At the stroke of midnight, South Sudan becomes the world’s 192nd independent nation. In the new capital, joy is unconfined. In the mud huts that stretch for miles in every direction, residents can be heard singing and ululating well into the night.

By 7am, the BBC World Service reports a crowd of a hundred thousand already gathered at the Dr. John Garang Mausoleum. The speeches here will last late into the afternoon. But despite a complete lack of respite from the sun, the people never once cease to sing, sway and chant… Read the rest of this article here.

#3 The anatomy of a Twitter gaffe (June 11th)
I went with this headline about a millisecond before every second article you read started being called ‘The Anatomy of…’ something or other. I’d actually just seen an exhibition of illustrations from The Anatomy of Melancholy. Perhaps all the other headline writers had seen it too. We may never know.

#2 The funniest thing I’ve ever seen (January 30th)
I’m still a (relatively) young man. But if I watch this one more time, there is a real possibility I will keel over and die laughing.

#1 The Lonesome Boatman (August 20th)
Very early one summer morning, myself, a photographer and an affable fisherman named Shane Murphy went on a gallivant off the coast of Kinsale. We didn’t catch much. We didn’t see much. We didn’t reach any profound conclusions. But it’s still my most clicked story of 2011.

At the stroke of midnight, South Sudan becomes the world’s 192nd independent nation. In the new capital, joy is unconfined. In the mud huts that stretch for miles in every direction, residents can be heard singing and ululating well into the night.

By 7am, the BBC World Service is reporting a crowd of a hundred thousand already gathered at the Dr. John Garang Mausoleum. The speeches here will last late into the afternoon. But despite a complete lack of respite from the sun, the people never once cease to sing, sway and chant the names of the new state, its new president and his army.

“South Sudan… oyee!”

“Salva Kiir… oyee!”

“SPLA… oyee!” After fifty years of civil war, today feels like deliverance to the people of South Sudan. Amid all of the rejoicing though, it would be easy not to notice the small, sunburnt Irishman visibly perspiring on the edge of the podium. He is neither a soldier nor a statesman. But he has done more to bring this day to pass than any other outsider. He is the rebel priest, “Commander” Dan Eiffe.

A WEEK EARLIER, on the trail of Commander Dan, I find myself perusing the modest selection of duty free Irish whiskeys on offer at Nairobi International Airport. (Well, call it a hunch.) Ringing up the purchase, the cashier is obliged to see my boarding card. “You are travelling to Juba, sir?” I admit that I am. He seems astounded. “That is a bad place,” he says. “Lots of killing.”

Technically, the cashier incorrect. Right now, a precarious peace exists in South Sudan. But for more than half a century, this vast, sweltering wilderness was the scene of one of the world’s bloodiest, most protracted and least understood conflicts. Three million civilians died in two Sudanese Civil Wars, four million were forced to flee their homes.

In 2005, a peace agreement was signed. To the surprise of most observers, the deal has held and, in January 2011, the people of South Sudan voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence.

For the old bush fighters of the SPLA, the task ahead is daunting. Home to over a hundred (often warring) tribes, South Sudan becomes one of the world’s poorest, most dysfunctional nations. More than ninety percent of the population subsists on less than $1 a day. Three quarters have no access to basic healthcare. There is no electricity, no running water and a fifteen year old girl here is more likely to die in childbirth than she is to have completed primary education.

The tropical diseases nurse in Dublin had asked if I was going to South Sudan on holiday. No, I told her. I am not.

JUBA AIRPORT IS BEDLAM. The largest gathering of foreign dignitaries ever assembled on east African soil will soon be traipsing through these doors. Already, a sense of nervous anticipation is palpable. At the centre of the room stands a brand new baggage scanner, into which passengers jostle to feed their suitcases. On the far side, the bags are dumped unceremoniously to the floor. Since there are two (surprisingly expensive) whiskey bottles in my bag, I elect to walk around the thing entirely. No one even notices.

The gift shop is selling loose raw eggs and salt. This is, by some distance, the most foreign place I’ve been in my entire life. Standing amid a sea of young African faces pressed against the glass outside, Dan Eiffe isn’t difficult to spot. The young recruits at the door don’t recognise him. But the airport’s chief-of security does and my visa is processed with a flick of his wrist.

“Commander Dan!” “Commander Dan!” The soldiers and politicians clamour to shake his hand. Most of them, he greets by name. Occasionally though, he comes up short. “You don’t remember me?” asks one wide-eyed army officer. “Of course, of course,” Eiffe apologises. “How is your wife?” The two exchange pleasantries and part on the warmest of terms.

