Happy News Year!

Well another year draws to a close and what a year it was. Bin Laden dead, Gaddafi dead, Kim Jong-il dead. Maggie Thatcher still alive.

It's not fair!

"The Devil looks after his own" as my Grandad used to say. Of course he used to say it to my Granny as she went off to Mass and left him to open his first home brew of the day and start his long daily recital of shouting at the telly. He's dead and now it's my turn and I'll do my shouting on here.

I'm glad I got this blog up and running again but as you get older it becomes harder to come up with stuff you want to actually share with people. There is nothing worse than the kind of blog that goes on and on about the life of your kids or how you fixed your toilet, I strive to entertain and the banality of everyday life is only entertaining when you see it going horribly wrong on "[Insert country here] 's Funniest Home Videos".

"Oh look! Grandad's got his willy stuck in the electrical outlet again!"

"That's SHOCKING!".

Cue applaud from cross-eyed brain-dead looking audience.

I've been reading the usual raft of articles looking back over the big events of the year and it struck me that although this has been a momentous year in current affairs it has been a god awful year in journalism. Everyone has been going on about the Arab Spring, Libya, Obama, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Rupert Murdoch (and James), the Occupy movement, economic recession, unemployment, etc. No-one has said anything about the biggest story of the year.

Cheetah died.

And yet Maggie Thatcher still lives!

Again. I say NOT FAIR!

Here's to a happy and prosperous 2012 to all my friends and enemies. Slainte Mhath!

The next evolutionary step.

I was sitting on the PATH train when I think I identified the next evolutionary step. I was minding my own business and staring at people the way blind people do when they realize they can stare at people and people don't think they can see anything. Usually I do this to women with big boobs but this time I was absently staring at a Dad and his teenaged son who were sitting opposite me.

The teenager was playing with a hand-held games console and was disconnected from the outside world by the headphones in his ears. The Dad was on his phone answering emails and typing away furiously. These two people were together but they weren't really together.

It struck me then that I see this everywhere but just don't really pay any attention to it. Actually not only do I see it everywhere, I also DO it everywhere and so does my wife and so does my child. We are also together but not really together as one of us is usually buried into the little screen of some electronic device.

There have been a million articles written on how these things are destroying our attention span and how they are overwhelming us with information so I'm not going to regurgitate any of that, I am more interested in the evolutionary aspect of the phenomenon.

Everyone thinks "evolution" specifically refers to the Ascent of Man and of course it does, but if you'll notice the 4th figure in the Ascent of Man is carrying a spear. Evolution is as much about cultural changes and the tools that cause those cultural changes as it is about the extra vertebra and opposing thumbs.

For example: It is said that early man was lactose intolerant until he learned how to farm cattle and therefore developed the gene that allowed him to drink milk without shooting diarrhea halfway up the cave wall. Based on this it is a fairly safe assumption that loin cloths were not known for their absorbent properties and that early cavemen probably smelled like Charlie Sheen after a week long bender, consequently early man's sense of smell was not nearly as sensitive as ours is today.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I realized that the tools which will help the human race to our next evolutionary step are these little hand held devices.

In 50 generations from now we will communicate via text, email and chatrooms. We will forget how to speak so we will physically evolve in a way where we are born without voice boxes. We will develop languages based around the acronym that would seem alien and gibberish to us if we saw it today.

Our eyes will grow large but our eyesight will grow poor from straining at the little screeens. We will look (and probably move like) those nocturnal sloths that David Attenborough is always chasing through the jungle at very low speeds.

We will go completely deaf due to overuse of headphones and eventually our ears will just seal up and disappear due to lack of use. This will give us an entirely round cranium and we will start to resemble a very large eyed version of Charlie Brown.

We will get fat through lack of exercise to the point where our offspring are just born fat, blind and deaf. On the upside our fingers will grow shorter and move at lightning fast speeds as typing is the only way we can communicate.

In short we will be huge nocturnal eyed blobs with stubby lightning fast fingers, a big round head and no ears!

