Whatever emerges from Burma’s “saffron revolution”, it will be forever viewed through the images of monks, marching in their thousands, ringed by a growing mass of civilians.

That we have much of this footage, though, is thanks to those disparate few who have been carrying out a quieter revolution. By posting images and videos online, and reporting through blogs, texts and chatrooms, they have both revealed and possibly influenced the story in a major way. (more…)

I will be at the match this weekend. I might as well be miserable in Paris as at home.

Anyway, there is one big reason why the Irish team needs to win this match. It’s not for the years of effort, planning, hope that has gone into this World Cup. Not for the players or the coach. Not for pride or advertising contracts or the chance to etch themselves into legend.

It’s because, if we get knocked out, there will be a lot of Irish fans whose big trip to Cardiff next weekend will become a total fool’s errand. Who bought tickets for the quarter final months ago; who spent hundreds on a flight via Bristol; who have a B&B booked in some backwater mining village miles from Cardiff because all the hotels are already booked out by the Irish fans who had booked this trip two years ago.

Do it for them.

A couple of days ago I mentioned Megabus, which led to me getting tagged by a blogging Megabus driver, which in turn led me to finding the Bloodbus blog which promises:

I am a bus driver in Glasgow, Scotland. When my passengers misbehave, I blog about it!

It turns out that there’s a small but significant subculture of bus driver bloggers, and Bloodbus - blogging about the late night routes - is at the Travis Bickle end of things. (more…)

Some of the latest from Burma - where several more have been killed, including a Japanese photojournalist - can be found in the following places:

The Guardian’s news blog is updating regularly, using a translator to trawl the online reports.

There is new YouTube footage of a protest apparently being broken up by gunfire.

Burmese exile’s news site Mizzima.

Hit Taing site has dramatic pictures from the crackdown.

Dawn Xanga blogs from an office in Rangoon.

Regular updates - much of it Burmese, but including several pictures - from another blog, Ho Htike.

From July next year, the Netherlands will bring in a smoking ban that may or may not affect its coffee shops, depending on how things pan out. In preparation for the worst-case scenario, those hippies at the Guardian bring us the 10 best Amsterdam coffee shops. My tip: eat at the Supperclub while you’re there. You will be hungry.

UPDATE: Catherine points out that there’s only “one actual coffee shop on the list”, which makes me guilty of passing on dodgy gear.

From my fourth floor desk, I have a wonderful view of the architectural brute that is Hawkins House, and its ugly sister Apollo House. The former, in particular, with its green hunchback, is a building that truly saps the soul. In my days as a bicycle courier, I used to have the pleasure of going into it daily - the pleasure coming from being able to leave it straight away.

When it rains, these two building amplify misery in an almost preternatural way - as if their architects had some sort of gripe against the city and, perhaps, humanity. Occasionally, I can see window cleaners making their way across their gloomy windows. It appears the very definition of Sysiphean.

Anyway, they’re coming down, to be replaced by a high density office complex. If they need some help with the demolition, I’ll buy a new sledgehammer especially.

They are not the only ugly buildings in Dublin, or the country, of course. Off hand, you could argue that they form a quadrangle of ugliness alongside Liberty Hall (toweringly horrible) and Busáras (architecturally seminal, visually offensive). The capital also has the Penney’s building and the Ilac Centre; while the new building by City Hall on Dame Street is breathtakingly misplaced, and a worthy new addition to the hall of horrors.

Elsewhere, Cork County Hall may be a protected building, but not because the city loves it. Queen’s University Students’ Union has been touted as Belfast’s ugliest, but Dublin has UCD, which remains a riot of ugliness (ironic, really, because it was designed to be riot-proof).

Any other suggestions? We might get a gallery of the grotesque out of it.

The Guardian’s news blog is worth keeping an eye on, as it’s reporting the developing situation in Burma, including links to some of the bloggers reporting from within the country. Alongside the blunt violence, it appears that the authorities are cracking down on internet speeds, leading to the closure of Rangoon’s internet cafes, as a way of stemming the spread of information and dissent.

Today’s Liveline proved that there are some people left in Ireland who don’t realise that if you push the wrong buttons, Twink will explode.

