Monthly Archive for April, 2006

Being asked to do things I’m about to do!

Published
by
Adam
on April 26, 2006
in Life, Ramblings, Rant and Thinking
. 4 Comments

I’m in work and it’s just your normal wedding afters. There I am looking over at my table to make sure the guests have everything they need and I spot a nearly empty water jug. I immediately hop into action and make my way over to the table to pick up the water jug and refill it. “Sorry there”, I say as I try to make some room for myself to reach in to the middle of the rather crowded table. Then just as I’m about to reach in, a woman taps me and asks me would I be able to fill up the water jug. My teeth to begin to grind in pure frustration and understandably so. It is quite frustrating because I had already noticed that the water jug was nearly empty and was taking the required steps to restore the supply of water to the dehydrated table!

By asking me to fill the water jug it portrays me in a very bad light altogether because immediately this woman will feel that the service was bad because she had to ask someone to fill the water up for her but I wasn’t going to walk up to the table and announce “Hi, I’ve noticed you’ve run out of water. Let me fetch you some more”. Not only would I sound gay but I’d also be like a human version of the infamous Microsoft Paperclip and that couldn’t be good. It also doesn’t get across the fact that I had actually noticed the water needed filling and I’d feel very cheeky if I said “Yes, I noticed. I was just about to fill it” because I know myself as a customer that I’d consider that to be cheeky. I go and fill up the water jug and bring it back to the table and I don’t get one “Thanks”, because they all feel that they shouldn’t have had to ask for me to fill the water in the first place. BUT I WAS GOING TO FILL IT ANYWAY!

It happens at home all the time as well. Say I’m the kitchen for example and then I hear my TV on upstairs. I leave the kitchen and on my way up the stairs to turn it off my mother shouts out to me that I should turn off my TV while I’m up there. IT’S THE ONLY REASON I WAS GOING UP THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Maybe there must be some sort of telepathy going on here or maybe people are puzzled by my presence and want to know what I’m doing there so all of a sudden their mind goes into overdrive and my mother starts to faintly hear the television and the fat woman at the table notices that there’s a water jug on the table that needs to be refilled. Then they think they’re great for noticing and deem it necessary to bring the matter to my attention - a matter that I had already managed to bring to my attention by myself.

It is frustrating though!

Tracy, Do you want to meet me in Los Angeles?

Published
by
Adam
on April 24, 2006
in Bebo and Geekiness
. 3 Comments

Once I has finished my report on Bebo I changed Tracy’s Page to let everyone know about what the experiment was all about. It reads:

First thing I really have to say that I’m not really a real person!

I was just created by “Adam” (http://Murdererer.bebo.com) as an experiment to prove how dangerous bebo can be.

My sole purpose was to add random people in order to source as many phone numbers and real addresses as possible.

After a week, my job was done and my profile has since been changed to tell everyone of my goals

A full report has been published on www.adamsrants.com

You’d think that a profile like that would be obvious enough to get across the point that it was all a big fake and that Tracy didn’t really exist. You’d be wrong though. Especially when Americans are added to the equation!

Over the past few weeks people have continued to send me messages and leave comments suggesting that I meet them in person and people complimenting me on my body and my looks which is quite impressive considering that I had already confessed to being a guy carrying out a social experiment?

I’ve included an montage of just some of the comments and messages I’ve been getting. The first is rather innocent but that last is rather disturbing and seriously raises questions over peoples ability to read!

Bebo Montage

Tramerica

Published
by
Adam
on April 24, 2006
in Life and Ramblings
. 2 Comments

With my mother going on yet another holiday (great for some isn’t it?), I’ve been ousted out to my fathers house in for a week! It wouldn’t be that bad if it wasn’t for me having little or no contact with my friends out here anymore! Thanks to me working all last Summer, I was never really out in Tramore and when I was I just wanted to relax for a while or go on my PC. Actually, I probably spent more time on the PC than relaxing!

It’s a big pity because some of my closest friends used to be out here and I spent more time talking to my neighbour out there over than I do in person. I’m not exaggerating either when I say that he’s my neighbour as he only lives two doors up the road and it would take more time to turn on the PC, connect to the net, log into MSN and see if he’s online than simply putting on some clothes and walking up there! Suppose it goes to show just how reliant I am of the PC :(

Tramerica isn’t all that bad though. Our house is for though which means people are regularly coming to look at the place so we have to keep the house clean and tidy. I’m not a tidy person though so I don’t have to help clean up which I suppose is one good thing about the place!

