The Devil Complains

Hell. The Devil on his throne, phone in hand about to make a call

THE DEVIL: [calling off screen] Henry! For crying out loud put down that flamethrower! I keep telling you there are no communists in Hell! People really gotta read the Bible… [dials number and puts phone to his ear]

Heaven. Jesus is in the midst of a raucous party when his phone rings amid the strains of a drunken crowd singalong: “I am going, I am going, where streams of whiskey are flowing…” Pint of Guinness in hand, he heads to a quiet corner to take the call.

JESUS: Lucifer! So nice to hear from you. [Calls off screen] Yeah another whiskey! [returns to call] What can I do for you, only we are a bit busy up here [puts his pint down to accept a glass of whiskey].

THE DEVIL: It’s Henry Kissinger! I think the guy is too evil for Hell! He’s already carpet bombed the Seventh Circle. He’s naplmed the Eighth and installed a fascist dictatorship over the Sixth where anyone who questions the official state ideology is disappeared! That’s the Heresy Circle! The poor souls can’t help themselves!

JESUS: Luce, mate… what’s the problem? They’re meant to suffer! It sounds like you’ve finally gotten some help for that workload you’re always complaining about. [yells off screen] Hey Shane! “Dirty Old Town”!

Strains of a rough voice slur-singing: “I met my love, by the gas works wall…” 

THE DEVIL: Hang on… do you have Shane MacGowan up there???

JESUS: What? Oh… yeah he’s on a double bill tonight with Sinead.

THE DEVIL: You get all the good ones!

JESUS: Yeah that's... kinda the deal, Luce.

THE DEVIL: [sighs] I don't know how much more of this I can take! You pay me to torture these souls, fine. I think I do a pretty good job! Then some upstart psychopath comes down and starts trying to do it for me! Reckons he’s got more experience in making things “scream”! It’s like he wants my…

A knock on the door. The Devil gets up to answer.

THE DEVIL: [to Jesus] Hang on.... [opens door] Yes?

Two uniformed soldiers march in and declare The Devil is under arrest in the name of the new regime established to restore order and destroy the Communist threat.

THE DEVIL: [being dragged away, yelling into his phone] JESUS! Help me! JESUS! There’s been a coup… you have to intervene... JESUS! JESUS?!?

JESUS: [hears Shane MacGowan start singing “It was Christmas eve babe, in the drunk tank...”] Sorry Luce, didn’t catch that. Look gotta go [downs whiskey] Shane’s just got Kirsty MacColl up on stage [hangs up and hurries off raising his pint glass]

THE DEVIL: [being dragged down a firey hallway] JESUS!!!!!!!

Yes, even dental industry spammers from New Jersey want a piece of this blog's action!

Photos via Advanced Dental Group of New Jersey.

Much has been written in praise of this blog, from "totally deranged rantings" to "deeply disturbing insights into the mind of a probable psychopath with substance abuse issues" all the way through to "hardly ever updated".

(And that's just from my mother HAHAHAHA no actually she just refuses to acknowledge my existence these days.)

This blog, if the mail I receive is any indication, is famed over the world as much for the quality of its contents as for its reach into key target communities for spammers ranging from supplement sellers (possibly driven my references to the Mighty Essendon Bombers?) to a disturbingly wide array of porn providers.

But finally, I've made it. Finally the dental industry in New Jersey has been forced to sit up and take notice! And they wanna piece of the Carlo Sands action!!!

Yes, I received in my inbox the following piece of correspondence that indicates beyond all doubt that appreciation of my world-shaping impact only grows.

Hey, Carlo! 

I am Andrea from Advanced Dental Group of Edgewater, I was searching for local bloggers in New Jersey where our business is located and I found your blog www.carlosands.com/2009/06/shane-macgowan-gets-his-teeth-fixed.html. 

I'm writing this to you because I'd love to contribute a guest post to your site or if you find our site helpful to your audience you can add our link as an additional source of information to one of your posts that fits our nature of business. Here is our link: https://www.theedgewaterdentalgroup.com/ 

Please let me know if you’d be open to accepting guest posts. I will be glad to promote it (when live) on our social media profiles. 

