Thankfully, the nitendo is white, the psp is black and the computer doesn’t have an internet connection so my 9 year old niece dumbed things down for me! In a stream of conscious type of excitement, she told me, ‘I’d like game x for the white one and game y for the black one’.

The long and short of it is that she’d like Age of Empires for the computer and MySims for the white one (sorry, the nintendo DS). But I was a bit freaked out when she told me about one of the games she already has. It’s called Imagine: Babies for the Nintendo. I didn’t believe her that it was an actual game. But it is! It’s so incredibly sexist and demeaning that I can’t believe it’s allowed to be sold. As you’ll see from the description below, it’s targeted specifically at girls.

Basically she has to pretend to be a babysitter and earn money.

Here’s a description from game.co.uk

Embody a young student who visits her grandmother’s house for the summer. Your grandmother leaves to go on holiday and leaves you in charge of her house. During her absence you will have to maintain the house and even decorate it to your taste. In order to do this you will need to earn money by taking care of all your neighbour’s babies, where you will find your vocation–babysitting!

Imagine: Babies Features:

* Embody a young babysitter and take of your neighbour’s babies all with their own personalities!
* Take care of 6 babies (one after the other), each with a distinctive character.
* Prepare their bottle and baby food in the kitchen, check on the amount of food in stock and buy the right food according to their needs.
* Rock the babies in a cradle, put on the soothing radio or move the mobile to help them sleep or to calm them down.
* Change their nappies to keep them clean, keep an eye on their health and dress them up with different clothes
* Entertain the babies: Play with them and their toys, play music to make them dance and take them into the garden to play on swings and other garden toys
* Exchange information, photos and clothing with other players through Wi-Fi
* Keep the house clean: Use fun mini-games to create a welcoming home for the babies: wash up, clean and vacuum, paint the walls, mow the grass, trim hedges and drive away spiders!
* Make the house to your own taste: Use the money you earn and the vouchers you receive in succeeding in your missions, buy items at the shops to decorate the house

/Rant

The most damning thing I can say about my old school is that the teachers simply didn’t care about the pupils they were teaching. Obstensibly, it should have been a good school; it was in a middle-class area and the student body was probably 66% middle-class and 33% working class. My friends hate me using the word ‘class’ but sometimes it’s a good shorthand. In this situation, one would expect the expectation/entitlement of one class to interact with the hunger of the other class. It should have been ripe for everyone to feed off each other and encourage the students towards higher education and/or entrenpeneurship.

Here’s some examples. Only the first one is likely to have changed.

• The students were graded into A1, A2, B1, B2 classes. Imagine being in the B2 class! I was in the A1 class and therefore was taught latin. There was a computer room but only the B1 and B2 classes were allowed to use them…
• I was a cheeky sod (still am)and I always questioned everything (still do). Being ‘disruptive‘, my parents were called in by the Geography teacher. My mother takes no prisoners and, soon enough, herself and the teacher got into it. Her final position was that I only had to do Geography for 40 mins a day whereas he had to do it for 8 hours a day. Whose commitment was likely to be wanting? He had no answer to that!
• We were trained to be office drones. The CAO forms (University application forms) were never handed out, never discussed, even though I think our civics teacher wrote a mass-market book on the subject. As well as the computer rooms, there was also an art room but again only the B1/B2 classes got to use them.
• It’s sorta funny now but, on a Friday, both the teachers and the students used to take off their ties, go to the local pub, and drink beer!!

I could go on but I’d only get twisted and bitter!!

Thanks to my parent’s support, I did go on to higher education in the end and have travelled halfway around the world using my qualifications. In a strange quirk of fate, I’ve ended up back in my old neighbourhood. But there’s no way I’d send my children (t.b.a.) to my old school.

If I did have children, I’d definitely send them to a Northside school. But I’d want it to have a good mix of Irish and foreign* children with an emphasis on mixing the academic and the creative. *Not sure what the PC term is for ‘foreign’ but I think a cultural mix can only be good.