UPDATE: Link had changed. It’s now been fixed.

Some links:

73man highlights one of RTÉ’s more ridiculous online polls.

66 Simpsons scenes alongside the movies that influenced them. (via BoingBoing)

TV3 has been given some stick for its coverage of the rugby. New Zealand’s TV3 has been getting abuse too. Maybe they could form a support group.

A supreme-court judge in the Phillipines announced that he chats with three elves only he can see. He’s become a TV favourite because of it. The Supreme Court’s medical clinic says he’s suffering from a form of psychosis. The judge says he’s not. You decide.

Fresh from turning back Venezuala’s clocks by half an hour, Hugo Chavez’s TV show lasted a record eight hours this weekened.

The Ryanair of bus tours: Megabus

New York Times gives Americans the impression that all one-off housing in Ireland can be an architectural masterpiece.

Best bit about Friday’s match? The fan getting stuck in the bog.

TV3 will be pretty delighted with itself, given that Friday night’s match gave it the most watched quarter-hour in its brief-ish history. An average of 622,000 viewers tuned in, with 863,000 watching between 8.30-8.45pm, roughly around the time when we looked like we might still have a chance.

TV3 says:

The figures show that more viewers than ever are choosing to watch Rugby World Cup matches on TV3. The fact that they are choosing to watch TV3 is a testament to the excellent commentary and analysis team that has been assembled for this Cup.

“More than ever”? It’s its first World Cup, and this was the biggest match so far.

There’s also the small point that more people watched the end of the first half than stayed to listen to the commentary. Still, these are big figures for TV3, which still relies very heavily on imported soaps, British documentaries and programmes that you can watch on ITV at exactly the same time.

Although, it has come at a cost to the nation, given that the fabled “curse of TV3″ has struck with a vengeance.

Mick Fealty - of Slugger O’Toole - has a new blog, Brassneck, at the Daily Telegraph’s website. Focussed largely on British politics (but also US and European), it will, he says in his first post:

draw in news and analysis from across the political and intellectual spectrums. If it proves successful we hope to build a team of (hopefully) writers to work out and then try to explain the complex goings on.

Given that it’s not so long ago the Sunday Independent’s front page screamed “APOCALYPSE SOON”, it was a shock to see this week’s blurb: “IF THERE IS A SLUMP… THEN WHO TALKED US DOWN?”

Inside, there were several pages of analysis, among which were such proclamations as: “It’s a case of boom not bust, say the real experts” and “The economy is just fine”. There was also some light-hearted chastising of TV programmes in which “men drive around in cars talking down the economy”, a piece blaming RTÉ’s gloominess for falling house sales and an interview with Brian Cowen in which he said we shouldn’t listen to the doomsayers.

What could possibly have brought about this sudden change in attitude for a paper that should usually come with a free “the end is nigh” sandwich board? There was a clue on the front of the Business section:

O’REILLY DISMISSES GLOOM AND DOOM AS ADVERTISING ON THE UP

Gavin O’Reilly, Independent News & Media’s Chief Operating Officer, gave an upbeat presentation detailing the performance of the global media group at the half-year stage last Tuesday.

O’Reilly dismissed Ireland’s doom and gloom merchants…

From the always excellent Slate, a video history of canned laughter.

Winter arrived this week. The clouds drew in, it grew darker, a chill wind came blowing in and the newspapers headlines brought ominous rumbles. Once more into forecasts of a gloomy season of cloud, rain and occasional outbreaks of economic catastrophe. It happens every now and again, these moments when the nation takes a collective look at itself and realises that it needs a week on the beach, or a decent sporting result. The rugby did not deliver that last night, so reinforced the idea that we should just stay in bed lest the week get any worse. (more…)

Last night’s nine o’clock news on RTÉ included a live link to Charlie Bird, who was reporting on the Mahon Tribunal while standing outside the gates of Dublin Castle. And not for the first time it’s worth asking: why?

Why did Charlie need to be outside a closed building, hours after the tribunal had concluded its business and everybody else had gone home?

Maybe he was hoping that, several hours after the event, Bertie would suddenly rush back, shouting: “Hold on, I remember everything now!”

