The Most Pointless Purchase Ever

I think I've finally cracked it. After years of searching and near misses, I think I've finally made the most pointless purchase of my life. A golf glove. I have played golf maybe six times in my life. I enjoy the sport but I've no clubs and play maybe once a year. So obviously I bought a glove in Arnotts for €10. And what's worse is it wasn't even an impulse purchase. I actively searched for it. I want to take up the game but I've no clubs and no way to get them from house to course.

I'm a sad case.

Kiss the Crest

The West Indies are as close to a rabble in international cricket these days. It's a terrible site. Twenty years ago, when Marshall, Daniel, Ambrose, Walsh and the rest roamed the world's cricket grounds few would have believed that they could disintegrate as they have done. And nothing is more symbolic of their collapse as the crest, or lack thereof, on their helmets.

Time and again in this series we have seen their batsman march out to the middle dressed like club cricketers. No crest on their helmet, all odds and ends on their gear, surely Denis O'Brien can at least give them the money to cover these little costs that matter so important?

While England, even Ireland have personalised jerseys and personalised tracksuits, the men from the Carribean shamble around in whatever they can find.

If you look like a bad side chances are you will be a bad side. If you look the part, you may still lose, but at least you'll have a chance.

Dump Portis, Samuels

So Clinton Portis and Chris Samuels have played down accusations of dog fighting involving Mike Vick.

My reaction?

Trade them, cut them, do what you want with them but get them the Redskin's roster asap. There is no place for that attitude in society, never mind a football team.

I Have A Dream...

Listening to The Speech again, inspiring stuff.

If only America had a public figure to match him now...

Decisions decisions decisions

Happy Holidays to all my readers! I thank both of you for your unwavering support all through this time.

So it's December 27th. I've a wedding in three days time, I don't know what to get as a gift or whether to get a gift at all. The following day is New Years Eve and I should be going home after the wedding. The thing is, do I go down to Bundoran where there is a girl I like, or do I go to a party in Dublin? Like I said, decisions decisions...

Ashes to Ashes, funky funky to funky, we know Major Tom's a junky...

So it's finally here. The Ashes. The biggy. The bee's knees. The cat's pyjamas.

And already it's a cop out.

Australia won the toss and are 198/3. Game over. It's 4.23am in Ireland watching Ingerland getting trounced, and I'm loving it.

Stumps prediction: Australia 345/6 (Ponting 131*)

Series prediction: Australia 3, Ingerland 1.

Firefox joy

Greetings grapple fans! I'm back, and writing this in new fancy Firefox 2.0. So far so good. Anyways, I've decided that the company I work for, and the life I now lead is quite bizarre. Last night on BBC 1 news it was announced that a gang of investment banks are planning to set up their own trading platform to rival the London Stock Exchange. The LSE's fees are too high. What's strange is not only did I know this but I also agreed. I pay out around $1.3m in commission on trades done out of New York every month. My colleague pys out around the same amount of dollars on London trades but on far fewer trades. NY is better value. And I know this.

I also sent a mail to a mate of mine who works for a rival firm (yes, we do refer to it as The Firm, complete with Gene Hackman and Hal Holbrooke types) and he replied from his Blackberry. my first such encounter with those beautiful machines. Last time I saw him he'd just bought a particularly crap phone. Now I know why.

My friends are slowly leaving their youthful idealism behind in favour of cold hard cash. One wors for big law, one is in the process of joining Accenture having been rejected by Shell and I'm now in investment banking. We just need someone in Big Pharma to compete the set.

The Drinking Log

Monday November 6th- Sunday November 12th:

Friday: Post work pints in Smyths and then the we were going to the Leinster game but it was raining so in true Leinster fashion we went to the Waterloo instead. Pissed.

Estimate: 4 bottles of Heineken with ice, 3 pints of Guinness.

Saturday: What a day. A match in Terenure at 12, an international at 5, Sheehans by 7, Dicey Rileys by about 1, the Manhattan by 4, home by 6.

A mess. Guesstimate: 12 Guinness. Awful.

Sunday: We won the Leinster Cup Final beating the overwhelming favourites 19-16. Back to the winners enclosure. Some very drunk people and lots of nakedness. Mildly drumk. Well, not mildly at all.

3 bottles of Heineken, 5-7 pints of Guinness (some were ruined by beermats, cocktails sticks and lemons).

It is worth noting that between Thursday evening and Sunday night I had 4 club sandwiches and 3 Strawberry shakes. Probably not the most healthy of weekends.

