I was away in Spain recently and, thanks to my shitty salary, I had the honour of flying with Ryanair, again. I don’t like flying with Ryanair, never have. Perhaps it’s the headache-inducing bright yellow cabin or the exceptionally high ratio of male flight attendants or maybe it’s just because Michael O’Leary is a tight fisted wanker. I don’t know.

I’m not really great for flying with any airline, not since the Twin Towers came down. I know there’s more chance of winning the lotto than dying in a plane crash but even still, I can’t relax on a plane. There’s always a “What if…?” scenario being played out in my mind when I fly. And on Ryanair flights it’s worse than usual.

I had flown over to Spain a few days previously with Aer Lingus and it was a much nicer plane. More legroom, better headrests, seats that actually recline. A flying palace compared to the winged sardine can I now found myself in. Having kicked and punched my way to the front of the queue, I was one of the first to board. So I chose my seat and settled in, waiting then to see who would sit beside me. Here’s a tip: If you see someone eyeing up the seat next to you, but they look like a bit of a freak, make gurning faces and mutter to yourself. They’ll quickly find themselves somewhere else to sit. Works every time, trust me. Pity I forgot to do it.

The man that parked his arse in the seat next to me had John Waters written all over him. A fuck ugly, middle aged, self-righteous tosser… with a briefcase. Who fucking carries briefcases these days? Briefcases are for cunts. I just knew that this guy was a knob-end, and the knob-ends always try to make conversation.

“Hello there”, he said, not wasting any time.

“Howz’it goin?”, I replied. I tried to sound like a scumbag, hoping then he would just shut the fuck up and leave me alone. My scumbag accent musn’t be very good. To be fair, he didn’t yap on as much as I thought he would, but when he did talk, it was pure verbal horse shit. You probably met someone like this yourself, the type of person who tells a total stranger what’s good to eat on the menu.

“It’s Ryanair… it’s all shite” I said. I’m fucking right too.

“Honestly…”, he says, “…the wraps are delicious”.

I don’t know where this guy gets his dinner, but personally, I’d sooner eat a tramps trousers than a Ryanair wrap. To call it ‘delicious’ is just preposterous. Maybe he meant the wrapper was delicious? That would make a bit more sense. Either way, I was getting pretty fucking aggravated by this asshole. He must have sensed it:

“You don’t like flying, do you?”

“Not really, no”

then he started:
“I used to dread flying, but now I enjoy it… I’ve read a book about the fear of flying… it’s all in the head, you know? The book told me how to overcome my fear… now I love flying…”

Somebody please shut this fucker up. Another 1… 2… 2 and a half… Bollocks, another 2 and a half hours beside this wanker. I didn’t even bring a book. I’ll have to pretend to sleep, I thought. So next time the conversation died down, I tried my best to get into a comfortable sleeping position (impossible) and closed my eyes. I didn’t think I’d actually sleep (since I can never sleep on planes) but surprisingly, I conked out in a matter of minutes.

When I awoke the first thing I did was look at my watch. I had slept for two whole hours… Nice one! We’ll be landing soon enough and, for some unknown reason, no-one seems to talk during landing. Just then the pilot came on the intercom:

“Hi Folks, this is your captain. Just want to let you know that there are strong winds over Dublin at the moment, so our descent may get a little bumpy. ”

“Shite”, I thought, “That’s the last fucking thing I wanted to hear” . I started feeling uncomfortable right away, and I noticed that I was beginning to sweat. The man beside me, seeing I wasn’t too happy about hearing this news, tried to reassure me that everything would be ok.

“I fly a lot, it’s never as bad as they make it out to be”, he said.

“Thanks. I’m sure I’ll be fine”, I said. I wasn’t fine though, not one fucking bit fine.

The next couple of minutes passed without event. I thought that maybe the captain was wrong or the winds had died down and I was just starting to relax a little when the plane began to tremble. It started out as a small tremor but quickly got stronger and for a good 30 seconds we were shaking rather violently. The shaking stopped quite suddenly and everyone around me took a deep breath. The tosspot seated next to me said, “Fuck, I didn’t like that”.

Great. Now Mr “Everything’s gonna be ok” was nervous too.  That didn’t help.

The respite didn’t last long and the trembling started up again in much the same fashion as the last time. This time, however, was even worse than the last, and the cabin was really shaking hard. Then, suddenly, we dropped. There were screams coming from behind me and one man at the back of the plane shouted “JESUS CHRIST!” rather loudly, which would have been pretty funny if I wasn’t screaming it in my own head at the same time. I’ve no way of knowing just how far the plane fell, but I’ll tell you now that if I wasn’t wearing my seat belt my head would’ve burst through the overhead storage compartment. Brick-shitting was rampant.

After the shaking stopped and the plane had steadied it course once more, the captain came back on the intercom, sounding a little worried:

“I’d just like to remind all passengers to ensure that their seat-belt is tightly fastened and to make note of your nearest emergency exit”. He might as well have told us to repent our sins.