Maybe Charlie had had his dinner in Eddie Rockets across the road.

Maybe he was fresh from watching the hilarious comedy stylings of Jimmy Carr at the Olympia.

Or maybe it’s because RTÉ guesses it’s worth spending your licence fee money to put Charlie Bird and a cameraman out there, because the viewer feels happy that he is on the spot. That’s showbusiness.

After about five minutes of Tuesday night’s documentary The Naked Politician Election, I grew restless enough to flick through the channels and stumbled across a repeat of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe just in time to catch an item in which he explained what each of the people in the programme’s credits actually do in their jobs. Except it was accompanied by a musical montage of him screaming abuse at them, torturing them, punching them, etc. It takes a very particular type to make that so funny.

A new series of Screenwipe starts on BBC4 this Tuesday night at 10pm, for those who have it tuned in.

Brooker’s Guardian columns are always excellent, and this week’s was a particularly sharp mix of invective and insight in which he talked about how the previous week’s column had been spiked by the editor, the nature of offence and why he loves offending the easily offended. He is familiar with The Offended, as this apology from 2004 shows

And here’s an archive of his TV-related Screenburn column.

Brooker, by the way, was behind the delightfully vicious site TVGoHome and the not so good spin-off comedy Nathan Barley.

The debate over what has gone wrong with Irish rugby has today focussed on giving Ireland’s Call a good kicking. In this paper, Trevor Brennan went in fists flying:

Ireland’s Call is weak and wouldn’t even fire up the Barnhall under-12s

Frank McNally’s Irishman’s Diary is on the topic too:

Ireland’s Call was and remains an honest attempt to solve a real problem: the fact that Amhrán na bhFiann does not represent the whole island. It was also written - or so I suspect - to suit the limited vocal register of the typical rugby supporter. And as a song to unify Ireland’s two communities, it has succeeded well, if only because music-loving Catholics and Protestants seem to hate it equally.

(more…)

The new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is out, and it contains 2,500 new, officially-recognised words and phrases.

The following can now be used on Countdown:
- Manbags (”Man’s handbag or shoulderbag”)
- Yummy Mummies
- Wags
- Jaffa Cake (”a sponge biscuit with an orange-flavoured jelly filling and chocolate topping”)
- Get your ya-yas out (”To enjoy yourself uninhibitedly”)
- Heaviosity (”Quality of being serious, intense, or ‘heavy’, esp. in popular music”)

Most interestingly, the OED’s website also confirms the following new words:

(Under tonsil, n.)
tonsil hockey
to play tonsil hockey

(Under star, n)
starfucker

Most journalists know what is “really” going on in the Irish rugby camp. Here are the main problems:

1) Several members of the squad attempted to get out of playing by claiming they had to fly home to attend the funeral of Stephen Ireland’s dead grandmother.

2) Eddie O’Sullivan has lost the players since bringing in a pre-World Cup motivational speaker: RTÉ’s George Lee.

3) After the Georgia match, Malcolm O’Kelly and Donncha O’Callaghan traded blows due to O’Kelly’s frustration over losing his place. Players watched in shock as O’Kelly pummelled O’Callaghan while shouting: “I should have had that Triton showers contract!”

4) Players who have not been in any match day squads are upset at having to go to the matches anyway.

5) Ronan O’Gara has been distracted by his failure to “nail” his line in the credit card ad. And by the creeping feeling that he should actually value silverware over a bloody credit card.

6) The rift between Munster and Leinster players has grown. Things finally came to a head in training on Tuesday when the Munster players argued that the sub-prime crisis in the US and the near collapse of Northern Rock exposed the potential fragilities of the Irish banking market; while the Leinster players insisted that our membership of the Eurozone and access to the European Central Bank protects us from similar problems.

With uncanny timing, and just in time to catch the economic downturn, pre-boom rappers Scary Éire will play the Village on October 10th.

They’ll perform such old-world favourites as ‘Rev It Up’ and ‘Dole Q’. What’s a dole Q, you ask? You’ll learn soon enough.

