Geometry

When you are locking lips with the man of your choice in your local pub, the stance you adopt has long been established: Opposite and facing one another.

But what happens when you are playing tonsil tennis with more than one beau at a time? The solution lies in the power and beauty of mathematics.

If there are three of you altogether, you each should occupy one of the vertices of an equilateral triangle, aim towards the centre, and tongues away!

Euclid, eat your heart out.

In the (even better) event that there are four players in the game, you should each occupy the corners of a square, again aiming towards the centre.

In the extremely rare - and even more pleasurable - instance that there are five protagonists in the drama, each of hot n' hairy bears needs to occupy one of the five vertices of a pentagon, and once again lean towards the middle.

In the case of six, seven, or even EIGHT burly beasts playing this game, it can be shown that you should perform the same with the corners of a hexagon, heptagon, or octagon, respectively, though I can't (yet!) say that I have had experience with these numbers in that context.

However, it is best if the feat is not followed by either - or both - of the following:

1) All of them disappearing as soon as you have gone to the bathroom, in spite of your best efforts to bring them all back to a location of your choice.

2) You leaving your jacket out of sight for a while, and then when returning home (under a black cloud, because you thought you were going to have the night of your life, only to have iced water poured on the whole thing at the last minute) you discover that your phone is no longer in said jacket.

BAH!

Things I have to stop doing when I'm drunk #55,368,792

Running around asking everyone if they share my opinion on how hot a straight guy of our mutual acquaintance is.

Well, thank CHRIST!

The current wave of exams is over, and apart from a few assessments I have to hand in over the coming weeks, I'm finished with them for a while. I celebrated by going on a bender from hell yesterday, which saw me get home in the small hours of this morning.

Well, at least I was able to stand at the end of the night, which is more than can be said for some of the people I was out with. Now I'm at work though, with my head on the desk again, and I'm supposed to be going to Kung Fu tonight.

The Medicinal Chemistry exam wasn't as bad as it could have been, thankfully.

Once I've shaken this hangover, I'm going to go out and do something I haven't been able to do in a while without feeling guilty: Head to St. James' street and get me some COCK!

I HATE exams

I had a controlled-drug dispensing exam this morning.

Only someone who has done, or has to do, one of those can appreciate what a minefield they can be. You leave out the most tiny, seemingly insignificant detail when submitting your supporting paperwork, and you get a big fat zero. I narrowly avoided making some mistakes, correcting them at the last minute, and then ran at top speed from the post-mortem that was conducted by the other students outside aftwards.

I don't feel too bad about this, but gut feelings are useless when it comes to this kind of exam, as there is no sliding scale. You either get full marks, or nothing.

And just to put me in good spirits, I had a rather unexpected dose of the runs just before I was due to go in. I think I need to take stress management classes.

(Though it must be said, having hot sex with a beefy muscle-bound guy the day before helped, even if the timing might have been a bit ill-advised)

The results aren't out for over a month, which is just fine by me. Ignorance, for the moment, is bliss.

Next week: Medicinal Chemistry exam. Now where are those razor blades?

Gawd ALMIGHTY!

Got back into the swing of things by staying up until nearly 1am last night, finishing off a report for a lab we had earlier that day. A lab that ended with an MCQ exam.

The deadline for applying for a summer placement with Lloyds Pharmacy was midday today. I had a 4 hour class this morning, so I resolved to go in early and try and get the application done first. Sleeping through the alarm this morning and waking up half an hour late didn't help, and now I've missed that boat. The only consolation is that the 4 hour class this morning was a mock exam in dispensing controlled drugs, a very difficult one to pass, and I managed to pass muster. If I play my cards right, in a week, I'll be qualified (almost) to give out morphine, methadone, valium, and the like.

I have another shitty bio lab next Monday.

On the Wednesday, I have the controlled drug exam.

The Thursday of the following week, I have another exam, an end-of-module one.

I could certainly do with some morphine, methadone, or valium now...

Well, FUCK IT!

The christmas tree is down in the Ryan household, the decorations put away, and the last of the presents have been handed over.

How do I know this, seeing as I should be in Gatwick airport by now? Three guesses and the first two don't count.

This is just the cherry on the cake of my day.