It is only afterward that I realise the “Commander” still has no idea who the man was. When you’re a white renegade Catholic priest turned gunrunner in the land of the Dinka and the Nuer, it seems, people remember you, even if you don’t remember them.

“APPROACHING A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN is like capturing an enemy village.” The young army officer is drunk. He leans across the table and grabs my arm. “First you make a reconnaissance.” He puts an imaginary spyglass to his eye. “Then you lie in wait.” He sinks his chin below table level. “Then you strike!” He leaps from his seat, upsetting our drinks and laughing so hard he almost falls off the stool.

The DaVinci is one of a dozen or so Western compounds constructed since the 2005 peace deal brought aid funds pouring into Juba. Right now, it’s getting late. But Dan is in reflective mood. He was born in Ratoath, Co. Meath, to a family of sixteen children. “The most important person in our village was the parish priest. So that’s what I wanted to be.” He laughs. “Some people want to be jet pilots. I always wanted to be a priest.”

After finishing school, he entered Maynooth as a seminarian. There he learned about the injustices of Apartheid and came under the influence of liberation theology. “I just couldn’t believe that a situation would exist where two human beings, a black person and a white person, could not sit together, could not eat together, could not love each other.”

Upon his ordination in 1977, he decided to go to South Africa where he worked as a Missionary of the Sacred Heart. A decade later, he decided upon a rather dramatic change of scene.

“When I landed in this here town of Juba in 1987,” he says, “All the NGOs were gone. I was the only white man in the place. There was one road out of town and it was closed. So this was basically an open air prison.” Eiffe found the town occupied by the Sudanese regular army, but under siege from native SPLA fighters operating in the surrounding countryside.

“I couldn’t eat the food here. Every morning I would get on my motorbike at 6am and rush to meet the morning relief plane from Nairobi. They would give me whatever they had leftover: croissants maybe and some jam. For five years, I didn’t eat any meat. I lived on beans. There are only so many things you can do with African beans. Believe me, I could write a book about it.”

How did this diminutive priest go from providing humanitarian aid for the victims of civil war, to taking up arms in support of one side? The 1980s were one of the bloodiest decades in the Sudanese conflict. After an eleven year lull in fighting, Arab horsemen (forerunners of the janjaweed that would pillage Darfur two decades later) had resumed attacking southern villages, killing men, raping women and taking their children as slaves.

“All the international press wanted to talk about was apartheid, apartheid, apartheid,” recalls Dan today. “Well, I’d worked in South Africa for eight years. And the worst excesses of apartheid were a tea party compared to what was happening here. This was a hundred times worse. This was genocide.”

ON THE GRASSLESS PLAYING AREA outside Juba One School, nine hundred barefoot children are being put through their paces by an unsmiling drill instructor. The children are preparing for Independence Day celebrations. We’re shooting documentary footage. There is a call from Dan. “It’s here,” he says. I flag down a passing boda-boda motorcycle taxi.

Fifteen thousand copies of The Sudan Mirror have just landed at Juba airport. The publisher celebrates with an early afternoon beer. The Kenyan journalist Aidan Hartley once wrote that “few have faced the dilemmas, seen the evil or risked death and destruction the way [Dan Eiffe] has.” Yet in person, Dan is less imposing, less adapted to his surroundings, than you might expect.

He speaks in a thick Irish accent. With a mobile phone constantly at his ear, he is constantly barking orders at people who seem not to understand what he is saying.

Did he ever consider making a life in Ireland? “No. I was fed up of the clericalism there. If you didn’t wear your collar, or were seen talking to a girl, that was looked upon unfavourably. I thought that was ridiculous.” So his decision to become a missionary priest was partly inspired by anticlericalism? He flashes me a cheese and onion smile. “You could say that,” he laughs.

The Sudan Mirror is published with the support of Trocaire and other international aid agencies. When Eiffe founded it in 2003, South Sudan was taking its first tentative steps toward nationhood. “These people had never had a newspaper in this country, let alone a TV station.”

This special independence edition includes articles celebrating the triumph of the South Sudanese liberation movement. But on page nine there is a piece recalling its nadir. Nimule, in 1994, might well have proven the SPLA’s last stand. Instead it marked a turning point in the rebels’ fortunes – one that would cement the legend of “Commander Dan”.

