Barry Puzzle

An Irish Times Letters Page fight about Neil Young

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:39:00 -0700

An Irish Times Letters Page fight about Neil Young:

Neil Young played the RDS in Dublin last Saturday night, which received a very lukewarm review from the hack sent by the Irish Times to cover it, on the basis that he didn’t play any of his “hits” (even though he was never known primarily for his singles but his albums) and when he did play stuff, it was infected with overlong, inexpert, meandering, feedback-laden guitar solos.

Well, so fucking what? He’s not a fucking tribute band. He’s the Neil Young. He’s not The Rolling Stones, who stopped being interesting in 1973 and you’d probably be right to be offended if they didn’t play any hits. Neil Young is still making top quality original rock music, and his last four albums were comparable to anything produced by contemporary rock acts.

Anyway, it’s not in his nature to ask permission before diving off the deep end. I have a Neil Young album called Arc which has no tracks on it at all, it’s entirely compose of a 40-minute meandering rock guitar solo thing. And why not? He’s Neil Young. He has showered five separate decades with original, creative, wonderful rock / pop / country / electro / swing / grunge records. He does not owe you anything.

psilentasincjelli: If I ever tell you I’m going to sleep and then you see me posting or liking...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:30:25 -0700

psilentasincjelli:

If I ever tell you I’m going to sleep and then you see me posting or liking things online for about an hour immediately after that, I promise I wasn’t lying to you, I’m just bad at going to sleep and it is usually a long process that begins with disengaging from any sort of immediate contact with people (chats, for example) and ends when everything on my screen is blurry and I’m hallucinating plot points I haven’t written yet

I was considering making a post along these lines. Now I don’t have to.

This is the cover to Paul McCartney’s album Band On The...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:34:00 -0700

This is the cover to Paul McCartney’s album Band On The Run. I have no idea why, but there’s Michael Parkinson and James Coburn and Clement Freud and Christopher Lee on the cover.

They’re not in the album and it’s nothing to do with any of them.

Why I Will Never Learn To Swim

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:02:10 -0700

On Monday, 15th April, 2002, I went for a drive to the beach with three friends of mine. As we are all men, we thought it would be a good idea to climb on the rocks. It was easy enough to start with; it wasn’t so much climbing on rocks as around them. Then Killian lost his glasses in the freezing April sea. It took us some time to retrieve them, during which we failed to notice our original path slowly being covered by ten feet of water.

We were not yet worried. That would come later. The main aim of the afternoon had become reaching the beach without getting wet. Two hours later, this had changed to reaching the beach at all. There were a series of four small inlets, all covered in sucking surf, and a water level that oscillated between three feet to eight feet in unpredictable increments of seconds.

None of us can swim. Panic set in.

The first rescue vehicle was a small truck with Cliff Rescue written on it. This turned out to be a misnomer, as the equipment that they would normally use to winch us up was “in Dublin, being repaired”. Filled with a renewed sense of cynicism, we then saw a boat approaching from the mainland, and sighed wearily. A few minutes later, a brand new Sikorsky helicopter came over the horizon and then swung around. The lady in the boat radioed the helicopter to tell them that an air rescue was unnecessary. We got into the boat.

We had to sign our names in a little book in the boathouse. As we were all still in shock, we signed our real names. There was a map on the wall, covered in little red pins, and one green one and one blue one. She explained that the map was a record of all their rescues, and the red pins were people who were dead by the time they were pulled out of the water. She said all those people could swim, and if we had known how to swim, we probably would have tried to make the very short hop to the beach from where we were. And died.

I was taking photos of my beardy face. I had the camera set to...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:25:48 -0700

I was taking photos of my beardy face. I had the camera set to video by accident. I quickly realised the problem and set it back to photo. I found this on the chip. I have no idea where the audio came from. I was on my own in the room at the time and there was nothing playing on the computer.

I’m not scared or anything. I assume there’s a reasonable explanation. But I’d like to hear it.