The flight has been rescheduled for tomorrow at 12:55pm. It can't come soon enough.

I hate this time of year

The Dutch are gone. We saw them off at the airport yesterday. I took a picture of them all with my parents before they headed through the departure gate.

It looks sort of ropey - I still don't know what I'm doing when it comes to my parent's digital camera - but it's the first we've got of them all in a while so it has sentimental value.

Once they had gone through the departures gate, they waved from the other side. I took a picture of that too, only to have a security guard (alas, not a hot one) coming straight for me. He made me delete the picture I had just taken in front of him, or else I would have had to give up the camera. Thankfully he left the rest alone. My father got ratty and asked him if he thought we were terrorists.

Now I have nothing to look forward to except a very shitty January, laden down with exams. Normally I'm optimistic about heading back to Brighton. This time, Urrgggh. Even the prospect of hot n' horny no-strings fun doesn't have quite the same allure.

Well, maybe...

My brother's wedding and New Year's Eve.

It was a day to remember. For different reasons.

On Saturday, both my brother-in-law and my Dad were sick. My brother-in-law particularly so, but his bug proved to have a short life, and by sunday, he was more or less ready to go. My father was a different story.

Ever since my father had a bypass operation for his heart 3 years ago, he's been a lot more careful about his health. Add to this the fact that his skills at social prioritising were never the best - to invent a random and arbitrary term that only goes someway towards describing his problem - and he has sometimes passed on attending things that really required his presence.

This wedding, believe it or not, was one of them.

He aired the notion of staying away on Saturday night, and it was met with no small amount of hostility, so he appeared to backtrack. However, on Sunday he was adamant. My sister was raging, as she was of the opinion that as he was on a course of antibiotics, going to the wedding wasn't a big risk, and that he would need to be on death's door to consider missing it anyway. Initially, he said he would go to the reception, and sleep in the room that he had booked in the hotel. He backed out of this later, and decided to stay at home. Needless to say this was not taken well. My mother was quite upset on the morning and if it wasn't for a couple of the neighbours offering moral support, she may never have gotten out of the house at all. My brother appeared to shrug it off, but as was pointed out by my sister, it was always my father he got on best with, so he had to have been disappointed.

We got on with it, asking one of the neighbours to check in on him regularly, and deciding to phone him every so often.

The church ceremony was nice, with a guy playing an acoustic guitar throughout, instead of the usual organ stuff. Having little to do other than direct people to their seats, I was able to relax after a while. Well, after I had read my prayer of the faithful, which I was given only minutes before the service started.

After the ceremony was over, we mingled outside and met a few relatives that I hadn't seen in a long time. It was nice, I hardly recognised some of them, and of course most of them didn't recognise me. After that, we headed to straight to the Silver Springs hotel in Cork and once I got in the door I descended on the free sparkling wine that was provided in the foyer. After that it was into the reception room to sit down to our meal.

It was then that things got a bit more interesting. Because our father was absent, it was decided that I would take his place at the top of the table. It was also decided, not long before the speeches were to start, that I would have to say a few words on his behalf. I was momentarily assailed by waves of terror, but I got it together. By the time my turn came, I'd had a few glasses of wine and was full of my own importance. After being handed the microphone, I started off inauspiciously, but then decided to improvise.

"Paul and Claire's relationship reminded me of Cathy and Heathcliff's in Wuthering Heights", I declared to Claire's bemusement, "but we've got a happy ending in this one". Falling in love with the sound of my own voice, I continued: "There have been quite a few contenders over the years for who would be my sister-in-law", to which the whole place gave a big 'Ooooooh!', "but I'm glad Claire has become the one".

Once I had called a toast and sat down again, I felt as if I had been a bit artless, but everyone seemed to like it, although my brother-in-law said that it was a bit like the Italian Job: I went right to the edge and then braked.

The rest of the night was a blur. The white wine that my glass was constantly being topped up with was maybe the best I've ever had, and I partook liberally. After a while I ended up buzzing around talking to loads of different people and giving one or two men the eye. One such example was my step-brother, the son of my brother's birthmother (my brother was adopted). He had acquired a beard since I saw him last, and was looking distinctly wolfish. Sample: "Matthew, as my step-brother, it would be WRONG to say that you look distinctly doable with your current look. Very wrong indeed". To which he guffawed. Then there was another bloke. He looked at me with fear in his eyes.