“WELL, I WAS NEVER NEUTRAL,” he admits. “From the beginning, I was giving the rebels blankets, fuel and food. They had nothing. Our president didn’t even have a car.” Eiffe was employed by Norwegian People’s Aid, a maverick aid agency with ties to the rebels. By 1994, government advances had pushed the SPLA all the way back to the town of Nimule, on the Ugandan border.

The rebel position was hopeless. Across the Ashwa River, 8,000 government soldiers were massed. To the south, in the jungles of northern Uganda, Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army were lying in wait. Stranded in the narrow corridor between, three thousand SPLA fighters were facing annihilation. As government forces prepared to attack, Eiffe distributed hooks, intended for use in a fishing programme, in a desperate attempt to snare government scouts crossing the river.

“We were being bombed every day. The soldiers told me ‘Dan, you have to leave.’ But I refused.” His bravery surprised even himself. “On the hurling field as a boy, when someone started a fight, I would walk away. I was a coward. But here I was ready to die.”

In desperation, Eiffe visited the mud hut of rebel leader Salva Kiir and offered to petition the Ugandan government for aid. “He told me I was wasting my time. I said, Salva, let me try.” So the Irishman undertook a perilous journey to the northern Ugandan city of Gulu. To his surprise, he was received in person by the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

“For three hours, I hammered away at Museveni. I said, if we lose Nimule, the Sudanese army will be here in Gulu in three hours. Their policy is to come into Uganda and overthrow you.” The president was sceptical, but Eiffe persisted. “I said, Your Excellency, they are talking about you every day on Khartoum radio. Don’t you have any Arab language speakers on your staff? Aren’t you even listening?”

The Ugandan leader was persuaded. “He said, what do you need? I gave him a shopping list, like my mother would have given me.” Eiffe requested RPGS, mortar rounds, howitzer shells and other weaponry.

Had he any qualms, I ask, about running guns to an army that included child soldiers among its ranks? “None. There were half a million people in that corridor. If these people were forced back into Uganda, they were dead. The LRA [Lord’s Resistance Army] would have cut their heads off.”

Neither was there any reason to expect mercy from the Sudanese army. “There was no UN here. No NATO. No television cameras. I’d been in Africa for sixteen years. I’d seen what happened in Northern Bahr el Ghazel. If these guys had crossed the river, it would have been a massacre. I had a moral obligation to defend them.”

He has no doubt, either, about the success of the mission. “I used to tell people, I will lose my faith, I will cease to believe in God, if these people continue to suffer like this. And then suddenly, God rescued them. That was a turning point in the war. That visit.”

AN ESPECIAL PRIDE IN ONE’S PHYSIQUE is required to barbecue sausages shirtless. But if young Desmond Eiffe has a reckless streak, there is no great mystery where he takes it from. He and his twin brother Daniel were born in Juba in 1989, at a time when SPLA shells were raining down upon the city. On one occasion, their father flung himself on the two boys to protect them from a mortar blast.

How did their parents meet, I ask? “The story we’ve heard,” says Desmond, “is that our Dad was driving around Juba on his bike when he saw our mother Nouna walking to the market. So he offered her a lift.” (“She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” their father recalls. “I mean, to me she made Tyra Banks look ugly.”) The two began seeing each other regularly. “My Dad only knew English and my mother only knew classical Arabic. So my Dad had to bring an Ethiopian friend along on every single date.”

Unexpectedly, Nouna fell pregnant. “There were no condoms in Juba,” Dan admits. “To be honest, I barely knew what condoms were. So I went to my religious superior and his reaction was very humane. He said that in difficult circumstances, it was not surprising that I would look for companionship.” Dan left the church and he and Nouna were married. Thought he still has dreams about saying mass, he has never regretted his decision.

“I’d managed to escape marriage a few times previously. Now here, in the very worst place in Africa, God gave me a lovely wife and two beautiful sons.” Once Dan’s links with the SPLA became known, Nouna and the boys were forced to flee the Juba to Nairobi. “So many Sudanese refugees would come to our house that Dad built a waiting area outside,” Desmond recalls. “While he was off fighting in the war, our Mum was always helping people.”

The war remained a dim presence in the children’s lives. “I would walk into the sitting room and my Dad would be playing videos,” recalls Daniel. “There would be massacres. There would be piles of bodies. He would say ‘Go to your room!’ He would act strong and tell us not to worry. But you could see the worry in my mother’s face every time he left.”