Thanks,
Andrea

Wow. It is always nice to be noticed and appreciated by your own locals, isn't it? I mean, sure I may live in Sydney and the closest I ever got to North America was an ill-fated trip to Venezuela in 2005 when I nearly died from e-coli until the Cuban doctors in the country as part of a solidarity exchange with the Hugo Chavez government gave me entirely free and high quality care after a private hospital had milked me for my travel insurance (but that's a whole other story).

But I've drunkenly sung along to Bruce Springsteen's "The River" more times than I can count, so I reckon I'm pretty much born-and-bred Jersey.

What makes this particular piece of correspondence so convincing is how it picks up on the essence of my, to be honest, only ever dental-related blog post -- the highlighted piece on how the frontman of the Irish Celtic-punk pioneers The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, got his famously terrible teeth fixed.

Sure, my post was a disturbed drunken rant about how MacGowan had betrayed everything he ever stood for by selling his soul to Big Teeth, as I like to call these dentistry QUACKS!

But still, somehow, in my uncalled for and frankly quite weird raging about MacGowan selling out, Andrea from the Advance Dental Group of Edgewater has detected, underneath all the bile, an actual fondness for dentistry. In New Jersey.

So please, if you ever find yourself in New Jersey and you've drunkenly smashed you teeth to smithereens like Shane MacGowan, consider giving these people a call. Tell them Carlo sent you, they're fans.



'I come from down in the valley, when mister when you're young, they bring you up to do like your daddy done...' The Boss sings the song of my people.

We want blood...

"We want blood! (we want blood), We want blood! (we want blood), let the scarlet red river turn our cities into mud..."

Finally, someone has stood up and said what needs to be said. And that someone is the great singer-songwriter from Dublin, The Mighty Stef (born Stefan Murphy).

The Mighty Stef aims his rough-as guts, drunken, impassioned, bluesy musical guns at the Irish government and calls them out for what they are: fucking lying thieves.

Having turned those parts of the Emerald Isle not still occupied by the British into a happy hunting ground for corporate plunderers (corporate tax rate lowered to 12%), when the good ship Corporate Plunder ran aground, the good people in the Irish government gave them 70 billion euros.

I mean, seriously, they gave it to them. It was not a loan. They wont have to pay it back. Just "there you go, you cheeky scamps, don't spend it all on lollys".

And these are the sort of people who wouldn't give a beggar a buck in the snow.

I mean, I was personally a bit strapped for cash a year or two back and I asked Brian Cowan himself if he could lend me a few bucks for a few pints in his nation's lovely pubs.

Well, the reply I got from his personal secretary's staff clerk's assistant's secreatary is not printable even on this blog.

Hell, I was only trying to do the bastard a favour. The economy clearly badly needed a stimulus package to get it back up and running and nothing stimulates an economy like a Carlo Sands' drinking binge.

But no.

But a bunch of goddamn fucking thieves in suits who fucked the economy up in the first place give him a call and next thing you know its 70 billion pounds from the public coffers straight into the veins of the profit junkies.

And it all gets blown on debts and speculation. Soon as they get the cash, it's straight down to their dealer round the stock market and whole sad and pathetic cycle starts again.

With the cash not being spent on anything *actually* productive or useful, far from saving the economy, it drove it further into crisis. Unemployment has tripled since 2007, numbering hundreds of thousands. Wages are 20% lower than three years ago.

Mass migration, that terrible feature of Irish history that has foisted morbid, miserable Irish folk songs on innocent people all over the world, is raising its ugly head once more.

And, after it all, the government has found itself a little strapped for cash.

The solution? Pay for the bailout of the parasites by squeezing the fucking people that *actually* do something useful in society, that actually produce something of social value: brewery workers and bartenders.

And the working class in general, they were just the first that came to mind.

The problem is it wasn't even the government's cash to begin with. It was money provided by taxpayers.

And the rich in Ireland generally don't pay taxes (do they Bono?).

So the government gives the rich the working people's cash. Then, it makes up the balance by making the working people pay even more.