"I thought this thing would tell me why everyone hates Jews. I’m going to bed."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 04:49:18 -0700

“I thought this thing would tell me why everyone hates Jews. I’m going to bed.”

- My father’s succinct review of A Serious Man, one of the best movies of 2009 as far as I’m concerned, a perfectly crafted piece of cinema art from beginning to end. It doesn’t really have a message, or a point, and maybe that’s the point. Sometimes things don’t have a point.

I’m not selling it very well. It’s probably on Netflix or something. Go watch it. It’s scene after scene of delicious Jewish cinema magic.

Related: My slightly-related review of Take Shelter

We have a saying in Massachusetts: Maybe someday you’ll...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:27:06 -0700

We have a saying in Massachusetts: Maybe someday you’ll get horribly sick and die.

- Alan Shore

abitofluff: I’m so in love with Barry it makes me cry. I should probably point out that Christina...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:10:00 -0700

abitofluff:

I’m so in love with Barry it makes me cry.

I should probably point out that Christina was under the influence of a cocktail of psycho-active pharmaceuticals when she typed that. We’ll see how she feels about me in the morning.

Nevertheless,

Denny Crane.

They Can't Be All Bad

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 04:20:00 -0700

Let me cite the following case. It concerns Dr. J, the only man I have ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to characterise as a satanic being. At the time I knew him, he was generally called ‘the mass murderer of Steinhof’, the name of the large mental hospital in Vienna. When the Nazis had started their euthanasia programme, he held all the strings in his hands, and he was so fanatic in the job assigned to him that he tried not to let one single psychotic individual escape the gas chamber. The few patients who did escape were, paradoxically, Jews. It happened that a small ward in a Jewish home for ageing people remained unknown to Dr. J.; and though the Gestapo which supervised this institution had strictly forbidden the admission of any psychotic patients, I succeeded in smuggling in and hiding such patients there by issuing false diagnostic certificates. I manipulated the symptomalogy in these cases so as to indicate aphasia instead of schizophrenia. I also administered illegal metrazol shocks. Thus these Jewish patients could be rescued, whereas even the relatives of Nazi party functionaries were ‘mercy’-killed. When I came back to Vienna - after having myself escaped from being sent to the gas chamber in Auschwitz - I asked what had happened to Dr. J. ‘He had been imprisoned by the Russians in one of the isolation cells of Steinhof’, they told me. ‘The next day, however, the door of his cell stood open and Dr. J. was never seen again.’ Later I was convinced that, like others, he had by the help of his comrades, found his way to South America. More recently, however, I was consulted by a former high-ranking Austrian diplomat who had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for many years, first in Siberia, and then in the famous Lubyanka prison in Moscow. While I was examining him neurologically, he suddenly asked me whether I happened to know Dr. J. After my affirmative reply he continued: ‘I made his acquaintance in Lubyanka. There he died, at about forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder. Before he died, however, he showed himselkf to be the best comrade you can imagine! He gave consolation to everybody. He lived up to the highest conceivable moral standard. He was the best friend I ever met during my long years of prison!’

This is the story of Dr J., the mass murderer of Steinhof. How can you dare to predict the behaviour of man!

- Viktor Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, discussing with enormous compassion and objectivity the case of Dr. Erwin Jekelius, who was so far up the Nazis that he was dating Adolf Hitler’s sister, Paula Hitler.

Again, remember that Frankl’s entire family was wiped out by the holocaust, and observe his absolute refusal to allow his experiences in the holocaust to negatively affect his life, his absolute refusal to believe that men (even the worst Nazis!) are either inherently evil, or, once evil, condemned to live an evil life forever.

How can you dare to predict the behaviour of man?

Related: pinkphilosopher’s realisation that Hitler was a real person

I’ve been getting mysterious updates from different...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:02:12 -0700

I’ve been getting mysterious updates from different anonymous accounts with obviously throwaway email addresses, all candid shots of Leonard at play, Leonard asleep, etc.

