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There must be few things that make a person feel grubbier than to be caught watching porn. This week, it was reported that Channel 6 had considered, then dropped, the idea of broadcasting “erotica” late on Friday nights. Channel 6 revealed that it would be targeted at a “primarily male audience”. Which is a statement only slightly less obvious than the outcome of a plumber calling to fix the shower in a women’s prison.
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RTÉ has set up an archive site, featuring highlights from elections past. It’s a busy spot, given that the 1980s alone saw an election every six weeks.
A highlight: in 1982, even the most sophisticated pair of glasses took up the size of a whole room
Excellent work is being done by two sites that are keeping an eye on the election as being fought through YouTube. If you haven’t already done so, it’s worth checking out Vote Tube and Irish Election TV.
Bonus: A random punter at a train station deconstructs the ’superimposed’ Bertie poster
Given the fuss that surrounded her arrival, Claire Byrne has yet to light up the mornings on Newstalk’s Breakfast Show. During the contractual row that delayed her start at the station, Ger Gilroy presented the whow with another female anchor, whose name could never be mentioned. The thing is, you’d be genuinely hard pressed to tell the difference between Byrne and the women-whose-name-could-never-be-mentioned. Apart from, I’m guessing, their weekly pay packet.
All the ingredients should be there, because she’s undoubtedly an intelligent broadcaster, but what works well on TV doesn’t always sound so great on radio. More than anything, though, she must be really miffed that she left TV3 just before Exposé was announced.
By the way: is there anyone who looks less likely to wear a suit to work than Ger Gilroy? 
On the northern coast of Australia, in a remote land near the Timor Sea, live the last two native speakers of the language of the Mati Ke tribe. Patrick and Agatha are brother and sister, and their language is structured in a way quite different from ours. Objects are arranged into one of 10 noun classes. Weapons, for instance, are in the same class as lightning. Space and time go together. Apparently it’s really something to hear. But it is rarely heard, because Patrick and Agatha do not speak to each other. Haven’t done for 50 years.
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Some issues raised by Cllr Lucinda Creighton’s thefirststepsforward.ie:
1. If you’re going to have a game on your site, try to insist on a good one.
2. And make sure it doesn’t involve hitting a bed-bound patient with a mallet.
3. Why does any policy involving the elderly require a stock picture taken from an American source, featuring people who don’t look like your granny and granddad?
4. When a politician is asked why they’re in politics, wouldn’t it be refreshing if they replied by shouting: “Power! Power!! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
5. If you’re going to throw in something about the environment isn’t it better not to have lots of pictures of yourself having fun in the shadow of a giant, fossil fuel burning power plant
6. Will the election be won by the party with the best steps-related website?
Green party site: www.50steps.com
Fianna Fail site: www.thenextsteps.ie
Fine Gael site: www.thefirststepsforward.ie
Optimistically titled, but still regularly updated, Steps fansite: www.generationsteps.co.uk
Graham Linehan says he’d have been proud to write this.
Link: Homeless James Bond
A ticket from the Dublin v Tipperary match of Bloody Sunday 1920 sold for €30,000 last night. Only a month ago, one (apparently in better condition) sold for €7,500.
I was at last night’s auction, in a room so packed that it flowed out into the corridor. These events take on a momentum, generated by publicity, volume and the frenzy that can take hold in a salesroom, and almost everything went for in excess of its estimate. It was fascinating to watch, with real tension at times if two bidders drove each other higher and gasps from the crowd at certain prices reached.
With the 1916 centenary nine years away, the interest, and market, for items relating to the time will only increase. Some see a certain vulgarity in it, and hold a distaste for those willing to “sell our history”, but given that the State bought a lot of items last night (including this Blueshirt uniform) it could be argued that these auctions flush out material that mightn’t otherwise emerge.
Some Black Books clips, because I stumbled across a couple of episodes recently and feel the need to share the misanthropic mirth.
