rabble 5 – Take Five!

In #rabble5, Culture, History, Humour, Print Editionby rabble3 Comments

 young-lads

 

1. Dublin’s Little Feckers

 

They come in all shapes and sizes. Big ones, little ones, snotty-nosed, lazy-eyed, gap-toothed or freckle speckled. Cheeky chungfellas and yobby young ones that shout after you as your dog drags you along the street. Halloween belongs to them, a festival of chaos punctuated with bangers, stolen pallets and a warm can of bulmers shared between five. On bicycles they come unlit whirling through the night like some steroid enhanced Dalek, pulling wheelies down the length of the M50. Haranguing you for fags to the chant of ‘hey mister’ and ‘ah here leave it out’. Two-fingers up at the gardai as they rush home to see their Mammy the Dublin bold kids embodies the irreverent potential of this city.

 

But what is it about the hands down the pants?

 

2. The Ginger Man

 

Obscene, offensive, outrageous, downright rude. These are all words presumably used to decry J.P. Donleavy’s 20th century wonder of Irish literature known as The Ginger Man. Banned in Ireland and America for obscenity, there is now no harm at all in wiling away a tiresome afternoon following a homemade trail of the titular character, Sebastian Dangerfield. A work of explosive wit and sexual mischief, Donleavy’s prose cognitively map 1040s Dublin through the deranged and drunken eyes of Trinity student and ex-pat Dangerfield. Tour Dalkey with a spring in your ragged shoes; fart about Trinity in full knowledge of your own inebriation; crash through the window of a swanky, upper class window in the middle of lunchtime service only to run home and have a go at your wife and child for not understanding your love of alcohol and other women. Well… Maybe just enjoy the walk…

 

3. Bingo

If you fancy an evening sans booze there’s an underground movement out there that you may not have heard much about. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday night between 1,000 and 2,000 people pack out the National Stadium as well as other venues around Dublin like the Whitehall Grand Bingo Club. If you don’t know what you’re doing just ask for help and within moments you’ll have a flock of blue rinses giving you advice, explaining the difference between a check and a house and honestly it’s great gas. Pots of tea and the finest minerals accompany a fast and frenetic numbers game that is live linked across bingo houses in the city meaning one wrong call by you will draw tutts from upto 4,000 hardcore gamers across the city

 

4. Hot Sauce

 

If you find yourself searching for that hotter fix and they’re out of Frank’s Hot Sauce in Dunnes visit hotsauceemporium.co.uk. Their produce rated on a “pain scale” from 3 – 10+ is the mecca for chilli junkies. For flavor with a kick we recommend Blair’s Q Heat Wasabi Green Tea with jalapaeno & lime or the deliciously smokey El Yucateco Chipotle. But if its straight up obnoxious pain you’re after go for the Sphincter Shrinker or the Colon Cleanser, just remember the sudocream tomorrow. About town, Boojum Burrito Bar offers a consistently changing selection of hot sauces to use as liberally as you dare. Your local Asian market is great for picking up unusual brands, just avoid the crowd pleasing sweet chili. A notable mention is Hogan’s Butchers on Wexford St, their Hot Squirt comes in a tub you’d easily mistake for poster paint if not for the slogan “We’re proud of our squirt”, and so are we.

 

 

5. KildareStreet.com

Vampire capitalists, ghost estates and zombie banks, Ireland is a treasure-trove of Halloween costume ideas. This year we dressed up as our favourite government watchdog transparency website, KildareStreet.com, which raised nearly €8,000 in a zombie-themed appeal to bring it back from the dead.

Set up by John Handelaar and TheStory.ie’s Gavin Sheridan, the site got its first boost when it won the Twitter-based crowd-funding competition Outvesting back in 2009, walking away with over €5,000 in a precursor to today’s omnipresent Fund:IT campaigns. Since then it has been providing an actually useful, searchable alternative to the official and woefully inadequate Oireachtas website, maintained entirely through donations from its loyal users.

Such civic-mindedness could not go unnoticed by the Powers-That-Be. Dismayed that more people were using KildareStreet then the official website, the Oireachtas changed their system to be even less usable, shutting off their XML data stream and forcing KildareSreet out of business. With even TDs calling for its resurrection, the site went on the fund-raising offensive to build a better data-scraper and no longer rely on the munificence of the Oireachtas.

Though it’s not the prettiest site in the world, its usability puts it leaps and bounds ahead of anything the Government have offered themselves. In an era when successive politicians have pledged themselves to open data and transparency, the current KildareStreet saga shows how hollow their words actually are. rabble salutes the KildareStreet Massive, and hopes their online treat did the trick.

Comments

  1. Think it just like a journal or a magazine from general interest for anyone to go through. Funny, witty, controversial, entertaining, useful, acerbic, thoughtful, serious, curious, unexpected comebacks are actually welcome.

  2. Just want to say your article is as surprising. The clarity on your
    submit is just nice and i can suppose you are knowledgeable in this subject.
    Fine together with your permission let me to
    clutch your RSS feed to keep updated with imminent post.
    Thank you one million and please keep up the rewarding work.

  3. You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something that I think I would never understand.
    It seems too complicated and very broad for me. I am
    looking forward for your next post, I will try to get
    the hang of it!

Leave a Reply to online payday loan lenders Cancel reply