Listen to some tracks on their MySpace page here. And here’s a Mongrel interview from earlier in the year. Turns out that two of them are investment bankers, one of them is the youngest captain in the history of Foxrock Golf Club and the MC is now treasurer of the Progressive Democrats.

Only joking.

I’d missed this when it first appeared in the Guardian the Saturday before last, but a piece on Turner Prize winners elicited this from Dublin’s new-best-friend (and 1994 winner) Antony Gormley:

He dislikes the “gladiatorial” way in which artists are pitted one against another, and feels “embarrassed and guilty to have won - it’s like being a Holocaust survivor. In the moment of winning there is a sense the others have been diminished. I know artists who’ve been seriously knocked off their perches through disappointment.”

How could being a Turner Prize winner not be “like being a Holocaust survivor”? Bravo, that man.

The previous post linked to an article on “History Rock”. Nat King Coleslaw went and found Sinead O’Connor’s Famine. He’s still in shock, the poor man:

Great GOD ALMIGHTY.

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=NL3ChbaAc1Q

I’m off to redefine “ghastly”. It’ll take a while, because I’ve already gnawed off my knuckles.

Some links:

Neurologist Oliver Sacks (whose book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat is a must read) has a fascinating piece in New Yorker about a man with a memory only seconds long.

How much is a first edition of At Swim Two Birds worth? Too much.

The chequered history of ‘History Rock’. Warning: this article includes the Cranberries lyrics: “He had perceptively known that it wouldn’t be nice/Because in 1980 he paid the price.”

Geordan Murphy does a weekly Q&A for the BBC. This is last Friday’s. Can’t wait for this week’s thoughts.

RTÉ webchat with David McWilliams, which, rather impressively, includes the question: “Are you away now for your dinner or will you be staying longer?, I have to go out.”

New York Times is dismantling much of its pay wall.

E-mail etiquette dissected.

Derek O’Connor’s post-Blogorrah life continues with Maladjusted - a “one-act, one-man, tragi-comic tale of middle-aged despair and the ties that bind, both literally and metaphorically” - coming to Bewley’s Cafe Theatre from next week.

1) David is an omnipresent being who stands in shopping centres and watches people he’s just interviewed go by. But they don’t seem to be able to see him.

2) Manufacturing in Ireland is - you may need to sit down for this one - under threat.

3) If you need a show to pick you up and put you in a jolly mood on a Monday evening - choose Prosperity.

4) Uruguay’s strident economy collapsed during the 1930s because it relied too much on beef. QED: Ireland’s economy could collapse. No further context is needed here.

5) You had hopes and aspirations to move up in the world. Now you’re doomed. You fools.

6) Lots of speeded up shots of David moving through a city at night make his argument stronger.

7) The show may all be a glorious work of satire, too subtle for most of us to understand.

Today’s ConText column by Kevin Courtney explains the word Noddy Shots, which are those things Alan Yentob was caught doing when pretending to interview people he hadn’t.

Here’s another true, and shocking, TV secret:

When you’re watching the RTÉ news and, because it has no interesting pictures to show you, it simply gives us various views of the Four Courts (up close, from across the river, etc), they are not filmed on the day. Instead, RTÉ has a file featuring the Four Courts in a variety of weathers - in sunshine, in rain, under cloud, in a freak tornado* etc - that it can pick from to match the day on which the bulletin is broadcast.

* It might not actually have this one.

Simon at Tuppenceworth.ie has created a really handy customised Google search engine of the Irish newspapers that are online. He was inspired by the UK search tool Chipwrapper, which is pretty useful too.

David McWilliams showed up on the Late Late Show and the Sunday Tribune, as well as in a piece in the Sunday Times and in a profile I wrote for Saturday’s Irish Times. There are two major elements to his new book (and accompanying TV series) The Generation Game. Firstly, the buzz phrases.

As I wrote:

Those who were irritated by his incessant and convenient classifying of people and economic models will find this new work the media equivalent of having itching powder poured down their vests.

The Generation Game suffers from McWilliams’s almost pathological need to coin a phrase, regardless of how much those phrases begin to pile up on the page. There is the Jack Charlton theory of economics, the French Open economic model and Wezzenomics (”the global economy works precisely the same way as a teenage disco”.) We are the Botox Nation but also the Kleenex Nation. There are Jiffies and the Jagger Generation and Jugglers.