The Teflon T

11.35am, The Office

I’m here, it’s month end, I will be in until about 11 tonight, but right now I have nothing to do.

* * *

5pm, Still in The Office

I’ve just heard The Taoiseach’s “apology”. It was a non-apology apology, to paraphrase Ben Bradlee.

He’ll get through this, but what struck me about it was not so much the speech and the apologies, but rather the texts and comments that came in to The Last Word on Today FM. Either he did brilliantly or he sucked. And the same went for Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte.

It seems to me that no matter what he said today, opinions had been formed long before this scandal. Very few people would be swayed by his performance today, or even this episode as a whole.

He’s either a crook or a legend.

What do you think?

Corruptio optimi pessima

5.21pm, The Office

This morning I bought JPY 70m, £2m and CHF 5m. Power definitely corrupts. As does people asking you if they can leave because you’re in charge…

Drole journos & Enoch Powell like thoughts

11.45am, The Office

Listening to the Newsnight Podcast- absolutely brilliant. Paxman is the most sarcastic, wonderful, presenter on TV.

“Don’t forget our Newsnight video podcast; sure to succeed where regular sleeping tablets fail”.

What a legend.

4.01pm, The Office

I just heard on the news that Bulgaria and Romania have got the go ahead to join the EU.

My first impression? Shit, more immigrants and more beggars.

Just read Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback on Si.com. He’s in touch with a Sergeant Mike Maguire in Iraq. Maguire lost one of his men, sergeant Bevington, on Sunday. I’m not an American, and for the first time the war really hit home.

* * *

Senator John Danforth- a former Republican and now ordained minister- someone who can discuss the influence of the Far Right on the GOP without going crazy.

I am not a homophobe!!!

The Office

I curse something as “gay” or “homosexual” a lot. I don’t mean it in a malicious way, or derogatory to homosexuals in any way. It’s just a figure of speech, similar to the way Tiger Woods described his putting at the Masters this year as “spaz” like. You don’t mean anything by it; you just say it without thinking.

Today I described a system in work as “a homosexual system”. Normally this would not pass comment but today, the reaction was, “now Fred, you shouldn’t”.

Oh shit.

Grovelling apologies later, I think I’ve got away with it.

But still….

Nude Australians

Nude

Do you sometimes get intimidated by the girls in Nude? Rarely, if ever, do I see a girl here that I would not aspire to see nude, as it were. Yesterday it was a D4 blonde and brunette about my age, today it’s three Aussie/Kiwi girls who are slightly older. Two weeks ago it was another antipodean in the region 23-26. Last Friday it was the daughter of an Australian family sitting next to me.

I have a slight thing for Australian girls as you may have noticed. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know. I just love them.

Five years on

So it's the 5th anniversary of 9/11. At the time I was on a train from Rome to Bologna when I got a text off my sister to say that US airspace was closed but I should be okay for getting home (I was leaving on the 14th). I hadn't got a clue what she was talking about. It was only when we were reached the hostel in Bologna that we found out what happened. We then went into town and were accosted by a distraught American girl (who was quite hot) on the street asking us if we had heard what happened. One of the lads had an American Airlines tag on his bag and she had latched on to that.

It was bizarre day, the rumours of dozens of planes, the talk in the hostel that night. A strange night. And nobody knew what it all meant. I look back on it now like it was a dream.

I didn't quite grasp it though. To some degree it passed me by. Then I went to New York, saw the void of Ground Zero, and looked up at the sky scrapers and tried to imagine looking up and seeing a plane fly into one of them.

Since then I've developed an unhealthy interest in the events. I find myself online late at night watching the news coverage on You Tube, replaying the gasps and exclamations from the broadcasters as they watched the second plane hit, David Letterman's charged interview with Dan Rather a few days after the attacks. A documentary made by two French brothers who happened to be filming a fire crew at the time has become required viewing. The sound of the bodies crashing to the ground outside the Towers is one that endures.

And now I work for an American investment bank. I deal with the New York head office all day. The firm occupies one of the World Financial Centre buildings and part of another. Those buildings are part of my enduring image of 9/11. When I see the WTC site, my enduring memory is of the WFC buildings overlooking the site.

I talk to the guys in New York all day. We make jokes, we have a laugh, I'm in the NFL Fantasy League with the guys. And I try to imagine what it would have been like five years ago if I had been in the office, chatting with the guys, and then That happened.

It makes you think.