Personally I can't wait. I'm already halfway there!

A Country Song for Bruce Cantley.

I spent my last 5 dollars on PBR,

In a Williamsburg, Brooklyn Hipster Dive bar.

The fairy lights on the ceiling couldn’t mask how I was feeling

as I looked at you in your faux-working class glory,

Drinking crap 5 dollar beer and telling your stories.

You were talking about Oasis’ split and Noel

but when you went to the jukebox you played Billy Joel.

You think it’s ironic to play something shit, Tears for Fears,

Debbie Gibson or some other 80’s hit.

You wear pre-ripped skinny jeans which

slowly cut off the blood flow

right to your balls

and that extra small t-shirt

from Williamsburg Music hall.

Your politics lean just a little to the left

And you hate that the rich are engaging in theft.

You’d Occupy Wall Street but not right now

Because Daddy’s portfolio is still a cash cow.

You play with your iPad and Droid

get a corporate electronic erection.

But with Joe-90 glasses on your face

that huge beard and that acned complexion.

The ladies will hardly swoon.

It’s a safe bet to say

you won’t be making trust fund babies anytime soon.

The Caterpillar branded trucker hat that you wear on your head

was made for you by a kid in China who’s probably now dead.

But thank god for your shriveled balls and your girlfriend’s cavernous vagina

You’ll never be able breed and the human race’ll be finer.

The recession is here and 5 dollars for crap beer

Is just fucking stupid to me but thanks to you

and your whole yuppie crew

My drinking days are through

Because you can’t get drunk

And you won’t get far,

When you spend your last 5 dollars on PBR,

In a Williamsburg, Brooklyn Hipster Dive bar.

Let's Occupy Existence.

I've been trying to figure out why I am not more engaged with the Occupy Wall Street protests beyond reposting and commenting on stuff online. In my student days I was a member of the Student Union and went to anti-apartheid marches, anti-poll tax rallies and anti-student loan protests. Later I was a member of the Labor Party (campaigning for Tony fucking Blair of all people), and when I worked at the BBC, a member of BECTU (Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union).

Now I am sitting here clicking on a mouse, sharing information and helping push the message for a movement that I can't quite decide how I feel about. I know they have the right ideas and I admire their tenacity and use of the media but something is bothering me and I can't quite work out what it is.

There are various manifestos posted on line, and also various people who say there should be no manifesto at all. This is part of my problem I think. There needs to be some kind of concrete manifesto, even if it is an entirely idealist one that will never be realized. They are after all fighting against a system that is built on an illusion, the illusion of worth. That dollar bill or euro note in your hand is just a piece of paper until it is notarized, then it instantly becomes valuable. Why? Illusions.

It sounds silly but when you have major party candidates running for President on a platform of zero taxes or abolishing the federal reserve then you have to start thinking. Illusion.

Start getting some concrete ideas and aims. Stop acting like a bunch of directionless hippies. Abbie Hoffman might have been a fun guy but I doubt he really changed anything significant in the cultural zeitgeist so stop trying to be him.

At this point I think I should add that I hope my own observations in all of this are completely wrong. I will be very happy if they are and this movement actually does coalesce into some kind of viable revolution.

The hippy analogy is one that the press will obviously continue to overuse and I don't wish to add to that particular pile-on so let me make this argument.

The real social change in the 60's came about by grassroots community organizing by people like the SDS and the Black Panthers. They went into the schools, they started soup kitchens and built community centers. Almost every activist I have met who is still involved in politics got involved at a grassroots level like that and they are the people, through hard work and patience and tenacity, that have affected real change, not a group of photogenic flower children.

It disturbs me that the Occupy Wall Street movement did not start until the destruction of the banks and corporations and other non-democratic organizations spread to the middle class. Those same people have been enslaving and ripping off working class people in every country in the world for decades, why was there no real outrage until the property bubble burst, college fees skyrocketed and unemployment reached 10%?