Domestic life must be a hoot for the McWilliams family. “You see,” he might comment, “the economy is rather like this Baked Alaska: hot on the outside, but cold on the inside. Foreign borrowing is this gooey bit.” “Oh, shut up, David, and eat your bloody dessert.”

(more…)

Let’s overlook the match itself, chiefly because I’ve spent a lot of money on booking a trip to the Argentina game and it increasingly looks as if I’ll be paying for the pleasure of having my spirit sliced, minced, ground into burgers and fed to the Argentine pack.

Instead, let’s look again at the coverage. Newstalk has been encouraging the public to turn down the sound on their TV and turn on the radio commentary. I did that on Saturday night. Some thoughts:

1) The radio coverage was a few seconds behind the TV. On the TV, you could see the Georgian makes break towards the line, while Newstalk’s commentator was still chatting about the previous move. Then, several seconds later, he’d suddenly yell “Oh! And Georgia go for the line!” while you could see that the attack had broken down. It continually sounded as if he was getting a prod in the ribs.

2) Hook was ridiculously optimistic, telling listeners at half time that the reason why Georgia stayed on the pitch was because they were too exhausted to move. They would, he assured us, wilt in the second half. They didn’t.

3) Which is perhaps why he became so apoplectic as the match wore on: he was as annoyed by his ill judgement as the Irish display.

4) Bizarrely, there was an ad at half-time, telling listeners that the match could be seen on TV3. Surely, anyone within reach of a telly would have turned it on in the first place. And why does Newstalk carry an ad urging people to switch off Newstalk?

5) Regarding TV3, there was an hilarious moment when Matt Cooper went over to an interview with, I think, Eddie O’Sullivan. “He’s talking to Sinead Cassan.” Cue very male, very obviously UTV voice.

If you missed this week’s episode of Prosperity - and feel that the combination of soccer, rugby and tribunals haven’t depressed your spirit enough - then you could catch up with it again, any time you wanted over the last few days.

You could watch the opening episode, read the scripts or watch the director interview one of the lead actors. You could do this because, while RTÉ struggles on in the hope of getting some recognition for what it does on the small screen, what it’s doing on an even smaller screen is quietly impressive. (more…)

Instant opinions for the weekend’s pub talk:

1) The Petraeus report showed that things are on track in Iraq. In the same way that the Irish soccer team is “coming along nicely”.

2) The Italians boycotted pasta this week as a protest at its cost. The Irish should also revolt against the expense of our national dish and boycott frozen chicken nuggets. (more…)

Interesting work from German artist Martin Klimas, who uses high speed photography to capture moments of surreal drama and emotion in shattering figurines.

The Daily Telegraph’s arts blog includes a quote on the process:

I drop the figurine from the same height in complete darkness while the lens of the camera is open. When the figurine hits the ground, the sound triggers the lights to go off for a fraction of a second. I do this procedure many times, or until I find the one frame that is just right. I keep just one such picture for every figurine. Every attempt yields a unique outcome, so I need to look for the one that best expresses a transformation of the figurine into a new form.

(more…)

Being an Irish sports fan is a series of heart-mangling, soul-violating moments, relieved occasionally by a brief moment of glory that seems only placed there to raise hopes so that they can be dashed horribly. That’s a given.

At least there’s still some good value from the coverage. Last night’s featured comedy, outrage, career confessions and a touching moment in which Brady plunged the knife into “his close friend” Staunton, while clearly wincing every time he gave it an extra twist.

But it was really about Dunphy, who was particularly primed and managed to get in references to his failed chat show (”15 weeks - out!”), “buggering up” his career, Bill O’Herlihy’s 40 years of on-the-job training, the Dublin-Cork train service, and the phrase “rinky-dink”. He half-insulted Giles when asking who on earth goes from a playing career straight into international management? (Giles, muttering: “I did.”)

And towards the end of the broadcast, he even managed a head-back, pantomime-villain laugh.

Pity the soccer has to be so depressing for it to be so good. It’s a little like showing like showing Prosperity as a warm-up for It’s A Knockout.

