Just when you thought the government had run out of ridiculous ideas to waste our tax money, along comes education minister Mary Hanafin and the shit-for-brains plan to give books to all newborn babies.  Apparently, the idea is to encourage reading from an early age, thus combatting illiteracy and other reading problems in later life.

Does minister Hanafin realise that newborn children will not, no matter how fucking hard you try to teach them, be able to read until they are, at the very least, 2 years old? Perhaps she thinks these books will survive two years of being torn, scribbled on and chewed so that they may be read by the children at a later stage? Does she not realise that the illiteracy problem lies with the fact that many parents do not (or cannot) read to their children and no amount of free books is going to change this? What kind of retard comes up with these ideas in the first place?

So there we have it, another day, another blatant waste of already sparse resources. More of our money slips down the tubes whilst some well-connected publisher pockets a handy fucking contract. God I love this government.

Not.

An elderly couple I know were looking to get a weekend away next month and since neither of them are computer literate or possess credit cards, they had asked me to find and book a two night stay (with breakfast) for them in a reasonable hotel in Wexford. I’ve been around this block a good few times and know that you can book the exact same hotel, for the exact same nights, yet get different prices on different online reservation websites. I don’t know why…

Anyway, I did a search and found that, at €128 per night, the Quality Hotel & Leisure Centre in Wexford was the cheapest by a long way. I was literally just about to click the ‘book now’ button when I happened to notice the room only rate: €71 per night.

I’m not much of a mathemetician, but it would appear that the privilige of eating their two breakfasts in this hotel will set this couple back a staggering €114, or €28.50 per breakfast. I can only imagine that this must be one of the finest breakfasts to be found in the country, a veritable early morning feast. Surely the sausages must be hand-made in their own kitchen by Nevin Maguire, the rashers carefully sliced from the rump of prize-winning pigs, the mushrooms and tomatoes picked from the Garden of Eden itself and the coffee beans brought directly from Colombia in a private jet flown by that smug bitch in the Kenco ads? The reality, I’d say, is that you’d get as good a breakfast, wrapped in a baguette, down at the local garage. Needless to say, that’s exactly what they’ll be doing.

We all know that Ireland is the land of the rip-offs, but this takes the fucking biscuit.

I’ve been fairly lazy this week, partly due to the Paddy’s Day hangover, partly due to the fact that my laptop is still fucked, but mostly because I’ve been fairly fucking depressed. The God of misfortune has been pissing all over me this week, with large bills (both expected and unexpected) coming thick and fast at a time when I’ve already got fuck all cash. On top of all these, we’ve got a wedding to go to next weekend (I’m one of the groomsmen) so that’ll be another €500-600 down the shitter. Then on Thursday, just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, my car decided to commit suicide.

So I’ve spent much of this week drinking and gambling to take my mind off the question “how the fuck am I gonna pay for all this???”. I can’t say getting drunk helped much and the gambling certainly didn’t improve my financial situation! But thankfully, I emerged from my shell this morning, in the realisation that these things aren’t going to go away by themselves, and miraculously solved all my short-term financial worries in one go - god bless credit cards!

Expect a similar post in about a months’ time…

As a lifelong contributor to the coffers of our illustrious tobacco industry, you can imagine my dismay upon hearing the news yesterday that cigarettes are going up (again) by 30c. Having said that, it could have been an awful lot worse. Yet again, the government pussied out of the big hike, and yet again the anti-tobacco campaigners were whinging that the latest rise only reflects inflation and that the government should have hit us with a wallet-busting €2 per pack increase. Yikes.

Professor Luke Clancy, and his buddies at ASH, say that the cost of cigarettes plays a huge part in deterring kids from smoking. I say that’s a big load of bollocks. I can remember back when I started smoking the price of a 10 box was around 90p. Now 90p might not sound like a lot of money to you, but in 1989 the only kids that had any money were the ones that just made their communion. And let’s face it, your communion wasn’t exactly the rollover lottery jackpot that today’s kids enjoy. You were probably lucky to get £50. And you were even luckier if your parents didn’t drink that £50 when you were tucked up in bed that night. Thieves. And yet, somehow, we all managed to scrape enough cash together to buy 10 Rothmans (kids were hardcore in the 80’s) every couple of days and so begin our careers in smoking.

That 90p to us back then would be the equivalent of €20 to the flush little fuckers we have now, and so, I think Luke Clancy should give up the game on this one. Either that, or campaign for such an enormous increase that your local Spar will have to start offering finance packages on a box of 20 Benson.

Everyone knows the real reason kids take up smoking. It’s the same reason I started smoking and the reason my parents started smoking and their parents before them. Smoking fucking rocks. You can take a four-eyed, snot-nosed, google t-shirt wearing nerd and stick a cigarette in his mouth and he becomes instantly cooler. It’s like magic. And the reason we all have this amazing image of the cool-as-shit smoker is because every single action hero smokes. Fucking Fact. I defy any man under the age of 40 to tell me that he hasn’t, at some point in his life, stuck a fat cigar in his mouth and uttered the immortal words ‘I love it when a plan comes together’. You say you haven’t? You’re a goddamn liar.

If it wasn’t for Bogart, Brando, James Dean, Schwarzenegger, Willis and even that awful sack Mel Gibson then maybe, just maybe, smoking wouldn’t be so cool. Unless someone comes up with some sort of mind-erasing technology, and wipes my memory of these movie legends sparking up a smoke after a particularly impressive killing spree, then I’m sad to say that I think I’ll be smoking till the day I die…

So stop putting up the price, assholes. It’s not working, it’s just pissing us smokers off.

H