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August 27, 2005
King of Lazy
Standing in the front porch in nothing but my boxers and dressing gown my eternal days of doing nothing we’re over. An entire year’s worth of hanging about came crashing to an end before my eyes and all in one little sentence – "You’re college course starts Sept 14th". My what? You must have the wrong address I said to the letter, for I am Liam Geraghty, master of idleness. I am, as the dictionary so beautifully puts it, "disinclined to action." It all started after I got out of journo school last year. All those notepads, deadlines and pencils-behind-the-ear had taken their toll on me. I needed a break. Some time away from all that hustle and bustle.
So I did what anyone would do - I took a year off. It’s a bit like taking a day off work or mitching off school only instead of one day it’s 365 days. With that much time on my hands it was important to make the best possible use of it. Which I did. I drank record-breaking amounts of tea, I watched every episode of Murder She Wrote (all 34 seasons) and I did lunch a lot. A lot. The weeks were like D-list celebrities, constant and unyielding. It was the lifestyle of a millionaire only without the millions. A year of unadulterated laziness. In fact, I admire that postman from a small community in Italy who was so lazy he couldn’t be bothered delivering their mail. Antonio Piras, from Ittiri on the island of Sardinia, faces up to ten years in prison after police found his home stashed full of sacks of letters he had failed to deliver. He came to the attention of police after locals complained that none of them had received a single letter or parcel since March.
The great thing about his story is that he was too lazy even to destroy the evidence. Thousands of letters were found in his car and even stuffed in his garden shed. The man is a legend. I almost wish he was my postie and I wouldn’t have received that ill-fated letter from my new college. So this is it. My last few weeks of freedom before I’m thrust back into the humdrum of commuting life once again. The running, the cycling, the trains being late, the priceless driver announcements, the LUAS, the rain, the mornings (oh God help me - the mornings!), the ticket prices, the front seat on the bus, the taxi ride in bad weather, the night, the day and all the other little joys of commuting. Ladies and gentlemen, Liam Geraghty commuter extrordanaire is back.
Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist (pg.6)
Posted by LiamG at 11:01 PM
August 20, 2005
LOTTO: Why Endangered Animals Should Be Worried
According to David Bach, author of The Automatic Millionaire, you don’t need a lot of time or money to make a million dollars. He reckons that if you save five dollars a day, you’ll be a millionaire in 41 years. Great. If I start saving now I can buy a few Ferrari’s when I’m 62. Presumably the "automatic" in the book title must come with a footnote explaining how 41 years is in anyway instant. Good work, David. Keep it up. No, in these times of vast material want we want everything to actually be instant. We want to win the Lotto. Or more precisely - we want to win that Euro Lottery like Dolores McNamara.
Last week she claimed the astounding €115million jackpot. Or maybe I’m using the word "we" too liberally because last week when the news broke of the Limerick woman’s fortune I over heard a dozen people around the town claiming they’d hate to win so much money. Am I the only one who wants it? Yes? Well to Hell with the whole lottery game - just give it straight to me! The approximate odds of winning the Irish Lotto Jackpot are 1 in 5,245,786 and the odds of another Irish person scooping the Euro Lottery are so astronomical I dare not print them. They’ll only depress you. Or more to the point they’ll only depress me. Which is probably one of the main points of Lotto critics who believe lotteries symbolize the boredom and materialism of modern life. And I suppose they’re right.
Statistics of people who’ve won large amounts of money instantly have had their boredom increased ten fold. What this suggests to me is a total lack of imagination in the spending department. On WinAMillionDollars.com they have a long list of what people would do if they won. A Mary. P. says that she "would like to help re-establish the desert tortoise population, which has declined dramatically since the early 1990’s from respiratory ailments and shell disease." A Cameron Q. says "I’d buy up as much rainforest as I could and protect it." My favourite though is by a Susan L. who proclaims "If I won a million dollars, I would hop a plane to the jungles of Venezuela where the true love of my life is working right now. If he took me back in his life, then we would live happily ever after. If he didn’t, I would tell him ‘goodbye, I always loved you’ and ‘I just won a million dollars.’
Eager to have a laugh at the lottery culture of the world one particular financial website founded a new type of game. FOOLottery! was a worldwide, multi-hundred-million-dollar game organized to compete with state-run lotteries in the United States. Rather than a 50% ratio, their members would be treated to a 110% payout ratio, on average earning them rewards on each wager. Thousands of people clicked on to buy as many tickets as they could before realising the day’s date - April 1st. Now much as I would like to be handed large amounts of money I actually don’t play Lotto which certainly puts the odds of me winning in a somewhat uneasy place. If I did ever win €115million the very first thing I’d do would be to have it all put into a huge room where I would plunge into it off a diving board ala Scrooge McDuck from Duck Tales (WooUhh!)
