Snow… ugh… also some notes from watching old Tony Awards, Irish taxes, etc.

Posted On February 13, 2021

Dia duit. Just finished the Irish 101 course from Dublin City University and about to start Irish 102 next week. Both are free through futurelearn.com, which is good for those of us who might well have a little Scottish in us mixed with the Irish and hence don’t want to pay.

Week 4 of Irish 101 covered hobbies. Including such things as favourite bands and songs.

Which is to say:

Well, I do believe there’s probably some legal requirement to plug Dublin’s favourite tax refugees/escapees*, just surprising that it took till week 4 to get around to it.

Interesting/cute that they took the time to get the sunglasses detail right on Cartoon Bono but failed to get the part where he’s much shorter than his bandmates right. And, in all 4 cases, these are clearly their debut album waistlines.

* BTW: I ain’t criticizing Bono on the tax front. That shit actually makes me like him more. Taxation is theft, y’all at Irish Central (above link) and the Guardian (quoted within the above link) can go to Hell. And if he paid all the shit you assholes want him to pay, it wouldn’t make a single bit of difference to “the poor,” it would simply mean more pork for Irish politicians to siphon off into their own pockets and those of their friends, same as in Canada. And these assholes at Irish Central admit regular micks are “absolutely screwed for tax” – is that Bono’s fault? No. You voted for politicians who keep raising your taxes and you voted for politicians who kept promising free shit that requires crippling taxes to pay the bill, and you voted to be slaves to the 4th Reich/Evil Empire known as the EU who absolutely destroyed the former “Celtic Tiger” economy. Don’t bitch about Bono being smart and taking his money elsewhere.

It’s also hilarious to see them target the dude who’s done more about poverty than any politician and certainly more than any of the asshole media scum pointing fingers at him, supposedly on behalf of the poor (as opposed to their own egos and jealousy).

I was actually looking at moving to Ireland because it’s possible to get a nice little cottage where my ancestors came from in Kerry or close to Galway for under $100K US, even needing fixes it would be less than half what I can sell my current house for, but even though I have far less money than Bono, like way less than 1% of it, I just about shit myself when I saw some of the tax shit I’d be in for. And I think they even have it so if you live there for 5 years, they can rape your estate for 20% after you die even after you’ve left Ireland. Hell no, not happening.

I suppose I might be able to live there in the summer months for just shy of whatever cut-off it is that makes you deemed a resident or domiciled in Ireland or whatever they call it, but then again, Ireland is severely ruined and imprisoned right now due to the commie coof and all the Karens. So… maybe in 10 years when the Karens are hopefully over their current mass hysteria (and ruining people’s lives over something else). Or if they ever remember what so many fought for barely a century ago that the current generations have just given away because the media told them to. Otherwise, South America is looking much better. But I digress…

So… you go, Bono! To Hell with those jealous crybabies in the press. And it’s absolutely not “cheating” to avoid paying obscene amounts of tax when you don’t have to.

In other news, every year since I moved here to the Cowichan, mid-February means a dump of snow as winter’s last kick in the teeth after fooling us with what seemed like an early spring.

This year I got to enjoy my dwarf irises for a couple days:

before they got hit with the first bit of snow on Wednesday:

Now, as of Friday afternoon when the first of the snow had melted, some of the irises were OK, but I doubt they’ll survived the dump of snow coming over this weekend. Up to 8″. Ouch.

Maybe they’ll still be OK when this shit melts off in the coming days (it’s supposed to warm up and piss rain starting on Monday), but if not, well, there’s always next year. And I’m somehow less bothered by this year’s snow damage than I am by last year’s slug damage, though the bastard slugs did wreck most of the yellow dwarf irises this year as well.

One interesting thing I noted on Wednesday was how my hellebores all lay themselves down in preparation for the freeze. First, a before pic:

Now, shot from Wednesday when the snow was just starting:

And also Friday afternoon, still lying down in -2 Celsius when the first snow had melted but the rest of the snow was en route:

In February 2019 when I got more than a foot of snow on my then-freshly planted Merlin hellebores (pink ones that are right next to these white ones in the above pics), I only saw them lying down as the snow was melting and assumed the laying-down stems had been weighed down by the snow. (They reverted to upright over a week or so after the snow was all melted.) This week I was able to see that they actually did that before the snow ever came.

