andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

I’m back from Romania. Here’s a sneak preview.
The Timisoara tram service – not the most modern, but efficient and useful. 19th September 2006. Click image to view larger versionA typical Timisoara street. Almost everyone here drives a Dacia, which is a primitive but reasonably reliable home-grown car. 21st September 2006. Click image to view larger versionSomewhere, deep in the Romanian countryside, a bit of post-communist industry. They are trying to clean up though. 23rd September 2006. Click image to view larger versionAn occasionally dubious Romanian, Oana, trying to look innocent in Sibiu, central Romania. I know better, though. 23rd September 2006. Click image to view larger versionSome really incredibly old buildings in the medieval heart of Sibiu, in central Romania. There are Germans nearby. Many Germans. 24th September 2006. Click image to view larger versionA busy boulevard in Timisoara, facing towards the main train station. 26th September 2006. Click image to view larger versionThe main town square in Timisoara. See if you’ve seen a photo very like this on this site before… 26th September 2006. Click image to view larger version
More shortly, with plenty of pictures and a few stories. I recommend a reread of my earlier adventures in Romania.

Right, that ‘Phil’ business was entertaining – and so was Garret, from time to time – but it’s dying a death. www.make-phil-and-his-fucking-contraption-history.com. I’m in Romania right now, having a ball, relaxing, enjoying myself, having an actual holiday (I was told they were good, and I thought I’d take the plunge, so to speak) and taking about four thousand photos, you’ll have to sit through some choice cuts before long. I’d put up a photo now except for the fact that this damn Internet cafe doesn’t actually have USB on this computer (This USB business is important because it means I can attach the memory card from my spanking new Canon Digital SLR to the computer and… Well, you’re clever people, you’ll get it.) and it’s pretty slow. I know you’re all going to say something like “Hey you, like what is the fuck this, you know?”; to which I’ll probably reply “Well whatever fuckarse, because, hey, you know.”.

Special shout out to the beautiful, clever and occasionally dubious Oana, who is chaperoning me, owning me, taking care of me and showing me around Romania. Shouts also out to Roxana, who has suggested many clever things to get up to, and the girls of ExamPlus for keeping Oana on her toes and being a generally great bunch of people. I’ll be curious to hear what they thought of ‘Intermission‘ featuring Colin Fucking Farrell which I thought was a reasonable Irish film with contemporary Irish culture, and ‘The General‘ which is a pretty good representation of Ireland in the nineteen eighties.

Anyway, better go. Oana’s getting bored and we have a train to catch from (as she would say, and probably will) a dubious train station, else we’ll be trapped in Sighisoara tonight. I’ll try and post again, but I’ll be back on Wednesday night, and by Saturday you’ll all be wishing I’d stayed here; by then Garret may actually seem like a less painful option after all.

Oh, and one more thing; I finally met Ovideo! It was sheer coincidence, but it was icing on the cake for a great week. It really was.

That last post didn’t exactly set the world on fire, did it? Well, this is more important.

I think.

Me, being very dark and serious as I consider dark and serious matters. I’m also trying to look a bit Polish, to get into the mood.

It’s not a new story, but I hadn’t gotten around to writing about this (Nothing new there, then.). There is a plan in this State to bring in Biometric ID cards; plastic cards containing lots of personal identity information with which to identify the card-holder. Now, this is similar in principle to to how they are planning on doing this in the United Kingdom (who are applying pressure to the Irish State to bring it in too, partly because there’s a mutual free movement agreement between the two States, whereby Irish and UK citizens can freely live and work in each other’s countries.) but with a unique Irish twist; it’s just for non-EU citizens.

So, let’s say Garda Siochana Officer O’Reilly stops Oleg on the street, and says ‘Sorry Sir, can I see your Biometric ID card, I have reason to believe you are an illegal immigrant. Snap it up there, sonny.’. Oleg, who is Russian and although he is a nice guy, he really shouldn’t be here, he realises the game is up, and his many years of diligently paying income tax while working hard to help bolster the Irish economy have just been laid to waste. But wait! Oleg, not being Irish, comes equipped with some native cunning, and comes up with an ingenious plan, and answers: “I sorry, Mr Police Office, cannot be help. I don’t have card”. Very cunning indeed. Because, you see, if you’re not an illegal immigrant, then you don’t have to have a card! So, basically, you just lie and say you don’t have one, and then you won’t get arrested and thrown out of the country. If you’re not Irish, then pretend you’re Polish, which currently puts you into a very, very large ‘minority’ ethnic group in this country; apparently there are anywhere up to four hundred and fifty thousand Polish people in the country right now, which is more than one in ten people? And Poles are here legally (well, we’ll see what Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte has to say about that; he’s calculating forty million. That’s all of them!) at the moment.