It follwed this up by slashing billions out of social services, cut funds to education and hike up tuition fees, slash public sector jobs, reduce pensions and increase taxes for ordinary people.

But that was still not enough, because the Irish government claims it still can't pay its loans to... the FUCKING BANKS.

The solution? Well, "dear banks, get fucked" is the one understandably that struck most Irish people, who polls say back a default.

Instead, the government went crawling on its knees to the International Monetary Fund and European Union and got 90 billion odd euros in a loan at high interest rates, in order to burden the Irish people minus the six counties claimed by Britain with *even more* debt it never asked for. (But don't worry, the six counties claimed by Britain are having to pay for debts racked up by the British government for handing billions of euros to British banks.)

And in return the cash, the government will lose economic sovereignty and hand the running of the day-to-day economy over to IMF and EU bureacrats *and* commits to implementing *further* savage spending cuts and other neoliberal austerity measures - of the sort that helped cause the fucking crisis in the first place.

This, you might think, may make people angry. Well, the government is on the verge of collapse an some 100,000 protested in Dublin on November 27 at this state of affairs.

The Mighty Stef goes further: "Let the downtrodden rise with a fire in their soul ...how many times do you need to be told? We want blood!"

How to organise such a thing? I made some general suggestions on the issue of how to make the streets run scarlet red with the blood of the ruling class, followed by what may be best described as a "colourful" discussion in the comments section, in my post Could *this* be the wall?

But the practicalities are largely to do with Australia and the Irish people will have to find their own solutions. And, indeed, their own walls.

The Mighty Stef has rightly raised the issue and got the ball (if not yet the heads) rolling. And this from a man whose previous experience of protest songs was this effort in response to Ireland losing a football match to France in the "Hand of Frog" scandal.

But I like the Mighty Stef in general. Rough, raw and drunken... Irish, in other words. If you want to hear some more, here are three song suggestions (though I could list more):

Death Threats: "It's getting to the stage I guess I always knew it would, where I can't walk down my street. I'm getting death threats here, death threats there from everyone I meet..." Carlo Sands can relate, especially to the empty beer glasses in the film clip.

Poisonous Love: "I'll return, your jewelry, I'll return your keys. I'll return your records and your poxy DVDS. I'll give you back your innocence that you blindly gave to me, and I'll sink you to the bottom of the sea..." The Mighty Stef shows the mature way to deal with a relationship break up.

Waitin' round to die: "I came of age and I met a girl in a Tuscaloosa bar, she cleaned me out and hit it on the sly. I tried to kill the pain, I bought some wine, hopped a train..." The Mighty Stef teams up with Shane MacGowan to cover Townes Van Zandt's classic.

Or you could just get on with the task of spilling their blood.



"Coz I've heard all the lies that I'm ever gonna wanna hear... we want blood!" Accoustic fury this time.

Wherever people long for freedom, Johnny Depp is there

Yes, it is all over the media.

The Greatest Actor of His Generation turned up at a British school in full pirate regalia after a young fan wrote to him seeking help to stage a “mutiny”.

“Beatrice Delap, nine, wrote to Captain Jack Sparrow — Depp's character in the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies — asking for help with an uprising against teachers at Meridian Primary School in Greenwich, south-east London”, ABC.net.au said.

“We are a bunch of budding young pirates and we were having a bit of trouble mutiny-ing against the teachers,” Delap wrote. “We’d love if you could come and help.”

Recognising that surprise is of the essence in a successful insurrection, Depp gave the school just 10 minutes notice of his visit in response to the call for assistance in the students’ liberation struggle.

Panicked, the school establishment called a hasty assembly, into which Depp strode in full pirate regalia, accompanied by four pirate offsiders. The students, we are told, burst into applause.

No doubt this ovation was also accompanied by many cries of “Long live the revolution!”, “Fourth graders united shall never be defeated!” and “To the wall, teacher scum!”

However, corporate media accounts omit any reference to such chants.

Despite the element of surprise, it turns out there was a turncoat in rebel ranks. Addressing the rebels, Depp was forced to advocate a tactical retreat: “Maybe we shouldn’t mutiny today because there are police outside monitoring me.”