The night finished well. I found out that two people I had always liked were now engaged ("Catherine and Peds! Paul and Claire may have been my Cathy and Heathcliff, but ye were always my Romeo and Juliet! Oh, and make SURE you send me an invite to the wedding!") and I rang in the new year by hugging just about every one of the 300-odd people who attended. Then there was an indie disco (Gotta love that category) where we took a trip down memory lane moshing like madmen to Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, The Sultans of Ping FC, and God knows what else.

After that, I went to see about which room I was in. It transpired that my parents hadn't booked me into one after all, even though they'd said they'd had, so I ended up having to wake up one of my cousins at about 4am and sleep on the floor in their room.

The morning rise was horrendous. My cousin woke me, saying that my mother was downstairs waiting for me and was driving home in 10 minutes. I stood up, racked with the mother of all hangovers, and staggered into the bathroom. Once it became apparent that I wasn't going to puke there and then, I put on my jacket and shuffled downstairs, shirt still open halfway down my chest. I went to the bar and met one of the tenders from the night before, with a big smirk on his face. "Orange Juice", I slurred. "Certainly", he replied. I annhilated it in under 2 seconds.

I got a drive home and once our destination was reached, I got into bed and slept for a few glorious hours.

Looking back on the whole thing, it was quite a success. I had wondered what it would be like having very few of my friends there, as they didn't really know my brother well enough to come, and had their own plans anyway, but it ended up for the best, as they ended up in different locations, scattered throughout the region. This has been as good a new year's as any I've ever had.

The one major fly in the ointment was, with the crisis of my father not coming, my mother and I forgot to bring the digital camera. The evening has been well documented, as loads of others brought theirs, it just means I don't have any decent pictures immediately to hand to put up here. It's a shame. Apart from anything else, I wanted the world to know what I looked like with a dickie bow and a tux with tails. Perhaps if they're forthcoming from other people.

On reflection, my brother's friends, a bunch I didn't always believe would be the most focussed of people, really came through for him, and I really didn't have that much involvement at all. I still have kind of mixed feelings about this. My brother was the black sheep of the family for quite some time when he was younger, and this may explain why, even now, that his friends seem to enjoy a place in his life that is at least - if not more than - of equal importance than his immediate family. My mother had asked me over Christmas if we still got on, and the truth is he can still be slightly hard to take sometimes. Having said that, I was still paying attention to how much our immediate family was involved over the day. It shouldn't have bothered me, it certainly didn't when my sister got married 10 years ago, maybe I'm just being a bit paranoid. He asked one of his long-term friends to be the best man (thank God his speech came after mine, so he could put my Wuthering Heights reference into context), and I never heard anything about his stag party in Hamburg. But that may have been because I think I once said that I wouldn't be able to afford it, studying in Brighton as I am.

He and his wife are now en route to their honeymoon. They flew to Gatwick today. They had no idea where they were going after that, they were just going to jump on a cheap flight and head somewhere warm. Not a bad idea at all...

So that's it. Major event of the year over for us. Back down to earth with a bang. Bah!

Yum!

The song isn't half bad either.

The Dutch have arrived

There are around twenty aryan-looking people squashed around our dining room table, all yabbering at each other.

My mother woke me at the ungodly hour of 9:30 this morning, telling me she was off to the airport to meet the relatives. "There are 18 bread rolls out in the kitchen", she declared. "I want them all buttered and ready to be served when I get back. Be sure to heat up the two huge saucepans of soup as well. That'll take at least half an hour". "Haven't you realised by now," I returned, "that anytime before 1pm is not good for me".

"Tough titty. See you in an hour, and don't you dare go back to sleep".

God above, the things I have to deal with.

So things (and my mother along with them) are only going to get more frantic between now and Sunday.