There’s simply no end to the things I’d spend it on. I can’t see how any millionaire could possibly get bored. First I’d travel to every, single country in the world. After that I’d buy a ticket on one of those Russian Tourist Space Shuttles For The Crazy Rich. I’d do all the stereotypical millionaire things like buy a huge mansion, a swimming pool in the shape of my head, a red Ferrari and most importantly monkey servants. After all that is when you’d be allowed to become somewhat bored with you’re millions upon millions of euros. But not me. That’s the point where I’d start funding expeditions to find Atlantis, uncover the Marie Celeste and finance research into how do they get the figs into the Fig Rolls? I’d buy as many endangered animals as I possibly could and then I’d have them fight each other for the survival of their species. It’d have to be fair though. If the match draws revealed that a some sort of small koala like creature was up against a Bengal Tiger then we’d have to give him a baseball bat or something. Fair is fair.
Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist.
Posted by LiamG at 12:41 AM
August 13, 2005
This Never Happened to Willy Fogg . . .
"A balloon?" I said. "Yes, yes, a hot air-balloon," replied John in a slightly annoyed tone. Annoyed because I had to have him repeat what he had just explained to me. It was something wonderful. Something marvellous. Something grand. John, a PR friend of mine, was launching a brand new hot-air balloon company. He explained that they planned to take visitors for champagne flights over the scenic sights of Wicklow. During the launch day, they would be flying several balloons from different parts of the county and journalists from all over we’re being invited down for a free flight. So John kind enough as he is, asked if I’d like to come down too. "Count me in, John," I said. "Count me in."
There’s something about hot-air balloons that I can’t quite put my finger on but that I just love. I was only ever in a hot-air balloon once before. That was a couple of years back when on holiday in Slovenia. We had to get up at 5am in the morning, drive around with the pilot in a jeep until he found a suitable location to take off from but once we did - it was magic. Floating calmly off the ground we sailed through the sky above luscious green forests until we hovered right about Lake Bled. It was a spectacular sight. Lake Bled has a tiny little island at it’s centre with a little church on it that we passed by. Right below us, early morning rowing enthusiasts we’re cutting through the water. We could even see the menacing outline of several rather large fish from where we flew. After a hour or two the pilot told us we would be landing in a air-field up ahead and told us to hold tightly onto the basket. The gentle way in which the balloon started to come down was in stark contrast to the frightening fact that we had just zipped dangerously close to a house beside the air-field. We didn’t hit it, thank God, and landed safely in the air-field. But just as we landed a figure emerged from the said-house and began marching towards us shouting Slovenian profanities. The pilot shouted them back and the mother of all arguments took place between him and this little old lady. When she finally stormed off the pilot told us that he had told her "What did you expect building you’re house beside an air-field?" But despite that and probably a little bit because of it, the journey was immensely pleasant.
Thus my eagerness to take to the skies again only this time on home ground. On the day in question, John drove me out to where a gaggle of journalists we’re all standing about watching the crew as they filled the balloon with hot-air until it stood proudly on the spot showing off it’s great yellow and blue stripes. The pilot indicated for everyone to come a little closer. "Now," he said, "do we have any volunteers to help us with the launch?" An uneasy silence followed so thinking I knew it all from being in one once before I shot my hand up. "Ah great. What’s your name? Liam? Good, now Liam you climb in the basket there while I just do this here," he said as he walked over to some equipment a little bit away from the balloon. "Now," he said turning back to me, "you see that rope there give that a tug." I took a look at the rope. I recognised it as the one that releases the gas flame that heats the balloon and hence makes it rise. Hmmm, I thought, that doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. Obviously reading my mind the instructor shouted that the balloon was anchored to the ground by a long rope. I turned around and indeed there was a big length of rope that was tied to the balloon. "Go on then, give it a pull," he bellowed. I did just that and in an instant the gas roared as it lit a tremendously hot flame and just like that the balloon began to gently take off from the ground.
As I moved a little higher, the instructor shouted up to me to give it one or two more tugs of the rope to stretch it to it’s full length. Again I obliged the man. But then something odd happened. I heard a few gasps and a big shout. I looked down to see one or two people running towards what would have been underneath me and as they grew smaller and smaller a most peculiar feeling came over me. A sort of eye of the storm moment. A dawning realisation that the anchored rope was had been anything but. Oh no, I calmly thought to myself. Oh no, no, no. I must explain to you what this moment felt like because I have these unusual moment’s routinely in my life where I calmly take stock of my present situation. I had one a good few years back that went like this:
What am I doing sitting on the back of a moped driven by a seventeen year old girl at 4am in the morning through the unlit countryside of Germany?
One from last year was:
What am I doing in standing here with a Starbucks hot chocolate in my hand on a scorching hot day, staring at some Panda bears with controversial American author Marty Beckerman in the Washington D.C. Zoo in America?