Sleeping hasn’t been the most comfortable of things for me to do yet though because my bed has been broken down and sent to a scrapyard as we wait to move into our new house where I’ll be getting a much bigger bed! Unfortunately for me though, my sister decided to take a break from the high life of being a creche worker and came out to Tramore last night which meant I couldn’t sleep in her bed unless of course we thought incest is best! Yuk! As a result of this surprise visit I was assigned the airbed! Airbeds in themselves aren’t that bad and can be quite comfy if you can get the air pressure just right so that it feels like a matress but this yoke wasn’t pumped up enough and as a result my bony arse was constantly digging into the floor! Luffly!

Thankfully for the rest of the week I’ll be able to sleep in a proper bed complete with an electric blanket which’ll result in me getting a decent night’s sleep making the whole process of waking up at 7:30 in the morning that little bit easier!

Bebo does Prime Time.

Published
by
Adam
on April 22, 2006
in Bebo
. 33 Comments

It really was inevitable wasn’t it? With no political scandals as of late it was typical of Miriam and co. to latch onto the latest phenomenon and produce a scaremongering report into the social-networking site Bebo.

In it’s attempt to produce an expert and indepth report the program starts off with the story of a 16 year old in Dublin who posted an image of someone hanging themselves on his Bebo profile. This same 16 year old then commited suicide a few days later. Fingers were pointed at Bebo.com. I can’t understand why though. Is it because his parents didn’t want to admit that they did a terrible job of bringing their son up or his “friends” didn’t want to admit that bullying him over the years may have had an impact on him? Maybe it’s both! But that’s no reason for Bebo to take the hit on it. In fact, if I saw my friend posting up pictures of someone hanging themselves on Bebo it would set off warning bells in my head and I’d strive to help that friend because obviously their screwed up in the head.

A Ken O’Shea then went “around Dublin” speaking to users of Bebo. Hardly “around Dublin” though when you listen to the deplorable D4 accents! So apparently the views given by 3 Dublin teenagers (living in D4) are the views and opinions of everyone else in Dublin? Yeah. Whatever.

After that wonderful insight into Bebo provided by those esteemed students, Miriam invites Ken to show everyone the site that he has been looking at for the past 2 days! Yes, two days and all of a sudden he’s in the position to offer an expert’s view on the workings of Bebo. It’s obvious that all he did was search for the most offensive images and cases to present Bebo in the worst light possible. Not one advantage of Bebo is mentioned at all. Probably because he doesn’t know there are such advantages having only used the site for 2 days with the sole aim of finding offensive material!

I know that I have been a critic of Bebo in the past but that was because I had the right to be one as there were very clear and present dangers. However they improved their policies and now I don’t see any dangers to responsible users. If your son or daughter isn’t responsible then don’t leave them near the site because clearly after seeing this Prime Time report they’ll end up becoming hard-core drug users, posting pornography before comitting suicide.

Everytime Michael Birch began to make a good point, Miriam interjected and slowed his momemtum because after all, it wouldn’t be right if the one person who had a clue what he was talking about was able to make a fair point. Prime Time, fuck off scaremongering.

If you missed the prime time report then you can watch it here (opens in a new window, RealPlayer required)

Bebo, prime time, rte, Michael Birch, scaremongering

Cometh has the 10,000th day review.

Published
by
Adam
on April 20, 2006
in Reviews
. 6 Comments

It’s been 1 day since it was reported on Fourtheye.net that the Tool album, 10,000 days, was leaked. But it’s been nearly 2 days since I got my hands on it. Virtual hands that is as I downloaded it the very second it was released from a private site! A lot of people have been posting around the internet that people were wrong to download it and that they are going to hold on until release date because they are the true devoted fans! I can actually only laugh at how wrong they are! Tool have always said to fans that they need to question authority and guess what I did by downloading the album? I questioned authority!!!! Surely anyone who takes in what Maynard says would have copped on to that?! By standing in an orderly queue at your local record store on release day I can gah-run-tee you that you won’t be questioning authority and that Tool will forever hate you. Artwork is also a hot issue and apparently I’m not listening to a Tool album unless I have the artwork in front of me. That’s bad news for anyone who wants to listen to the album on an MP3 player as they’ll have to label all the songs with an if they aren’t actually listening to Tool at all… unless they have the artwork with them!

Now that I have that off my chest I can go on to review the album. If you are a “true fan” of Tool then you may find the following text to be of a disturbing nature… unless you have the artwork in front of you. You Muppet!