If you've read any Naomi Klien or even more mainstream writers like Paul Krugman then you'll know that the economic destruction reaped on the working classes is not an accident. It has been a very deliberate and slow erosion of human rights in the name of profit. They've been screaming that message from the rooftops for years but no-one seemed to care. Again, it was the loss of the middle class dream that spurred the Occupy Wall Street people into action.

I'm Scottish and I'm aware we tend to be over obsessed with class struggle and again I hope I am wrong and I hope this movement serves as a catalyst for the kids involved to go on to much greater things and to stay involved in politics at a grassroots level after the occupation is over. That may be the real revolution.

Contradicting the Irish in Me.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself standing on 238th Street in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale looking up 128 steps. At the top of the steps was An Beal Boct Cafe, a great Irish pub that pours a fantastic pint of Guinness (one of the best in NYC in my opinion), and at the bottom of the stairs was me. In between us lay my total lack of fitness and a little motivation that was only driven by the thought of that creamy pint at the top of the concrete beanstalk.

I didn't count the steps but I know it was 128 since at least 3 people that I talked to later in the day took the pains to point out that there are 128 of them and they climb the damn things everyday.

"128 feckers I tell you!".

After about 40 or 50 steps I was starting to get out of breath. It may have been altitude sickness, after all I rarely go north of 14th street, but more likely it was just a condition known as "Fat Bastarditis". I sat down on the steps for a rest and turned around to enjoy the view of the 2 lithe 20-somethings striding up the steps 2 at a time, and who overtook me with a look like I was a dog log that they couldn't be bothered wiping off their shoe.

Slightly offended and therefore freshly motivated, I rose slowly to my feet wheezing like a 90-year old emphysema patient and started mournfully plodding up the stairs again. By this time I was doing a pretty good impersonation of a gasping fish floundering for water and I could see an angelic pint of Guinness beckoning me ever onwards.

Reaching the top I expected a guy to be standing there with a tinfoil blanket and a medal that says "Congratulations you came 9000th in the New York Marathon" but alas there was only more hill. A hundred yards up the road I could see the sign for An Beal Boct and instant alcoholic redemption.

Dragging my bloated corpse in the door I collapsed down at the bar and instantly remembered why I had put myself through this. An Beal Boct is a great bar and probably the closest thing that New York City has to a genuine craic.

Within 10 minutes I was deep in conversation with John the barman and a union carpenter named Tommy who had just finished working a 19 hour day and was having a hard time just focusing on the horizon.

The bar itself is one of those places that feels lived-in. It is only 20 or so years old (which is nothing by proper Irish bar standards) but it smells older. The varnish, Guinness, pre-smoking ban nicotine and ammonia mix together with years of discarded skin cells and blood and guts to make that smell. It is a combination that is unique and I love it. It's also rare, especially in America.

A good craic is always free flowing and can veer off anytwhere. After a bit of yapping about carpentry, obsessive compulsive disorder and the homeless people who live in the Amtrak tunnels of the Westside of Manhattan I bring up the subject of the stairs.

"There's 128 of them" Tommy and John say at the same time.

"When I was a kid I used to ride down them on a beer tray in the winter. Beats any sledding hill in the Bronx" John added.

The conversation moved from there to the Beatles, then to Irish history and Scottish history and the differences between the two. It was a lovely spontaneous bee-bop like flow and I was sorry I had to end it but I had to head back down the stairs to meet a friend.

I said my goodbyes, promising to be back (it's true, despite the stairs I will be back there to see Andy Irvine perform on Oct 13th). My belly now swelled by a quick 5 pints of Guinness, I walked out to the top of the stairs and tried to imagine riding down them on a beer tray but my bum started to hurt at the mere thought so I started my descent on foot.

At the bottom of the stairs I stopped in an old man bar called The Punch Bowl. There was nobody in there except one old Father Jack look-alike at the bar and the barman himself who looked like he hadn't seen the sun in several centuries.

"Arrghhyeedass" said the old guy at the bar.

