Hello.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Last update here was September 2007 and the last one before that was May 2007. So let’s call it a year all in, shall we?

Wow, I miss this blog. It was my first one, and although I’m present and correct on other parts of the Internet, The Levee Breaks was always a special place for me. We talked here. We pondered politics and the deeper issues of life. Sometimes we disagreed and bickered and other times we had a laugh.

But time moves on and we outgrow certain things.

Last June, I finally left the job that was causing me so much anguish. I won’t condemn the entire company, and even though I’d love to out them, I won’t. Northern Ireland’s such a small place, and I’d rather draw a line under that phase of my life and move on. This post is part of the process.

Oh, I could tell you all about it. Suffice to say it was a couple of years of drama that I’d rather forget. I had a friend/colleague whispering rumours and speculation in one ear, while I had a distinct feeling that the company wanted to outsource my job.

As my suspicions were raised, I wasn’t sure who to turn to. I decided to write down everything that was happening, as it happened. Reading over the log is eye opening - there’s evidence that the colleague I mentioned was a trouble-maker who had a history of causing discontent among staff. There’s also evidence that the company was planning to save money by dropping me and outsourcing my job.

This was backed up by the fact that when I finally handed in my notice, there was no attempt to retain my services. And yes, I would have expected that. So I finally had it out with my boss. Denials. And they were happy to crucify the colleague, except I wasn’t entirely convinced they were innocent.

Basically, I could have taken a formal route with the issue and had the situation drag on for ages after. Or I could draw a line in the sand and walk away. So I walked. Every so often I get a surge of resentment, and that’s when I’m tempted to name and shame the company who treated me so badly.

But I won’t. One therapeutic blog post later and I’m feeling so much better. I don’t know if I’ll post here again, but I’ve always loved the ability to post anonymously. There’s a tremendous freedom in that. Maybe.

Is there anyone still out there reading this?

I saw this and thought of you lot…

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

I was sceptical about The Righteous Men from the moment I read the strapline across the top: “The Greatest Challenger To Dan Brown’s Crown”.

Aw, shite. Not another Da Vinci Code rip-off.

The Plot

The plot centers around Will Monroe, a rookie journalist at the New York Times whose wife is inexplicably kidnapped while he’s out obsessively working on a story. As he desperately tries to find and save his wife, he also needs to work out what the connection is between two unrelated murders he covered recently.

Interestingly, Will’s investigations lead him to an Hassidic neighbourhood in New York where he finds his wife’s captors and is promptly given a hiding by them.

Just to confuse matters, Will starts receiving cryptic clues by text message that seem to be guiding him. With the help of the text messages and his hot ex-girlfriend, Will has to find his wife before time runs out.

The Verdict

To be fair, The Righteous Men beats the Da Vinci Code for more realistic characters. You can empathise with Will Monroe more than you could with Dan Brown’s characters. His back story is more developed and you find yourself thinking about how you’d react in the same situation. You can also see his conflicts whenever he has to call upon his former girlfriend for help in decoding the text messages he’s been receiving.

I would say for the first two thirds of the book, I was completely drawn in. The last third, I had started to guess at how the story would end. Let’s just say that the storyline takes a weird and wonderful flight of fancy and becomes completely detached from reality.

The increasingly bizarre events and ever more unlikely climax ruin the book in my opinion. I won’t spoil the ending here, but maybe we can discuss it in the comments. If you want to avoid spoilers, don’t go any further.

Well, I couldn’t let this week pass without some comment on the restoration of the Assembley.

Is this the beginning of a bright new future for Northern Ireland? That was the burning question yesterday. It’s really too early to tell, but surely the signs are hopeful?

I’m not sure what to make of Ian Paisley in the role of First Minister. Let’s face it, the man made his career out of opposing whoever held this (or equivalent) role in the past. In bringing down just about every ‘moderate’ attempt at peaceful governance, Paisley was the anarchist, the mixer, the organ grinder. He effortlessly roused the passions of paranoid Protestants in bigotted tirades against Catholics/Nationalist or anybody who looked at him squinty.

