How Myers might look alongside Dunphy (proportions accurate to within 0.1%)

After Ireland’s defeat to France in the 6 Nations, Myers lambasted out-half Ronan O’Gara saying he was as weak as ‘Kate Moss after a weekend on the gicker’, prompting a furious response from the Munster man. He claimed Myers knew nothing about rugby and was in no position to make judgements.

“When I heard O’Gara say that Myers knew nothing about rugby I knew he was the perfect man for us”, said Nugent yesterday. “If there’s one thing we like here in RTE it’s consistency and since time immemorial we’ve had pundits who, as soon as they open their mouth, make it quite clear they haven’t the first notion about the sport they’re supposed to be commenting on. And I think it’s quite obvious from his appearances on ‘That’s all we have time for’ that Kevin is well suited to panel type shows … even if he does have to have all his ‘jokes’ written down on cards for him because he’s about as funny as infant leukemia”.

Myers himself refused to be drawn but suggested to the Irish Sentinel that he was ‘perfectly informed’ about ‘association football’. “You don’t need to be Einstein to know your way around this game for ruffians, sex pests and borstal boys. I know my Alex Fergunson from my Insane Wenger, my Phil Bruce from my Steve Brown. I know when a player is off the side and when a penalty ball should be allocated. I can tell you the main difference between a four-four-two and a three-six-five, the connection between Wayne Rooney’s brutish countenance and F Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, and why Scimitar Bergkamptov is the best outside right since Alfred Finney.

And if I clash with Dunphy or Giles then it will simply be because they are wrong and I am right. They can accuse me all they like of having no background in the game but I’ve got a first class honours from the University of Kevin Myers. They have graduated from Bolton St VEC of thugball. One does not need to be a carpenter to see when one’s chair is incapable of supporting one”.

Reaction from football fans around the country has been mixed, with one poster on dangerhere.com saying “The one thing I always liked about RTE is that it wasn’t nearly as shit as ITV’s football coverage. Add this eloquent cunt to the panel and I’m gonna let Clive Tyldsley aurally rape me every time”.

Meanwhile RTE denied rumours that George Hook was to be removed from the rugby panel after upsetting Late Late Show host Ryan Tubridy by suggesting he was a Fianna Fail lackey. “There’s no truth to that at all”, said an insider. “Sure how could Ryan get upset by that? Everyone knows he’s up to his bollix with them and without the family connections he’d probably be a continuity announcer on TV3″.

Jesus imparts some wisdom to local residents

Councilors and gardaí in Mayo are calling on people to give up bad driving for Lent. Mayo County Council has said that instead of giving up chocolate, beer or hanging around the swimming pool taking surreptitious camera phone photos of pre-pubescent girls in swimsuits, motorists should stop speeding, tail-gating and using phones while driving.

The gardai in Castlebar have backed the call saying that road-users should use Lent as a starting point to change their behaviour for the better. Sergeant Dick Monogram, from Swinford Garda station said “I don’t know why we haven’t thought of this before, tying in obeying the law with obeying the Lord. People over here are scared *shitless* of Jebus. We’ll save lives while the chocoholics, booze jockeys and filthy pederasts can go about their business as normal”.

It would seem the whole community are getting on board, with many pledging to change their wicked ways in favour of nailing a front row seat in the strip club of heaven.

Local slut Sarah O’Toole expressed huge enthusiasm for the scheme. Aged just 16, she made a solemn promise to the lord almighty to “not get the box sawn off me” by every local lothario who so much as beeps the horn of their Vauxhall Calibra at her. Her 7 children will welcome the news.

However, some Mayo residents are unhappy at the council’s suggestion. Mickey Harte, aged 19 from Ballyhaunis, said the religious aspect had scuppered his plans. “I was planning on spending lent driving recklessly, you know. Doing laps of the town, racing knob-ends in Micras, texting my girlfriend at the same time and smoking joints as I burn the rubber of my 95 Nissan Sylvia. How can I do it now though?

I mean, I’ve seen all the safety films and the ads on the telly when the bloke crashes into a garden and lands on a kid playing football and they didn’t make the first bit of difference. All that buck was worried about was his insurance. I could happily ignore road safety advice all day… but you can’t ignore Lent”.

And it seems other counties are looking at Mayo as a new trail-blazer and copying the appeals. Gardai in Dundalk have appealed to shoppers to give up crossing the border for cheaper groceries and carjacking people with samurai swords. Wicklow County Council has urged people not kill their wives with bricks for the duration of Lent while in Dublin there have been calls for gangsters to stop robbing the country blind and abusing power so badly that it affects every strata of society.

So far there has been no response from Dail Eireann. They are currently on holidays for the vampire new year.