As an aside, my father's broadband provider is really starting to do my head in. The most harmless of sites are blocked, being categorized as sex sites or occult sites (never heard of the latter rating in content filters before) and they can only be temporarily unblocked for upto 8 hours. It's not that big a deal, as since it was me that set up the connection, I know all the passwords for changing the settings, but it's more than a little irritating. The provider is gaelic.ie, set up in connection with the GAA of Ireland, and it's more than a little reflective of the values of its parent organisation. Newsflash, boys: youtube is not what anyone with half a brain would consider a sex site.

Ho ho ho

It's been a bit of a mixed bag.

Most of my family have come down with some illness or other in the last few days. We had Christmas dinner at my sister's this 25th, and in a particularly cruel irony, she herself was unable to taste it, having completely lost her sense of smell. I myself still had a bit of an earache on the day, but it's gone now. Yesterday was pretty good though, as I had rather a lot to drink last night and met loads of people who I hadn't seen since last Christmas and probably won't see until this time next year. I ended up at a house party, and got home at around 5am or something like that.

Some of the people I know don't have much of a sense of ceremony about going out at Christmas though, which is a bit annoying as when I come home, I'm generally raring to go. Or maybe it's the fact that every pub was packed to the rafters last night. Oh well...

My brother's wedding is on Sunday, and the dutch side of the family are all arriving at the airport tomorrow. My mother is catastrophising left, right and centre as she's still feeling a bit sick, and is worrying more than usual about getting better in time for the wedding. I can understand, but anytime I tell her to GO TO BED AND TAKE IT EASY she dismisses it, saying she has too much to do, and ignores any offers we make to do things for her. There's nothing like a couple of obstacles being thrown in my mother's path to send her into a full-blown panic, and she is not one to suffer in silence.

Because of the wedding, Christmas has taken a bit of a back seat this year for us. None of us bothered to try and surprise each other with regard to presents. I got my brother a CD and kept the receipt so he can change it if he wants. I asked for Armistead Maupin's Tales From the City, which I've heard good things about. My father has just given it to me. All three of the titles.

So roll on Sunday. Thanks be to God I don't have to do any speeches. Thank God.

At home again

I'm at home, since last Saturday, the 16th.

Little did I know that as I began my descent into Cork, events were taking place in my left eardrum that would lay the foundation for a very unpleasant couple of days ahead.

At the start of this week, a pain had appeared in my left ear. Attempts to disinfect with olive-oil-soaked cotton wool balls failed miserably, and a couple of days later, I was unable to sleep, such was my agony. I also found it very difficult to have conversations with people who were anywhere in the vicinity of my left side, or watch films on TV at night, such was the deafness that had taken hold in my left ear. I hauled myself off to the doctor, and he prescribed a five-day course of amoxycillin. He also recommended an over-the-counter lotion with a dropper that you use to put the liquid into your ear. I used this once, and shortly afterwards, the entire left side of my head felt like it was going to explode, so I'm not continuing with that one.

So that's it. Antibiotics over Christmas. Which means very little alcohol (I don't think alcohol is advised against when taking amoxycillin but there's NO WAY I'm running the risk of that pain making a reappearance. I'm only just about back to normal now).

In other news, my parents are starting to embrace the 21st century. I came home to see a widescreen LCD tv in the sitting room. There was also a broadband router AND DVD/VCR combi waiting to be setup. My parents can be quite clever about these things. They buy them just before Christmas, when they know I'm coming home, and then don't touch them until I'm in the door, knowing they can count on me to do it all.

But thank GOD. Mallow may still suck compared to Brighton, but it's a bit more bearable now.

That bear I was supposed to meet on Friday before I left Brighton texted and cancelled at the last minute, so an opportunity for hot gratuitous sex was lost to me. Perhaps in the new year...

The preparations for the wedding grind on. Like a lot of women in such a position, the bride-to-be has turned into a bit of a psychopath, and has already fallen out with, and subsequently replaced, the two bridesmaids that she had lined up. They had been friends for almost 20 years. That's enough of a catastrophe. Hopefully there won't be any more.

In other news, I've been helping my mother type up a list of dutch recipes given to us by our relatives across the pond. The relatives had tried translating the recipes using an online translation tool, but had come up with some truly hilarious results. Pigs Head stuffed with cheese had come up as (fnar fnar) Head Cheese, and my favourite, Water-based Gruel had come up as 'Water Horror'. An interesting name for a horror film, that one would be. Anyway, it's done now, so my brother the chef will be getting a bound book of traditional dutch recipes as one of his wedding presents. He'd better apprecitate it.