I'd no idea what he said so I just told him I just came down the stairs from An Beal Boct.

"There's 128 of them" the barman said.

"Thanks, I know".

"Arrrgtyyyrrfuck" said the old man.

"Oh really? What makes you say that?" I said, still having no idea what he was talking about.

"Fuckarrrrgggeiisss". He then started laughing, either that or he was having some kind of fit. He was drooling big lines of spit down his chin and waggling his tongue from side to side.

I made up my mind to quicly finish my beer and hit the road. After An Beal Boct the Guinness in the Punch Bowl was utilitarian at best. At this point I met up with my friend Greg and we headed downtown to a pub called Connolly's in Times Square to see an Irish-American band called Shillelagh Law.

Connolly's is a borderline "Plastic Paddy" joint. Plastic Paddy meaning a celebration of all things stereotypically Irish, shamrocks, Guinness, James Joyce quotes on the wall, etc, etc.

However, I'd say it's borderline since it's kind of been around long enough to actually have some substance, unlike other bars in the neighborhood with names like "Lansdowne Road" and "Kevin St James". It's also home to the band Black 47 who's lead singer wrote a highly enjoyable book called "Green Suede Shoes" and who were known as an activist band during the days of the struggles.

This is where things start to get murky. There are plenty of things I love about Irish culture, and there are actually plenty of things I love about American culture too, but combine the two and it seems to bring out some of the worst people imaginable.

The struggles for me were always left leaning. The Father of the struggles, and indeed the person who the bar is named for, James Connolly said: "The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave".

Pretty fucking forward thinking for Ireland in 1912 I'd say.

So Shillelagh Law come on and they are pretty good, in fact I'd say musically they are excellent. You can tell they are all really great trad players in their own right but at some point The Pogues and East Coast Irish culture invaded their bloodstream to create this new smorgasbord of music.

I'm watching a group of kids down the front who may or may not be underage and they are really getting into it, slam dancing and moshing to these old jigs and reels mixed into a punk ethos and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to see them appreciating tunes which in some cases are hundreds of years old (albeit with new Yankee lyrics).

About halfway through the set the fiddle player dedicates a song to some local trade union and everybody applauds and I'm thinking Connolly again: "Without the power of the Industrial Union behind it, Democracy can only enter the State as the victim enters the gullet of the Serpent".

But then after one song which the band dedicated to a fire fighter who died on 9/11, the young kids started chanting "USA, USA, USA!". I was momentarily dumbfounded, then perplexed as I thought this mindless patriotic bullshit only exists on the right and weren't they just applauding a trade union song 10 minutes ago?

Patriotism is like an alien life form to me, I see it but I don't understand it. I call myself a 90-minute patriot. When the game is over and Scotland have inevitably lost at football, I take off the jersey and rejoin Planet Earth. My country is just as shitty as your country and vice versa. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The firefighter didn't give his life because he was an American, he gave his life because he was a firefighter and he cared about human beings regardless of where they were from.

It soured my night and I left wondering about those young kids. They have a great chance to appreciate something which is old and progressive at the same time. That music Shillelagh Law were playing couldn't have come directly from Ireland. It needed to be blended with the cultures in Boston and New York and the other Irish enclaves of the East Coast. At the same time, the politics have become regressive and Irish-Americans seem to have lost sight of the persecution their forefathers worked to escape from.

I finished my Guinness and we headed home passing the Connolly quote on the wall that reads:

"Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration". - James Connolly.

Welcome to the Terrordome

As I write this it is 10 years to the day that some religious nutters killed 3000 people a few blocks from where I am sitting. I remember the day very clearly (as does anyone who was in New York that day) but I am not going to talk about that, I've done it here before and the time has come to move on.

The only thing that makes this year any different from the last 9 is that it falls on a multiple of 5. Oh and the Iraq Body Count now stands at 111,937. That is approximately 37.31 times 9/11. Note, that is only Iraq. I didn't include the dead in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else that has been bombed to smithereens in the last decade. Iraq Body Count also only includes verifiable civilian deaths, the real number is probably a lot higher.

