Saturday, June 28, 2014

100 years ago today

On this day in 1914 a driver took a turn down a wrong street.
He found himself in he wrong place at the wrong time.
His passengers were the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.
An assassin appeared called  Gavrilo Princip  and killed them  both.
Once more the Balkans rose up to war.

The war spread to become World war one.

This was the beginning of "The great war" The war to end all wars..

  The HailO app tells me where my customer is..
      Italian Taxi  Toyota Prius of course

                   This young lady was pulling together a fashion show. (Not a good photo)

             Playing volleyball on  Dollymount strand.

My life has become more like a trawler mans every day.
I drop my nets and head off not knowing where I might pick up my next job.
Often I compare my day to being a world traveler in reverse. The world coming to me.
A Canadian guy asked me for the Mater as in "Hospital" and I was fortunate to find out that he wanted "The Marker" as in Hotel. I altered course and got him there without much of a roundabout. A good tipper into the bargain.
An Irish girl from Donegal who was well traveled. She worked in Boston and  Seattle,   but her family are fishermen and they now fish in America...They got the Green Card and emigrated to Cape Cod.
Fishermen in Ireland got a real rough deal from the European Union.. Our fish quotas were given to the French and Spanish while the Irish skippers were given very little.
One very sad story on the radio was of a Dingle fisherman talking from the quayside of his native port.
He had just come back from Spain where he had delivered his fishing boat to its new Spanish owners.
"In 3 weeks time my vessel will be re registered and its new owners will be harvesting fish off the Irish coast.
Irish fish that I am not allowed to catch"
There is not much justice in that situation.

A young  girl flagged me down in O'Connell St. She was so panicked that she couldn't tell me where she was going.  I had nearly stopped when she said Cork St. 
She was going for a job interview and was in a right sweat....But I also knew where Newmarket Sq was. She was really grateful that I had calmed her down at journeys end..
It was only when I turned around to get my reward did I see that she was really good looking.

"With looks like that you will have no bother getting the job"  I hope she did get it.

A big American at the Westbury hotel where I stop to buy Coffey. he wanted to take a taxi to O'Neills pub
No he couldn't walk. I told him that I was last in the queue and I would take him for nothing. But the number one car would have waited for over an hour for his job. The driver of the first car was relieved.
My passenger was very grateful for the free ride but forgot to put a penny in the poor mans hat.
So I suppose when I give his green umbrella to someone else they might tip me.

A Nigerian girl was going to Lucan village..She does a blog on fashion and on that day she was setting up a fashion show. But the light was behind her so the photo turned out badly.

Its Gay Pride week..
Once more it is not compulsory.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Put ART in your life




                              €115000  I have expensive taste.


This collection of glass art by CHIHULY can be seen at the Solomon fine art gallery beside the Westbury hotel.
Its on from 20 Jun until 31 July.

Free to see....Well worth a visit..

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

A strange moment !



                              A super single seater plane..Wouldn't it be great!



                       Google street view in Dublin


       Say hello to Alice my cat psychologist!

I love Magic,now you see it now you don't !
Today I brought an American couple to the airport, right into the Avis car rental area.
I took the credit card payment and as I finished I turned around to discover that I was boxed in by 2 courtesy coaches. 2 people came over to the driver of one of the coaches and asked her how to get to the city center. I said that I could take them as soon as the coach moved. The husband said that they would go to the terminal. "There will be a queue"was all I could say the driver knew that the queue for taxis would take them 20 min..
As the coach moved off an Irish lady asked me if I would drive them to the terninal.
At this point she had muscled in on the people going into the city center. Its no problem.I said
My husband will be along in a minute.
No worries I said the meter is not running.
The husband duly arrived and we set off.
"This gentleman kindly agreed to bring us to the terminal free !!"
Said the wife

Where did you get that idea from?
I said that the meter was not turned on while your husband was coming to join us,
OK says the husband we will wait for the next coach.

Now
Do you explode and demand the amount on the meter.
No you allow them to get and wish them a good day and allow "GOOD KARMA" to take hold.
7 minutes later the HailO app gave me a job to the O2  Going to Bob Dylan..

He will know by now that Bob was absolute shite !
I couldn't tell him as he had never seen him live.

But he was in my taxi before.....A millionaire computer whizzz kid.
He works between New York and Dublin, but complains that he cannot find the skilled staff he needs because he has to compete against Google and Yahoo to get good staff.
Google and Yahoo do not offer staff JOBS just 6 month or 11 month contracts OK but not real jobs.
If he took on staff and nurtured them a bit he would really FLY !

He knows people that I know and the conversation was really good.

So if the first job into town, or the second job into the terminal would have worked out I would have never have met my Whiz kid again.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Mother and baby homes.

Once more here in Ireland the media has drawn us back to the dark secret in our past.
The mother and baby homes have been propelled into the front page after foreign papers picked up a a story about 800 babys bodies which were thrown into a septic tank.
Sad storys have been told by mothers who were sent there when they became pregnant, the heartbreak when their babys were taken from them and given up for adoption. the mother had no say in the child's future.
Today a priest Fr. Brian Darcy commented about how parents would reject their daughters and their grandchildren just because they worried about what their neighbors would say.

A guy in my taxi
Once at the Westbury hotel I picked up a man who was going to tho Guinness hop store.
On the way there he told me that he was reared in an orphanage until he was 12 years old.
He told me that he was adopted by an American couple and reared in the USA.
"So I got the gift of the gab from the Irish and a great work ethic from my German parents in America.
When I was 20 I loaded all my tools into my car and started work.
My company now covers 2/3 of the United States.."

He had come back to get some closure on his past.
 He returned to the orphanage to see what he could find of his past.