I’m not sure if a concerned citizen wants to reassure me that he’s being taken care of in the correct fashion, or someone’s threatening me, and is waiting for the right moment to make their demands.

Either way, I’m not sure how a photo of his ass is necessary.

A bluegrass cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice. Oh yes....

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:13:00 -0700

A bluegrass cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice.

Oh yes. It’s about as great as it sounds. Comes with two separate epic bluegrass rock breakdowns. Oh, just listen to it.

Related: Cook’s Country blooper reel

"Just last week I was talking to a girl and she was doing shit on her phone and I asked her what she..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 05:38:50 -0700

“Just last week I was talking to a girl and she was doing shit on her phone and I asked her what she was doing, and she said “Oh I’m just texting my mom”. So I just said “I’m sorry if the middle of my sentence interrupted the start of your conversation with your mother,” and once she figured it out, *I* was the bad guy. Now she’s telling this other friend of hers never to talk to me again, but I’ve already seen her tits and they’re not that special.”

- Sometimes I wonder how anyone is friends with me.

I don’t even remember typing that, but it was part of a larger Facebook discussion about modern technology, which, like everything else, annoys me.

This little boy named Jaxson Denno should be happy because his...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:07:18 -0700

This little boy named Jaxson Denno should be happy because his first name contains all the best Scrabble letters. But he’s sad because he wanted to meet Iron Man and instead got Robert Downey Jr. And now he probably knows that superheroes aren’t real, which means it’s only a matter of time before he makes the leap to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Morton’s Salt girl.

Young Jaxson was all stoked that his mother was going to take him to meet a beloved superhero, who happened to be shooting a movie… er, I mean, fighting crime, in his Massachusetts town. But the 18-month-old tot had no interest in meeting a regular old actor, even if he did happen to be as well-coiffed as RJD was on this particular day.

According to a comment from Jackson’s mother, the youngster got over his sadness pretty quickly after it was explained that he had, in fact, met the guy who plays Iron Man in the movies. But that photo wasn’t nearly as hilarious.

Source: Liana Maeby

Tumblr Idea

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:16:49 -0700

How about we have one week, or one day, where we tag our posts with completely unexpected things, or at least tangentially related things. Not to troll people (which would be a valid idea for another day), but to get people interested in things they might not be otherwise exposed to.

Wow. This is a really bad idea. I did not think this through at all.

I had a bunny once. I fed him nothing but the best organic...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:55:06 -0700

I had a bunny once. I fed him nothing but the best organic lettuce and carrots. Then the vet told me that he was chronically malnourished and I should feel bad, so I put him in a diet of 100% grass. He wouldn’t eat anything for two whole days, just looking at me, and at the grass pellets, and back to me again, with very much a “What the fuck is this shit?” expression.

One time I decided to give him a bath, very much in the fashion of the photo above. As soon as the water hit him, and I made sure it was room temperature water, he froze. He completely froze. It was three days before he moved again. Mid-way through the second day, I poked him to see if he was still alive, and he just fell over in exactly the same sitting position. I was scared. He got over it though.

Here is a video of my bunny, which I called Bunnington.

He is dead now.

Lone Ranger

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:05:19 -0700

Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night and I think about all the friends I don’t have and all the girls who don’t want to (or can’t) give me night time hugs, and all the creative projects I’m not involved with, I don’t get lonely. I can’t remember ever being lonely. Instead, when I feel alone, I get scared. The reason I get scared is because to me, isolation is a very attractive prospect.

I understand intuitively that humans are essentially a social species, but I just can’t relate to that whole integral part of being human. And so sometimes I can actually feel myself turning into a half-human animal, like a kicked puppy behind a sofa, or a tiger with a spear jammed in its ribcage, slouching off awkwardly into the jungle, not to die, but to be alone.

