The dreaded April fools day arrives tomorrow, a week late.

Of course I’m talking about tomorrow’s impending budget that is. We have been told to expect a drop in the standard of our living and that we will have to bite the bullet and lots of other cliches by the assholes who are partly responsible in the first place.

I’ve had some thoughts on this for quite a while and of course it is nigh on impossible to avoid media coverage of the doom and gloom so why wouldn’t I have plenty of thoughts? And everyone has an idea or two on what should be done as well. But I have an interesting idea myself, one that deals not with the economy but more one that is more about political reform and one that may help in the future to avoid us getting this deep in the shit again.

Are you ready? Good, here we go:

No two members of the same immediate family should be allowed to serve in high political office at the same time as another.

By high political office I mean county councillor and above. We have a situation where there are three close family members from one family sitting as TD’s, namely Mary O’Rourke and Conor and Brian Lenihan. Come June’s by election in we may have more in the form of Bertie Aherns brother Maurice who is already a county councillor for Dublin and is contesting the late Tony Gregory’s seat.

Also we have one husband and wife double act in the current Dail. Olwyn Enright is married to another TD, Joe McHugh both of whom as one would expect are representing the same party but in different constituencies.

Am I alone in thinking that there is a conflict of interest by having multiple family members sitting in the same time? I’m sure family allegience would extend beyond their allegience to those they were elected to represent?

I do believe that having familiy dynasties are certainly not in the best interests of the country. Particluarly when it comes to Ms. Enright and Mr. McHugh who take home two salaries and up until recently used to claim double overnight expenses.

While I understand that Ms O’Rourke and the Lenihan brothers come from a strong political dynasty as well as number of other members of various County Councils, the Seanad and Dail, I think the country would be much better represented if there was only one from each family allowed.

How can we all be fairly represented if they are all related to each other?

For that matter how can we be fairly represented by generations on liers, theives and scumbags who get elected by family name alone?

Entire generations of thieving fuckers who think they have done nothing wrong. Beverly Cooper Flynn being the most obvious example. Being rewarded for her, dare I say treasonous acts encouraging wealthy citizens to hide their money from the Revenue Commissioners, by being welcomed back in to the fianna fail fold.

Bertie Ahern of course is another. Oh how I wish the next time I’m stuck for cash in a pub that someone hands me a brown envelope stuffed with a few thousand. I can only dream because I have as much chance of that happening as winning the lotto.

This ridiculousness has to stop and I for one am dreading the fact that an overpaid solicitor (who’s family alone have to be clearing at least a couple of million a year of tax payers money) will be presenting his idea of economic salvation. Or at least in his very blinkered eyes what he thinks will be. He’s a solicitor! He’s trained to lie and trained to lie more so than an accountant!

The fact remains that this country has no chance whatsoever as long as political dynasties rule the roost.

Or at least it was free back in November when I last used it.

I parked, met  my mother (who was already after walking up to the car park) and tried to validate my parking ticket where I almost fainted when the damned machine insisted that I needed to pay €2.50! I was parked for 3 goddamed minutes at the most! A quick check on their website when I got home confirmed that this is now the case since January this year.

The dirty rotten thieving bastards! It’s not enough that they have built possibly one of the worst airport terminals that it is possible to build but now they expect those of us merely collecting someone to pay for the debt ridden white elephant.

So my advice to anyone dropping someone off is to drive slowly along the front of the terminal and get them to jump out of the car with their luggage. You know, like someone jumping off a train in a western?

As for collecting somone, I’m going to drive slowly with the boot open and they can throw their luggage in. I will circle around again and they can jump in in case they didn’t make it the first time.

• The Financial Regulator is getting plush new offices to the tune in €8m paid for out of government funds. By the same government who said that there was not enough money to spend €10m on a cervical cancer vaccine! (Thanks to Grandad for pointing that one out.)
• Civil Servants are told not to use Wikipedia to help them decide on asylum claims!
• TD’s constituency office workers are exempt from the pensions levy. Given most of them are family members makes each TD’s pay cut seem a little hollow. I’d personally be interested to know how much the Lenihan and O’Rourke families are stealing from us.
• Our transport minister compares the countries bankers to Oliver Cromwell, this is the same minister who thought electronic voting was a good thing! While on the subject of comparisons I would dare to say that our Taoiseach is like Worzel Gummidge, he changes heads to suit a particular situation and leaves a big mess for everyone else to clean up.
• A government sponsered study points out the obvious declaring that ‘Ireland suffers from high levels of lawful corruption‘

There is lots more but I couldn’t be arsed looking for them. I’m depressed enough already.

Anglo Irish Bank’s annual report released today states that it loaned €451m to 10 clients that are now more commonly referred to as “The Golden 10″. As anyone can tell you, 450 million is a significantally more than the previous estimate of €300m.

And here is the kicker – €83m has been repaid and the bank are expecting to strike out the rest of the debt. 300 million gone just like that! 10 people who owe money to a bank that the people of Ireland now effectively own don’t have to pay any of it back and the Minister of Finance refuses to name them!