Now I have to go and help my mother polish silver.

(P.S. I know I've been getting really bad at regular updates. I promise I'll try and keep you all scintillated over Christmas. Ta ra)

The Cock

I haven't written about any trysts with men for some time now, mostly because at the time I couldn't be bothered. But then I thought, well, half the reason I started this blog was to record them. So. An update.

It's either feast or famine when it has come to the men in my life lately, but I appear to be in the middle of a feast at the moment. It's about time.

Daffy hasn't been on the scene for a while now. It's a shame. As much as I know he's not boyfriend material, having one of his own already, he's still fun to be around. Oh well, maybe I'll see him around.

There was that time recently where I went out with Dan and June to celebrate the anniversary of their first date. Once that finished, I headed into the Bulldog and netted myself a man. As we headed back to his, he announced that he had a boyfriend. "Where is he?" asketh I. "In prison" replied the object of my desires. "Cripes" said I, "what for?". "I don't really want to talk about it", respondeth he.

We had much fun, but I hope it wasn't GBH or murder his boyfriend was in for, otherwise I may have to flee the country when he gets out.

On sunday night, I arranged to rendez-vous with a smouldering polar bear in the Star Inn. I thought we'd have time to go back to his after our drink, but he had to move on and meet other friends, though I might be able to pencil him in before I head back to Ireland on Saturday.

After he'd left, reinforcements were summoned, and I ended up staying for a few more. The Star has now set up its own playroom. As most of the crowd there weren't taking advantage of the opportunity, I waited until a burly person I've had my eye on went in there, and I followed him in. Some fun was had.

After that, I went to the Bulldog, and after a while, I made eye contact (and then mouth contact very quickly after that) with a hot skin bear. Locked in a passionate embrace, we took turns to pin each other against the wall. We're meeting at mine on Friday after lectures at about 3pm. I'm looking forward to it, and he's well-endowed, apart from anything else. Of course, as luck would have it, he's in a relationship, albeit an open one. Oh well...

Then there's Nuclear Physics Bear, who I'm still in touch with. We've been sending each other filthy texts lately, and now that I've got a camera phone, saucy pictures as well. One of them is currently being used as wallpaper on my phone. He hasn't been back to Brighton since Pride this summer, but there might be some potential there. He's single, at least.

Dying

I went out to an event organised by one of my classmates last night. It was for the kickboxing club, but the way it worked out, half my class was there.

A special arrangement had been made with the bar that they would only charge £1 for certain drinks (bottles of Fosters and vodka/cokes). By the end of the night we were all hammered (especially me. Surprise!) and cutting a serious rug on the dancefloor.

Unfortunately what goes up must come down, and now I am sitting at work with my head in my hands.

Please kill me...

Nnnnnggghhh!

Disaster, and shoddy landlords, seem to follow me at every turn.

It has been about two months now since we moved into our house in Staplefield Drive, near the university. After ironing out a few discrepancies, everything between me and the others in the house is now going fine. The house itself is not.

We found out not long after moving in that the previous tenants had left quite the trail of destruction after them. One of them was a drug dealer, and once the special branch of the police had gotten wind of this, they raided the house, SWAT team style. Everyone who had happened to be there at that time found themselves being forced face-down onto the floor and their hands cuffed behind their backs. It appears that none of the others in the house knew about their rogue housemate's activities and by the time the team descended, he was gone.

One thing we noticed in the aftermath of all of this was that there was a raft of unpaid bills left behind these people. One would expect a decent landlord worth his salt to have all that sorted before we moved in, but no. That was left to us. Sorting out the £300 gas bill wasn't too much of a problem, relatively speaking, although it still took a while. The landlord gave a meter reading to one of the housemates, and I (eventually, as I didn't know he had it) got it off him. So now that's done. The electricity has turned out to be a different kettle of fish entirely.