“WHAT THE FUCK DID HE SAY THAT FOR…??”, shouted the man sat beside me, “…THE ROTTEN CUNT!”

“Oh fuck”, said I in reply. Thoughts of ploughing into the Irish Sea or the long term car park were now racing through my mind, and by looking at the faces around me, I’d say I wasn’t alone. As we began to descend over Dublin Bay, I tried my best to avoid thinking about the words “Impact” and “Ball of fire”. Strangely, I found myself saying goodbye to my loved ones in my thoughts. Death was imminent. As we neared the runway, I gripped the edge of the armrests so tightly I’d say I left impressions of my fingers in them. My eyes were firmly closed as I waited for the bang. Thankfully, It never came.
The landing itself was very smooth and I let out an enormous sigh of relief. Some people cheered, others were thanking Jesus or Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever ridiculous lord they believed in. Some, like me, were too scared to say anything. I looked at my hands I noticed that I was shaking like Michael J Fox after 20 cups of coffee. I swore to myself that I’d never fly with Ryanair again.

There was no fluting around when the plane came to a stop. Everyone grabbed their shit and got off the plane as quickly as possible. You would expect that the captain or the flight crew would apologise to the passengers as they disembarked but no, nothing. Not even so much as a fucking “thank you”. The pilot didn’t even have the decency to come out of the cockpit and I’m sure I heard the sound of hearty laughter as I walked down the steps. Cheeky cunts.

I didn’t notice I right away, because I was so eager to get inside the terminal to safety, but as I left the airport some 20 minutes later I noticed something odd: There were no trees bent over… no bits of rubbish blowing down the street… no sign of any fucking wind at all. I lit a cigarette and even the cigarette smoke was just… drifting… away. There couldn’t possibly have been less wind.

The laughter from the cockpit suddenly made sense. We were had. The pilot staged the whole fucking thing for a laugh. The bumping, the shaking, the worried voice telling us to find our nearest emergency exit and THAT FUCKING DROP. All a big prank.

I have a message for the pilot of that Ryanair flight, whoever you are: You’re a total prick. Honestly, what kind of a sadistic asshole purposely scares the living shit out of 200 people for a fucking laugh? I saw an elderly woman praying for her life. I saw a young couple getting off the plane and they’d obviously been crying. In fact, Everyone onboard including the “I love flying” fuckwit was visibly shaken, some of them might never fly again. All so you and you ‘crew’ can have a few giggles? You prick. I hope your plane nosedives into an oil tanker in the middle of the ocean and you burn to death in the most horrible way. I’ve got the right mind to blast your fucking plane out of the sky (where’s the Al-Qaeda when you need them?) you fucking prick.
And just so you don’t forget: YOU’RE A PRICK.

And you owe me a pair of underpants too, you cunt.

…YOU MOTHERFUCKIN PIECE OF SHIT!!!

*smash*

Sorry about that. Nothing in this world is as liable to drive me into a violent rage as my mobile phone. That’s the third one I’ve destroyed in such a fashion since last summer. I really shouldn’t blame the phone, it’s the cunt on the other end of the line that I’d like to smash off the wall, the infuriating prick.

I’ve had a mobile phone for as long as I can remember, in fact, I was one of those ‘yuppie bastards’ that had a mobile way back when they were the size of your average toaster. And it never really bothered me that I was contactable at any given time, most likely because people didn’t call you at strange times of the day. But in the last few years it seems that ‘office hours’ have been abolished and your colleagues/clients think they can (and should) call you whenever they fucking please. Some people have even gone as far as leaving blatently abusive comments on my voicemail simply because they can’t get in touch with me. What the fuck is with that? Since when did it become law that you must be contactable 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?

Maybe it’s just because I’ve got a shit type of job and this doesn’t happen to other people, but I don’t think so. What has happened to our society that we can’t simply finish work for the day when we leave the building? Why does some annoying asshole (usually, the boss) make ridiculous demands of me during my time off? Why can’t people just fuck off and LEAVE ME ALONE!!!*

Fuck it… my phone is in bits.

Can anyone recommend to me a good replacement?

*Not you, unless you’re my boss.

After a bolloxy long day in work today (13 hours of Monday shite at it’s very worst) I was really looking forward to getting home, putting the feet up and staring at the box for a couple of hours whilst supping on a couple of whiskeys. I got out the Jack Daniels, put a nice drop into a glass with some Coke and ice and turned down the lights. All I needed now was something moderately watchable so that I could go about destroying some brain cells (preferably the ones storing today’s memory) and then pass out on the couch. A small bit of mind-numbing bliss at the end of a shitty day, that’s all I ask for.