If one of us owed a red fucking penny to the revenue commissioners our names would be in the tax defaulters list of every national newspaper!

That stupid ignoramus from Co. Offlay claims it is in the national interests as the debtors are shareholders. Well if they are shareholders in the bank and they owe it so much money and won’t be paying it back take the fucking shares off them! And Mary Coughlan, when you said yesterday that it “would damage confidence in Irish banks” you can just fuck off back to Donegal and crawl back under the rock you crawled from. Are you actually that thick fucking stupid that you think that there already hasn’t been a serious loss of confidence in Irish banks?

That statement alone from Coughlan instantly proves you; Fianna Fail haven’t one iota of what is actually happening to the country. You seem to be so preoccupied with balance sheets and our standing in the international community that you seem to have forgotten about us. The ordinary people. The ordinary people that are losing their homes their jobs and the ordinary people who are ending up in prison because they can’t pay their television license.

Well, Brian Cowen, Mary Coughlan and the two idiotic green party lapdogs of yours. Let me give you a sound piece of advice.

Fuck the international community. At least until you get your own house in order because that is exactly what other countries are doing. They have their own problems too you know and they really couldn’t care about us at the moment. Or anyone else but themselves for that matter. And this is probably the right thing to do. We can all kiss and make up when this all blows over in a few years when we are all learning to walk again. And anyway what have you got to lose at this stage?

It’s a poisoned chalice but drink from it you fuckers. Drink long and hard and deep for the sake of those of us who have to live in the mess that you have created. Take it on the chin and get us out of it. And if that means calling a general election and losing control of government just do it anyway for all of our sakes.

We want someone to get us through this and time and time again you have proven that you are not the right people for the job.

Edit – Just to put things into perspective, €300m being written off the books is the the exact same as 1200 homeowners with a mortgage of €250,000.

So who is fooling who?

Mind you, every now and then something comes along to remind you that maybe Adobe Flash is not so bad after all. And maybe, just maybe there is a use for it other than useless website intros and You*.com videos.

So here is a virtual hamster: http://abowman.com/google-modules/hamster/

But just to prove that Adobe Acrobat is still hateful, the latest version of Acrobat Reader weighs in at 33.5MB. To put that into comparison Open Office can create the damn things and it’s free! And it is only a 142MB (JRE Bundled) download but you get an entire office suite of software! Word processor, spreadsheet and you get the idea. You get more than just something for just reading documents!

As if that isn’t hateful enough just consider that Open Office is considered to be among the slowest pieces of software available – yet it loads up in about 30 seconds compared to about 3 minutes for Acrobat reader on the exact same P.C! Grrr..

But if it is just the ability to read PDF documents that you are after then FoxIt Reader is free and only weighs in at 2.57MB and takes but a split second to open.

And it is better than having to download a 200MB update for a program that was originally 33.5MB to download.

It seems that the marketing droids are determined to Americanise all our holiday seasons. A brochure or Tesco arrived in the door the other day advertising halloween costumes! What the hell next?

Instead of pfaffing with all the other useless boring stuff that the E.U. get up to why can’t they ban christmas advertising until at least two weeks before the day itself? Most of us are depressed enough as a result of the recent budget and have a lot less money and now, in the middle of October – someone is determined to depress us even more by advertising for christmas already.

*Sigh*

I’m notoriously choosey when it comes to music but the back of this card had a ‘unique code’ no less. It prompted me to visit umusic.ie and enter my promotional code to download my free download of The Blizzards single “Buy it or sell it.”

Free Download the card screamed! Well I can hardly turn that down can I? Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought? I might learn to love the song given some time.

Well Imagine my surprise when I visited that site and was asked to register and to choose a method of payment, (Maestro, Credit Card, Paypal etc.) All that before I got to enter my ultra exclusive, one of a kind, once in a lifetime special offer code!

Things got slightly worse when an ActiveX Microsoft DRM control couldn’t run. Given that I wasn’t using a Microsoft operating system and not using t Internet/Internot Explorer might have something to do with it but by now my curiosity was piqued.

I used my Windows PC and followed all the steps only to discover my “Free Download” was going to cost me 99c and I would really have to install that DRM control and register! And if that wasn’t bad enough I would have to provide a method of payment before I could even download my “free” song.

Avoid umusic.ie at all costs.

Of course umusic.ie is only a pseudonym for Universal Music so being forced to pay for something that is advertised as free would hardly come as a surprise.

A free song for only 99c? Next thing you know we will be forced to pay for water. No.. Wait!

So. If you recently got a student pack then you can ignore almost all the crap in it. I got the ‘Male’ edition so I have a nice pen, a teeny sampler of Clearsil, Sure deodourant and a two pack of Durex Condoms bundled with a rather intriguingly titled “2 Play Feel Lubricant Sachets” whatever the hell they are!

Too late for me with that kind of stuff I’m afriad but for all the rest of the new students enjoy the condoms and lubricants. Just stay the hell away from umusic.ie.