In a few years time – short, thin on the ground years – the situation will be even more convoluted: Garda Siochana Officer HlavaVeprova stops Oleg on the street, and says ‘Hey you, you foreign guy, show me the biometric ID card that you are having, so that I can know the point.’. Oleg realises the game really is up this time, and his even more accumulated years of diligently paying income tax while working hard to help bolster the now failing Irish economy have just been laid to waste. But wait! Oleg, not being Irish, Polish, Latvian or indeed any EU nationality, comes equipped with cojones of the highest order and decides there’s nothing to lose. He answers: “I sorry, Mr Police Office, cannot be help. I don’t have card!”.

Garda Siochana Officer HlavaVeprova laughs and says “Ha ha, I am making a shit on you, it is joke! I not having card either, I am from Croatia! Ha ha!”. They go off to the pub and do a deal on Semtex and Kalashnikovs.

Now I’m just being facetious. But, I do have a very real and serious issue with the first scenario, because it will shortly become a real one. You can be stopped on the street and challenged to produce an ID card on the basis that you don’t belong here. As I understand it, if you’re here legitimately, then the card is a boon, it will allow you to use healthcare services, social welfare, State services, and generally fit into society. But with this card comes legislation to make this card a legal requirement for non-EU citizens, and brings with it the notion of everyone in Ireland being legally required to carry one at all times. Just the same as they’re going to bring to the UK (which has some interesting implications, as I described at the start of this post.). How will they know who to check? Skin colour? Accents? An armband with a special symbol on it? A tattoo, applied to non-EU nationals when they enter the country?

Anyway, I’m curious to see what you think. David used to joke about what he would do when he was in power with his Fascist State, but the Progressive Democrats are the real deal. Fascists in power now. Here are some links, to get some more detail on this story:

Dry and factual analysis (hopefully you’ll stay awake the whole way through): http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/

Brief and concise: http://www.rte.ie/news/

Also brief and concise: http://www.breakingnews.ie/

I’m not the only person to have reservations: http://www.boards.ie/

Here’s a really good one, which shows you where the so-called Irish Left is at:
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent – requires registration; more on that below.
This is an excerpt from The Irish Independent. I don’t like The Irish Independent. It is rubbish. It is a rubbish newspaper. It is badly written. It is opinion masquerading as journalism, and articles frequently descend into inarticulate, badly punctuated, apoplectic rants. But, they do have some gems from time to time, such as this one.
Earlier this year, Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte sparked anger in his own party ranks after calling for restrictions on workers from new EU member states coming to Ireland.

In an interview he said: “The time may be coming when we will have to sit down and examine whether we would have to look at whether a work permit regime ought to be implemented in terms of some of the non-national labour.

“There are 40 million or so Poles, so it is an issue that we have to look at.”

Read that last line again, maybe even a couple of times. “40 million or so Poles”. If it wasn’t such a wildly ridiculous statement and also dangerous statement, it would be funny. That son of a bitch. Who is building this country, Mr Rabbitte? Yeah, let’s get the Poles to wear armbands or something, good thinking Rabbitte. You should be deported, you vote-grabbing Neo-Fascist.

Check out my comment in reply to Anto’s story on registration in order to enter a site and view the content. Actually, I’m just going to put the comment here in it’s entirety, but remember to check out Anto’s site, I agree with him on this…

Well, there we have it. I think it’s safe to say that I fear The Irish Independent more than I fear Biometric ID cards or vegetarian fundamentalists.

Just a quick post tonight; I’ve been busy again, partly taking some time out to relax, with getting back to work and getting stuck into some freelance jobs, and with setting up my new laptop (which I bought along with some other stuff as part of getting myself set up as a mercenary. Sorry, freelance web developer. I did say I’d post about my next few moves, didn’t I? And I didn’t, did I? I even have my company/trading name, the URL has been bought and the hosting paid for… And it’s not Kraton, Defeater of Meat Slugs, it’s a lot less exciting but more useful.

Now, I hadn’t posted this before, and I partly was waiting a little bit, but here it is. Tee, who you’ll either know personally, or know of because you read this site and you know I go on about her from time to time, has put up a moving and honest post dealing with a serious issue on her site, ideasforcheapstuff.com (the site of the three deliciously lickable girls) and it’s something that I think people should read; I should warn you now that it’s serious stuff, and you should approach it with an open mind. I think everyone could learn something from it. The events Tee writes of happened barely a week and half after I met her for the first time, so I got caught up in it all, and it’s touched me too in that sense. Just read it, and think about it, maybe follow the links she gives and hopefully if it helps even one person who reads it then that can only be a good thing.

http://www.ideasforcheapstuff.com/wordpress/2006/06/15/confronting-suicide/

So I’m glad I’ve put that up; please don’t comment on it here, just read it and think about it.

