I am sat here in my front room watching some chaps who don't live on the estate hang flags on the lamp posts. This is because it is only a couple of weeks until that annual orgy of all things "orange" and "protestant" gets under way.
This year there are a lot less flags, mainly due to the fact that when the wee toerags whose appear to communicate in monosyllabic grunts, groin scratching and positioning of a Burberry/Rangers FC baseball cap at varying angles upon their echoingly empty heads, came to the door and asked "wannagiveussomemoneyfurdeflagseh?" I, like many of my neighbours when we had taken a moment or two to decrypt this strange request replied "Ah no". This could be because folks are a bit strapped for cash this year or it could be that being surrounded by 100's of flags all flapping in the ever present Norn Iron wind roughly level with your bedroom window was just a bit intrusive. "Tradition" or not, sleep deprivation can be a right royal pain in the arse.
Now it has to be said we have a plethora of flags and for some it is a requirement equivalent with breathing that they fly every fecking one from every lamp post in the province.
At the top of the heap the Union Jack, the flag of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" to give it the full rather boring name.. this one Then you have the "Government of Northern Ireland Flag" which is the sort of official flag of the six counties Then you have the "Alternate Northern Ireland Flag" Which has no crown and a wee union jack in the top corner. This is perceived to be a UDA (Ulster Defence association - an illegal paramilitary/terrorist/drug dealing group)
Then you have the flag of the Orange order, a protestant religious organisation famed for it's bowler hats, sashes and it's unofficial war cry of "Fuck the Pope" (i am being crass here, however on the 12th july when certain songs are played at the BIG parade you will hear this with a monotonous regularity and on walls in Belfast you will see FTP scrawled on walls and it is not the work some underground group of TCP/IP graffitioso)
Then there is the King Billy Flag .. another sort of Orange order flag
Not to be left out the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force - Another illegal paramilitary,terrorist organisation) and the YCV (Young Citizen Volunteers - Much the same as the UVF but without the moustaches)
And here are more.. including Dutch flags (King Billy was Dutch) Scottish flags and even Israeli flags (The Meyer & Cohen Hassidic Loyal Rising Sons of William temperance and Ohi Vey Battalion perhaps??) Anyway there are lots and lots and lots of flags on BOTH sides and as they fly in estates all over the north each flutter picks at the scabs of a 1000 insults both real and imagined.
So here I sit watching a plethora of flags flutter in the stiff breeze and there in the background several of young Ulster Protestantism's finest are singing along to the not terribly well played battle flute. "We are... We are... We are the billy boys! We are up to our necks in Fenian blood, surrender or you die" whilst necking a bottle of Buckfast tonic .. well after all it is traditional so it must be right... isn't it?
Oh what a difference an S makes
Thu, Mar 11th 2010 3:24p Steve McDonagh Just comming into my blog and typed this http://doiminoyesmaybe.blogpot.com and ended up a href="http://dominoyesmaybe.blogpot.com/"here/a.. just my luck..I have a german porn star as a doppleganger and a reglious site as a typo link.. hey ho!br /
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Fkx1-w7uSqA/S5lLXnPFfzI/AAAAAAAABAU/eBgneBMjzlc/s1600-h/ohno.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" height="124" sr [read] Keywords: blogger
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New family blog
Thu, Mar 11th 2010 3:24p Steve McDonagh Just a heads up.. I have started a new non-techie blog for the McDonagh Clan over at http://slightlydoolally.com br /
I will keep up the techie particularly Yellow tinted posts here but all the "noise" i was infamous for will now be over on Slightly Doolally, so I might be able to reclaim a certain level of professionalism here ... no perhaps not.. ;)br /
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Ohh my better half has started blogging as an assiociated Admin on Slightly Doolally, so if you do browse over ... please say hi to us bo [read] Keywords: admin
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My mother helps stop MSDS (Memory Stick Disappearnce Syndrome)
Mon, Mar 8th 2010 6:25a Steve McDonagh We have all been there.. we are in a meeting or are called to a colleagues PC and we feel we really really need to share some file with that user. So out comes the memory stick and into the other PC it goes .. and as soon as the file is copied your prized memory stick just disappears... poof ... gone.br /
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I have a theory that there is a eddy in the space time continium, the memory chips on the memory stick act as a strange attractor and becon the eddy towards the memory stick and once it ge [read] Keywords: ilug