So ends the rant lesson.

Against my better judgement, I watched the Ireland v Argentina rugby game this afternoon. In the final quarter of the game, the Setanta commentator made a pithy comment that ultimately was a damning judgement on Ireland’s performance. ‘Oh’, I thought to myself, ‘I should write that down so I won’t forget it’. Sadly, the Sunday afternoon stupor meant I was too lazy to rouse myself to find pen and paper.

It was a two-word phrase – easy enough to remember? All I had to do was remember the first word (homeopathic) and the second word would spring forth. But now I can’t remember!

It was something like, ‘homeopathic aggression’, homeopathic defence’, or even ‘homepathic gameplan’. Actually, they all apply.

It’s also my birthday tomorrow so I’ve also lost another year. I really am losing it.

POLI from the Greek Poly meaning ‘many‘
TICS from the Greek ‘Blood sucking insects‘.

The next approach in my time management saga was to buy patterned socks. It was elegant yet simple. Pairs of socks could be matched even in low light. Hell, I could even match them without my glasses. The major flaw with this approach was that if you lost one of the matching pair, you’d spend ages looking for the other one. So that didn’t work either.

Of course, all this is irrelevant if your girlfriend/wife buys your underwear. I’m single so I don’t have the luxury of a personal assistant

*Alpha male: When people think of an alpha male, they usually think of a Gordon Gekko type who excels and wins at everything. An alpha male to me is entirely different. To me, I’m an alpha male: a protean facsimile of a male who is not fully formed nor fully functioning when I get up early in the morning.

My hair is spikey and pointing in entirely the wrong direction. Out of the side of my mouth, the drool sparkles in the harsh light of the bedroom lightbulb. My eyes can’t focus because of the ’sleep’ in the corners of my eyes. Some mornings, I scratch my belly. Other days, I scratch my backside. Every morning, words and thoughts are hard to form.

And that’s why I need easily-paired socks.

Today I was using a map to find a street in central Dublin. While perusing said map, I saw Upper Digges Street described in shorthand as ‘Digges St Up‘. I wonder if the OPW or the Roadworks Dept have a depot on the street – it would be rather fantastic if they did.

I had a friend who used to work on an assembly line for an electronics company. Part of her job was to ‘tick’ the QC box if the gadget passed the Quality checks. She did this hundreds of times a day. In an effort to brighten her day, she used to draw smilies instead of the tick. Inevitably, she got found out. The QC manager was shocked, and angry, and sacked her for abusing her position!!

It’s good that mapmakers and assembly line workers still retain a certain ‘ability’ to fight the tedium of their jobs. And so should the rest of us.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I need a holiday, or at least, some sunny weather!!

Sigh, here we go again…

A Brazilian friend is moving to a new apartment. It’s all a bit sudden…her partner died recently and she can’t afford the rent. Her English isn’t very good and she’s a bit nervous about ‘officialdom‘ because of her dealings with the immigration people. She wanted to cancel her NTL subscription and asked me to do it.

Long story short…I eventually spoke to a real human being and explained the situation. It went something like this…
.

– You can’t cancel on her behalf.
– But her English isn’t great and she’s in a bad place right now.
– She’ll have to phone herself to cancel. We’re open until 10pm [I maybe misunderstood the closing time]
– But she’s working until late [Spar-type shop] and she’s gotta move out tomorrow. [I didn't mention she didn't have the money to waste waiting and waiting for someone to answer the phone. Nor would she understand the 'press 1 for, press 2 for...]
– I’m sorry but she’ll have to phone herself.
– Do you have anyone there who speaks Portugese or Spanish?
– Err, I’ve no idea. [Puts on helpful hat]. You could write in to cancel?
– Let me get this straight. You’ll accept a cancellation letter from me but you won’t accept a verbal cancellation from me?
– Yes.
– 10% of the population are non-nationals now. Do you have anyone there who speaks foreign languages.
– Err, I’ve no idea.