In other news, today was my first day as a contractor for a company I’ll be doing work for over the next while (it’s ‘web stuff’, that’s all you need to know, and it is very exciting stuff to be working on for someone like me.) which was great, although I had to take a lot of technical stuff in and now my brain is full, which when added to what I’ve had to deal with in setting up my laptop (I’d rather punch myself repeatedly in the nuts than install a PC or a Mac for my own use again.) is almost too much to deal with and I’m toying with the idea of turning into a fully-fledged psychopath tomorrow, perhaps murdering some innocent bystanders on my to attacking my colleagues in the office with a chainsaw. Well, I might have considered it, but this evening I saw a Czech movie in the Czech embassy (Thanks for organising tickets to that Michaela!) and it was so remarkably miserable (And believe you me, the Czechs know how to do misery better than anyone, even people from Longford.) that you’d be incapable of harming anyone after watching it. You’d just think about it, and then break down in tears, while nearby children laugh and frolic, unaware of the sheer meaningless misery of life. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems that the point of view there is that everyone is either a bastard, or a weak fool, and everyone gets what they deserve, or gets betrayed, or things just go pear-shaped for everyone generally. Also try to see a movie called ‘Czech Dream’ (‘Cesky Sen’), where some students get a grant and then set out to make everyone very miserable, even though they were all perfectly happy to start with, just to make a point that they weren’t really all that happy to begin with. I’m being fairly facetious about it, but it’s not far off the mark, and bloody typical too.

Yes, I’ve been busy recently, and although I may have mistakenly given the impression that I quit my job in a particularly dramatic fashion, sticking it to The Man in all my bridge-burning glory (“To Hell with you and your Goddamned job, I’m leaving! And I’m taking Michaela with me!”) it really wasn’t like that, and I gave four entire week’s notice. I also didn’t get Michaela, which was even more disappointing. The next reaction I’ve been getting is generally “Whooo! Must be so awkward to be there after writing all that!” and that hasn’t been the case either. At least, not more awkward than usual, which is actually more than most people would tolerate is one of the reasons I called it a day anyway. So business as usual.

I have been taking notes for a big post about what comes next after the four weeks is up, which is next Friday (Parallel got a day for free there, I’m a generous soul at heart) and I think you’ll all enjoy that one no end, especially since it publicly commits me to a particular direction in my life and of course I’ll have to see it through. On the upside, it will hopefully involve a bit more writing and that can’t be a bad thing (assuming, of course, that I actually do the writing). It’s very, very exciting for me right now, and even if things don’t work out, I’ll painstakingly document it here in much the way I don’t get around to documenting anything else, and you’ll all get a kick out of reading about it.

So, in the words of Richard Ashcroft of ‘The Verve‘, “Baby, Oooooooooh ahh yeah, Oh no no no, In my head, My Lord! My Lord! I’m a lucky man, this ain’t no symphony, slip slide slip slide, no no no, yeahhhh.”. If things don’t work out in the coming months I could always find myself the next Verve and write songs for them, it seems like easy work. I’m close to finishing Keith’s site at long last which has proven to be hard work partly because I spent a week and a half which wasn’t otherwise very busy at all fighting spam on this site (automated systems which know how to post comments on sites like this, repeatedly posting comments which are links to insurance sales sites and Viagra) and on the LTD site (check it out to see the most deliciously edible girls in the world, having way more fun than you or I). I eventually got around it but it was hard work, and then of course I started being busy again, and I still don’t know where all this stuff comes from. So I’ll post a link here when it’s done, and hopefully I’ll talk Keith into actually writing on it too.

I’ve been looking at my self-discipline too; I really could be so much more productive but I just somehow am not. I like sleeping. I like taking a walk somewhere. I like taking a moment to sit and drool while making a low humming noise. Stuff like that, I think, which makes life more enjoyable than trying to follow a path in the manner of a whizz-head with an F-15 strapped to his (or her) back. Even so, I should be using the extra time to get some work done instead of surfing the same crap news sites, or trying to by cheap Tadafil, or even chatting relentlessly to Romanian women (although, if you can manage it, it is very entertaining and educational, and winding them up is about as much fun as you can have, short of getting your nads paddled by Oompa Loopas). Speaking of which, I met an actual person on the Internet. I mean, someone I haven’t previously been introduced to by someone I already know, and as a result my English has deteriorated drastically over the last week and a half. My englis, he is not more so good as the time from one day, and you are no understan me soo good as now tehn. I am make her mistak wit the word. Yo are gett this from womans ho speak no englis soo good. You can see where this is going, so maybe if I spend less time chatting, and more time finishing Keith’s site, we’ll all be better off, if not as amused as before. I’ll write some more about this intriguing development very shortly, and the mechanics of meeting people online and in real-life quite shortly, because it ties in with a number of interesting discussions I’ve had recently, and some ideas which developed independently about that and my writing (and for a dramatic change of pace from my previous writings these ideas aren’t about the enslavement of women, or being offensive just for the Hell of it). Yo like wan yo see waht I rite yo abot these thing.

Lastly, I got a webcam: k_parallel (at) hotmail.com – yes, you have to be smart enough to decipher the bit in the middle, because I will spammed otherwise.
Me at work, doing my thing; as viewed through my webcam.If you want to have a look at me, in my natural environment, add this address to your hotmail MSN contacts and watch away. I really don’t know why, but you’re welcome to. it only works on my office PC, but when I get my new laptop I’ll have it on most of the time, home or work. You’ll be able to see pretty quickly if the new career is working out or not.