I just want to be on my own. All the time. This throws a massive spanner into the works of any attempt at relationships, which generally happen outside the home, or at the very least, outside the person. When I’m not constantly in touch with the humans, my albeit meagre skills atrophy, and any necessary appointments become something worse than a chore.

Occasionally a girl will get close to me, because I’m funny, and smart, and as long as we’re on our own, I’m “fun”. This one time, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean to make a relationship work and it fell apart after about a month. I gave up everything I knew and it just didn’t work out. Not even anyone’s fault. It just fell apart. My personal relationships are the source of meaning in my life; I attach great value to them, more than others seem to, whether they be with friends, or girls with whom I want to be more than friends.

I don’t do one-night stands.

Sometimes I think I’m friendly with girls, and they just stop talking to me, for reasons very much unclear. Requests for clarification or either completely ignored or angrily dismissed. Obviously I’ve done something wrong, but I have no idea what. I never do. This keeps happening. I can’t help but think that there must be some sort of horrible misunderstanding, but the truth is far more likely to be that I’m so fucking socially retarded that I can’t recognise what would be obvious to anyone else.

So I can feel the monster inside me, the isolation monster, twisting in my gut, screaming to be fed, and all you have to do to feed him is leave me alone. It’s a struggle to talk myself into ever leaving the house for any reason, in case I bump into someone and have to talk to him, to pretend like I know how to negotiate the social contract, to run the risk of making new enemies, or expose myself as “weird”, especially in this town, my small Irish town, where I am viewed by many as something of a ridiculous character. Most of my family think I’m crazy.

I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to have anything to do with anyone, and the only contact I can stand for any amount of time is email or online messages. I stay inside all day, I don’t have any friends, and I don’t do anything apart from make fun of people online, read chunky books about religion and write my stupid little stories. Yes, I’m probably missing 90% of life’s rich pageant or whatever, but I don’t care and you’re all just going to have to get used to it.

I’m not sad about any of this, by the way. I’m certainly not any kind of depressed. I’m perfectly happy being on my own all the time. And that’s what scares me.

Photo

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:34:10 -0700

Frankl Speaking

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:24:12 -0700

“Whether any circumstances, be they inner or outer ones, have an influence on a given individual or not, and which direction this influence takes its way - all that depends on the individual’s free choice. The conditions do not determine me, but I determine whether I yield to them or brave them. There is nothing conceivable that would condition a man wholly, i.e., without leaving to him the slightest freedom. Man is never fully conditioned in the sense of being determined by any facts or forces. Rather, man is ultimately self-determining. He determines not only his own fate, but also his own self, for man is not only forming and shaping hte course of his life, but also his very self. To this extent, man is not only responsible for what he does, but also for what he is, in asmuch as man does not only behave according to what he is but also becomes what he is according to how he behaves.”

- Viktor Frankl, neatly summing up decades of existential theory in Psychotherapy and Existentialism, a lovely collection of Dr. Frankl’s essays and lectures which sounds like it’s going to be pretentious twattery, but turns out to be (probably unknown to the good doctor and maybe against his intentions) a warm, very readable exploration of existentialism, how that relates to psychology, all set against the background of a world gone mad.

He thinks he’s a psychotherapist, but as with Freud and Jung, he’s actually a practical philosopher.

Dr. Frankl spent most of World War II as a guest of the Third Reich in Dachau and Auschwitz, after which he learned that his entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. This should, one would think, bring him down, but he has a wonderfully infectious upbeat and positive way of looking at everything. I’ll be quoting more of this book on here soon.

Photo

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:13:00 -0700

New Nine Inch Nails Single

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:39:00 -0700

New Nine Inch Nails Single:

Nine Inch Nails new album ‘Hesitation Marks’ will arrive September 3rd 2013. Pre-order now and get tickets to the Tension 2013 tour.

It’s a bit more Year Zero than With Teeth, but whatever. Trent apparently reckons it’s “frankly fucking great” and that’s good enough for me.