"Jesus man why did you do that ?
It must have been awful for you" I said.
"Man it was like 10 men were sitting on me when I saw it again, I fell to my knees and couldn't get up again. my wife and kids had to help me up"
So he learned nothing about his past...But by God his future seems assured  As far as I can find out he runs a fitting out company finishing offices and big companies. Someone told me he finished out the Google offfices and another big job was done by him in Dublin.

At journeys end he gave me €40 and told me to wait for his wife and daughters and then take them back to the Westbury. hotel.
I brought them back and said that I hoped that he got some closure on his past.
I am sure his mother thinks of him every day. How cruel we all were in those times.

The nearest thing I could work out for him was to adopt a charity and help others hands on.
Here is a charity in South Africa. My son has just come back from there. He went there to give them a hand for a few weeks ago..The children Richard and Kate are mostly kids that no one else would take on.

So at the journeys end I stopped the meter and handed back €20 of the €40  he had given me.
His wife said "If he gave you €40 its yours."

It is a pity he couldn't meet his parents, or even if he could know more about them.
The movie Philomena has done something to let people know what went on in the past.
One other thing of note is that the older babies were SOLD to parents in America and Australia.
Go to the RTE website and look for Doc on One to listen for more.



So some light is shining into dark corners and it is becoming a better world.

An old guy called Mike told me that you should not dwell on the past where wrong was done.
If you were not the guilty party then you shouldn't carry guilt. The Germans gassed millions of Jews, the Americans dropped 2 atomic bombs in Japan killing millions of innocent people. America slaughtered thousands of innocent people in Vietnam.
Awful as these crimes were they are outside of your control.
We were driven from our lands by the white settlers.
Then when winter came we allowed hundreds of them to die from the cold in the winter.
Yes we allowed baby's to die from the cold when we could have shown them how to survive.
But they took our land and God took them.

Mike was an American Indian and a very wise man.

If someone is unkind to you or throws verbal daggers at you, that person has a problem---
Why make it your problem too?
You might not love what a person is doing, but you must love the person, because if you're going to say you love a Higher Being, you have to remember.He created that person also.If you can't forgive,then that's a challenge for for you to work on until you can pray for that person and mean it.
Then a big load is going to be lifted from you .
Until you do that, you carry a nagging aching feeling all the time.You can't even rest with it at night..You lie and toss and turn and all kinds of dreams come up--your inner consciousness is trying to get through to your brain, but it can't get through because its all clogged up with anger.It's one thing to talk about love and forgiving, but another thing to truly forgive.
Break the word forgiving down "for giving"
Giving what?   Giving love.
That is why love and forgiveness are intertwined,,,

From the book  "The wind is my Mother" by Bear Heart   a road man for the native American church.

You could learn a lot from the Injuns for sure

Monday, June 09, 2014

Hijack !!!!

Well it had to happen the way things are going on.
A taxi driver picked up 2 guys in Rathfarnham going back into the city center.
Then they hijacked the taxi and crashed into a pole killing the driver (click here).
The passenger was OK and the owner is shaken but OK
Perhaps the judges will now treat carjacking as the deadly scourge that it is.

My visitors are here from Australia so we are showing them around. We went and saw the Titanic center and the Milltown cemetery in  Belfast. In Dublin we saw all the usual things including Glasnevin cemetery.
Micheal Collins grave and all the great leaders of 1916 etc. Don't forget to check into the tourist office in Andrews st to pick up maps and get information.




So tomorrow I have to get new shock absorbers fitted to my car and a new tyre plus the tracking.
The guy in Atlas tyre in Drumcondra has me booked in at 11and says it will be 2 hours turn around.

Did you ever hear of the "Law of attraction?"
Positive thoughts transfer to positive results.



This takes it to an extreme, in other milder forms it works really well.
As a taxi driver I must remain focused and work out how to find my next job.

Robin Sharma would like to talk to you as well.


So the Euromillions did not click in but I am so lucky in many other ways.

More again soon.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

No law and no order.

Just to show you how mad things are in Ireland.
A guy was sent to prison for stealing pizzas, but that is not all.
In 2006 he was sentenced to 8 years for with 5 years suspended for killing a 20 year old man.
In the paper it said that a judge now suspended 2 years of a further 3 year sentence.
The guy a Mr Walsh has 58 previous convictions and he was also found guilty of robbing a taxi driver and hi-jacking a taxi in December 2012.

Last night at 10 PM a woman was killed while crossing the road at Goldenbridge Luas station.
The car did not stop. With scumbags like him above on the loose it is no surprise. Someone has been taken in for questioning in this instance.
Perhaps if some of these judges experienced crime at the hands of these thugs they might waken up and punish them properly.
2 serious cases was thrown out of court recently involving child pornography. One the name "Crow St." was spelled as "Crowe St." and the other was thrown out as the Garda had not examined the computer in question.
You would think in this day and age an "expert" could be brought in to do the forensics for a minor cost. 
One of the cases was at level 3 involving children being abused! 

The other day I picked up a traveler beauty queen she was around 20 years old off to visit her boyfriend in Clover hill prison.
Everyone in her family seemed to be in prison..               
Her boyfriend,her father and her brother plus 2 cousins. who were in jail for something they didn't do.
"They didn't make a getaway"
The run came to  €13 and she told me how she was charged €25 for the same trip a few weeks ago, then she was locked in the car until she paid. 
So she ranted on.

What to do?
Turn your phone on to video and discreetly film him and his ID and then his roof sign and numberplate when you get out.

Then contact the taxi regulator. 
But I am sure that they will do nothing either !

So I have a visitor coming from Australia, house cleaned from top to bottom.
But they have missed the ferry from Holyhead so they will be here in the morning.
Its 45 years at least since I put eyes on him.
I bet he has changed.

Do you remember the big fight on the Luas?