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Is "a" Sandwich a category error and can mayonasie dribble be accurately measured
Sat, Mar 6th 2010 11:25a Steve McDonagh I was sat in a href="http://www.groundcoffee.net/pages/about.htm"Ground/a Having the usual excellent Chill, chicken, bacon, roast pepper, cheese and onion panini with a white chocolate Moccha no cream (Well i am on a diet) Now it was pointed out to me recently when you buy a panini you are actually doing nothing of the sort! You are noshing down on a PANINO for PANINI is the plural.br /
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Now it occured to me that a Ground Panino is a foot long and to fit on the plate the very nice baristas c [read] Keywords: blogger
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Good Music , good company and craic in the nineties @ the Beflast songwriters festival
Fri, Mar 5th 2010 9:24p Steve McDonagh Having spend the last 10 weeks in the purgatory that is the post Christmas anticlimax I decided that a bit of fun was in order. So I booked SWMBO and myself into the a href="http://www.dukesatqueens.com/"Dukes Hotel/a in Belfast for the weekend of the a href="http://www.belfastnashville.com/"6th Annual Guinness Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival/a now that might sound a little bit too country and western for my taste and yes there was some Camp;W but we managed to avoid it :-)br /
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I hav [read] Keywords: blogger
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If curling were easy it would be called Hockey
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 6:24p Steve McDonagh span class="goog-spellcheck-word"T'other/span span class="goog-spellcheck-word"nite/span I was chatting to span class="goog-spellcheck-word"Duffbert/span about the fine art of Curlingbr /
Whichnbsp; rests vampire like in the popular consciousness for 4 years andbr /
then explodes on the moonbeam of publicity that the winter Olympics brings.br /
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All of a sudden the media is full of "houses", "Skips" "Stones" and "Ends"br /
However as my chat with the bold Mr span class="goog-spellcheck-word" [read] Keywords: blogger
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ILUG 10 Preperations gathers pace ... poster ideas
Wed, Feb 24th 2010 6:23p Steve McDonagh The throb of antipication has moved from barely noticable into "shit itis only 9 months away" mode. 9 month's eh? I have time to get pregnant and give birth before the crowds of the faithful descend on Ireland for another round of ILUGy excitment.br /
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Here are a few posters ideas that may or may not be usedbr /
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div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; tex [read] Keywords: ilug
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Access the clipboard in Javascript
Sun, Feb 14th 2010 9:24a Steve McDonagh Now here is a wee something I fell over the other day whislt trying to figure out a way of copy and pasting a text stream from a Turdcopy; document to a text area on a form. It would be really useful to grab the clipboard contents .. do some RegExp replaces on it and then import it into the text area.br /
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Well after a moment or two's research you can be done in IE and you have to tweak Moz browsers a href="http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/securityprefs.html"see here/a to allow it to [read] Keywords: blogger
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....and while I am at it, Ireland WTF?
Sun, Feb 14th 2010 8:23a Steve McDonagh ... ohh and while I am at the keyboard and logged on to the blog ...What the hell were Ireland thinking yesterday? Jeeze I mean to say what is the point of me getting all prepared with loads of beer and crisps and the other accoutrements of 6 Nations watcherdom and then you sent the under 13's instead of the real international team?br /
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Go home dig out the SKY+ box and watch the Wales vs Scotland game, now THAT was rugby at it's best!div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' s [read] Keywords: blogger
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Enthusions and Indifferons - The physics of not being arsed
Sun, Feb 14th 2010 8:23a Steve McDonagh It has been a while since I last sat at the keyboard to write a blog post of any kind and to be honest I think I reached the rubicon between "arsed" / "can't be arsed" and Julius Caesar like I marched resolutely in the territory "can't be arsed". Mind you instead of declaiming "ālea iacta est" (The die is cast) or something equally as memorable I think I may have sighed deeply and poured another cup of coffee.br /
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There comes a time in every diariest's life where you start to slip into the [read] Keywords: domino
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