February 2012
4 posts
My other tumblr account of doodles: The snail.
twistedlildoodles:
The Truth about Snails.
Another TUMBLR!
So, I’ve made another tumblr to this one which is all doodles.
It is here. http://twistedlildoodles.tumblr.com/
January 2012
6 posts
Annaisms
Anna who I work with is getting married soon. Her friends asked for a list of memories or sayings from her that we may have.
Looking back through tweets I found 50 ‘Annaisms’.
Reading back through these made me laugh a lot.
Anna: ‘I got asked for ID, it could be that I look young or be the fact I was buying a bottle of vodka and 10 bags of sweets.’
Anna:...
A ghost story. (Don't read it alone)
A number of years ago on a cold Winter’s night a man went to a pub.
He had consumed some alcohol, the alcohol had had a magical effect on him.
He was drunk and had all of the magical ability of a drunk man, unrealistic confidence and the power of frequent urination.
Afterwards he entered nearby chip shop and purchased a bag of chips.
Hot, proper chips, crispy, thick, potatoy and greasy....
FACTS ABOUT: Butterflies.
Butterflies, they’re on TV. As caterpillars they eat all the time, as pupa they sleep all the time, as Butterflies they have sex all the time. Even humans want to nail them….to a board.
It showed butterflies having sex, or making love if you believe those blank eyed bastards are capable of that emotion.
Butterflies are incredibly showy. Very in your face about how beautiful they...
Size matters
This is about how the sizes of different objects make me feel relative to that object.
I’m using giant because, it’s awesome to feel like a giant.
I’m using child because when I feel smaller I feel like a child again.
This is now accurate about how I feel when doing these things.
Eating a fun sized mars bar = Feel like a giant
Eating a King Sized Mars Bar = Feel like child...
Science ruins stand up comedy. Part one.
Hey! Do you know what the difference between dogs and cats is?
Genetically cats are only 82% similar to dogs.
Cats are 90% similar to us.*
What do you get when you cross a cat with a dog?
This wouldn’t happen, the animals are genetically too different.
Worst case scenario you waste thousands of pounds in research money trying to mate a cat and a dog.
One approach could be dressing...
Enter stage right shouting a cats name.
You might think naming other people’s cats is a strange pastime.
But then again, do you really think a cat cares what you call it?
Since my boyfriend Colm and I moved into this area last year and been exposed to its abundance of cats, we’ve been naming them. Well some of them.
Our street has a house with five cats, these cats are in a cat army and are retired together.
To us, they...
November 2011
2 posts
Stand up, now sit down.
Yesterday, I did two comedy gigs, which was a first for me.
There is a lull after a gig, the day after, feels empty.
Two gigs, emptier still. I’m trying to fill the spaces of quiet with people or babble to stop me thinking about how drained I feel.
Now the adrenaline of trying new material and the spotlight in my face as ebbed away, I feel tired or dull. I certainly don’t feel...
Let's get Quizzical.
The pen moves over the paper, I start with an eye, I always start with an eye and the idea spreads outward from there. It’s now a cat, the pen moves in my hand. They’re talking about questions.
We’re at a quiz.
The quiz is in a badminton club. The idea that the badminton club has a pub above it amuses me, so does watching the players on the court.
‘Shuttlecocks!’...
August 2011
6 posts
Riotious Laughter: The making of a podcast.
“Let’s do a podcast, fellas.”
- John Lennon, The Beatles
That’s the email signature of my friend Ben (@Bursaar) and it always makes me smile.
For the past few months I’ve been involved in a podcast called Show and Prove (I had no choice in the name) which was founded by guys I know exclusively through Twitter.
And because of the podcast I got to know...
Wiki-WAH!-WAH!
I’ve something to confess, late at night when you’ve gone to sleep, I open up my laptop and I spend ages on the internet. What I’m looking at, I’m afraid to say, you’ll judge me.
But, this is hard enough already.
Look, fine… late at night, I’m addicted to reading Wikipedia.
Right, I know what you’re thinking ‘That’s not that bad?...
July 2011
5 posts
Rules so I don't appear crazy.
I’m creating a new set of rules for me to interact with people and not appear too crazy.
1) Things aren’t probably good if I’m going to be ashamed to tell anyone about the actions/conversation later. Remember this.
2) If things are going badly I’ve to stop trying to fix them, that makes things worse. Then instead of sending one email, I’ve sent 6, and text...
Why Nick Thune probably thinks I'm stalking him.
I don’t know when I really got into listening to Podcasts.
Maybe it was somewhere in the hours of realising I couldn’t listen to radio on my iPod and I wanted something more than the chatter of my own thoughts being interspersed between music or backdropped by it. Radio used to fill that void, perfectly and podcasts aren’t exactly radio. They’re an echo of something and...
