Tegan and Sara

I'm really loving the new Tegan and Sara album Sainthood. Here's one of the standout tracks on it - The Cure



I love how they're wearing my T-Shirt from the Communist Defectors Will Be Shot video Pink Snow on a Moon of Neptune.

NHS Fucking Sham

Sham is a term we Ballymena people use when we're talking to assholes (often each other, we don't travel far). Though I'd like to use sham in its more national way by saying that I think the NHS is a sham. Particularly based on the time me and my girlfriend have spend there in the past 6 months (twice for me, once for her).

Both times both of us thought our treatment was insufficient. Though some cock has said (as cocks often do) that TV shows misrepresent the NHS. This is balls. I accept there are many hard working competent people in the NHS, however they are always undermined by underfunding and corner cutting by asshole administrators.

Let's get a good NHS system on the go. It's more deserving of our money than elected representatives scamming off us, shite fucking public spending situation after another (how long til some kid fucks themselves up on that junk in Arthur Square), or troops fighting illegal wars (who in my opinion should be pulled the fuck out of there).

Let's get it going good, because people get fucked up and current plans are to close the city hospital A and E.

Selling Mobile Phones

My sweet honey pie bought a mobile phone recently and that's a clumsy way of introducing this post. On TV recently I've seen two that stood out for me. One for being very good and the other for being very bad.

First of here's the bad one: Orange's Monkey service



This sounds like a middle aged mum trying to sound cool in front of her teenage son's friends. She's managed to find his NME's when she's been cleaning his room and knows all the name's of "cool" "with it" (she doesn't understand this term) music of the moment. The son is embarrassed and his relationship with her deteriorates rapidly. She hits the bottle and he gets bullied at school because of her referencing "Skindie(?)" and suchlike in front of his (now-former) friends.

It also looks cheap, the whole weather report angle has been done before and this looks like someone remembered one day that they had to have an ad finished by 4pm and just threw whatever they could get together and hoped it would be okay. It wasn't (or shouldn't have been but someone said: "I suppose it'll do."

The other add is this: Vodaphone's Red Haired Party



(sorry for the quality, it's the best I could find).

It is slightly scary to think of a world where people devote so much of their time to encouraging red heads to breed with each other but it's quirky, funny and gives you a nice warm feeling when you think of all the red heads being taken seriously by each other at their red head party. Not a reference to beans or fanta for miles.

NvTv's Blogtalk

I appear on this week's Blogtalk (made by NvTV), alongside Conall McDevitt and Owen Polly. We're discussing the Kelly report, remembrance in modern Ireland and Culture Minister Nelson McCausland's new blog.

Have a gander

Blogtalk (episode 4) from Northern Visions/NvTv on Vimeo.

Performance Poetry is Sexy

With someone like me doing it, performance poetry was always going to have some kind of raw sex appeal that spread out across the radio (U105 mostly) and hit hard between the legs of teenage girls (legal age ones of course, please don't sue) and dirty old men everywhere.

So it was no surprise when recently Mark Madden came second in the BBC Radio 4 Slam and Seamus Fox came first in The All-Ireland. A big congratulations to them both. Check their links out(by clicking on their names) but watch me first below:

The Adventures of Boring Tom - Part 4

One day Boring Tom found a penny on the ground

"Hey! I've just found a penny!" he shouted, as he picked it up.
"So what?" said some passers by. "You can't buy anything for a penny."
"I collect pennies and keep them in a jar at home," said Boring Tom.

The kids walked away laughing.
"We'll see who's laughing when I've saved up a pound!" said Boring Tom happily to himself.

Words by Gerard McKeown Art by Ryan O'Neill.

Geocities is Closing

That's right, at the end of October Yahoo's Geocities will close and all the lovely old (because a lot of it is really old) websites will be lost forever.

This puts a wee lump in my thoat because it was the place where my first website was put up on the 31 December 2005. Yes once upon a time www.geocities.com/gerard_mckeown was the place where the Gerard McKeown Generation pulled up a chair and was informed of the intellegence (sic) I was offering them.

Nowadays people crash by here or my myspace,facebook or twitter to check out what is happening on the streets.

The website was an instant hit and was just as controversial as all the afore mentioned Gerard Places, the queers in particular had a problem with it. But sure they're just a shower of bastards.

Check out the out dated bio and the links section. I feel a wee bit happy that only three of the links still work. Outlasted most of the bastards. All the celeb quotes are real though I'm not entirely sure they were talking about me. If they'd like to dispute them I'm sure I could break their legs, apart from Pol Pot who doesn't have any because he's dead.