: We asked people around the country to tell us what they’re giving up for Lent…

lent

Joe Duffy reacts to news of Capel Street fire

A source told the Irish Sentinel last night “The Head Shops thing was just the start. There was a meeting of the stations chiefs late last year in which they decided to use their influence as the national broadcaster to shape Irish life on a day to day basis. They felt there was a niche there now that the church’s control has dwindled. And what better way to do it than through the nation’s second most listened to radio show, Liveline?”

Before Joe Duffy’s radio show began its campaign of scaremongering and misinformation Head Shops had been legal in Ireland for years without anybody batting an eyelid, but store owners hadn’t counted on Duffy’s production team shamelessly exploiting the death of one man in 2005 to sway public opinion against them. As more and more people rang into tell Joe how disgusted they were with these shops that none of them ever used and were in total, blissful ignorance of until they heard about them on the radio, the more pressure grew to do ’something’ about them.

Listeners, who both smoke and drink alcohol, lambasted the owners for selling dangerous products which could adversely affect one’s health. Ultimately, it appears that the crusade resulted in the arson attack on the Nirvan head shop on Capel Street, destroying it and several nearby buildings, and resulting in the closure of one of Dublin’s main thoroughfares to traffic.

“We had a fuckin’ party!”, said the RTE insider. “At best we thought there might be a bit of legislation in 18 months or a few people out with placards but getting the whole place burned down was beyond our wildest dreams. It just shows that Liveline is the voice of the people when we tell them what it is they should say. The plans have been ratcheted up now and with our new two week long offensive against foreigners we’re sure Ireland will be a proud, and much less swarthy nation, once again”.

It’s not the first time Liveline has been embroiled in controversy. Transport Minister Martin Cullen and his advisor Monica Leech sued the show over allegations made by a caller and in 2006 there was outrage as a Daily Mail journalist accused gays and lesbians of wanting to adopt children so they could practice legal incest.

: We spoke to the people of Dublin and asked them for their reaction to the Capel Street fire and Liveline’s Head Shop campaign.

Download audio file (joeduffy_mix.mp3)

Adele Staunton, media pig

Social media experts up and down the country today rejoiced at the launch of Google’s new social media product ‘Buzz’.

“We’ve had a mare of a Q1 so far” said Adele Staunton of leading Irish digital media agency Vapidit.ie

“Our portfolio of expertise was waning there for a short while. People had begun to unlock the deep, dark mysteries of Twitter and Facebook and we found our 2000 euro per day ‘Social Media Synergy’ workshops were beginning to lack in popularity. We needed some new hype, and thankfully, Google Buzz has come along at just the right time to fill the money shaped hole in our portfolio of bullshit.”

“In the last 24 hours, Vapidit.ie has established itself as Ireland’s leading authority on Google Buzz. How? That’s a deep, dark mystery that I cannot divulge, and you could never hope to understand. All you need to know is that WE are the experts. Only we can help your business leverage it’s  untapped sales potential in the sociosphere.”

So it’s just a simple matter of upscaling your clients’ vertical markets into a socially scalable, cloud-aware hyperniche?

“Pretty much. Our marketplace is mostly advertising agencies who don’t have a clue about the internet but know that they should be ‘involved’ in social media somehow. They saw it on the cover of the Economist, but were too lazy to actually read the article. At the proposal stage, we just throw a couple of buzzwords at them like ‘retweet’, ‘unfollow’ and ‘fan page’… before you know it, marketing managers are crapping  themselves because they’re hearing technical-sounding words they’ve never heard before. They don’t want to seem out of the loop, or that they’re losing their edge.”

“Once you instill that fear, well, the money starts flowing like the fucking Niagra Falls.”

“We’re talking workshops, seminars, conferences, open coffee, closed coffee,  shitbrick Tuesdays… you name it, we’re selling it to them for sizeable chunks of their marketing budget. All we’re really doing though is copying stuff off someone else’s blog and pasting it into Powerpoint, but don’t tell anyone.”

So business is booming then?

“Google Buzz is going to keep us in Grande Lattes and Macbook Airs for at least the next 12 months.”

What then?

“Sure if the hole falls out of it, I can always go back gutting fish part-time in the factory down the docks. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll probably go into SEO.”

Advertising about advertising – normally the preserve of dreadfully sub-standard national broadcaster Newstalk – has taken this turn for the post-modern more out of necessity than any self-referential insight.

Bravo boss-man Meredith Hennessy explains:

“People need something to lift them – what better than upbeat outdoor ads?”

Hennessy went on to outline the rationale behind his ads about his ads.

“It’s meaningless without being clever. Imagine a paper that said it was the last word in print – and you can have that for free!”

But before you could say, ‘run these cunts down with the props from Mad Max 2’, Bravo Advertising were hit with a law suit for their use of the word ‘last’. Today FM lawyers have served notice declaring their ownership of the word ‘last’ in order to top-load their programme names in some sort of empty theme that starts nowhere and makes zero progress.