Conversation in a car with my mother.
In the car with my mother, driving through rain which is also driving down against us, through the countryside of Donegal. I like spending time with her, she is a sensible woman and we talk about the world and its ways.
She asks questions about my life, I talk about achievements and the fact that I’m doing comedy now and finding it hard, that there is work there I wasn’t expecting.
...
Get up, stand up, no wait, sit down.
Another comedy gig, another blog without comedy about comedy.
The gig didn’t go well. I didn’t die, I wasn’t up on stage sobbing, though that might be funny but it felt lacking and that was up to me.
I can’t blame the audience.
I think this is my sixth gig and so far I’ve only had a real buzz out of my first gig and I think my third. The buzz is the feeling that...
Mum gets chickens.
Phone call with my mother.
‘Yer fucking father is after buying me hens.’
‘What? Chickens? How many?’
‘I don’t know! They’re in the back of the car!’
‘Where are you putting them?’
‘I don’t know! He bought them, you’d think he’d have made arrangements before he bought them.’
‘Where did he get...
June 2011
2 posts
A bitch of a note.
A note about this piece: So, I ended up talking to one of the comedians involved and it turned out that she’d been writing the note to the other comedian. I’m a bit red faced over this but I guess this blog is about my own paranoia when it comes to women and bitching and what that’s done to me with regard to them. So I’ve changed parts of this to reflect that.
Last...
Sea Sidling
I try to return home to Donegal once a month, I call it home, it’s the town I’ve lived in for 18 or so years of my life, it’s now where my parents are. The bus takes me home, I say that but really it’s the guilt of not being home of my parents not seeing me. My mother and father forgetting what I look like, or joking about it, incessantly.
I say this like I don’t...
May 2011
2 posts
Getting rid of the Wii
We’re moving house. Colm, my boyfriend, doesn’t like me to have any fun at all so we are now getting rid of our Wii. The following like a list of the dead is what we are selling:
Wii, white.
2 nunchucks
2 controllers
2 wiimotes
a balance board (for Wii fit or stubbing your toe on)
Games:
Wii fit
Wii fit active (What ever the EA one was).
Okami
SoulCalibur Legends
Super...
April 2011
3 posts
With or without Ewe.
The place where my parents have sheep, the land and the hills and the brown around it. That’s where the sheep are, the land my parents reclaimed ten years ago from neglect, falling the trees and tearing down the old house that my great grand parents lived in most of their lives.
The old house scared me, you couldn’t go in but in the window you’d see the final scene of a horror...
Birthday Email from Emma.
Hip hip horray!
My name is Emma. Today I will be your guide to turning 30. I will help you wave frantically goodbye to your youth, plump taut facial skin, hair pigment, control over your bowel movements and numerous other trinkets of your twenties. Bid farewell to the possiblilty of possibilities.
Welcome to a world where you realise that yes, today is the best I’m ever going to look as...
March 2011
1 post
The Hilarity of Tenuous Linking
As of the time of writing, my twitter bio reads
‘Scientist, uses innuendo and double entendre to confuse predators. Not a writer.’
Firstly, I am a scientist, I have a BSc and a PhD, it’s the area I work in, it’s what pays the bills and as difficult and heartbreaking as it can be, I love it.
We rush to class ourselves before other’s can class us, we try to create...
February 2011
3 posts
Tweetbreaks, mistakes, misfits.
In Twitter as in my actual life, I’ve no real idea what I’m doing right or what I’m doing wrong. Though I occasionally use Twitter to document my foibles to try to get the bits that I do in life right, which doesn’t always happen but it’s nice to have someone to tell it to. Plus, it’s more amusing to read about failure especially if it appears in the form of...
When Tempest Toss'd, Embrace Chaos.: Are you... →
cripesonfriday:
It’s been a good while since I’ve blogged about the appeal,and there has been very little written on the @twjoketrialfund account too. This is because, although there is a lot of movement behind the scenes to do with various aspects of the appeal, fundraising etc, there is nothing going on that is…
January 2011
2 posts
Catty Celebrity Gossip
I met Shaun (@shaunoboyle) for coffee, I know him years and over coffee he informed me that he wanted to get a cat.
‘You want to adopt a cat? Seriously?’
‘Sure but we work pretty long hours so we wanted to get an indoors cat. We figured it would be cruel to get a fit and healthy cat so we’re going to adopt and old one or one with FIV (Feline immunodeficiency...
The adventures of words on electronic...
Emailing a friend this morning, I wasn’t sure what to write so I wrote this short poem, if you can call it that, instead.
