After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley, "Music at Night", 1931
English critic & novelist (1894 - 1963)

Cansei de Ser Sexy, which is Portuguese for ‘tired of being sexy’ are a Brazilian band from Sao Paulo (they are also referred to as CSS). They played a couple of gigs in Ireland and I went to see them in The Music Factory in Carlow a couple of weeks ago. The band is made up of five girls and one guy and they played their asses off for more than an hour and a half. They had great energy and enthusiasm which had a very positive affect on the crowd. The lead singer is pretty mental in a good way and even dived off the stage at one point and was carried by the crowd for a while. The guy in the band played drums for most of the songs but swapped with one of the girls to play guitar for a while during the performance. The girl that he swapped with was a really good drummer. If there is such a thing as reincarnation I think I’d like to come back as a drummer in a band like CSS. The Music Factory is a good spot and seems to attract lots of good bands. Sometimes it’s nice to get out of Cork and experience music elsewhere. Cheers to V-girl for doing all the driving and for having tissues in the car when I had an incident with a freshly whipped ice-cream cone. Ratgirl, it was similar to your incident with an ice-cream cone in Florence!

I took these photos recently on a flight to Birmingham. It was a lovely day and the clouds looked exactly like giant blobs of white candy floss.

This was sent to me recently via email and I found it very funny, it almost made me wish I was correctly the leaving cert English papers. Some of the following quotes are pure genius!

Quotes from (real) leaving cert English essays:

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a tumble dryer

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a paper bag filled with vegetable soup.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Ballina at 6:36 pm travelling at 55 mph, the other from Claremorris 4:19pm at a speed of 35 mph.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the full stop after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for while.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame.Maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" ad.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

It came down the stairs looking very much like something no-one had ever seen before.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamppost.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free cashpoint.

It was a working class tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with their power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a dustcart reversing.
She was as easy as the Independent crossword.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature British beef.

Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

I was kind of excited when I heard that the Lemonheads were playing in Cork. They played at the start of May in the Savoy and it was a great gig. I was a bit fan of ‘It’s a shame about Ray’ and ‘Come on feel the Lemonheads’ when both of those albums were released. They played loads of songs from these albums as well as songs from some of their other albums that I didn’t know that well. Evan Dando, the lead singer of the band, looked pretty much the way he did back in the early nineties. I remember having a picture of him stuck in the back of a school diary along with a couple of pictures of Johnny Depp. The band played for more than an hour and managed to pack in a hell of a lot of songs in that time. Evan Dando has a great voice and was well able to keep the audience enthralled even during some solo numbers. My favourite part of the night was when he sang ‘Into Your Arms’ and everyone joined in, it was a really nice audience participation

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Mahatma Gandhi
Indian ascetic & nationalist leader (1869 - 1948)

This is where I wish I was today instead of sitting in front of a computer catching up on three days worth of work!

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.

Jeff Valdez

Earl Okin played the Tiki Lounge in Cork a couple of weeks ago. It was an interesting gig and Earl put on a good performance. I have to commend him for the amazing trumpet noise that he produces and for the fact that he got the audience to reinact a memorable scene from the ‘When Harry Met Sally’ film. His CD ‘Earl Okin - Musical Genius and Sex Symbol’ is definitely worth a listen especially for his unusual cover of ‘Song 2’ by Blur.

I arranged to meet my sister at lunch time a couple of weeks ago. I was a few minutes early and she was a few minutes late so I took a few pictures of my shadow to pass the time. It’s amazing what you will do when you are bored.

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.

Mark Twain
US humorist, novelist, short story author, & wit (1835 - 1910)

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

Dorothy Parker
US author, humorist, poet, & wit (1893 - 1967)

I found this recently when I was going through some photos. It’s one of the first photos that I took when I got my camera last year. I was taking a walk down by the Lee fields and generally snapping everything in sight to practice using the camera.

I read a recent article on the New Scientist Environment Blog entitled ‘One more nail in the biodiesel’s coffin’ and it depressed the hell out of me. I thought that perhaps biodiesel/biofuel would be in some part an answer to our oil dependency and pollution problems. Unfortunately a new study published by ‘Chemistry & Industry’ suggests that ‘diesel fuel made from rapeseed (canola) oil may produce even more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional diesel made from crude oil’. Apparently the problem is in growing the rapeseed oil because agricultural fields emit a lot of nitrous oxide gas which is 200-300 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. It turns out that we would probably be better off using conventional fuel and planting lots of trees instead of growing rapeseed oil and burning biofuel. Is there any fuel that we can burn that doesn’t have a disastrous affect on the environment?