(Thanks to the wonders of the RTE website, you can watch the aftermath here.)

Michael Parkinson has become, oh, the umpteenth person to say that the chat show is dead. The difference here, of course, is that he’s Michael Parkinson. He is the chat show. He’s also retiring, which allows him the luxury of writing off the genre that made his reputation, although Dara O’Briain won’t be thanking him for the welcome.

This is it. It’s [his show] had it’s place and, judging by what you see on TV now, maybe it’s had its day as well.

Either way it’s runs its course. Mine is the last of the classic interview-based chat shows; the rest of them are now just comedy shows. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what I do. So this is it, I’m done.

It’s not an Irish condition, though. The old-fashioned chat show continues to thrive despite being stubbornly unfashionable. It thrives, in fact, despite being stubbornly awful. (more…)

This ad is probably the best that’s been on the television in quite some time. Certainly the best ad in living memory to involve a gorilla and Phil Collins. Here’s a MediaGuardian piece on how it went superviral.

Current book is Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West by AC Grayling. Relevant but potentially dry-as-digestives topic given an impressive lightness of touch.

Wired piece on “Gamer Regret”, that shameful realisation that you’ve wasted an enormous chunk of your life on killing non-existent zombies. (more…)

Matt Cooper: “Welcome back from the break. Jim, sum up that terrible performance.”
Jim: “Terrible.”
Matt: “Victor?”
Victor: “Poor.”
Matt: “Rob?”
Rob: “Hopeful.”
Matt: “I’ve to stop you there because it’s time for an ad break.”

As of this morning, a full Irish Times archive - actual pages from the paper stretching back to 1859 - is online here. Results bring up a digitised version of the original page, such as this one:

Accessible to subscribers (€395 a year for access beyond articles over 10 years old), it is also freely available to schools and public libraries. It is quite addictive, of course, because you can find not only what you’re looking for but also a few unintended gems such as this 1972 article:

There probably never was any “golden age of air travel”. Planes have always been cramped. The food has always been ropey. There is no escape from screaming children, big-elbowed neighbours, stale air, stale passengers or piped Richard Clayderman.

When passengers could smoke, it was like travelling inside a subsonic bong. And for years it was the only mode of transport in which the opening minutes of a journey were spent being reminded of the many ways it might kill you.

But in comparison with now, the past does look like the golden age of air travel. Because this summer confirmed a growing suspicion: that flying has become a time-wasting, earth-destroying, head-wrecking, wallet-mugging, embolism-triggering grind. (more…)

The Mirror pulled off a deft sleight of hand in its front page coverage of the Madeleine McCann story.

Portuguese police called Kate and Gerry McCann back in but refused point-blank to tell them why. Both now fear that today they will be named as SUSPECTS

Which seems measured enough, except that SUSPECTS was printed in massive type above pictures of Kate and Gerry McCann.

The Sun’s front page was different here, but in the UK it went with the straightforward: “DID YOU SEDATE MADDIE?”, although its editorial blames the “plodding” Portugese police, and maintains a sense of calculated sympathy by asking: “Hasn’t she suffered enough?”

This case has been a big one for the media over the summer - as much because it is considered to have a been partly repsonsible for the unusually strong sales over the summer. It may be about to wind up again in the most disturbing way, and given the double-edged approach of morning’s headlines we will get another reminder that there is one thing the media loves more than a hunting for a missing girl - a witch hunt.

There’s a bit of a fuss brewing over the plan to offer Lansdowne Road’s naming rights to the highest bidder, with the IRFU standing to make €75m over 15 years of a contract. It follows a similar move for the redevloped Thomond Park.

There shouldn’t be any surprise in any of this. If I remember correctly, when the East Stand was renamed the Guinness Stand, the sponsors were booed during the pre-match announcement. If fans didn’t like that, their they’re not going to enjoy watching Six Nations matches at the Harvey Norman Stadium or the Tayto Dome. (On second thoughts, they might enjoy the latter.)

The web’s man of the moment is Ronald Jenkees, who Nat King Coleslaw points out

initially looks and sounds like Benny Hill does Deliverance

Which makes him an unlikely funk icon - but that’s what he’s become. Nat has posted his riff on the Rocky tune.