The real news from Today FM however is that super-bland, if likeable, easy-listening Canuck jock Alison Curtis has been drop-kicked to the milkman shift from her 10-midnight slot. The Today FM Station Director, whose name is coincidentally not an anagram for ‘Denis O’Brien’s cum receptacle’, said:

“I guess she can carry on liking every tune in the world from 5am to 7am.”

Curtis - once unheard of, soon to be unheard

Meanwhile U2 front man Bono has announced plans to masturbate in space. The NASA-funded project aims to ascertain if the raw genetics of self-importance can compete against the classic Newtonian staples of galactic power such as gravity and light.

The ceremony is held every year to acknowledge the best in radio advertising and for producers, recording studio employees, voice over artists and advertising industry folks to get pissed, tell each how great they are before going off and bitching about how Mario Rosenstock ‘…isn’t all that anyway. I mean he could never do a film trailer, his voice is just too reedy’.

Ben Dunne was a knockout with his sophisticated voiceovers

The big winner of the night was Ben Dunne who scooped the much coveted Coke-Spoon D’or for overall Best Ad or Ad series. Chairman of the Irish National Radio Advertising Awards board, Lorcan Nugent-McCann, said “There really was no contest this year. Who could not have been moved by Ben’s mellifluous delivery as he weaved a magical web of words to tell us how much cheaper it was to join one of his gyms that have a cappuccino in Dunnes Stores? How could any right minded person resist the velvet intonation as he beseeched us to buy our art from the Nora Dunne gallery? That one, I have to admit, put me in mind of a young Brian Sewell crossed with latter-day Donald Sinden”.

“Those alone would have won him the prize”, he continued whilst alerting a Windmill Lane sound engineer to some powdered residue around his left nostril, “but then came the cream on the top of the already scrumptious cake … Ben Dunne dot com. I liken it to a footballer who has gone around the keeper, then stopped the ball on the goal line before kneeling down and heading it in off the ground. Pure class.  It was a stroke of advertising genius. Only Ben and his lyrical vocalisations could have persuaded people to spend money on something that so many others continue to do for free. He is a man ahead of his time. I’m always aware that advertising people are the best people in the world but I don’t know how we’re going to top this”.

Ben Dunne also won the top prize in the controversial ‘When are we going to tell people to use a voice-over guy instead and stop doing their own ads? Without the repeat fees I can’t pay my mortgage’, category beating off stiff competition from Rory of Elephant Self Storage.

There were also gongs for Wardrobe Elegance in the ‘Most pitifully annoying jingle category’, leaving hot favourites Garmin weeping and swearing revenge for next Christmas, ‘Black and Yellow’ for most memorable ad that nobody can ever remember the product for’ and National Radio cabs for ‘Chip and Pin’ in the ‘Most hackneyed stereotype’ section.

The party went on till dawn, lots of people had sex with people they shouldn’t have, and up to three septums were completely burnt through. Just another normal day in advertising.

Gygax69 - Boards Moderator

A number of violent episodes followed in the wake of the boards.ie hack last week. Intrepid forum moderators had no choice but to manifest their Hitler complexes in the so-called ‘physical’ world.

“I moderate my forum on boards with an iron fist. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, fucks with me and gets away it.”

The words of After Hours and Motors mod Gygax69.

In real life, Gygax69 is known as Seamus Brady, an unassuming 28 year old World of Warcraft enthusiast from Leitrim. Living with his mother in the sleepy hollow of Drumshambo, Seamus chose to shun the trappings of a regular young Leitrim man such as dowdy women, poorly modified cars, 10 shpots, 3rd level education and minimal standards of hygiene.

“I knew that was never the life for me. I knew, somehow, that I was different,  that my life was supposed to *mean* something. Sure, it was tempting. I mean, who doesn’t want to nick Micras and burn them out across the border, or finger fat birds in the alleyway beside Macaris chipper?”

Seamus shut himself off from the topsy-turvy world of Drumshambo when he discovered the internet. It was like a whole new world had opened up for him.

“Suddenly, I didn’t have to be a fat 28 year old virgin living with my Ma, working part-time in my uncle’s bakery, with really shit skin and terrible teeth. Online, I was like some kind of RamboJesus made out of ones and zeros. I could be whatever I wanted to be.”

With his snappy new online identity in place, Seamus trawled the net looking for an outlet where he could flex his newly found cyber-muscles.