And now he’s the head honcho?

Over the last few years, The Reverend Paisley has had plenty to say about the IRA and Sinn Fein gaining the trust of the people. Today, Ian Paisley still has a long way to go before he has my trust. Too many stunts, posturing and double-speak from Paisley have left me rightly suspicious of his intentions for this Assembley.

My hope for the future is that Paisley decommissions his bigotted rhetoric the same way the IRA put their weapons away. Is it too vain to hope that he has seen the damage he has done to Northern Ireland and that in this late stage of his career (and life) he wants to finally be a force for change?

I hope so. Peace be with you, people…

I, like most people of my generation, like cartoon programes such as The Simpson’s and Family Guy, yet I miss Looney Toons like Tom & Jerry. My favorites also included Speedy Gonzales, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester & Tweetie, Road Runner and of course Bugsy. But a part from the odd feature length sanitized version from Disney, they never seem to show the classics on terrestrial TV, or else I’m never up early enough to watch them? I fear however the PC’ers and people with too much time on their hands to complain caused them to be axed…

I’m not condoning the violence of cartoons or sayings its amusing (although of course it is hilarious); no I’m also interested in the philosophical issues raised by cartoons such as T&J, Cats inhumanity to Mouse for example. Also it’s an interesting case study of the 1950s/60s and its politically incorrect climate, which is progressively diametrically opposed to our current more enlightened times. I’m not asking that they show them just for entertainment, but for the purposes of education of our youth, social studies classes should be established for the study of such cartoons!

Or you could just watch the ones I found on youtube?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8z5JON-fOc
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvR58XdzINk&mode=related&search=
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av7nyA3ufXE
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT92rLEAWd8&mode=related&search=
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-OzPYra_o

Seeing Ian Paisley, the representative of everything wrong with my tribe, and Gerry Adams, the representative of everything wrong with his, trying it seemed to find a “final solution” to the “Irish question” - was for me not surprising. It was what both Sinn Fein and the DUP wanted all along, not peace necessarily, but power - the former to join Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic to fulfil the “1916 prophecy” and the latter to “keep Ulster free from Dublin interference”. Two polar opposite positions have now been brought to the middle ground, which sounds good for Tony Blair and Peter Hain, but is not the reality as far as I can see.

Of course I welcome any move to bring our province into the 21st century, and peace is what I desire, but I am not convinced (yet) that Paisley and Adams can bring that about. Watching them together, I felt a nervous hope, but for a brief moment I wished it would have been David Trimble and John Hume! Not because I like Trimble or Hume, but because I believed they could have had a genuinely equally beneficial working relationship, that they would truely have embraced the middle ground - rather than just talking about it.

Ian Paisley has not fundamentally changed his position, he himself said it was more pressure and threats from Peter Hain and the British/Irish governments, than a genuine desire on his part to make a deal. Gerry Adams has also not fundamentally changed, he has made it his lifes work to destablise and destroy Northern Ireland, he is not seeking reconciliation within our country but a United Ireland “by any means necessary” - even if it does mean turning his back on certain, what Republicans wrongly call “principles”, he will do it all for a United Ireland and more.

I am more of a realist, I do not believe a few photos and nice words are enough, as the British and Irish governments do, to hear them you’d think Paisley and Adams peacenik photo-op was the solution in and of itself. Of course I’d welcome the reconciliation of Loyalism and Republicanism (Paisley is no Unionist) but are these polar opposite idealogues the way of the future or the past?

Paisley is still the old fundamentalist preacher who sees Rome and Leinster House as one, and perhaps believes the devil is behind both, there is a conspiracy behind it all involving the Republican movement as well perhaps?

Republicans accuse him, quite rightly perhaps, of living in the 17th century - of course their enlightened socialists and revolutionarys? Perhaps Adams and his comrades spout Wolfe Tone quotes (a man of the 18th century) about uniting the religious communities, but it means little in reality, they are a sectarian movement with little or no support from Protestants - and their campaign of murder…”armed struggle” has set back their cause by decades - yet Adams and the Volunteers cannot admit that it was a complete and utter failure; Paisley may well live in the 17th century but Adams and Sinn Fein are right there along with him: of course Republicans think living in the 1960s/1970s makes them so much more…”groovy”?