The Drinking Log returns

There used to be website run by a few lads from my class in school. Most of these guys were knobs. The website was called The Drinking Log and was essentially a log about their exploits on Friday nights in the various hostelries around town. Well, I’m going to start something similar here but for slightly different reasons. I’m not going to be trying to prove anything by keeping a log or show how cool I am. I just want to keep track of how much I’ve been boozing lately. I work hard and play hard but my hangovers are getting worse so just want to keep track.

This week:

Saturday 9th September
Guinness (4 pints)
Heineken (3 bottles)
Sambouca (2 shots)
White wine (half a bottle)

It was a heavy night and a painful morning.

Chaos at Kennington

So I'm sitting here watching the chaos at the Oval in the 5th Test this evening. Darrel Hair is refusing to come out for the remainder of the Test after a dispute over a ball tampering accusation made against the Pakistanis.

Pakistan refused to come out after tea and eventually were persuaded to take the field, only for Umpire Hair to decide not to come out.

Now, my thought is this. Would this happen in a football match? Or a rugby match? It is a nonsense, and it sums up the ICC's incompetence in running the game. There should have been no dispute. Part of the initial dispute seems to have been centred on the fact that Pakistan cannot appeal the accusation at stumps tonight. When they refused to take the pitch after tea, the umpires removed the bails indicating the that Pakistan had forfeited the match and the match was over. Now the law is an ass, but the law's the law. The umpires have made the decision and their decision is final. When a team tries to undermine the umpires' authority then that is the ball game. It is indicative of the ICC that they cannot even back their people in such an important time.

One more thing, and once again it is a gripe against the ICC. Nobody in the ground seemed to know what was going on. There were no announcements, no nothing. If you didn't have a radio to listen to TMS, or a pocket sized TV with Sky, then you would not have known what was going on and be left hanging for ages.

Thoughts on a Nuclear Winter

Well, one thought really. I'm watching The Sum of All Fears at the moment and it struck me; why is it always windy after a nuclear bomb? I mean does the blast screw with the atmosphere to create 40 mile an hour winds or what? Ben Affleck's helicopter crashed with the force of the shockwave. So far so believable. It was a completely still day before the bomb. Now it's dark (obviously) but also what I would call a fresh breeze. And it's not the first time I've seen this in films. Is it authentic? I wonder...

Price, You're Priceless!

So a mildly disturbing thing happened to me this weekend. Last night was Paddy’s birthday. We got dinner in Luigi Malone’s and then headed up to Capital. I was drinking Heineken. Bottles of Heineken. A fiver a throw. Instead of being disgusted at the price I was actually happy. I thought to myself, “that’s so convenient, I don’t have to worry about shrapnel blocking up my wallet and ruining the line of my jeans”. So I gladly paid €5 for a bottle of beer. There was a time not so long ago where I would have turned on my heel and got a pint instead, but not now.
Then today I went into town to get myself a nice shirt or two. On the way to Grafton Street, I stopped into Specsavers to see about getting a pair of clear glasses with that special CPU coating for using with computers all the time. I‘ve been getting a lot of migraines recently. I ended up dropping €300 on a pair of Hugo Boss glasses and a pair of Quiksilver spares. I spent €300 impulsively on something I don‘t even use that often. Then I went into Brown Thomas. I’ve never bought anything in the new BT’s. I went looking for a nice shirt. I was going to get a Canali. In my head I figured €110 wouldn’t be too much on a shirt. Eventually I didn’t do it. But they are beautiful shirts. I then saw a sale rack marked “up to 70% off”. The shirts were by Truzzi and priced originally at €500. There was one reduced to €225. I was willing to buy it. I could justify it in my head. Fucked up.

Meanwhile I’ll describe work by describing my two best mates in the place. Rob is an Andrews boy, lives on Park Avenue in Sandymount, long term ambition is to get into the Oil Industry because that’s where “the cash is at”. His icon is Ken Lay. No irony here. It’s for real. When he died last week he was distraught. He make jokes about AIDS a lot.

Fabio is an Italian Londoner. Formerly worked for BGC (formerly Cantor FitzGerald). Very slick dresser, every shirt has cufflinks. Always turned out very well. Wants to be trader because “that’s the life”.

I’m back reading American Psycho again. I bought it in the states in 2003 but dropped it after about 150 pages because I just didn’t get it. I started it again today. It makes perfect sense. I can relate completely to the life described in it.

What the hell has happened to me?

By the way, if you want to get a good night’s sleep in New York, the Ritz Carlton is the place to go. The pillows are just to die for, apparently.

Holy Hell

I'm after seeing the new and controversial Haka performed by the All Blacks against the Aussies this morning. Terrifying.