Rebirth

Not sure what I can say about this.
Sometimes life is strange.

Some Facts from todays Irish Star

Conor pay close attention to fact 4

Comments

It appears blogextra is screwed, so all your incise comments are consigned to history. Oh Well.

Blogger comments now enabled. Really, Really, Really must move to my own domain and start using wordpress. Soon my pretties.

I Respond

Michael,

Thanks for your reply. Apologies for my mail yesterday, it was unreasonably rude.

In general I have an issue with additional charges for public services. I think that this will become a headache for Irish Rail, and people will go back to local estates/roadside to park. Perhaps you have been working with local councils on this, because disc parking/double yellows will be the only way to stop it. People are cheap.

Allowing for 48 working weeks at €5, €240 a year is a lot of money to add on to the €980 that I pay for my annual ticket. Perhaps the parking charges can be added to your taxsaver.ie program?

Still, it's coming in to summer and I have a bike. Maybe I should get off my fat ass and use it.

Regards,
Conor

Irish Rail Responds

Dear Conor,

I refer to you comment logged with on our website yesterday in relation to our new car park in Leixlip (Louisa Bridge). Our intention is to charge €5 per week for or €2 per day as you mention. This means that daily commuter will have to pay €1 per day for parking.

We have discussed this proposal with local representative groups and they agree that it is a reasonable charge for parking beside the station. As I am sure you will appreciate we need to generate some revenue from such a facility to cover the costs of its ongoing management and maintenance.

I believe that most customers will agree that this car park will make public transport more attractive to them and suspect that it won’t be long before it becomes very popular.

Yours sincerely,


Service Planning Manager
Northern & Eastern

We Sixty

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Well chaps, the Wii wasn’t enough. [STOP]
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No games you see. [STOP]
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And I am an impatient man. [STOP]
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The red mist of consumerism came down and I was forced to buy an x360. [STOP]
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Gosh it’s heavy. [STOP]
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Gosh it’s loud. [STOP]
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Come join me online. ConRehn is my name. [STOP]
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Raw V Smackdown, Top Spin 2, Gears of War and (especially) Table Tennis are my games. [STOP]
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Fellow Wii owners will have to wait, no online games available yet you see. [STOP]
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PS3 can suck my balls. [STOP]
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Communication ends

Letter to Irish Rail

Sent this off to Irish Rail today:

Hi,

A new car park has been built in Leixlip Louisa Bridge. You are going to charge €2 a day to use it and have converted your existing free car park to pay-per-use also.
Presumably the car park was built to stop people parking on the road and neighbouring housing estates. A straw-poll on the platform this morning revealed that’s where people will continue to park because of an effective doubling of their train fare.

Making public transport that little bit less usable, you short-sighted monkeys.

I am not a crank,
Your etc.,
Conor

Phychic pyschic

Sinéad and I went a psychic fair in the Westgrove Hotel in Clane. It is not the first time we’ve been, I doubt it will be the last.

It was chock full of women (chick full?), with the odd (and I mean odd) guy hanging about. Taffeta-clad behemoths and beardos everywhere. Like last time, I avoided the scientologists who all looked like child molesters. I did like the look of their stress tester though, retro in a 1950’s science fiction kind of way. Sin got her fortune told. Her neural APIs either have their ports closed or her psychic is not hooking into them with the right psychic code, so all she got was the normal garbage. The psychic did say I was “a good man” so at least she got something right. I went off to leaf through a book on Tantric sex and put it back without buying it.

I picked up this card and will give Madam Moira a plug here. Visit her, she’s the phychic’s pyschic.

A bleak sestina about work

Haven't been blogging for a while, but here is a sestina. A highly stylised form of 12th century poetry. Not only am I blogging again, but a poem as well! Feel free to send me a sestina and I'll post it. I have foregone Iambic pentameter, because it's hard and I'm lazy.

Going to Work?

Today I arrived at the train station
And cursed the right-handed ticket machine
One of life's less subtle jokes
A sinister cross to bear
I can't allow a feeling of persecution
Because that way leads madness

Maybe I should give way to madness?
Reject my place in life's station
Embrace a state of persecution
Should you be talking to me, Machine?
I find it hard to bear
Your overly technical jokes.

Kidnap victims make jokes
To keep out the madness
Like a sanity Teddy Bear
I have found my station
In front of my tired machine
My own lesser persecution

It's a phantom persecution
Like bad Scooby-Doo jokes
010000010110110100100000010010010010000001100001 Machine?
Roll on, roll on everyday madness
Last stop crazy station
I ate your porridge, bear.

Little dipper you are a bear
Free from any earthly persecution
Shining in your heavenly station
The butt of big dipper's jokes
Do you reflect my madness
Stuck in my corporeal machine?

Being used like a machine
Is a situation I can bear
It leads to a bland madness
With little or no persecution
No more bad jokes
Numbly, I accept my station

Do I station myself to act like a machine?
Relating to life like bad jokes that I cannot bear.
Do I prefer boredom to persecution and madness?