MANY OF HIS FOMER COMRADES enjoy lavish lifestyles today. But Dan lives in the heart of one of Juba’s largest slums. There are no streets here, let alone street names – just a succession of landmarks and directions to be memorised and regurgitated. Around the corner, a traditional doctor’s clinic offers patients relief from asthma, syphilis, bad luck and “bewitched people”.

Corrupt on a mind boggling scale, with power concentrated in the hands of one tribe (the Dinka), and one city (Juba), independent South Sudan already seems intent on replicating the very mistakes that made Sudan a failed state in the first place. But traumatised by the faction fighting that precipitated the Bor massacre of 1991, Dan’s newspaper is reluctant to criticise the new government.

His more pugilistic rival, Nhial Bol at The Citizen, is far dogged in highlighting official corruption. His reward has been official persecution, but also higher sales. Today Dan Eiffe is broke. His compound has a generator, but no fuel. A pump, but no water. He does not own a car. In a city swarming with Western profiteers, a less scrupulous person in Dan’s position might put a higher premium on their friendship than a few drinks and the occasional lift home from the pub. But Dan is a true believer, in the best and worst senses.

His sons Desmond and Daniel are both studying business in Ireland. Dan Sr. jokes that one day his boys will return to home Juba and make him rich. Desmond has even spoken about enlisting in the SPLA. But that seems a remote prospect, for now at least. In conversation, both boys express a desire to return to Juba some day but also scepticism at the prospects for doing business in such a corrupt environment.

On my final day in Juba, I call around to bid them farewell. The twins are joined by their cousin and former school friend Menut Kiir. I’m surprised to find that the son of President Salva Kiir, the quintessential Dinka warrior, dresses like a London hipster. When I tell them I’m returning to Kenya, the boys make no attempt to hide their envy. What’s the first thing they’d do in Nairobi, I ask? See their friends, they reply. Have a cup of coffee. Watch South Park. Have a shower.

The old bush warriors of South Sudan have won their freedom. But the challenge of building a nation in which their own children would choose to live has only just begun.

Photographs by Ross McDonnell

Walk on Walsh’s hill
Look up at the stars
The town is full of lights and there are people in the bars

The nights are made of nothing
And the mornings are so cold
The television talks to you like you were four years oldTake your life on Friday night
And dream when you’re alone
The people will still curse and kiss when you’re here on your own

The people will still curse and kiss
And dance and drink and screw
While you’re wandering the perimeter and you haven’t got a clue.

[N.B. Chanced upon this juvenilia when I was home for my father's anniversary mass earlier this month. It was folded, appropriately enough, inside a copy of Johnny Rogan's Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance. I guess I must have written it when I was thirteen or fourteen years old.]

But this was no summer holiday. As a journalist, I visited the Gaza Strip during the Israeli blockade in the summer of 2008. But Gaza was a holiday camp compared to this place. South Sudan is one of the poorest, hottest, most remote and dangerous places on earth. A place where there are guns on every street corner. A place where a 15 year old girl is more likely to die in childbirth than she is to have finished primary school. Still, it isn’t a bad spot all the same.

Stepping off the plane in Juba was quite a culture shock. Everyone was so tall. The Dinka and Nuer tribes are the tallest on earth. And their skin was so dark. This was something a Nigerian taxi driver back in Dublin had mentioned to me. But I didn’t appreciate what he meant until I actually met a few South Sudanese in the flesh.

But by far my most vivid first impression of South Sudan was the smell. It turned out I had accidentally set my bag down outside a malfunctioning toilet. But for a while I figured I’d stumbled upon a terrible secret generations of missionaries were too polite ever to mention: That is, that all of Sub-Saharan Africa smells like wee. Well it doesn’t, thanks be to God.

There was a huge baggage scanner in the Arrivals hall, into which passengers were queuing to feed their suitcases. On the far side, these same bags were being dumped to the floor. Since I was under strict instructions (from a homesick Irishman with a thirst) to bring two bottles of Powers Irish whiskey along in my bag, I decided to walk around the whole thing entirely. No one noticed.

The gift shop was selling loose raw eggs and salt. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most foreign place I’d been to in my entire life.

Our mission in South Sudan was to track down a renegade Irish priest, turned gunrunner, called Dan Eiffe. I’d read a short piece about him in London’s Spectator magazine and was interested in doing a story for the Irish Times. He’d come to Africa in the late 1970s as a Missionary of the Sacred Heart. At first he’d simply distributed aid to the victims of the Sudanese civil war. But over time, he came to identify with the rebels aims and began running guns to them from Uganda.