You’d easily be forgiven for initially thinking that the album opener, vicarious is actually a remix of Schism. This song is a combination of everything Tool has done before and (musical) references previous songs can be heard throughout. Before the song was even over I came to the conclusion that this was Lateralus’s last stand and that from this point on nothing would be quite like it was in Lateralus (with “I need to watch things die, from a distance” being the prominent lyric in the chorus).

Jambi starts off almost like a death metal song would but right at the point where you’d expect a Scandinavian death growl to join proceedings, Maynards melodic voice intervenes as does Danny with some beautiful tribal drum beats! The bass line is also mesmeric (a word you’ll see me use to describe many elements of Tool’s genius). The highlight of the song has to be Adam’s seductive guitar solo in the middle of the song which is something that’s right out of Tom Morellos books but sprinkled with a bit of Adam’s magic to make it as captivating as it is!

10 years a go, Third Eye won over a sizeable proportion of my heart. It was a song of epic proportions that for 13 straight minutes never ceased to amaze me. 10 years later and I fear that Wings for Marie (Part I) and 10,000 Days will do the same. Once I hear that opening guitar I’m drawn in. My attention is purely focused on the musical and lyrical articulation that follows - I could be raped and wouldn’t notice! Part II is a eulogy to Maynards mother. The song undoubtably deals with faith. I think it’s about him eventually coming to terms and beginning to respect his mothers beliefs (she was a devout Christian). The words “10,000 Days in the fire is long enough, you’re going home” are possibly the best lyrics I have ever heard. Adam, Danny, Justin and Maynard are at their best. This is musical perfection! Tool have taken the best elements from not only their own songs but from other influential bands and have produced a sound that I’ve never heard before, yet sounds so familiar to my eager ears!

“t’fuck?” was my first reaction to The Pot. It’s intro is so unlike Tool. Maynard sings in an unusual high voice which makes him sound identical to Will Young! After the initial quirky intro, the song reverts back to something that we’d expect to hear from Tool. But I’d like to point out that it’s never WHAT I would expect to hear from them. Always different yet always in the vincinity of what I expect. It’s this formula that makes this song very accessible. It’s experimental and accessible to fans of other genres but retains an element of toolishness that will ensures it will please fans.

Lipan Conjuring is filler (or seque as Tool call them). Sounds like spoons being banged together a long with some chanting and on occassion someone blowing some air between two sheets of paper. Not really much more I can say about it except for at the start I thought that it was going break into “A wimba wa, A wimba wa. In the jungle, the mighty jungle”. It didn’t though.

Lost Keys initially seems to be another seque. But about half way through it a conversation is introduced which appears to be between a psychologist and a patient.”You need to talk to us, what happened, tell me everything…” “Alrighthy then” a voice replies and all of a sudden the next song, Rosetta Stoned erupts into a robotic fury. There seem to be references to the album Aenima at this point particularly “Pushit”. Although unlike most people, I’m looking at this album as something new, not recycled. The song is nearing it’s peak at 8 minutes, you can sense that they are getting ready to throw something truly groundbreaking at you and that’s exactly what they do! A sublime melodic verse from Maynard is supported by the best drumming I’ve ever heard by Danny and some insane work by Justin and Adam!

Thankfully we’re given some time to recover from that tour de force in the form of Intension, a incredibly experimental song with Maynard chanting and whispering throughout. A very moody song but one of the weaker songs on the album.

Initially the penultimate song Right In Two seems relaxed, almost as if the album was beginning to wind down. All is not as it seems though and soon enough the song begins to pick up pace, explodes and then subsides before once again erupting like a mushroom cloud for one last relentless assault on your ears. Everything combines to form a hypnotic entity. This is new Tool and I like it!

Finally we reach the last song,Viginti Tres which is nothing but machinery sounds for 5 minutes. I’d like to speculate that the song wasn’t fully ripped and that there’s an easter egg at the end of it but the album is already pushing on 77 minutes which doesn’t leave much time for anything magnificent to be introduced but I suppose I’ll leave all the true fans of tool a long with their artwork to discover that!

Tool, 10000th day, review, Adam Carey, Maynard James Keenan, Justin Chancellor, Lateralus

Bebo and Myspace - Changing society as we know it!

Published
by
Adam
on April 16, 2006
in Bebo and Life
. 170 Comments

The purpose of Myspace and Bebo was to bring people from around the world closer together. But what are the costs of bringing over 71 million (and counting) strangers together?

