Weekly Satirical Column from the City Tribune, Ireland
'Tis the Season to Start Arguments
"I think we should count the 'holiday season' as beginning with the end of Ramadan and continuing on until the Chinese New Year. That way we get over three months out of it."
"IBM has a really interesting - and just slightly scary - plan. In cooperation with a Swiss technical institute, they want to simulate your brain."
"The companies that develop them talk about making GM crops infertile... if they think they can control this they only fool themselves. The infertility is in itself a genetic characteristic, and there is nothing to stop occasional 'sports' deciding that actually they'll be fruitful anyway, thank you very much. Genes are reproduction, and attempting to change them so that they do not recreate themselves is like commanding the tide to stay out."
"After all the time NASA spent fixing the problem of foam coming off the tank, what happens? Foam comes off the tank. If I were an astronaut right now I'd want to just leave the bloody Shuttle out there in orbit and hitch a ride back with the Russians. It's become the Ford Explorer of spacecraft."
"The ferocity of the elephant is not a matter that will be easily settled on the public airwaves. Lesson one was given to us by a man who called in to say his uncle had been killed by not one, but two elephants. How exactly? They'd been fighting and he'd tried to break them up."
Violent Pacifists versus Armed Peacekeepers
"Remember the Biblical injunction to beat swords into plowshares? Well beating a warplane into large, vaguely plowshare-shaped chunks seems close enough."
"For the first time in the history of the state we are about to go to war with another country. We're not actually sending our troops, but vitally we are providing American soldiers with their last chance to buy beer before Saudi Arabia."
"It's supposed to be 'stimulating', you see. Give the kids enough bright coloredy stuff that goes 'boing' and they'll grow up to be hyper-intelligent Übermenschen."
"While some of the moral precepts seem sensible and good, others are worryingly bizarre. I mean, they made masturbation a sin. What was that about? Whoever harmed anyone by wanking? "
"I don't really have much of an ethical problem with engineering transgenic pigs for transplants. Eat a pig's liver, get it grafted straight into your thorax. What's the big difference? I mean, to the pig?"
"Arr, Jim lad. Belay 'em to the yardarm and shiver their timbers. They knows they likes it."
"Anything goes here, from Buddhist meditation to Catholic guardian angels, pretty-colour therapy to cold porridge enemas, as long as they fulfill the one true great purpose: To make you feel better about yourself."
"Like playing Russian roulette with an automatic."
"In the country with the most schizophrenia in Europe, in the region where that schizophrenia is concentrated, St Brigid's is where they put the schizophrenics."
Secrets of the Irish Soccer Squad
"We don't pretend to be the greatest country in the world - but we'll be damned if we let anyone treat us as inferior. As historic underdogs, we don't fight to conquer. We fight to assert our equality."
Sex and Violence and That Stuff
"It's pornography if you're enjoying it by yourself and erotica if you're enjoying it with someone else."
"Keep shouting "Vomit Cola!" at somebody day in, day out, and they will eventually come to think of it as good old Vomit Cola."
J. Edgar Hoover Says The Funniest Things
"A bureaucracy is in other words just a mob - a mob sitting down"
"That's what I'm going to say next time someone asks me how old I am. 'Twenty-one - on Mars.'"
"Is there anything so precious and delicate and yet so heavy and dangerous as a computer monitor? It's like owning a high voltage glass anvil."
"Oh Lord, a screen the size of a wall! Imagine Space Invaders on that. The relative size of the little laser base, you could run back and forth going 'Shvee! Shvee!'"
"Should people who fit car alarms to their vehicles be locked in steel boxes full of screaming baboons and slapped around with live sharks?"
"Norrath exists purely in a game - to be precise, the online fantasy role-playing game Everquest. This does not however prevent it having the 77th biggest economy on the globe."
Quit Smoking The Ridiculously Easy Way
"This was as stupid a way to try quitting as has ever been imagined by the mind of man. In a matter of hours every nerve in my body was stripped bare and screaming for a fix."
Kids' Toys - The Twisted Truth
Parents are partly to blame themselves of course, because they don't merely want their child to be happy, they want them to be the happiest.