The electricity is managed by a pre-payment meter, which basically means you top it up in advance of using it, like using a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. We found, when we moved in, that once we topped up the meter, it was counting down our credit a lot quicker than it should have been. The landlord and his lackey fobbed us off, telling us that we must have been using high-drain appliances a lot, but we knew this was bullshit. A lot of phonecalls later, and I found out that the meter was incorrectly programmed (to recover debt from the last tenants, I think) and it was indeed deducting too much from us. More phonecalls to the suppliers later, and I was given a list of instructions on how to correct this. Basically, I've been sent a new electronic key in the post. I have to use this key in the same shop the next three times I top up the meter. A bit convoluted, I think you'll agree, but I went along with it.

This afternoon, I went along to the grocery store to put money on the key, and then went home and stuck this key into the meter to transfer credit to it. The meter responded by displaying a single message.

'No'.

I put in the old key we had been using all along. 'No'.

There is only 44p left in the meter, which should see us into the small hours of the morning, before our electricity is cut off, and I currently have no way of increasing it. I'm going to ring the supplier's emergency helpline in a minute...

Part 2: I've just got off the phone, and the monuments of incompetence at British Gas Electric kept me on the phone for twenty minutes (bang went £2 of airtime credit) and couldn't even find the computer records for our address. I'm going home now. Two of the others in our house have contract phones, so I'm going to use them in an effort to try and iron this out. Stay tuned for the sorry saga...

Part 3: I've come back from the house and am now in the library. I've made I don't know HOW MANY phone calls, and finally found out that I have to buy ANOTHER key (£8) at a participating outlet. I was told this at about 8pm. All participating outlets had by then closed. I told the moron on the phone that we had only 17p left on the meter. She assured me that as a a safety measure, meters don't cut out the power supply at night. They wait until 9am the following morning. The gibbering fool was mistaken. About half an hour later, the meter clocked down to zero, and the entire house was promptly plunged into darkness. I have to wait until I can go to a 'participating outlet' in the morning (6am) before I can (hopefully) restore the power supply.

My phone credit is down from £7 this afternoon to the £1.50 it is now.

I have a report to hand in tomorrow.

Oh, and the university messed up my wages transfer, and I have not been paid for the work I did last month. I have £10 to my name.

I hate the world...

I have formed the definitive criterion for finding out what I call the 'monkey rating' of a landlord. I've dealt with quite a few in my time, and have thought about the differences in personality and competence of a lot of them.

Put bluntly, if your landlord's career comes under the heading of 'unskilled labour' or 'semi-skilled labour', hang on tight, boys, you're in for a bumpy ride. Prime examples of this class of people (oh, contradiction in terms) are bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, or any other kind of people involved in the building trade. Having worked in construction for some time, they've cottoned onto the fact that property can make for a good investment and, gathering their similarly inclined handymen around them so they can have a go at doing it themselves on the cheap, they decide to give it a shot. Unfortunately, once they start renting it out to their victims, the lack of skills required to organise a piss-up in a brewery become apparent.

Also not very encouraging are those who have inherited their property, or who have come by it in a way that they normally would not. Guards or other civil servants can also be a bit troublesome.

I think the quality one needs to look for in a landlord is whether he has the means to come by the money to buy the property without borrowing heavily and banking on the tenants covering the repayments. The best landlords I had were ones who had good careers anyway, and didn't need to invest in property to start bumping up their assets. They were also organised enough to get things sorted when it was necessary, without us having to harass them for weeks to get them to do it.

I've thought about property as an investment when I graduate. If some of these idiots I've rented from can do it, anyone can.

Casino Royale

Well, I came, I saw, I enjoyed.

Trying hard to forget that I had just paid £3 for a carton of popcorn that would have cost me 50p if I had been organised enough to buy it in a shop, I headed into screen 4 of Brighton CineWorld on Wednesday night.

Spoilers follow.

As I've previously said, I've never really been a fan of this franchise, and have only ever seen them when I've nothing better to do. Still, the amount of people who take seriously what is ultimately a load of fluff... oh well. One thing I've come across in some people so far is the conviction that Seán Connery was the original Bond. It speaks volumes for Connery's acting ability that he got famous off the back of what was essentially a bit of escapist bubblegum. Mediocre actor, mediocre films, match made in heaven, and yet he gets to be the benchmark by which all other subsequent Bonds are judged. Whatever.