A minor problem is thatSocial Networking sites have made it ridiculously simple to find people with similar interests and nowadays it’s common to encounter people with more online friends than real friends. This is worrying because it means that people are spending more time online on sites such as MySpace than they are out in the real world. This results in people having low self-esteem and generally not having a clue about what goes on outside their house! This is only a minor issue though and it can be argued that Television has been contributing to this happening for generations but the internet is aiding the acceleration of this process! The main problem is something far more sinister that has the ability to change society as we know it but this is undoubtably serving as a catalyst!

Unfortunately, because people have a lot of online friends it has almost become acceptable amongst todays youth to travel across the country to meet each other and often times not just for mere friendship. I’m talking about something more than that. Not only is this dangerous but it is also in most cases carried out without the knowledge of parents - the older and wiser generation. If I told my mother that I was going up to Dublin to meet a random stranger for sex then all hell would break loose in the house which should get across the point that this is unacceptable behaviour. However, if I lied to my mother and told her that I was going up to Dublin with a friend for a spot of shopping then my mother would be none the wiser and not in a position to warn of the dangers (let a lone stupidity) of doing such things.

The people who do this though obviously think it’s okay to do so. If I think it’s okay to do such a thing then I’d tell my child that it’s okay to do it. Teenagers are notorious for disobeying authority though. So if my mother says that I can stay out until midnight then I’m going to stumble in the door at 4am. Now if I tell my child that it’s okay to go out and have sex with random strangers then imagine what they’d do when they (inevitably) disobey you and try to push the envelope! This is where the problem lies. Because teenagers can be in relative secrecy on the net they are operating with no guiding light, no authority and no advice. It really is a disaster waiting to happen and I really do hope that in the future such things won’t be acceptable!

bebo, bebo dangers, society change, society, myspace, myspace dangers, casual sex, social networking, anarchy

A death in the family

Published
by
Adam
on April 16, 2006
in Ramblings
. 3 Comments

Over the past few weeks my grandfather noticed that their dog (well it’s actually ours) was gaining a bit of weight and after catching her “fornicating” with the dog next door a while a go he came to the conclusion that she may very be pregnant.

The day after I was told about all this, Janeway (yes my mother named her) had her puppies. Initially it was thought that she had 8 puppies, 5 of which tragically died in their first few hours but like in a general election there were plenty of recounts. At one point my grandmother counted 24 puppies but as more and more puppies stopped moving it became a lot easier to count them!

Why did they stop moving? Well Janeway must have had a vendetta against her newborns and took a liking to attracting the thirsty pups over to her milk inflated bosoms before rolling over and smothering them! All atempts to reach the bewildered pups were futile - my grandad has the teeth marks to prove it!

At this point there weren’t many pups left and they were beginning to catch on to her rolling over trick. I must admit that it was an ingenious killing method although obviously very cruel! Now that the pups were weary of their homicidal maniac of a mother they tried to avoid her. But Janeway found a new way to kill them by putting them into her mouth and running down to the end of the garden and hiding them in the bushes and brambles! Yet again my grandfather couldn’t reach them - he has the thorn marks and splinters to prove it!

As far as I know, Janeway killed all eleven of her pups which means we have a mass murderer in our family! I don’t know why she killed them and I don’t think I ever will (unless Dr. Doolittle intervenes). Maybe they were too weak? Maybe she thought she was shitting out the toys she ate over the years or maybe she was just bored! One things for sure though, we missed out on a chance to be minted. Stupid selfish dog!

death, murderer, dog, puppies, pups, homicidal dog

I’m going to go home and do four lines of coke

Published
by
Adam
on April 13, 2006
in Ramblings
. 4 Comments

That was kind of bullshit I was subjected to all throughout the day in what I can only describe as one of the most depressing days I’ve ever had to endure! The day didn’t start off all that negative either as work was simplicity defined and I even managed to get a 2 hour paid break. A paid break being defined as hiding in the hotel pretending to do work!

I went into town after work and for only the second time in my life went down to the infamous Plaza on the Quay! For some reason I never thought much of either the place or the people and always made it my business to stay well away from the place. And hey, I didn’t turn out all that bad did I? …

While I was there I managed to run into a few of your average, run of the mill teenage drunks and it was there that I began on my path to depression! I noticed that one of the guys, lets call him Jimmy, was smoking like a chimney so to break the ice I asked him how many fag’s he had smoked. “13 or 14″ he said to me. Thinking that was the end of the conversation I turned to one of my “real” friends but before I could utter a word to them, ‘Jimmy’ blurted out his life story and was saying that he chain smokes because he’s depressed. I thought that once he had got that off his chest everything would return to normal but my hopes were shattered the moment I saw his mouth open and his vocal chords begin to work overtime as he started to explain that when he’s depressed he smokes and drinks a lot and does drugs. “When I’m go home I’ll probably go up to my room and do four lines of coke and smoke a joint before crying a little”. Not something I thought I’d hear someone say in amongst their first 50 words to me!