He later married a local woman, the sister-in-law of the rebel leader Salva Kiir (now president of South Sudan), and had two children with her. I was, I suppose, secretly hoping to meet some Colonel Kurtz-type, who had gone out into the jungle, gone mad and turned native. But the person I met was nothing like that. Dan is a sincere, honourable man whose actions, however drastic, may well have helped to avert genocide in the region.

And of course, like any two Irish men, anywhere in the world, once we sat down and sank a couple of glasses together, it turned out we had acquaintances in common. Two of Dan’s sisters had gone to school in Tubbercurry with my aunt Mary Butler from Kilkelly. The three ladies later shared a flat together in Dublin. It is indeed a small world.

Although South Sudan is officially at peace, continuing violence in the countryside made travel overland too dangerous to attempt. (Besides, in a country the size of France, there are less than 50km of paved roads.) So we took to hitching lifts on rickety old aircraft operated by Christian missionaries. These flights were gas altogether. Before we took off, the pilot would come on the intercom saying all the usual stuff. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard… Now if you’ll just join me in a quick Hail Mary.”

It wasn’t the Hail Marys I minded, so much as the suspicion that maybe the Hail Mary was in lieu of an actual safety check by qualified engineers. So were we really flying on two wings and a prayer? Well, the missionaries never asked us for airfare. So it seemed a bit rude to ask.

One of the highlights of the trip was the Independence Day football friendly between South Sudan and Kenya. There are no soccer clubs in South Sudan, so the home team was chosen from trials. The Kenyans were highly trained professional athletes. The South Sudanese team, meanwhile, looked like eleven guys who’d just walked out of MacSuirtans. (No disrespect to Macs, you get what I mean!)

On the face of it then, it should have been a total mismatch. But with enormous home support behind them, South Sudan were a goal up within five minutes. On the ten minute mark they went two ahead. If a third goal had gone in, I swear, the stand might have collapsed, so ecstatic were the home crowd. But it couldn’t last. After twenty minutes, the home side were knackered. In the end, Kenya ran out easy 6-2 winners.

There were other highlights too: The young men of the SPLA marching band whose enormous red uniforms looked like they were designed to be grown into. The delirious happiness of the ordinary people at midnight, when their homeland officially became the world’s 192nd independent nation. (It reminded me a lot of Packie Bonner’s famous penalty save in Italia ‘90, when my mother packed her four small children into the back of the car and drove down the town beeping the car horn!)

There are, of course, some other not so happy memories. There were things I saw in South Sudan that I wish I didn’t see. Things that really should not exist in the world in the year 2011: extreme poverty, malnutrition and (as the poet wrote) “guns and sharp swords in the hands of small children.” We are going through some tough times at the moment here in Ireland, no doubt about that. But as our thoughts turn towards Christmas, consider this: as long as we have security, a clean water supply and the occasional rasher, have we really all that much to complain about?

[This article appears in the current issue of my local parish magazine, Annagh, hence some of the rather awkwardly shoehorned-in local references. A longer account of my visit to South Sudan will appear in the Irish Times this coming Saturday, December 17th.]

The mushrooms go straight into the bin. I’m sorry but that’s non-negotiable. Mushrooms are fungus. As a child, I once dreamt they were growing out of my scalp. And an ex-girlfriend of mine once cheated on me with a guy who ran a mushroom house. (In restaurants, I usually just say I’m allergic.)

The remaining mix gets chopped, sliced, chucked in a pot and served up as moderately tasty gloop with tagliatelle and a salad. A cinch. Roll on Tuesday.

TUESDAY
Tonight’s recipe – salmon, green beans, lemon garlic butter and baby potatoes – proves slightly trickier. The Ireland v Estonia game is starting at 7.45pm and some of the things being demanded of me here seem more like party tricks than cooking instructions. (Know how to grate lemon rind onto a teaspoon anyone?)

The green beans take ages to top and tail. There are about a hundred of them and they all keep wobbling about on the chopping board. Do decent, hard-working people really need this kind of hassle when they come home at night? I doubt it. I don’t even work that hard and I can hardly be bothered.

Despite being in the oven for the requisite twenty five minutes, the salmon turns out not to be fully cooked. My dinner companion insists on hers putting back in.
- You can eat salmon raw, I protest.
- No you can’t.
- Smoked salmon is raw.
- Smoked salmon is smoked!