Cheese has always been a problem with the Bond films in the past. Chat up lines, martinis, introductions, female leads, eyes rolling skyward inside of five minutes of the start of the film, you get the picture. This was different. Straight from the opening, it was obvious that the director was not going down the route tried and tried again. The flashback to the fight scene in the toilet was interestingly rendered, and when the theme song kicked off, I noticed a familiar timbre in the singer's voice. My hunch was right, ex-Soundgarden singer/songwriter/instrumentalist Chris Cornell was listed as singer and co-songwriter on the opening credits. My only trouble was working out if this shows that the Bond franchise was moving up in the world, or if Chris was moving down.

Other things that jumped out at me during the film was the opening sequence, which was more kinetic, and yet still more realistic than what I've seen in other Bonds, M's wit ("If an agent did something that embarassing before, he usually had the good sense to defect. God, I miss the cold war!"), and the scene with the camera effects where he's in the hotel bathroom, desperately trying to hold it together after being drugged. Also, the usual outlandishly far-fetched slew of gadgets was mercifully absent, save for a bucketload of product placement for Sony.

Then there's Daniel Craig.

It has been debated by everyone from Jonathan 'Woss' to 007 anoraks as to whether Craig is good enough to step into the shoes of the character. Well, if the ability to ham your way through an entire feature and take yourself seriously to a ludicrous extent in the process is a prerequisite, then Craig fails. If getting himself across as a hard-nosed hitman with a presence all of his own is the thing, then hats off, because he's pulled it off. Oh, and he looks great doing it. Much better than the other lot. That body. Mmmmmmm....

Otherwise the film is more or less the usual. An innocous subtext about a baddie trying to gamble his way out of debt to underworld crime lords is introduced, and I forgot it almost as soon as it was presented. As is often the case, the less than worthy one is afflicted with some physical malady to highlight further Bond's rugged manliness. There is also a near Road-To-Damascus experience where Bond falls in love and (almost) resigns from her majesty's secret service. However, the producers toward the end seem to adopt the philosophy of my flatmate - "No gadgets and he falls in love? Then it's not James Bond" - and all of that goes tits up. There are also a couple of knowing references to the original style, which grate more than anything else, and the last line does indeed cause me to, yes, roll my eyes towards heaven, but at least it was at the end.

So that's pretty much it. It's different, and there are worse ways to spend your time than watch it, even if it ultimately ends up paying tribute to the very style it helps revamp.

Now all they have to do is bring out a Daniel Craig blow-up doll in time for Christmas.

Ugh!

I hate Tuesdays, because they usually feature a big fat pharmaceutical chemistry lab that involves running around for up to six hours, competing with everyone else for analytical instruments, evaporators, bunsen burners, oh...everything. Today we did extraction and analysis of caffeine from tea-bags. The 0.02g sample of pure caffeine we ended up with did NOT seem worth all the effort, and now I will never look at a cup of Tetley's in the same way ever again.

I've moved this blog over to the Beta version. I'm not sure how it'll look until I publish, though I think the comments will disappear, according to what I've heard.

(Oh Yuk! AGAIN! Someone near me in the computer pool room keeps farting, and it's VILE!)

In other news, I have bought a new phone (complete with new number. The chosen ones will be notified of it as soon as I get around to it) so I am now free of the torment of having long text messages truncated, the earpiece cutting out mid-conversation (kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a phone, when you can't hear the person talking to you), and the power cutting out whenever the notion takes it. My new baby is a Sagem my501c. It's really rather dishy...

Nothing else to report, except I'm back drinking again, albeit a bit more sensibly. Oh, the willpower of a dying swan.

Oh James!

History has just been made. For the first time ever, I am prepared to sit through a James Bond film.

(Clue: The reason doesn't have much to do with the story)

Daniel Craig has the honour of being the only one of the 007 movie stars - one of the few male Hollywood stars, in fact - that I would like to disrobe. Seán Connery's accent killed stone-dead any presence he may have had, Roger Moore's arched eyebrow added to the camp factor but detracted from the oomph, and Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan hardly registered at all. Craig is something of a departure for me. He's not particularly big, he's not at all hairy, and he doesn't have a beard. Yet he has a certain something, and a big part of that something is his eyes.

