Heh heh, if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you will know how much of a dope I am, getting dates wrong, not knowing vital contemporary topics etc but check this one out. I drew a piece for what I thought was called ‘Everything that I wanted’

And now just finding the link I read it’s called ‘Just what I always wanted’ and it has to be about a toy you wanted. Ah well, I suppose a meat grinder is a toy. It’s all for charity. I’ll probably bid on Phil’s or Chris’ if I can. Fair play to Craig and Liam for organising this and hopefully they can get their ‘press photos’ into the Metro on the back of this.

I don’t read emails I just glance over them so I miss things, and when they’re written with ‘flair’ I just zone out. An example of flair would be this, written by me:

“Hey all you groovy go getters, Just slinging an old e-mule into the inbox to drop the lowdown on those of you who aren’t privvy to whuz ‘appenin. If you have not had a chance yet to peruse my previous mail, we here at Twisted Pepper towers are proud to announce we have secured a new dining station!! so be sure to swing by and kick back with a Corona and lime.”

When it could just say:
‘Hello, we bought a new table. We close at 11 during the week’
See,all the info you need. I fucking hate this ‘perusal’, ‘privvy’, ‘we here at Clamnut Towers’ shit. Grow up. It’s 2010 in a month

‘There was always that one toy you really, really wanted.

www.thecomiccast.com

Wowzers, those young pups are producing some really good work. Check out the most recent Comic Jam. The one with the lad getting the tattoo and the ice cream is genius. Every time I attended I got lazy and just drew mickies on stickmen but the lads really put the work in.

I should also mention that I am putting the pages of the classic Say a Prayer For Me up on Spazzmoid until Christmas every week. New page tomorrow innit. Innit?

For a few months I was besieged. Sitting here like an African baby with bluebottles dotted around my face, shclucking up the goo from my pores and eating the sugar on my lips. One day I couldn’t work up in the studio because of them between chasing them around and hosing the air with spray which makes me feel ill. I lost a whole days work because of 5 blue bottles.

They kept landing on my screen and nose and it’s impossible to concentrate. And worst of all was my daily visit by El Gordo, this massive humming bird/hornet nearly two inches long that would swoop in with a dentist drill like shrill and I swear to God more often than not I’d let out a scream.

Even by Spanish standards it has been a bad year for flies. The tiny increase in global temperature has made insects larger and live longer. They’re loving it.

But like Jennifer Lopez in Enough, I had had…enough. And I took the war down to my level. First weapon was the good old fashioned flame thrower. I had promised myself I would never use it again after nearly blinding a girl but I need it. I waited in the centre of the room, poised to strike and as they swooped down…

I feel guilty for enjoying it but I do. I torched around twenty one week, some while sitting down from 4 feet away. Next was the sonic boom. I saw her nephew catching them with his hands and I was just too slow to use that method, even when I calculated how far ahead to strike, half of the time I’d miss. Then I realised that if you clap your hands together really hard on front of them it creates a little shockwave that stuns them enough to try again. WHAMMMO! WHAMMO! SQUISH!!

One day I boomed one so hard that it’s wings fell off, turning it into a ‘walk’ rather than a fly. I probably skewered him on a toothpick to finish him. Little bastards. She hates fly paper so I can’t use that but we bought these little pink granules that you leave out in a tray for them and they eat it. It drives them mental, they just start spinning on they’re back at such a speed all you can see is a fuzzy grey globe.
I stand on them. And I start spinning around too. No, they squish.

So within six months of living here I have earned my stripes. Never again will I be held hostage by these flies. But I have a bad feeling the ants that I drove out a few months ago are regrouping and next Summer will be Armageddon.

Now THAT’s marketing synergy. Ads for all them perfumes and aftershaves crack me up. Trying to advertise a smell by showing a brooding sissy in black and white is ridiculous so National Geographic scented air fresheners isn’t too abstract I suppose.

Still vewwy silly though.

Slinked back into country two days ago on a plane full of old people who have property here. The cabin crew said three times that it is very important we all watch the safety demo and mentioned something about medication in overhead luggage which I was thought was good, they have a whole different speech when the plane is full of pensioners.

I picked up a cold from shaking hands and sleeping on floors and in chilly beds in Ireland. By Monday I just wanted to go home. Having seeing Ronan Keating strut out on the Late Late Show and hearing first hand from friends and family their Liveline tales of woe I just wanted out. Doom and gloom. Gloom and Doom.

