Damien Mulley

Say 8pm in Reidy’s which is opposite the old Jury’s on Western Road? Tom’s suggestion! It’s the bar next to the Cafe Paradiso, best veggie restaurant in this country. And most expensive…

We need somewhere on a saturday night that’s quiet. That sounds like the best place. Will email those who replied to last post on it.

Today is the free for all. Any Irish resellers online yet and offering domains? GoDaddy is offering domains for $14.75, Joker is offering them for €20 a year.

Some bloggers might be interested in available domains such as:

IrishBlogs.eu
RateMyMEP.eu
OPML.eu (wonder who’ll go for that)
gaeilge.eu
hurling.eu

🙂

When I went to college first time round and dabbled in elec eng (where dabbling = discovered the Internet in the computer labs) I used to work as a porter in a very very busy hospital. One of the not so nice jobs (and there were many) was getting “the box”. The box was the special trolley for transporting recently deceased patients to the mortuary. The nurse would page you and ask for you to bring the box to Ward 3a etc. You’d then have to find another porter to give you a hand.

You’d have to go down to the mortuary, collect the special trolley (basically a trolley with a lid over it) then go up to the ward where the nurses were meant to have the body wrapped in a sheet and have it taped so that you couldn’t see the person. A lot of the time they couldn’t be arsed or didn’t do it properly. Some had only died minutes before, some had died hours. Most were still warm. When yourself and the other porter transferred the body into the box the nurses would strip the bed, quickly wash the matress (which had a plastic cover), dry it, put a new sheet over it, and have it ready for a new patient that was down in A+E. Sometimes the new patient was sitting in the TV room, waiting to be admitted. Their bed was still warm when they got into it. Welcome to the Irish health system and you wonder why MRSA spreads so quickly and why some get sicker after they go to hospital.

When you got to the basement and into the mortuary you’d then have to take the body out of the box, transfer it into a kind of lift thing, open one of the large fridges and transfer it in there where it’d then be taken out by an undertaker when he arrived.

This is just an explanation of the process, now is the story about the dark humour that circles around such a job. One of the older porters told me a story before of when they decided to play a prank on one of the kings of the jokers. This guy was a right hard man but anything about death and ghosts scared the shit out of him. So this porter was called to take a former patient from the ward in the middle of the night. He called his buddy to give him a hand. They got to the ward and the body was wrapped. They brought it down to the mortuary and opened the box. As they were about to lift the body to the other trolley/lift thing, one of the hands fell loose. This scared the jokerKing but his buddy told him to just grab it and tuck it back into the sheet.

So as he was doing this the hand grabbed him. He screamed. The body started sitting up in the box. His buddy screamed and ran out the door. The hand was still grabbing him and he pulled it off his hand and he ran for the door. The door was a push in, pull to get out. He forgot this and was at the door screaming and pushing and looking back at the body sitting up. He panicked. He caught a chair and threw it through the window and jumped out. His buddy who was in on this came back in and say the window, the other porter dressed as a corpse wasn’t expecting that. There was hell to pay in the morning and the jokerKing needed a week off work he was so traumatised.

One of many stories from a former life. Maybe some other time I’ll write about when I worked in A+E and a call came in from an ambulance that they were coming in with a patient with a self-inflicted gun trauma to the head.

Edit: Howdy friends of Des!

I’d love to comment on this blog post by Des Walsh but I’ll be fucked if I have to register for a username and password just for the honour of posting on the blog. It’s a good blog, don’t get me wrong but I don’t see why I have to register to leave a comment. Imagine if I had to do that with every blog I commented on. Imagine if I had to do this for every person I wanted to chat to on IM. Des, can you change your commenting policy?

As regards to the content of the post, I’d point to John Collin’s post on lack of business blogging from those showcase companies at the Goodbody Summit. The message has yet to get through about the benefits of blogging. We need more examples of good Irish business blogs and why a business should divert resources to such a thing. Enterprise Ireland, Goodbody, Deloitte should be the ones too talking to companies going “You don’t have a blog? Why on earth not?”. Blogging isn’t for everyone, this is true but I do think the blogging population should be larger if you look at other countries with business cultures like our own.

He’s no Aine Chambers (I’m down to one mention a week damnit!) but Auds reports that Fr. Brian D’Arcy was on the Podge and Rodge show tonight. Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t Fr. Brian D’Arcy once the mouthpiece for the Catholic Church in Ireland? The Church press office were always monitoring the airwaves and any time the Gay Byrne show or Pat Kenny would bring up Catholicism he’d ring in with a “Ah hello Gay, I just happened to be listening and I wonder could I just address that callers issue with the Church..” kind of thing. What does D’Arcy do anyway? Wouldn’t he make a great blogger? We could have a Best Trendy Priest Blog at the Awards next year. Auds gives a summary of what seems a performance more than an appearance. Go read.

Richard might get a kick out of this, via Gudio Fawkes :

The band known as “The Right Brothers” sing how President George W. Bush is right on all of the decisions that he has made.

Watching it, it seems like a mix of Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire” with a guitar riff that sounds like the childhood rhyme “Tell tale tatler”. I adore the France line though.

Yes, Auds got me into appreciating this pornography. Now that I’m using the video iPod I got for Christmas (I opened the box 3 days ago) I put a lot of the latest/newest/coolest stuff on it. Many of these I got after looking at Aud’s website and seeing what she likes. Who’d have thought a gay man and a Pope loving conservative lass would have the same tastes. Sinéad’s site also helped me out.

So the great new music that I’m liking:

The New Pornographers
Josh Ritter
Tom Vek
Brendan Benson
The Go! Team
Band of Horses
Mew
Guillemots

Listening to the new Flaming Lips’ album and I’m not gone on it. It sounds like remixes of covers of other songs. Too many riffs and baselines from other songs or that’s how it seems to me.