This was a wise tactical move. With the forces of reaction mobilising their repressive apparatus against the rising in advance, the rebels were surrounded. A hasty rising in such circumstances could only lead to a bloodbath.

And a heroic but failed rising is of no use to anyone — unless you’re Irish, perhaps.

Far better to keep the powder dry, regroup, gather the forces, strengthen preparations and prepare to launch a successful insurrection tomorrow.




“So we’ll mutiny, take over the school and eat lots of candy till our teeth fall out.” Depp expounds the rebels’ action program.


Now there is more to Depp than his role as revolutionary leader. He also directed and starred in the clip below for the Shane MacGowan and the Popes song “That Woman Got Me Drinking” — an ode to the noble art of mending a broken heart with huge quantities of booze. (Of course, this features Shane MacGowan before he sold out and got his teeth fixed.)





“She said she’d always love me, she said I’d be the one. Now look at the way she treats me, just like a piece of scum. That woman’s got me drinking, look at the state I’m in. Give me one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten bottles of gin.”

From assisting primary schoolchildren in their bid to throw off their oppressors, to directing a clip celebrating binge drinking as a legitimate response to heart ache, to completely failing to win an Oscar despite being the greatest actor of his generation and despite Tom Fucking Hanks winning two... it seems there is truly nothing Johnny Depp cannot do.

And here, on this very blog, Carlo Sands has been kind enough to provide, in one single post, no less than two clips featuring Mr Depp.

And I do this entirely free of charge, purely out of passion for my work.

And all Carlo Sands asks in return is you have a look at the google ads kindly provided at the top of the page for your shopping pleasure, check them out, and, if you see anything like, give them a good click or two.

You'll find if you refresh the page, google kindly provides an entirely different set of ads — feel free to check them all out!

Shane MacGowan gets his teeth fixed??? First sign of the coming Armageddon?

I never thought such a day would come.

I mean, this is one crazy, mixed up world — that no one can deny.

But there has always been a constant. One thing on which we could hold on to. Something solid in this ever-changing world.

Something that represented all that was good, decent and worth holding on to as we slide further and further towards the abyss of barbarism.

Shane MacGowan's teeth.

Comrade MacGowan's teeth were a symbol of everything right in the world. A rebellion against all that was false, manufactured, artificially smooth.

A permanent defence of permanent drunkenness — years of abuse of intoxicants created those teeth! They were an achievement, a life well lived!

Of course, it should be added than an apparently decisive moment came when he allegedly broke his set badly after an all-day drinking session that ended with him tripping over a pile of bricks.

But such a gain is not just the product of one day's work. You spend your life drunk, sooner or later you will trip over a pile of bricks and create a mouth to be proud of!

But, it pains me to say, no more.

No, Shane MacGowan has turned his back on everything he once stood for.

He has gotten his chompers fixed.

Yes, this is how he spent the money he eared from a recent tour with a re-grouped Pogues.

This raises serious ethical questions.

Did those Pogues fans forking out hard-earned cash to go and see the original Pogues line up, with MacGowan out front once more, know this is how the tour's profits would be spent?

Did they know that they would be complicit in MacGowan betraying everything he once stood for?

That he would bugger off to fucking Spain to fill the bank account of some overpaid tooth quack to fix him up with some new-fangled fangs?

Well check it out. Here is Shane as we knew and loved him.






And here he is after his cosmetic surgery.





You see how he has caved in to the demands to submit to the dominant body image? See how smooth and conventionally handsome he now looks?

Oh the shame of it all.

I firmly belief that this is the first sign of the coming Armageddon.

And I will say this: if it turns out that Comrade MacGowan has started attending AA meetings, then the final battle between good and evil will have begun.

If this is the case, I trust all readers of this blog will find themselves in the front line — broken whiskey bottle in hand.



'I'll chop you down like an old dead tree...' A good example of Shane MacGowan's teeth in the pre-Armageddon days, before we were over-taken by the all-encompassing battle between the forces of Good and Evil.