There was a thing on the radio about buying medication from Spain as it’s cheaper and better, I’ve always believed this for hangovers and headaches but I’ve never tried them out on a cold. Gulped down three large satchets of caustic milk called Frenadol and wiggedy wham, fixed in a day. Nice.

The Late Late show…Jesus Christ. Ryan Tubridy throwing it to the band like he’s Mr Saturday Night. Jesus Christ it’s awful.

Six months away and I’m coming back for a few days tomorrow. Feels like it’s been longer in some ways and in other ways shorter. Some days it feels like I never left Dublin, drawing away listening to Stern on my own and other days the reality hits hard. When I go to hang out my washing and turn around to see them
big fokkin mountains and the orchards it’s still a shock (clothes dry in about 30 mins on a hot day and I can’t get enough of that)

One big change is wearing clothes, up until last week all I wore at home was a pair of shorts and sandals. The thoughts of putting trousers, boots and a winter coat on feels odd. I gave my boots a try yesterday and it felt like I was walking on the moon. Plus I don’t have to shave any more. The weather here has changed enough to put a jumper on though but you could still go to the beach if you wanted.

I’ve come around to agreeing that drinking small beers is better than drinking pints and a siesta after lunch is the right thing to do. I’m dying for a few pints of Guinness though. One crap thing about Dublin though is the opening hours, here it’s normal to head into town around 10.

I listen to Liveline everyday now and it reminds me daily it was the right choice to get out. See yiz over the weekend, Forbidden Planet in the day and Twisted Pepper in the evening.

Yes you. Look up there and click that new banner to see the new Amperduke site, packed with goodies. Big thanks to Johnny John mc Johnstein for whipping this up in record time and putting up with my wacky requests, ‘ Can we make the site in Virtual Reality John? Can we have a hand reach out through the screen and stroke the reader’s cheek ever so gently John?

Cheers man.

We went to Lisbon a few weeks ago. It was sort of a surprise for the both of us, we booked it a few days before on a whim and I knew nothing about the place.

It’s a great city. I went to this great comic library where I could have spent a few days lapping it all up. And I bought this deadly used science room poster of a cross section of a lobster in an old book shop.

The first night there we were walking back to the hotel after a nice dinner and I says I want a pint before bed. The local beer is this cheap widdle called Super Bock and its awful. A few streets before the hotel was a row of undoubtedly seedy bars and we said they’d do. The closest one, called Vienna Club looked dodgy from the outside and I told her it must be a titty bar but she wanted to go in anyway.

I’m only in the place about 3 seconds, up a small flight of stairs and this black behemoth flashes her gowl at me. I imagined a little stinky Astro Boy flying out and socking me in the face. There were about 5 whores sitting there in various states of shame and trampiness.

We paid 10 clams for two bottles of that manky beer and the effusive, old Chinaman seemed embarrassed as we found a booth to sit, walking past a pole dancing pole that looked like it’d snap if any of the workers gave it a whirl. The place smelled like camphor and old gee and it was nearly impossible to see anything.

Two well dressed men came in and the pune flasher and her pal hopped on them, they went to the booth next to us and you hear all these cartoon kiss noises then a big comical ZIPP!! as her ropey tits splattered all over her chest.

They left with their girls, one of them giving me the slow approving nod like Boba Fett as he passed and saw my bird draped over me. If not for the smell and the scruddy beer I’d have stayed and maybe paid for a sloppy dance but we left. I got a good look at the girls on the way out, most of them flaked out in abject boredom, one of them either out of it or doing a hard sudoku by look on her face.

So after all that brothel sexiness and intrigue we went back to the hotel where I was refused sex by my girlfriend and I had to whack it into a towel. So yeah nothing happened, this story has no climax. I just wanted to draw the pictures and use ‘ropey tits splattering’ in a sentence

I was writing a post about my visit to a brothel last month in Lisbon and I mashed the keyboard and its gone. I’ll do it tomorrow. Here is an amazing video from a shit film that has gained rapid internet fame for being the worst film ever made.

Look at his passionate rampage. He ‘wrote and directed’ this unwatchable mess and seems to think he has the goods and is a tortured artist. But scoff as you may, dopes like this clean up with women. Like every shitty ’singer/songwriter’.