Despite the eighteen-wheeler truck loads of dross which delayed-viewing talk shows on telly daily dump upon the frayed carpet of our flying duck-walled sitting rooms, nonetheless, we would all be at a loss, if. If we were without out some of the gems which somehow steal in, sans jemmy, among the dross.
Castar, áfach, na daoine simpli ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na samplaí.
Examples, mind you, are few and f. between so two of necessity will have to do (gender balanced gems too, for this is a shared space). It is a toss up, Flossie, which is the best thus leaving one at a further loss to choose which actually, ahem, Clem, is the better.
And so one will leave this choice to the one discerning well-read and red-haired reader still remaining to judge, one, Barnaby R. The frozen two, as it happens, are chosen from the Anointed Nineties.
First up was the classic mike-unshackling walk-out of the Brothers Gibb on BBC, in drib and drab, from the gabby Anderson Show. All the while the flabbergasted host, the toast of himself, remained seated on his own Jurrasic rearpassage, still resoutely up same. For that was where he was always seen to preen best.
This particularly aghast and talentless host was operating under a delusion common, yes, to the vast bulk of the sub-species known as chat show hosts, when they are not in full (yawn) fawning mode : that he was actually condescending to be in the presence of mere inferiors. Snakes alive, Clive (for it was he !) started a joke and the whole world did not shake with laughter.
Incidentally, Robin Gibb, the Colm Cavanagh-look alike, was the second to retire gracefully from this distaseful dumbass-hosted show, that memorable night.
Giorraíonn triúr motor-mouth.
Next up, on BBC Lite (aka RTE) this time, there was the magic moment ( aka a Perry Como mo) when the legendary Olivia O Leary got to interrogate, oops, interview some nonentity or other called, if one can recall correctly his name, was it….Nelson Mandate? Oops, it was Mandela. Cé eile?
At one point of the interview – well the last point in a long series of points – the palm-oily OOL interrupted her less than worthy guest during her high brow-beating session. Which prompted a clearly bemused Xhosa chieftain to raise the authoritative index finger of his right hand which he lethargically waved to and fro in a gesture of whoas, with the hint of a glint in his humorous eyes.
Eyes, incidentally, Dobbin, which had faced down far more professional – though on far inferior moola – interrogators on Robben Island:
-You will please to allow me, for once, Madame, the chance to finish answering a question.
For once, a shocked OOL was rocked back on her stillettos, Betto, and her painted trap compeleld to lapse, for once, into a enclosed order of Trappist Nun-like silence.
But, of course, this being a Valley of Tears we inhabit, she who gaffes last, gaffes loudest.
Witness her latest gaffe, in the shape of a RTE DO’C-umentary:
– Daniel O’Connell: Forgotten King of Ireland.
And which could be aptly captioned:
–OOL drools over Duelling Danno !
Although long retired, OOL hasn’t – lemme see now, how shall one phrase this, ah yis – gone away, one knows.
In fairness, going backwards, at the end of the day, she did have the good grace to fingerpoint beforehand what the unwary might expect. In an essay (no mere articles for our wise old, oops, golden-yeared OOL) which filled up a fair amount of shared space in the print edition of RTE, i.e., The Unionist Times, she namechecked a heck of a lot of The Great Predictables.
The likes of Nelse (who else?) McCausland, and of course, the ritual genuflections towards Hume and Mallon, Martin Luther King and Gandhi and last, but certanly not a moveable beast, Finchley Fintan of the Fuckáil Focal aka OOL’s rhyming couplet, The Toole.
Of most interest, of course, were the items she failed to mention in her selective pre-emptive essay. In the immortal words of another Kerryman, Eamon Kelly, seanchaí:
–Coimeád do shúil ar an bpussy cat :’tis da wans ya don’t see, yerra, dem’s da wans tuh watch !
For the benefit of Nelse, who else: the Erse emission there translates as:
–Keep your eye on the pussy cat.
Time now to meet and greet the meat course of the T.U.Times essay: which today consists of the best of La Cuisine Francaise:
–Coq au vin rouge.
Wake up Little Suzie, this bit’s a doozy:
–France taught him rhetoric and oratory, but also instilled in him a dread of the mob violence he saw during the Franch revolution.
Thus, did the Madame Defarge of Montrose, D4, continue to knit, in this instance her high brows, and see nothing. (Yes, indeed, Defarge, it rhymes with Farage, Nige).
The nothing she saw in this instance was a non-league nobody of no account, one Alderman D’Esterre of Dublin Corporation who challenged The Jewel in the Crown of Non-violence, DOC, to a duel. For the latter’s dissing of DC as ‘beggarly’. In her preview OOL failed to do a spoiler alert and so left the balder Alderman without a mench and on the bench.
The date was set for County Kildare on February 1, 1815, the feastday of St. Bridget despite one of the duellists being a Protestant and it wasn’t the Professional R.C. from Kerry. It may well be argued that the first shot of the West Brit involvement in WW1 was fired a hundred years beforehand in Bishopscourt in the short grass, big ass county.
D’Esterre, a crack shot, had first dibs and duly missed. Daniel O Connell, a crack shot as well as being a big shot who liked the craic, didn’t miss. In golfing terms, His Nibs holed an ace, at ten paces.