Hugging Fidel, supporting Basque separatists, drawing support for Fatah/Hamas isn’t about ebracing the future; its about clinging on to the past. Fidels Cuba is a relic of the 1950s, complete with that unwashed revolutionary zing, its funny when Republicans talk of the UN Charter on Human rights - when possessing such a simple document in Cuba can get you thrown in prison - as for the Basques, their decades behind the Provos, and for the anti-semites in Fatah/Hamas who strap bombs to small children - their light years away from the 21st century. You can always know someone by their friends, Sinn Fein are not representative of the future or of the 21st or any other century, so the question remains on mine and i’m sure others, lips:

Can Yesterday’s Men Become Today’s Future? We’ll have to wait and see…

I came across de-noted tonight, just thought I’d share this with you.

I blogged a while back about PostSecret, a blog where people anonymously submitted postcards with private or personal thoughts illustrated on them. Well, de-noted is a bit like that, except that people are encouraged to modify and submit pictures of money.

My favourite was the picture of Chairman Mao below:

I feel sick. I stumbled across RoboDump 1.0 this evening.

What’s RoboDump, you ask? It’s a robot that you install in a public toilet cubicle. When you start it up, it makes some godawful noises.

RoboDump is a robot. Sort of. And it poops. Sort of. Forever. A horrible, never-ending bowel movement complete with straining grunts, horrific gas, splashes, and pee sounds.

Sounds like a great idea for anyone office-based like me. Here’s how it works….

I picked this up at the airport that time we went to Amsterdam in December. At that time, I was a complete Irvine Welsh virgin - had never read one of his books before, or even seen Trainspotting (hard to believe?).

What’s It About?

Bedroom Secrets Of The Master Chefs centres around the rivalry between Edinburgh Environmental Health Officer Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby, a newcomer to Skinner’s department to whom Danny takes and instant irrational dislike.

Danny’s a full-on shit: womaniser, heavy drinker, drug taker, thinks Saturday night’s definitely alright for fighting (he’s virtually a professional football hooligan). All this makes for some pretty spectacular hangovers…

…which is where Kibby comes in. Somehow, in his complete hatred of the clean-cut mammy’s boy, Skinner manages to curse Brian Kibby - and somehow manages to curse Kibby with all his hangovers! Essentially, Skinner can party as hard as he likes and Kibby receives the hangover.

Bedroom Secrets is littered with some very humorous set pieces, set in Welsh’s gritty but affectionate Edinburgh. Interestingly, Skinner’s and Kibby’s lives are linked in more ways than they both know, and the tension between the two boils over into open resentment as the novel reaches its climax.

In Summary

Irvine Welsh manages to create some interesting, three-dimensional characters in Bedroom Secrets, from the protagonists Skinner and Kibby to the bit players like Skinner’s mother and his colleagues Shannon McDowall and slimy Bob Foy.

Skinner himself is a masterpiece of nastiness, delighting in Kibby’s downfall and generally getting up to no good. There’s a scene where he seeks assistance from an old clairvoyant and ends up sleeping with her in ‘payment’. Truly disgusting!

I liked Neil McAllister’s review of Bedroom Secrets - he picked up on a good point, that the ‘curse’ on Kibby is like a perverse Dorian Grey enchantment. Neil’s review is worth a read if you’re interested.

A copy of this review is also posted at PopOpinions.com.

This story gave me a laugh when I came across it this morning. In what was basically a very bitter divorce, a man chainsawed the couple’s summer home in half after their divorce settlement.

Well, the judge did say he was entitled to half…..

Just the mental picture of this German dude making off with half a shack on a forklift is cracker:

“The man said he was just taking his due,” said a police spokesman. “But I don’t think his wife was too pleased.”

After finishing the job, the man picked up his half with the forklift truck and drove to his brother’s house where he has since been staying.