Is he real? His first video blogs, over a year ago, suggest he’s developed his “character” since. Whatever the truth of it, he’s on iTunes and blogs are all-a-twitter, so he’s funking all the way to the bank.

Anne Enright makes it for The Gathering. My tip, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones is there too. Should have backed him when he was 20/1. Now he’s second favourite. Full list:

Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Well done to Morning Ireland for bringing the nation the news that matters - such as the report this morning that Diarmuid Gavin’s new show, Diarmuid’s Pony Kids, is on the telly tonight. Of course, it needed the leg up given that it only has the RTÉ Guide, several trailers and several radio and television stations through which to sell the show.

Coming next week: a one hour special on Dan and Becs. Presented by John Bowman.

Two tickets for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at the Odyssey Arena, Belfast. 131 of the queen’s pounds. As usual, though, it appears to have sold out in a time measured only by atomic clocks.

Dan Sullivan has spotted that Antony Gormley’s planned Liffey sculpture already has a brother in the University of Limerick. He informs us that:

This is the exact same figure that Gormley did for UL except he filled this one in … He is known as the rusty man

Apparently, he’s also known as Brown Thomas. It’s officially called Together and Apart, was installed in UL in 2001 and is a good 46-metres shorter than the one Dubliners will get.

Update 18:00: Green Ink has posted a vision of how what the sculpture could be.

As Cairan and Simon have pointed out on the previous post about the new drama Prosperity, RTE has done a good job on its web page. Not only can you watch the episodes after they are broadcast, and view family trees and trailers, but the scripts are available too - a very impressive touch.

Dara O’Briain is to get his own ITV chat show as a kind-of, but-not-actual replacement for Michael Parkinson. Apparently, it’ll start as a Saturday evening show but move to a later slot when Parkinson retires.

According to one of those ever-present insiders found by The Sun:

We love Dara and have great plans for him. He’s very warm and can get a lot out of people, which is what you want when you’re interviewing stars.

He’s also extremely entertaining as he has a background in comedy. He’ll be more like Jonathan Ross than Parky, but he’s exactly the kind of upbeat host we need.

In its tabloid shorthand, O’Briain is summed up as a “roly-poly comedian”.

We topped the Economist Quality of Life league in 2005, but this year we’re fourth, behind Norway, Iceland and Australia.

But in that time didn’t we get the Luas, a house price moderation and TV3’s Xposé. What went wrong? Clearly our lack of 24-hour darkness or killer animals is finally coming back to hurt us.

Mark O’Halloran and Lenny Abrahamson’s drama series Prosperity arrived on RTE2 last night, with the broadcaster, for some strange reason, scheduling it against the well-received Fr Michael Cleary documentary. I stuck with Prosperity and in doing so it seems that I missed the better of the two programmes. (more…)

As part of the Dublin International Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino will be attending the Irish premiere of Death Proof, on Friday 14 September at the Savoy in Dublin. It will be followed by a Q&A, giving fans a chance to ask those burning questions, such as: Does he think he was unfairly overlooked for an Oscar for his role in Destiny Turns on the Radio?

For those who miss it, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he turns up on the Late Late that night with Mr Grey.

Research has concluded that, in the first five years after chart success, rock n’ roll stars have a mortality rate three times higher than the ordinary person. European rockers who die young do so, on average, at 35 years old (seven years to go for Pete Doherty). US rockers wait until they’re 42. (more…)

Via Lifehacker comes a useful link to a page on the 10 Biggest Mistakes Freelancers Make. It’s for an American freelancer, rather than the Irish hack trying to make his/her way in the small pond of Irish journalism. But Irish newspapers and magazines increasingly rely on freelancers, and will never ignore good ones. (more…)

In an old Cognac distillery, they started serving dinner at 8.30pm, with the last course some time around 2am. It ended with Cognac or Baileys (or Cognac and Baileys). The fourth course was a lemon sorbet in Cognac. You may have spotted a theme.

Village of Gondeville and the 11th century abbey of Bassac caught in 3.2 mega pixel cameraphone glory.
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