Jimmny Homunculus: Not available at your local library!.

An esteemed colleague and all round saint and scholar with the literature crowd contacted me with some great news: “Your blog has a DDR score (whatever that is) of 226. That means it's too foul mouthed to view in a library. Congratulations!”. I was in the Forum on Saturday and tried to access the site and a warning came up that this blog was 'unsafe to view', I’m so proud. It will only encourage me to swear more and up the sleaze content (if that were at all possible). The alternative is to use only archaic slang: goon, mooks, rubes, pukes etc., which I often try anyway as in "get out of my face you lousy puke", which, as I have found to my cost, is not the correct response to students' questions. Essay deadlines for my TV studies students are imminent. They send me hilarious emails with stuff like ‘did I miss any thing really important in class?’ and ‘I’m thinking about doing this essay, can you recommend any good books?’. I’m like, what the fuck! do I have 'Amazon' or 'Google' stamped on my forehead. Go into the library, and in the little search box write ‘Television’ and, as if by magic, books about TV manifest themselves, see if any are relevant and, you know, maybe try and learn something.

Every time you think spring has arrived, winter cackles and gives you another parting boot up the hole*. It’s been snowing today, as Corneilious has been expertly documenting. I don’t understand snowballs. It’s like the weather is an excuse to throw things at people. When it rains, you don’t get to douse people with buckets of water. When it’s sunny, you don’t run up to people with a sun lamp and shine it in their faces. Perhaps some biographical explanation for my aversion to snowballs is in order. I went to an all-boys seminary in rural Ireland (about as much fun as it sounds). It was a bit like Alcatraz. That analogy doesn’t quite work, people—well, Clint—actually escaped from Alcatraz. Come to think of it, some of my class ‘mates’ could well have been paper-mâché replicas; it’s hard to tell.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I got hit full on the face once with a large snowball and,*plink* the right lens of my glasses fell out and into a nearby snowdrift. I had to spend double art (in a needle-in-a-haystack stylee) trying to find a bit of transparent plastic in a big fucking pile of frozen water. Never trust anyone who says that school days were the best days of his or her lives. Funnily enough snowballs were the least of my worries, don't get me started on the time someone threw a dead seagull at me! I mean, who throws dead seagulls. We lived in a landlocked county, did the dead-seagull thrower bring it in to school specifically to throw at people? I would love to see the report card of the thrower, "although lacklustre in History, student X is an excellent dead-seagull thrower and could well make it as a professional dead-seagull tosser". Relating this story at home once, one of my sisters revealed the startling fact that she was also hit in the back with a dead seagull...what are the chances?

*As Dylan Moran points out in the commentary for Black Books, 'hole'is a word for arse that is much underused (outside Ireland). Like if you want express to an authority figure that you are disinclined to carry out a requested task, you could say 'hang it out your hole', or as I learned while working nights in a bakery, it can also be used in impolite investigations into one's 'nocturnal maneurves' as in 'did you get your hole last night?'