, removed any belly-button fluff that was getting in the way, and I thought I might share some of my insights with you, if you don't mind…

Now I know you'll be familiar with Kant and Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer and Nietzche, so I won't bore you with repeating the more familiar aphorisms - Nietzche's old "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you" or Hegel's "Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights." spring to mind here, but I did do a trawl of some of the less well known but equally entertaining boffins of the philosoverse - if I may coin a neologism.

Life, according to the philosopher Gump, is like a box of chocolates. (Actually, he said chawk-lets, but I think we all know what he meant.) Personally, I think he was a bit on the optimistic side there. Experience tells me that life is more like visiting the toilets in our beloved workplace. Until you lift the lid, you don't know what you're going to have to deal with. Sometimes, it's pristine porcelain and you can just get on with your own business in a calm and relaxed manner, but more often than not you find yourself having to deal with the crap someone else has left behind. And sometimes it's all just too much and you run screaming from the cubicle. (I've only seen that happen once, in fairness.) But, and of this we are all certain, when that great final flush eventually comes, only God knows what kind of shite will be left.

Some of the stuff that's out there is written along the same lines as the Lisbon Treaty or the recent NAMA legislation. I mean, if someone says "I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying," you're going to feel a tad confused. That was Charles C. Finn's contribution, and it frankly left me in the same zone as the Zen thingy that advises you should knock on the sky and listen to the sound.

Of course, one of the classics of this sort was by a dude called Chuang Tzu, who said "The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?" This was clearly a man who understood the Soul of Ronan Keating, or who had been smoking something very herbal very recently.

Ram Dass said that if you think you're free, there's no escape possible, which didn't really cheer me up much and Heraclitus wasn't much better with "Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death." A lot of these guys erred a trifle on the gloomy side, and wouldn't be ideal holiday reading in the same class as, say, Dan Brown or Cecilia Ahern.

Stanislaw J. Lec said "If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?" which I thought was pretty good. Edward Albee said that sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly, which I also thought was fairly ok, but not as witty as Lec's line. Santayana, not to be outdone on the cryptic paradox thingy told us that almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

A guy called Robert Brault, who's obviously spent a lot of time on Ticketmaster, tells us that "I've observed that there are more lines formed than things worth waiting for." I concur. Although I did enjoy the recent Leonard Cohen gig, which was definitely worth waiting for and supplied more than a few philosophical moments of its own. But I think shopping in Tesco or Dunnes on a Friday evening bears out Brault's thesis.

Of course, if you want profundity, you've gotta go to Buddha (he ain't heavy…) who said "The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground." I don't know if he actually said that for the record, but you know how it is when you're at a good party. A few pints and a couple of shorts later, and you'll say any old thing that comes into your head, and the next day it's all over Facebook or Bebo. Look at Antonio Porchia, who told us in 1943 that "a thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence". He never heard the end of that one from the lads, and eventually started going to a different local just to dodge the wisecracks.

The Greeks, while we're in the classical world, apparently have a saying that goes:" A thousand men can't undress a naked man." That sounds like something Graham Norton might have said at a party, but it is, apparently, both ancient and authentic. Stand-up comedy has clearly been a part of human culture for a long time. In the modern world, and not to be outdone by those Greeks, America has a proverb that states that eggs cannot be unscrambled, but I betcha there are plenty of government research groups and Fas employees out there trying to disprove that one.

Anyhoo, having dipped my slightly discoloured big toe in the shallows of philosophy, I can only say that my own experience leads me to the conclusion that the man with the most profound insight was an Irishman. Apparently, some years ago a deep thinker called Murphy formulated a Law as all-pervasive and accurate as Einstein's wild notions about Relativity, and I firmly believe that Murphy's Law underpins the very fabric of our day-to-day existence within the walls of this wonderful world.

Days like today and months like the coming months and governments like the present shower definitely drag me, kicking and screaming, to the sad conclusion that anything that can go wrong will surely do so with vim and gusto.

Best regards and philosophical salutations,

Des