Which is pretty damn cool. Certainly better than some of the denizens in my Japanese side garden who got hammered not only with the 8” of snow on the winter solstice but then a few days later got squashed when the snow avalanched down off my neighbour’s roof. All survived, but there’s definitely some bent over stems that will require staking and pruning come spring… and I had some broken branches on one of my baby camellias… which is what the hellebores are smart enough to avoid by just laying down.

What else… well, on the university front, they now how my high school grades. (Phew!) BCIT are still outstanding despite being ordered 3 weeks ago. Two weeks to go till deadline… but I called BCIT yesterday afternoon and they said they mailed it out on January 22nd.

I’ll give it to Wednesday morning and if it’s still not checked off by then, I will email BCIT to get them to send a PDF transcript to the local university as insurance. Wednesday still leaves a bit over a week before the deadline and all the other PDF transcripts have been marked as received within a week of them being sent.

I ended up writing a whole new stage play excerpt for my portfolio, which is an end-of-Act-I moment in a play where the plot came to me the other day, loosely based on some shit from my time when I was at UBC almost 20 years ago.

Or at least I think it’s end-of-Act-I. I know the general plot arc but haven’t fleshed it out yet beyond the few pages needed for the excerpt, so the exact location remains to be seen.

(It might actually be better in a mid-point transition, now that I think of it. Or… end of “Act I” in terms of right before intermission, not the structural Act I which is way earlier in the evening.)

Speaking of plays, I found a video of the whole broadcast of the 2019 Tonys that I watched. (Link below)

Dear Lord… I mean, it looks like Hadestown is an amazing play. Ditto the Ferryman. I would like to see productions of those at some point. Aside from that, at least one other nominee for best musical was so cringey it makes it seem that it’s actually not that freakin’ hard to write a play more than good enough to get a nomination, lol. (Talking about a good enough script. Actually getting a nom is probably like so many other industry circle jerk awards shows: dependent on who you know and what you spew.)

And it seems most were rehashes either of old plays (fair enough) or of old movies. Hollywood and Broadway are clearly in full on double ouroboros mode. (Or maybe that should be “full on 69 mode.” Either way, they swallow each other’s tails and keep on sucking.)

Also, half the winners seemed rather… I guess “irritating” is the nicest way to phrase it.

Best acceptance speech of the night, hands-down, was Bryan Cranston, who is untouchable and can joke about whatever he wants.

I was gonna embed the video here, but here’s the funny thing: all the clips I found cut the really good shit he said, whether he was serious or kidding.

However, here’s the link for the video I watched of the whole thing that someone had uploaded and still left available: 2019 Tonys in full.

Cranston comes up right about 2:00:00, but meh, start watching from 1:59:00 to be sure you get it. Note the emphasis on “real journalists”. Which is to say, as opposed to the narrative-chuckers most of the people who call themselves journalists these days. (*cough*Irish Central piece linked above whining about Bono and his taxes which are none of their damn business to drum up a Two Minutes Hate amongst jealous losers*cough*)

I can, however, embed this clip from the press conference after the awards show:

I know he has to play the game, and he does (maybe he isn’t playing, I don’t know much about Cranston, actually), but I would point out the “risky” shows tend to be preachy garbage that no one wants to see. Which you can’t say, of course. Let them keep wondering why they’re losing money and relevance.

And I would argue most of the media are the enemy of the people. And they clearly do want to make enemies of people with a different opinion. There’s a reason why the average Joe despises the press, and it’s well-earned.

But anyway about the Tonys… Gotta say this: maybe that Spiderman musical Bono and the Edge did wasn’t so bad after all. I mean, it couldn’t possibly be worse than some of the… er, “highlights”… from 2019. (As you can see in the full show linked above.)

I say that having never seen Spiderman or clips from it, lol… though I might well get around to watching some one of these days when I need a laugh.

And while half the 2019 winners sounded like they would collapse in tears if anyone so much as failed to give them a standing ovation for their supposed brilliance and braveness and stances flogged on the audience foolish enough to show up (though to be fair, the worst offenders’ box office grosses indicate very few people were that foolish), Bono and the Edge actually showed up and took their verbal lashing at the 2011 Tonys:

Gotta hand it to my fellow Irish: that took way more balls than anything at the 2019 Tonys, outside of Cranston’s spiel, and especially more than anything being self-congratulated.