Fugger's Award Nomination!

Staring: note the technique.


Last night it came to Fugger’s attention that this blog (Your Blog, The People’s Blog) has been nominated for the Best Blog of All Time Award (sponsored by Moulinex: Moulinex make things simple and that includes the price). Fugger reckons whoever nominated the blog is known to Fugger as contact details had to be provided (although the Fugger email address has done the rounds, as my heaving Spam box will attest). Anyway, whoever it was from the handful of regular Fug-Heads that come here, I salute your taste, your courage, your strength and your indefatigability.

The last time Fugger was nominated for anything it was for the Most Unnerving Person To Have Staring At You Through A Restaurant Window Award (sponsored by A1 Office Stationary, Rialto). As the six or so regular visitors to this blog know, I am a dab hand at restaurant based acts of psychological terrorism. The ‘staring through the window’ tactic is a particular favourite of mine and one that finds its reward in the discomfort it causes diners. It’s a delight to behold the same old responses: the prolonged initial stage of affected ignorance at your presence, the eventual acknowledgement that there is someone at the window, the dithering and reluctant summoning of staff. You should see them, squirming over their little side orders of boiled carrots and glasses of sub-standard plonk. ‘Look at yiz,’ I mutter as I gape, ‘look at yiz with your little forks and knives and napkins. So typically bourgeois. As predictable as clockwork toys. Pitiful humanoids.’ How gratifying their unease. Just think, by simply pausing outside an eatery and pressing your face against the glass, you can ruin someone’s whole evening. Sometimes you can ruin several evenings at once, depending on the lay out of the restaurant and how many people you can catch in your gaze. The heady euphoria this affords the starer is akin to the feeling someone like the Silver Surfer must get as he death defyingly skirts the searing outer rim of a blazing supernova. Nothing can stop you. The cosmos is your plaything. You’ll ruin as many dinners as you like.

Sadly, I didn’t get the Most Unnerving Person To Have Staring At You Through A Restaurant Window Award, it went to some crowd called The Eclectic Micks (whoever they are, probably nominated themselves, where are they now? etc.) but I did get honourable mention and got to go up on stage and collect a little figurine of a man staring though a window. I didn’t say much by way of a speech but I did hold my hands up, cupping the sides of my face as if to shield my eyes from extraneous light, and deliver a cheeky wee pretend stare to the audience, who laughed and applauded. It was a good night and it’s nice to have your efforts appreciated.

However, the award brought with it a measure of celebrity that did not sit well with my staring endeavours. Some of my regular haunts (places that had yet to employ a member of staff physically intimidating enough to see me off) began to advertise my possible arrival. ‘Get watched as you dine by Mr. Fugger, Dublin’s second greatest dinner ruiner!’ their signs read. The pleasure derived from discommoding the middleclass shit heads inside these premises was extinguished by the fact that now, once spotted by a diner, I would be pointed out to the other diners who would all stare back and play act being put off their meals. The restaurants I frequented became hangouts for students, ‘knowing’ fans of irony, Neo-Situationists, researchers on RTE2 programmes, all those types of people. I was even invited to Trinity College Dublin to stare at History Soc. as they ate. Montrose called also, a last minute request to appear on the Podge and Rodge Show when The Eclectic Micks couldn’t make it (whoever they are).

My first reaction to all this attention was to up my game, deliver ever more disconcerting stares, to better the likes of The Eclectic Micks (whoever they are) but it was no use. It wasn’t meant to be a competition, just a simple hobby, a modest act of protest against the contrived pseudo-pleasures of semidetached dwelling somnambulists. But now it was ruined. Now it was all ‘look here he is!’, ‘he’s like toootally crazy’, ‘OMG, the goy is loik sooo looking down Sorcha’s top’, and ‘he’s loik almost loik as good as the Micks loik’. It was ruined. All ruined. Ruined! I tried emigrating and gave it a go abroad but, after receiving a sound kicking from an outraged pair of Spaniards, I returned home. I lay in bed for a spell, dejected and at a loss for something to do, when I had an idea. I know, I thought, I’ll do one of them blogs. Tell it like it is. Say what we’re all thinking. Do some straight talking. That’s what the Internet needs!

And so, here we are today, . . .Jaysus.