A lot of friends have been posting updates on Facebook along the lines of "Never Forget", I personally have no problem with that but lets stop living in the past and take a look at the present and the future.

This future is being presented to me right now outside the front door. Cops and men with machine guns behind barricades everywhere. It reminds me of my first visit to Belfast in the late 1980's except that this is no occupying force, this is our very own elected representatives doing it for "our safety".

Sure, I don't doubt that there are nutters out there who would like nothing better than to blow something up today but how is that any different from yesterday or next Tuesday. If those fuckers really want to do it they will, you can flood Downtown Manhattan with all the cops and army personnel you want and they'll probably blow something up in Pittsburgh.

Once you come to this realization then you understand that the cops and army folk all around you with their big guns are only there to provide the illusion of security. Sometimes it is an illusion that doesn't even make sense, over the course of the last week I have seen army guys with M-16 machine guns standing around inside crowded train stations. What the hell good are those guns in an enclosed and crowded space? They aren't any good, it's just an illusion.

I don't want this to come off as an anti-authoritarian post, it's not. I am well aware of the fact that many of the people who lost their lives that day were police and firemen who rushed into the building to try and save others. The cops and the firemen are not the problems here, the politicians are. Hell, the first responders aren't even invited to today's ceremony.

Bloomberg, Guilliani, Dubya, Obama and all the rest of the politicians just want their photo opportunity and a chance to cry crocodile tears. They need to do this to justify all the wars and people they have killed since that day. I hate to sound so cynical but it really bothers me and after 10 years it has the appearance of nothing but taking advantage of other people's grief.

They say the world became a more dangerous place on September 12th 2001, I call bullshit, it's no more dangerous than it was on September 10th 2001. The only thing that changed was our perception, finally our foreign policies came home to roost and we didn't like it.

The Injustices of the Kindergarten Experience.

It's the last day of summer and tomorrow my daughter will start kindergarten. It seems like only yesterday that she was still learning to walk so it's a little shocking to my poor time-lapsed brain that 5 years have passed since she was born and I don't even remember changing my underpants let alone the whole "Oh shit, here comes school" thing.

Kindergarten aka "Primary 1" to the Scots reading this is really the point where your memory actually starts to kick in and you start retaining stuff. She will see and do stuff this year that she will remember for the rest of her life, at least that was the way it was for me.

Primary 1 for me was when I learned that sometimes the world can be very unfair and that justice is definitely subjective to the whims of a probably half-drunk mad catholic teacher.

It all started in the playground where my friend Paul Clark started a "pile-on". This is where a kid grabs another kid that they either do not like, or just enjoy bullying, and wrestles them to the ground. At which point a third kid will scream "pile-on" and everybody will jump on top of the two kids on the ground.

It's a stupid thing to do really as the bully is quite often just as badly crushed as the original target and the amount of bodies with flailing legs and arms will easily take out some of those already loose baby-teeth.

Anyway so Paul starts a pile-on and I'm having nothing to do with it but this girl Patricia Rafferty comes barging into me and I fall into the pile of bodies somewhere in the middle. Some kids are screaming, more kids are laughing and I am just trying to wriggle free as I wanted nothing to do with this.

Unfortunately, just as I wriggle free and stand up, Mrs MacDonald the Primary 1 teacher comes running out the classroom screaming blue bloody murder at us. She knows the drill, the bodies towards the bottom of the pile are the perpetrators and the person on the very bottom is the victim.

I figure I am going to be alright as I see her wade into the bodies and start pulling people out. She grabs Paul Clark by the ear and pulls him to his feet, then to my horror, she starts making a beeline for me and grabs me by the ear too before dragging us both to the headmasters office.

I protest: "Miss, Miss, I didnae have anyhing to dae wae it! Ah was only standing by and I goat knocked intae the pile".

"Likely story McGrath. I saw you climbing out from under the pile of bodies" she said.