The rest of the day was spent soaking up the depression of the group. I swear to god, that they all just purposely wet themselves with depression once at the sight of me. And then I come a long like a big sponge and soak it all up. At one point I realised that I was on the verge of feeling depressed. Now that isn’t a nice feeling! Within minutes I made it my business to go home where surprisingly I didn’t do 4 lines of coke or smoke a joint. There’s hope for me yet!

depression, town, drink, drugs, depressed

I like to read?

Published
by
Adam
on April 6, 2006
in Life and Ramblings
. 1 Comment

Books never really made my boat float (despite being made from trees) and the only books that I can remember ever reading as a child were ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ and ‘Coral Island’ which I must admit had to read to me as my bedtime stories. And no, I won’t tell you what age I was at the time! While I may not have read much, English was always the subject that I excelled in partly due to my mother being from England (Kent to be exact) and she was always going around promoting the proper use of English. To this day she still refuses to talk to me whenever I fail to “dot the I’s” - even when speaking! So now that I think I’ve established the fact that books were never on my menu, I’ll suddenly hit you with a Dream Team-esque plot twist and admit that recently I haven’t been able to get enough of anything black and printed on paper! (cue the music that goes “Duh - Duh - DuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuHHHHH”)

It all started with the Christmas sales when our local Book Store, The Book Centre, had a big Sale section full of interesting looking books (but most importantly, cheap). Thanks to me having plenty of cash left over from Christmas I couldn’t stop myself from picking up a book, and another and, sure what the hell, another! Questions were raised over whether or not I’d ever be able to get through these books which could not be summarised under any particular genre - unless cheap is a book category these days!

The problem didn’t manifest itself for a while though. Like a tumour, it lurked underneath the surface for a while, waited until I was weak and then struck with no remorse! Wait a minute though! When was I weak? I’m glad you asked, may I add that you look ravishing today (but not you Jes :p ). Well about 8 weeks a go, my mother took the foolish decision of taking away my PC in order to make me study more. This made me extremely vulnerable! All of sudden my usual 6-11 slot was cruelly taken away from me and I urgently needed to find something else to occupy myself with. Then one night as I was staring into space wondering what the hell I could do (because I sure as hell wasn’t going to study) my eyes caught sight of “Catch 22″ a novel by Joseph Hellard that I had bought a few weeks earlier but like all other books I had bought since Christmas it had been thrown onto my shelf. At least it wasn’t a puppy anyway!

I decided that I may as well give it a try. Either that or watch more re-runs of The Simpsons on my barely tuned in 14″ TV which would have had me squinting at every moment trying to make out what was going on and squinting just isn’t on in this day and age. A proposed motion to have a 32″ Widescreen Plasma TV bought for my room was quickly shot down though so Catch-22 it would have to be! I was a bit sceptical at first over whether or not I would enjoy it as it did seem to be a bit heavy going. But all that changed once I actually began to read it. I am now convinced that Catch-22 is one of the best books ever written although coming from Adam “I’ve only ever read 10 books” Murphy, it doesn’t mean that much! My only advice to you is to buy the book. You really won’t regret it and the rewarding feeling you get once you finish it is well worth all those Math’s and History classes I dossed off so I could read it!

While I was still recovering from the rather satisfying high from reading Catch-22, I was told about a little known shop down the arse end of the Quay called The Book Stop where you can get second hand classics for around €3. “Hmmm” I thought to myself, “that’s cheap”. I like cheap. That lunchtime I was down there browsing through their vast collection of books and spent around €30 which wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the 30 something books that were already on my to-do list! The next day I went down there again. And the next. Uh-oh!

Throughout my life I’ve always had an obessive personality and every now and again I would obsess over a certain thing, be it food, bands, sports or friends. After a while I’d get bored and just add whatever the thing was to my “been there, done that” list. On some occassions I even got the t-shirt! The PC is, I think, the only exception to that. It seems to be a continuous obsession and once that was taken away from me I desperately had to latch on to something. I latched onto books. I’ll admit that books are a better obsession to have than some of my previous ones such as McDonalds Chesseburgers and pissing in the sink (it was just so easy). My mother gives word that my PC will be coming back tomorrow and I wonder whether or not I’ll keep up reading considering my mother of all obsessions will have returned!

catch 22, reading, books, obsession, obsessive