The ball from his pistol (nicknamed ‘bás gan sagart’ – death without a priest, Nelse) – did Pearse, oops, pierce his opponent in the plurals. And as D’Esterre fell groaning to the ground, clutching his groin, whining till he died, the slow learner from the hedge school of anti-violence, did not, on the spot, renounce the edgy art of taking pot shots. Not that one would know that from the silence in the tut-tut essay of OOL.
Ní bú-hú ach b’fhiú an braon fola.
At the time, duelling was illegal; so, both legally and regally, he was guilty of Murder. The Eagle of Beaglehunters at Sliabh an Iolair in Yerraland would only have had to look in Der Spiegel and see reflected there:
-Yerra, ‘tis meself surely, a murdherer. A murdherer most fair.
For, shortly afterwards, Dan the pacific Islandman from the Wild Atlantic Way, detoured specifically to insult Rober Peel. This resulted in a duel. Twice, however, the duel between the duo was thwarted. Till eventually it was defueled.
Just as well, then, for Danno: otherwise he might have had the Bobbies vying with the Peelers, like the CIA and the FBI, to he on his case in his later years, when he became rather biggish on the priggish side of condemnation once again.
So, why then was not this Beggar of Kings (or as Sean ‘Vive Moi’ O Faolain inaccurately descibed him, ‘King of the Beggars’) not arrested, charged, tried, convicted and all the rest before being laid to rest? But, even if He had been tried, the odds are that the case against DOC would have been such that it would have been oddly, dismissed.
In the immortal interrogative of Joe Duffy:
-Y?
Perhaps, the answer lies in the following rambunctious tribute to justice, the non-judgmental song by the remarkable Ry Cooder (the Ry, incidentally, has nought to do with Le Roi with whom Dan the Crackshot was besotted, but is short, rather, for Ryland)
In tearful supplication, she looked up in my face
I could feel her heart was breaking as these sad words she did say
“You should have told me you was married, baby
As she pulled out a forty-five and let me have it, right smack between the eyes
That’s the way the girls are from Texas
That’s the way the girls are from Texas
That’s the way the girls are from Texas
She was guilty, I was dead !
Now, what’d you think that the old judge said ?
“Ah, that’s just the way the girls are down here in Texas
Case dismissed!”
It is reported, though not authenticated, oops, fact-checked, that Judge Jeffries of the infamous hanging eyebrows and dangling participles, was wont to whistle a tune back in the C17th. Whenever a colleague in robes of ermine and wig of horse hair was up before him on a minor charge of wife murder most fair, a tune which was later to influence Ry Cooder. By the name of:
–That’s the way their exes are in Chambers. Case dismissed !
Monster Meetings, often of the abortive type, rather than his one successful murder, are what Danno is mainly associated with. In Twickers last Saturday, mar shampla, it had behoved a Monster Meeting of bawling RDS-type Anglo Oirish to be present in droves. And if the ensuing rout did nothing else, Elsie, it underlined an oval-balled truth in the following:
–Foireann gan Tongan, foireann gan anam.
For those shameless narrow-gauge Dinosaurs who shall, of necessity, remain nameless and who wish to gloat at the record-breaking loss in Twickers, when those cute Ben Hurs, those low-down charioteers swung into action against the The Team of Us faction, a word of caution. For those same unclubbable, chubby ones who are tempted to get their checkered knickers in a twist rather than a knot, at?
At the sight of a team in green suffering a record-smashing loss, with no Tricolour and no musical Tantrum of a national nature, but rather something of the compulsory English about it, urging the peculiarly impecunious into wailing about stakeholders, Jacob re. CJ, standing ‘Stock-holder to Stock-holder’. For these joyless, non-boater wearing gloaters The Perkin has but Two Words of Caution and One Wish, no, not the latter two initials in the hack’s dream IRFU.
Mar sin, an dá fhocal comhairle:
-Gloat responsibly.
Agus an t-aon ghuí amháin:
-May their breakfast of Schadenfreude eggs be runny and ruin the Carrickmacross lace table cloth. Even as they dine, having won the first prize for having predicted the correct (or is it the least correct score of the debacle in The Tabernacle of Twickers) with the God known as BOD.
How ambrosial an ambiance !
Wake up, Sleeping Beauty, the next bit’s a cutie from OOL:
–You know, after three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, and more than 3,500 dead, the mists of romantic nationalism lift and you look back down the centuries and see O’Connell standing head and shoulders above the rest.
Or the next bit again which is a real source of looty:
–As O’Connell stands there in the major street of our capital city, and all the physical force commemorations of 1916 and the War of Independence go on around him, you have to ask why we don’t have a day commemorating him.
Hmmmmmmmm.
The Madame Defarge of Montrose, D4, obviously went along to the Abbey Theatre/ Amharclann Náisiúnta na hÉireann, possibly even with a complimentary ticket, to view the swing-low Highlight of the 1916 commemoration. Like, ‘Somme Enchanted Evening’ .
Perhaps Madame D. just kept on knitting her eyebrows, and saw nothing ? Cá fios?
– Long-maligned by the 1916 generation of politicians, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Like her Mandela debacle OOL has been asking and interrupting the answer to her own question, i.e., the wrong question. Which, perhaps, oughter be:.
–Long revered by the 1914-18 generation of politicians, you have to ask why we don’t have a day commemorating him.
A holiday. A DOC holiday, perchance?
To be fillumed as:
-Gunfight at the UK Corral.
TUILLEADH LE TEACHT: TO BE CONTINUED
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