Twenty Major hangs up his satirical gloves…
Twenty’s not exactly gone, but it sounds like he’s had enough after four years and one day of blogging… Have sympathy with the long distance blogger… Some fairly sober valedictory remarks worth reading… He’s even set up a forum for those regulars who want to carry on without him… I think I met him once, at the bar at the second Irish Blog Awards, just after he’d clinched his book deal. Still don’t really know who he is… But he was (at the very least) a decent conversation starter…
I had been reading TM a lot over the last year even though I disagreed with at least half of his ideas. But can you get Blog Withdrawal Symptoms?
Here, I’ll fill the void:
“Some Irish ‘celebrity’ you’ve never heard of is a cunt.”
my favourite TM post (sanitised to be SFW):
While Fine Gael’s Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbite of the Labour Party rightly tore strips off you and your government you sat there looking down at the desk, maybe even scribbling on a piece of paper. You could, for all intents and purposes, have been playing noughts and crosses with yourself.
Their tirades over it was your turn to speak. This is where I have the biggest problem. You stood there, again not making any eye-contact with the people you were addressing, looking down and with one hand in your pocket told us not to worry.
[...]
You might as well have been chewing on a piece of gum while you said it. It really did appear that couldn’t care less that a 38 year old who raped a 12 year old was released.
It might as well have been just another one of your party colleagues involved in tax evasion or corruption or dodgy planning applications. You know, the day to day stuff your government has been involved in for years. You were more upset when the Bertiebowl didn’t happen.
[...]
Take your hands out of your pockets, look people in the eye and pretend to care. We’d all appreciate it.
I’m genuinely sad he won’t be posting regularly anymore. My fav 20 moment…his views on reality TV:
“I don’t give a fuck about ordinary people, I don’t want to see them on the TV. I want Hill Street Blues and other cool stuff that makes me forget about the poxy mingers that surround us every day. I don’t want to see ‘celebrities’ doing things like dancing, cooking, surviving or jigs and cunting reels.
When will it stop? You never meet anyone who says “Yeah, I love reality TV. It’s great!!”. That just means there are a fucking lot of liars in this country because they’re obviously making enough money to keep producing the things.”
He got the best ever, ever, ever scoop by an Irish blogger…
For me his finest hour was this fisking of everyone’s favourite internet reactionary over at A Tangled Web. Almost as amusing was Vance’s subsequent denunciation of Twenty Major as a ‘hate site’.
I missed plenty of his blogs over the years, but for me Twenty Major’s finest hour was when he cast his cold eye on both the “Love Ulster” march in Dublin, and the rioters.
haven’t time to make anything SFW, but here is the link to “Rioting in Dublin” from the Feb ’06 archive:
http://twentymajor.net/2006/02/