This year’s will be hard to top though: What on earth am I doing in a hot-air balloon alone without a pilot, a good deal away from the ground over Wicklow? What indeed. Sufficed to say I realised that if I stopped pulling the rope, I would slowly but surely come back down again. Until such time though I did what any self respecting writer would - I cracked open the onboard champers and began singing - "Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away . . ."
Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist (pg.6)
Posted by LiamG at 11:52 PM
August 07, 2005
The Horror Of It All . . .
As soon as I seen those infamous bright red lips my eyes lit up. "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," the poster read, "Every Friday at Midnight in the Dara Cinema, Naas." With only a passing glance to that poster my every Friday for the foreseeable future had just been booked up. For those of you who don’t know of or haven’t seen the movie (virgins, as those of us in the know refer to you as) "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" sexed it’s way onto the screen way back in 1975 after being adapted from Richard O’Brien’s stage play "The Rocky Horror Show." In an unjustifiable nutshell summary the film is about a newly engaged couple who have a breakdown in a spooky forest and, looking for help, pay a call to the bizarre residence of Dr. Frank-N-Furter where much sex, musical numbers and make-up ensues.
When first released the film didn’t make any major waves but as years passed it gained one of the largest cult followings of any movie and it’s notoriety grew as midnight screenings of it started to show all over the world. One cinema in Munich, Germany, has screened the movie every single week since 1975. Here in Ireland, the Classic Cinema in Harold’s Cross screened the movie every week at midnight for over two decades. But now after years of midnight screenings in New York, Tokyo and Paris, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has arrived for the sinners of Kildare in Naas. The night in question (last Friday) I rounded up the usual gaggle of my socialites to accompany me to the midnight screening. I had indicated that Rocky Horror was an interactive experience. It involved dressing up, singing and dancing. So that evening I enlisted the help of my good comrade Jeff’s girlfriend Zowie to bring over some black make-up and to proceed to put it on my face. I then donned my black blazer, black shirt, purple cords and odd-shoes to complement the look. I was more goth than transvestite but being the first time to see it in Naas I couldn’t be too sure whether I’d be the only one who knew anything about Rocky Horror Midnight screenings.
I rang Hank to make sure he would be dressing up too as he said he would but when I arrived at his chamber his idea of "dressing up" seemed to consist of wearing a red tie. Oh bother, I said to myself. For not only had he not dressed up (and knowing the other heathens wouldn’t dress up either) an even bigger quandary was that the problem seemed to lay in that we weren’t going straight to the screening. Why would we? It was only six o’clock. The plan was to go down to the Riverbank, catch the Broadway Song Book show and go for drinks in Coffey’s before catching the bus to Naas. Meaning I would have to walk through Newbridge in broad daylight in my Rocky Horror get-up, go to the Riverbank and go to the pub in it too! Main St. passed without incident but with a few raised eyebrows. Upon walking into the Riverbank though, there was Winters, Veronica and Laurence staring at me as if a small colony of bats had settled onto my face and they weren’t quite sure wheter to tell me or not. I then had visions of walking into the pub and having every inebriated soul looking at me sideways. I rushed down to the bathroom and reduced the make-up to a slightly (only slightly) more exceptable "blackness around the eyes." I really needn’t have bothered reducing the effect in anyway as every inebriated soul in the pub threw curious glances at me anyway.
Eventually the entire troupe consisting of Keara "I am not dressing up" Kennedy, Neil "available" Sheehy, Gav "mention me in your column" McCoy, Rich "newly twenty-something" Clifford, Senan "Ebbs" Dolan, Hank "I hate you all" Tree and Shane "I got fired from $chmackey and the Salads" Mackey and yours truly eventually arrived in Naas. Inside the cinema was buzzing with (at a rough estimate) around thirty people. The owner of the cinema, whose name unfortunately I did not get, was at the ticket booth. "I’ll call you Cowboy from now on," he said referring to the Garth Brooks hat I had bought outside the pub earlier in my merry state. Inside the atmosphere was great but as expected, as far as I could see no one had really dressed up. Before the film started the owner stated that he wanted to see everyone in drag next week. I must whole-heartedly concur.
Rocky Horror fans will know that there are several things you’re supposed to bring to a midnight screening - rice (to be thrown at Ralph and Betty’s wedding), water pistols (back row squirts them during rain scene), newspapers (for front and middle rows to shield themselves from rain), Flashlights or cigarette lighters ("There’s a Light" verse of "Over at Frankenstein Place"), Rubber gloves (during and after the creation speech, Frank snaps his gloves three times), noisemakers (the Transylvanians applaud Frank’s creation - so should you!), toast (when Frank proposes a toast at dinner) and of course a party hat (when Frank puts on his hat to wish Rocky happy birthday, so does the audience). The screening was great fun but will need some work to get it to standard so don’t be lazy! Get out your make-up kit and head to the Dara Cinema, Naas this Friday at midnight. I’ll be wearing lipstick this time round. Let’s do the Time Warp again!
Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist (pg.6)
Posted by LiamG at 04:36 PM