Let’s be honest realistic. If we wrote the letter, NTL would lose it and they’d maintain they never got it. They’d chase her for the arrears, threatening her with court action etc and further traumatise her.

So I’ve now got to send registered letters to NTL, my friend, myself, and copy the bank to cancel the direct debit. And, in six months time, I’ll almost certainly write again that they’re chasing her for money that she doesn’t owe.

Or maybe it’s a cunning plan? A normal person might not be able to read the sign but a drunk staggering up the road might be able to read it as he weaved from side to side?

I have to admit there’s a better class of wino on the Southside. As I cycled from town out to Dun Laoghaire, I was surprised to see them on the beaches ‘happy out’ with their cans of beer. They really seemed to be enjoying themselves and they weren’t threatening to anyone. It was a different story when I returned to the Northside.

On Dorset St, three police officers in two cars were watching over an unconscious junkie until the ambulance arrived. He was wearing all his clothes, and he wore the hood of his parka jacket up over his head. Maybe he needed to sleep and the hood was to keep out the sunshine? Still, it seemed to be a pleasant interlude in the afternoon sun for the three Guards and the sleeping junkie.

In late 2005, Dublin City Council met to decide how to spend their budget for 2006. Item no. 56 concerned alarming reports that children were playing football in the park in my estate. Obviously, this was a bad thing so they allocated €100 (plus €1,500 labour) to errect a sign prohibiting ball games in the park. And so it came to pass. The 10-year olds immediately understood this new prohibition and stopped playing ball games.

Unfortunately, after a week, they got bored and reversed the sign so it wasn’t readible from the road. After another week, they got bored again and removed the sign. So the poor, sad, lonely pole has stood naked, but proud, for the past year. No ball games remember!!

Thankfully, Dublin City Council met again in late 2006. They reviewed how the allocated money for 2006 was spent. When item no. 56 came up, there were mutters, there were frowns, there were even some creased brows. We’ll never know thanks to the (ahem) FOI laws but maybe it was Cyprian Brady, T.D. (he of 939 1st preference votes or 2.7%*) who muttered, ‘Those cheeky 10-yr olds are now 11 and they’ll probably have their first pets. Let’s spend this year’s €100 (plus €1,500 labour) on different signs.’ Maybe it was Tony Gregory, TD, who agreed with him and countered, ‘as a school teacher on sabbatical since 1979**, I think we should issue the signs in Irish. You know, for cultural reasons, loike.’ They all thought it was a wonderful idea and voted it through as item no. 55.

And so it came to pass. Dublin City Council worker’s descended on my estate. In the same way that a dog pisses on a lamp post, the council workers put up posters on every lamp post in my estate (ed: I thought the election was over?) basically saying, ‘the dog has done it’s duty, now do yours.’ But in the Irish language!

Thing is, it’s probably a good thing. There’s no money left to actually cut the grass in the park and it’s literally knee-high. There were a couple of kids lying in the park as I walked home and you could barely see them. So, it’s probably a good thing that there’s no dogshit in the park otherwise the kids could get some nasty diseases.

Oh, and I now know the Irish word for dog pooh!

*Cyrian Brady got 939 first preference votes (2.7%) and he got elected on the eight count. Frankly, that’s shameful. Our dear leader, Bertie, got 12,734 first preference votes (36.8%) and was elected on the first count.

** Tony Gregory is a teacher and a civil servant. He was elected to the Dail (Parliament) 28 years ago (?) so his ‘old’ job is kept open for him. A temp has covered his job for the past 28 years. He could give up the €100k politician’s gig and return to his €50k teacher’s job. On the upside, a school teacher gets 3 months summer holidays so that’s some compensation for the drop in wages!! Oh, no, wait….

I live in the Dublin Central constituency, btw.