“I used to get battered in school because I was smarter that everyone else. Not academically smart, or street smart, or sports smart, but you know… smart. People couldn’t handle the intellectual hand grenades I used to lob at them. Online though, I was the tough guy. I didn’t have to hide in the jacks at eleven o’clock break. Why? Because there are no eleven o’clock breaks on the internet, dumbass! Hahaha, pwnd you good. Anway, where was I? Oh yeah, I became an internet tough guy. Then I found boards in 2001 and joined the After Hours and Motors forum. At first, I was like ‘Hey, nice to talk to you etc’. This went on for two years or so. Eventually, they made me a moderator. From that day on, my place in history as the biggest cunt that ever ruled over an internet forum in Ireland has been firmly cemented in history. Don’t agree with me? Banned. Replied in a old thread? Banned. Cursing? Banned. Slagging off WoW? Banned, banned, banned.”

This continued for years. Gygax69 and his band of merry moderators were so good at their jobs, many new users would join boards, post once, get berated (“FFS. Did you even READ the forum rules, noob?”), then never come back.

However, on the 21st of January 2010, the world of Gygax69, online Superman, came crashing down. A hacker from one of the murkiest regions of cyberspace (Turkey) penetrated the Gibson servers of the boards mainframe. They uploaded the dreaded DaVinci virus, resulting in a mass outage of the boards.ie forum software

Suddenly, Seamus had nowhere to go.

“It was awful. I literally had nothing to do. I’d usually spend my days striking down new users with my staff of digital justice, but now I was just another fucking Leitrim douchebag. I felt like Clark Kent, except less educated.”

“My Ma asked me to take her Clio down to the mechanics. Her polio was playing up or something. Since I was a mod on the Motors forum, I thought myself more than capable of the job so off I went. When I got there, I decided to wow the mechanics with my knowledge of Nurburgring lap times. It all went wrong when one of the mechanics disagreed with me on the lap time of a Honda NSX. I whispered a private message into his ear saying ‘Don’t you DARE pull me up on anything like that again or I will ban you’. He’s all like ‘What the fuck are you on about man?’. That’s when I lose it. ‘Right, that’s it! You’re banned. Banned. Banned. Banned. For two weeks, no less!’. I began to escort him from his garage by the scruff of his (somewhat rouged) neck. That’s when I felt the sledgehammer in my back, followed by a balpeen to the temple. It was lights out at that point.”

Seamus Brady spent the next 2 days in intensive care and was only well enough to talk to the Irish Sentinel today. Had he learned anything from this experience?

“Yeah. Those mechanics in the garage that almost beat me to death? Fucking noobs. Tell them to try that shit on boards and I’ll wipe the floor with them. Now please leave. The site’s back up and I smell the blood of new users.”

And with that, Seamus sat back in bed and logged into his favourite forum. Cracking his neck muscles he mutters to himself: “Time to go to work, Gygax69. No fear. No fear.”

One of many stories of violence againsts boards.ie forum moderators across the country. Some call them lowest form of life in Ireland. Others call them badgers.

We call them people.

Despite fulfilling his contract the Sunday World has tried to prevent Williams from taking up a job offer from the News of the World, going so far as to take out a court injunction last week. The Sunday World claims Williams is obliged to serve out a three-month notice period under the provisions of the National Union of Journalists’ house agreement. Legal sources say the situation could take months to resolve unless a financial settlement is made but in the meantime the villains of the nation are left floundering.

Paul "The Journalist" Williams

According to Brock the Gobbler, a semi-notorious Limerick hardshaw, the longer the discord continues, the worse it’s going to be for them. “This is intolerable! I demand justice for Paul Williams. What are the Sunday World thinking? What drives them to the point where they deny a man the right to make a living?”

He was supported by Anto “The Armadillo” O’Cahill, an inner-city drug dealer, gang leader, forger, occasional hitman and importer of stolen good and orphans. “It’s all well and good an’ all an’ anyway if the Sunday World stop Paul Williams from writin’ for the News of the World but nobody stops and thinks about us. Knowwarramean? We’re out there all day every day, so we are, doin’ a decent day’s criminalisin’ and if there’s nuttin in the bleedin’ paper on Sunday then you stop and ask yourself what’s the point? Knowwarramean?

And are the Sunday World thinkin’ about the young fellas? The up and comin’ lads who haven’t even got themselves a nickname yet? It’s all right for me, knowwarramean? It’s all right for ‘The Viper’, ‘The Ostrich’, ‘The Snow Leopard’, ‘The duck-billed platypus’ and ‘The Stegosaurus’ but how are these lads gonna get ahead if Williams isn’t around to give them a droll appellation? Knowwarramean? Get it sorted”.

Sources close to Williams say he is growing frustrated despite the fact his name is still appearing in headlines and he can remain more famous than the gangsters he writes about. However there are real fears that unless he finds himself gazing at the streets of Dublin from the side of a bus advertisment he may take up TV3’s offer as Mark Cagney’s sidekick on Ireland AM.