**********************************
And yet morning has come and we fight it as if we’d never see another morning
and our heads they hum as the ideas come tumbling in
nursing a mug of coffee and staring at a blank screen, the words start to appear
And we pack...
December 2010
5 posts
Why I don't send Facebook Messages.
It’s Boxing night, traditionally the night we all go out and meet each other for our yearly ‘So, what are you doing now?’. There are a few people I’m really interested in seeing, in an effort to see one I actually used Facebook to send her a message, I’ve not seen or heard from her in about 6 months. And this is why I’m not allowed to use Facebook.
Names have...
The Walking Dead of Winter.
Walking at night the town where I grew up. It welcomes me with open arms as I wander over paths that remember my name, my step, that look up to me even if I am still a stranger to those around me. Beside it the sea a welcome friend, the smell, the sound, the reflection of lights sparkling on a bay, I am alone, me and the town. I walk in the darkness the voices of a podcast in my ears for company,...
Surviving Winter in the City.
Well I wrote an Article for Half A Giraffe which is here
http://halfagiraffe.tv/index.php/surviving-winter-in-the-city/
After the Punchline.
The moments we are alive, the moments where we carry the weight of living of a heart beating and beating and breathing and our need to breathe and the years rolled by, over us, around us, the moments we carry, the memories, the stresses and the responsibilities of the place that we are right now. Alive. Surviving. Trying to do the best we can.
That weight that pulls us, the gravity of our...
Twitter Guess Who
As a child I never really played many board games, mostly because of the level of violence it drew out of my brother and I. One game I do remember is playing Guess Who in a neighbours house, it’s like a cheap version of a photofit and you have to ask yes or no questions based on a person’s description.
The group of people are remember being in the game are these.
...
November 2010
3 posts
Robins.
Sometimes it would be nice to not have feelings, like robots, robins or prostitutes.
Robins feel nothing.
Have you ever looked at a robin and thought ‘He looks happy’? You haven’t…because they can’t feel happiness.
Robins kill other robins in an attempt to feel something.
Then they eat berries because the berries are large and juicy and shaped like the hearts...
Funny Feelings.
Firstly it’s hard to say that you’re funny or that you have a good sense of humour.
It’s never really up to you to say, so to clarify any points where you think I’m praising myself, I’m probably not. So, I’ll just say that enough people have told me that I’m funny without suffixing it with ‘looking’ for me to think, maybe sometimes I am...
Accented Ideas
This is the prelude, for the rest of this I’ve actually recorded me reading it. Exciting eh? You can listen along by loading this in a new window.
http://audioboo.fm/boos/209810-blog-post
At the tone, you can turn the page.
======================================================
Sometimes on the internet it’s hard to carry an accent. The words we use carry information and not...
October 2010
3 posts
Disarming.
When I was a child, well when I was a child up to a certain age, I thought that all Daddies had one arm. My father did so it must go to show that all fathers must only have one arm. I do remember realising at maybe three years old that this doctrine I’d invested my belief in wasn’t true. My neighbour’s dad had two, as did all the other dads, so my Dad must be different. Mum told...
Running with Scissors
Someone once told me that my tweets from the lab made for one of their favourite sitcoms. I’m exceedingly lucky to work with not only fantastic scientists but very funny people. Although they aren’t on Twitter I’d like to think that you at least have some impression of who these people are.
One of them is Brenda.
For the past number of months she’s been training to run...
Housemate tales: Anthony.
When I first moved to Dublin I lived in a shared house. My room was so small it contained only a bed, a cupboard, space to get into the bed and the wardrobe was in the hall. The house was one of those that people moved in and out of it.
One of those people who lived there was a guy called Anthony, he was in his forties, he looked in his fifties. He was from a rough area of Dublin but to be...
September 2010
3 posts
Arrrrrr Pilates.
You know when you try on clothes and you suck in your stomach before you look at yourself in the mirror. That’s pilates, except while you are sucking in your stomach you are lying down trying to swing your legs over your head like a fish floundering on a deck. I like pilates, well not exactly like but I like the fact that it makes me somewhat fitter and more flexible, one day I hope to use...
Emails from San Francisco.
Hello!!
I thought I’d send a quick email, I’m awake it is half seven in the morning. Due to jet lag and my body being a fucker this is the time I’ve been waking up every morning. Then I do jumping jacks then I sing at the pigeons outside. Seriously there are pigeons sleeping outside our hotel room. The hotel is great, the wallpaper is like someone vomited flowers… a...
Lab updates.
As an experiment for when I wasn’t tweeting at the start of the week I started writing lab updates that when to @mattleys first as he’s a fan of the lab and wanted to know what was going on. This isn’t all of them, in the others I go into specific details about things I wouldn’t usually talk about. But this is today’s. I guess if you don’t really follow the lab...