I've never really paid attention to someone's eyes in the grand scheme of attraction before, but his are definitely out there. Then there is the body. I've always been a fan of muscle (what person who digs guys isn't?) and Craig has the best body of all the 007's.

I've always thought the films themselves to be vastly overrated piles of shit. Octopussy was half-decent only because of the female acrobatics, and only Grace Jones could add an interesting twist to that one, what was it called? Does anyone care? I went to see Goldeneye with my sister when it first came out, and as soon as Pierce Brosnan did that jumping-onto-the-aeroplane thing, I rolled my eyes, sat back in my seat, and waited for the rest without too much anticipation. For some reason, being chosen for the role of either Bond himself or a Bond girl is an honour. Why? You could be incapable of acting your way out of a paper bag and still pull it off. It's nothing more than a dodgy signpost of popular culture.

But anyway, I shall be going, if only for the above scene where he come out of the water, and another one where he's apparently in the shower.

One thing I heard in the midst of all this was how lots of people felt that Craig wasn't right for the job (if someone could please take a minute to explain to me what being 'right' for this entails, I would be very interested), and some of these pathetic miserable fools saw fit to send him hate mail after he was chosen for the part. Which only goes to show just how much something of little consequence can mean to someone who seriously fucking seriously needs to get a life!

Bleh!

I'm in college this morning, having gotten up for an 'class' that has no attendance requirement, i.e. you submit everything for it over the internet. I still have something to work on from last week, but I could've stayed in bed for another couple of hours instead of hauling myself into the shower at the ungodly hour of 7:30am.

Dublin and Mallow was cool, although travelling at weekends reminds me of cattle being herded into the milking machine enclosure, with the way we were all trying to squeeze through airport security. On my way back, the steel toe caps on my army boots set off the metal detector, and the security guy made me take off my boots and walk through again. My socks had holes in them. It wasn't half obvious. 'Nice stockings, bud' said he. 'Thanks', said I, 'It's the student lifestyle, dontchya know'.

There were a couple of things I noticed about Dublin that distinguishes it from Brighton.

1. Dublin appears to have only one focal point for everyone at the weekends. That of the Temple Bar and Dame Street area. Every lager lout and his mother converges on the city centre at the weekends, and it's impossible to get away from them. Brighton is more diffuse in that respect, attracting different kinds of people to different areas, and West Street is enough to draw the flies away from the honey and towards the shit.

2. In spite of the fact that nightclub closing times in Dublin are more staggered than Brighton, taxi queues at 2 in the morning are still insane. What the fuck is going on? You can come out of a club in Brighton at any time and not have to wait more than 10 minutes for a cab home.

3. The traffic, Oh My God. I got on a bus yesterday to get to the airport TWO hours before my flight. It took an hour to get from Connolly Station to Drumcondra, and by that stage I was panicking that at that rate, I was going to miss my flight. I made it, but there was a mass exodus from the bus as soon as it arrived. Obviously others were counting on arriving earlier than it actually did.

4. Nightclubs and drink prices. EIGHT FUCKING EURO I had to pay to get into Bad Bobs at about 10pm. OVER TEN BLOODY EURO for a pint and a shot of vodka: I handed the barman a tenner, he went to the till, and came back. I had my hand out for the change. Into it, he put the receipt for 10.70 and held out his hand for the rest.

My nephew's christening on Sunday was cool, and the plans for my brother's wedding continue on, though the bride appears to have turned into an animal and has already had a massive blowup with the bridesmaids, both of whom have been her friends since school. Anyway, I've been measured for a tux.

I also had a meeting with my bank manager when I was in Dub, and I felt a bit better coming away from it, as I had a complex about my current debt, but he assured me that, relative to others in similar circumstances, I was doing quite well.

Anyway, back to work. I've got a report to hand in, eyes closing or not.

Ugh!

I fell off the wagon last night and stayed out more than a little bit beyond my bedtime. Today, for my sins, I am dying.

If nothing else, it serves as a reminder why I'm cutting down. Well, that or the fact that I really need to make myself drink some water before I fall into bed when I get home.

Days 'til I go home: 5. Roll on Friday!