The match begins in five minutes. I eat my partially cooked salmon and, at the time of writing, appear still to be alive.

WEDNESDAY
If there’s a flaw in the Dineasy dinner plan it’s that the five dinners provided have a shelf life of five days. Therefore, one missed dinner can throw the entire operation in a spin. Tonight a friend has invited me to a gig. It begins in half an hour. So either I cook this now or I have pork teriyaki stir fry for lunch tomorrow. This will need to be quick.

Some of the ingredients are unfamiliar to me. Ginger looks like a cross between a potato and a clove of garlic. I have no idea how much to use, so I email Marie Claire. She advises me to throw in the lot. This may have be a calculated attempt to sabotage my dinner, because the result is almost inedible. So far, the half cooked salmon is still way out in the lead.

THURSDAY
By and large, Ciara’s recipes have been easy to follow. But there has been the occasional blip. On Tuesday, a missing comma left me wondering what a “heat drain” was and how I was supposed to remove the carrots from it. In preparing today’s stuffed chicken wrapped in smoked bacon, meanwhile, I’m asked to place a chicken fillet on a casserole dish and “slice down the middle making sure not to cut all the way through.”

I make a short incision across the face of the chicken breast. But the pocket created proves wholly inadequate to accommodate the stuffing of garlic, spring onions, sundried tomatoes and mozzarella. I’m in my sister’s house and she rather testily suggests that the fillet should instead have been carved open like a book from side to side.
- If that’s what they meant, why didn’t they say that?
- Some basic level of cop-on was probably assumed…

While she steps in to salvage the situation, I’m banished to the next room to play with my niece. Served with a generous helping of baby potatoes and a less generous helping of carrots, this ends up being my second favourite meal of the week.

FRIDAY
Friday is supposed to be reheated spaghetti bolognaise night. But it’s the weekend and I’m going out. Now I’m no Paul the Octopus or anything, but I suspect I may be seeing the inside of a kebab house before long.

On the far side of the room, a third boyband clone is filming the pair on a digital camcorder.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what this hotel worker is thinking. But I’d be very surprised if the words “gay porn” aren’t high up there in the mix. Read the rest of this article here.

“No two groups encapsulate the essence of Celtic Tiger Ireland so much as yuppie arseholes and homeless alcohol and drug addicts”, commented one experienced industry analyst. “Both are edgy, controversial and totally now. Advertisers lap that shit up. And yet, to date, no brand has succeeded in spanning these two disparate markets. Mongrel already has the vacuous, urban sophisticate types in its pocket. If they could bring the winos on board the crossover potential would be huge. We’re talking big time synergy and, yes, advertisers really lap that shit up.”

WHY THE PUBLIC ARE MAKING MONGREL THEIR NO. 1

Bands they’ve never heard of, revealing interviews with (37%)

Sordid sexual fantasies, arty photoshoots provide personnel and scenarios for (29%)

Baffling in-jokes, can’t get enough of (13%)

Working class people, patronising interviews with “a real eye-opener” (12%)

Invasion of Iraq, magazine’s unflinching editorial support for (9%)

Hector, single oddball reader living in unending hope that we’ll do another feature on (0.001%)

MONGREL CEO: “I’M LOVING THESE NUMBERS”
Good morning sport, good to see ya. How’s the family? Great! Listen, I was just looking through some of these reports and, ah… I gotta tell you, I’m loving these numbers. I mean, I’m really lovin’ ‘em. There’ve been other numbers, sure. But it’s almost… Well, this is gonna sound crazy, but it’s almost as if these ones unnerstand me and unnerstand a bit of what I’ve been going through lately… What’s that, my pretties? You crazy little handfuls a’ nuthin’! You wild, beautiful angels! You think I’m gonna let them hurt you? You think I’m gonna let them destroy you? Well, I am NOT gonna let them hurt you! And I am NOT gonna let them destroy you the way they destroyed me. Turnin’ my fuckin’ wife against me. Takin’ my kids away. That’s not gonna happen this time. No, siree!

You unnerstand that, don’t you? Of course you do. Why, I’ll tell ya a little secret. We’re sittin’ right here on near a hunnerd thousand rounds a ammunition, and enough plastic explosives take out an entire city block. Right here in this very office! So take it slow n’ easy my pretties, cos we’re goin’ give ‘em a run for their money. Just you wait n’ see…

Mongrel CEO Rick Superburger
(in conversation with Eoin Butler)

[Published: Mongrel Magazine, April 2005]