Bernard’s novel gets rejected
Bernard taunts some skinheads
Bernard and Manny try to recreate a vintage of bottle of wine - in half an hour
She’d been captured by the enemy. Stripped. Separated from her comrades. Humiliated. Told to “confess” on TV. Then she was promised release, but only if she’d wear Mrs Borat’s hand-me-downs and wave like she’d just won Winning Streak.
Along with the 15 British sailors, Faye Turney probably thought that if she ever get out of Iran alive, nothing would ever seem so bad again. Every day would be a blessing.
They were all wrong. Because when it comes to humiliation, the British press make the Iranians look like amateurs.
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Here’s a round-up of reviews for the Sopranos (via Slate), which returned for its final episodes on HBO this week. The first half of this series ended quietly, despite having given us the great Vito/Johnny Cakes love story. So fingers crossed it all ends strongly.
Any thoughts on how it’s going to end? I’m guessing that the final scene will have Tony at the door in his dressing gown, having gone under the Witness Protection Programme. He picks up his milk and paper and says something like: “I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”
Hold on. Has that been done already?
Link: Reviews (half way down the page)
Here’s the recent Vanity Fair interview
And some bonus material
Seeing as I’m pointing you towards Slate, it has also been running a podcast on this series of 24, neatly called “Spoiling 24″. It runs a couple of episodes ahead, but if you’re really into your weekly fix of Jack Bauer’s outlandish escapades, you might enjoy going through the archive of previous episodes.
(I was going to say “increasingly outlandish” escapades, but that point was reached about 12 minutes into the first series. It’s been a steady plateau of outlandishness since then.)
The show has allowed itself to get away with so much because it has created a parallel America, which kind of resembles our world’s, except that it has more nuclear explosions, a goateed president and some kind of law which dictates that Jack Bauer can’t go two hours without being captured and escaping at the moment he’s about to get a bullet in the head.
Link: Spoiling 24
And here’s the Jack Bauer Drinking Game. Damn it!
Justin’s blog is also worth visiting for an excellent run-down of Patricia McKenna’s recent interview on The Last Word, in which she said that “many parents in this country have chosen not to vaccinate their children in relation to the MMR because of the links to autism”.
Andrew Wakefield’s research has been shown to have been utterly false. Have a look at the Bad Science link on my blogroll for one of the many scientific clarifications on this. The Daily Mail’s effort at keeping the conspiracy alive in Britain have been shameful, chipping away at the medical profession’s attempts at trying to get back to the point at which parents can be confident in the science rather than the conspiracy.
McKenna’s scaremongering was aggressively rebuked by Matt Cooper. But because her views niggle at a parent’s greatest fears, the worry is that some listeners will have taken them at face value.
Link: Taint.org
Justin writes:
regarding the assertion that they’re ‘not fearful of a quasi-Orwellian society - they actually feed off it’ — this article is good:
http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/It argues that the Bebo/Myspace/Livejournal phenomenon is symptomatic of a new way to deal with privacy, in a world where privacy no longer really exists with pervasive surveillance, security cameras and what-not, especially for the
younger generation who have to live under suspicion and persistent
monitoring by the older generation.Well worth a read…
Discussion on Tuesday’s Tubridy Show about political bias in the print media. Starts about seven minutes in.
Link: Tubridy Show archive
Fox News presenter Bill O’Reilly speaks at Trinity tomorrow night. Last week he and Geraldo Rivera had a yelling match on The O’Reilly Factor. Background: two teenage girls died in a road crash, allegedly caused by a drunk driver called Alfredo Ramos, who also happens to be an undocumented immigrant. O’Reilly has come down hard on this. Geraldo reckons he’s got it wrong (”What if his name was Bubba?”). A screaming match ensues.
Does it have the whiff of a contrived WWE smackdown? You decide. We’re fair and balanced here.
Link: O’Reilly v Geraldo
On YouTube during the week, you could watch a video of some teenage lads larking about in an Irish town. Wearing their school uniforms, they posture and play-fight. At one point, one of the boys throws an empty bottle on the ground and keeps walking. To most people over 30, such littering is guaranteed to bubble up the blood pressure. But to a teenage boy, it is no big deal. He owns the planet. It’s his to do what he wants with.
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