I realized then that if I had just waited it out I would have been in the anonymous group of arms and limbs and I would not have been singled out. Instead I had scampered out and caught her attention.

"I wisnae Miss, honest ah wisnae!".

She dragged us both by the ear down the long corridor towards the headmasters office and made us sit outside on these two big leather chairs while she went inside and spoke to Mr Budis, the long suffering head master.

Directly opposite the headmasters office was the staff room where the teachers took their break and where my Mum, a teacher of the Primary 5 class, was sitting. I prayed to Jesus, the Pope and all the "black babies" I'd ever given money to help me now. If my Mum came out the staff room while I was sitting there I was dead for sure.

Paul was sitting alongside me sniffing and crying and saying "Ah dinnae want to go in there, he's goannie belt us" and I was sitting sniffing and crying and saying "Ah wantae git in there before ma mam comes out the staff room and kills me dead right where I'm sitting".

In the end we both didn't get our wishes. Just as Mr Budis opened his door and beckoned us in, the staff room door opened and my Mum walked out from a gigantic cloud of cigarette smoke just to see the back of me going into the office.

She said "Just a minute" and turned me round to check it was me, then she said "I'll talk to you later" in that tone of voice that really means "You're dead!". At that point I knew anything Mr Budis did was going to be easy to deal with compared to what waited at home.

Mr Budis said "Come in boys and stand against the wall".

We walked inside and stood where we were told. Mrs MacDonald stood in the back of the room giving us the evil eye. She was obviously enjoying herself.

"Put your hands out, one on top of the other" he said, then he reached into the drawer of his desk and pulled out his leather strap.

"Waaaaah!" Paul cried and started shaking before anything had even happened. I didn't cry because I was now getting furious. I hadn't had anything to do with the pile-on, nothing at all, I knew this was a serious injustice.

"HANDS OUT IN FRONT OF YOU!" Mr Budis shouted. We meekly put our hands out in front.

Mr Budis swung the strap at Paul first and Paul's self-preservation instinct made him pull his hands back so the strap missed entirely. "HANDS OUT NOW!" Budis screamed and brought the strap down a second time, this time it made contact with Paul's hand and he screamed in pain.

"OKAY, YOUR TURN" he said to me. I stood there fuming but kept my hands out. He brought the strap down and it stung like mad but I was so angry at the injustice I managed to suppress my yelp and only my eyes teared up.

This went on 5 more times and almost every time Paul pulled his hand away whilst I just stood there and took it. I managed to get through all "Six of the belt" without crying and I felt good at not having given them the satisfaction.

It definitely hurt physically but it hurt much much more mentally. For the first time I learned that justice is not always fair and the good guy does not always win. A pretty depressing thing to find out when you are 5 years old.

My anger lasted for the rest of the day and I guess I was still angry when my Mum finished teaching and came to take me home. She asked me what had happened and I told her the whole story, the CORRECT version, and that I'd had nothing to do with the pile-on. There must have been something about my tone of voice because to my amazement she believed me and marched me back into school where she confronted Mrs MacDonald over her version of events. I was left to sit outside the classroom and I could hear them arguing inside, two colleagues arguing not just Mother to Teacher. After 10 minutes Mrs MacDonald came outside and apoligized to me. She said she had talked to Paul Clark and he'd told her I had nothing to do with it. I knew she hadn't, she'd only been talking to my Mum and Mum had straightened her out.

I went home in the car that night with mixed emotions. I was completely baffled and annoyed and upset that things do not always work out the same way they do at the end of children's comics with the good guy winning, but at the same time I was very proud of myself for not crying when I was getting belted and even more proud of my Mum for sticking up for me.

She was a good lady. Thanks Mum.


* As a post-script to this, it just came back to me that I was at my Mum's funeral and an old lady came up to me in the Church. She said "You must be David" and I said "Yes" but I had no idea who she was. She said "I'm Mrs MacDonald, I was your Primary 1 teacher".

Fucking. hell, the old bat must have making sure Mum was actually dead.