But what do I get? Absolute….shite. I don’t know exactly how many channels I can receive, but I suspect it’s close to 500. Now, you would think that with 500 or so channels there would be at least one good program being aired at prime time on a poxy Monday night. For fuck’s sake it can’t be that hard to dig up some good fucking telly shows, can it? The tripe that passes for entertainment these days makes me wonder. I could look at of show about someone taking a shit and it would be more watchable than Desperate Housewives or Lost. Trust me.

Once a year I pay a fucking scandalous TV licence fee despite the fact it’s impossible to receive over-the-air broadcasts where I live. This means I must also pay a 2nd shower of cunts (ie. Sky) to actually receive the channels I’ve already paid for. All in all, I waste over €800 a year on this shit. Not any more. I’m taking my €800 and buying myself a flight to Japan where the media executives know a thing or two about real entertainment, as you can see for yourself:

See what I mean?

With the exception of a handful of quacks in the American Republican Administration, we, as a race, have all now accepted the reality that our planet is fucked… and that it’s pretty much all our fault. But rather than actually make some serious environmental changes, our collective Governments have been dragging their heels since the whole ‘Global Warming’ theory was first put forward some 50 odd years ago.

50 fucking years. And what exactly have the mighty industrialised nations of our world achieved in the last 50 years? Well unless you can call breeding a populace of fat bastards an achievement, they’ve done fuck all.

But perhaps, this is the root of the problem. Fat people are, as we know, slow and lazy. From a global resources perspective, fat people are a strain that we can no longer tolerate. Let’s take a look at the facts:

• A Fat person needs to have bigger clothes, a bigger car and bigger furniture.
• In some extreme cases, fat people require specialised machinery just to move their fat fucking asses.
• Fat people eat more, thereby taking someone else’s share of food.
• Fat employees cost companies millions of lost man-hours per year due to the fact that it takes them longer to walk to and from the toilet/snack machine.
• Fat people use more water when washing (although this is sometimes balanced out by washing less often).
• According to the laws of force, more energy is required to move a fat person. Try this one out yourself.

Everything about these fat cunts is a needless waste. If these people weren’t so resource-hungry, our world wouldn’t be so fucked. So what I suggest is that we put all the fatties to work in ‘human power plants’. No, I’m not talking about Matrix-style bio-cells! They could be just like gyms, but the ‘exercise equipment’ would all be turbine-based so when the fatsos run, cycle or row, their fat asses are being converted into electricity.

This plan which not only would see a huge decrease in our fossil fuel consumption, but also has the added bonus of taking fat people off the streets. And that can only be good.

Think about it.

As you probably all know, Ireland’s Top Model - Katy French, said goodbye to this cruel world just a few short hours ago in the arms of her sister Jill at Our Lady’s Hospital in Navan. Another victim of Ireland’s impressive record in the ‘World coke-snorting Championships’. Of course, your not likely to hear the mainstream media say that. It’s waaaaaay too insensitive to say something like that about one of our darling dead Tiger Cubs. According to the latest press reports, Katy French was not, (as many people believed) going a bit heavy on the nose powder at a party when she collapsed. In fact, she wasn’t even at a party. She was merely over at a friends house having a chat… and there were lots of other people there… and it was around 3am, when all of a sudden, she had a mysterious seizure leading to multiple heart attacks. Yeah right. I’ve seen that girl do a bungee jump, there was fuck all wrong with her heart then. And what exactly were all these people doing at 3am, if not ‘partying’? Playing poxy Scrabble?

As I write this, there still been no formal Garda investigation launched into the circumstances of her death, any by all accounts they seem to be taking a very sensitive approach to the matter. Asking a couple of questions here and there, not causing a big fuss. Just keeping themselves to themselves really.

Rewind a couple of days before this awful tragedy, and you might recall that another young man died due to overdosing on the nation’s favourite sugar substitute. His name (in case you’ve already forgotten) was Kevin Doyle, and his friend, John Grey is still in a critical condition at Waterford Regional Hospital. In this situation, however, the Gardai were called in, the house was raided and people were arrested. The media promptly made sure everyone knew that these boys were ‘no-angels’ and were speculating as to what exactly was in the ‘cocktail of drugs’ they had taken. There was no big 6-page spread on the tragic loss of life for this young man, as I’m sure we’ll see in the morning for Ms French. Why not? Well, as it turns out, the lads happened to come from the Sunny Southeast’s Capital of Crime - Ballybeg in Waterford City. And for that reason we are not supposed to give a shit about them.

So what exactly does this say about the ‘unbiased’ media reporting in Ireland? It doesn’t fucking exist, that what it says. I wholeheartedly apologise for the insensitive nature of this post but it drives me absolutely mad to see this kind of bullshit two-tier society crap going on. Whilst Katy French won’t be soon forgotten, Kevin Doyle will hardly even be remembered.

H

**UPDATE**

It’s now 12:51 pm and I’ve come to learn that an official Garda investigation into Katy’s death is now underway. You’re on the ball there lads. The friends have only had 4 days to get the place cleaned up and get their stories straight. Can’t wait to see how this pans out…

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