This is not a great way to start off any column, but you might not want to read this one. If you’re among the 200,000 or so viewers waiting patiently for the final episode of The Sopranos, then this will not contain any clue as to its outcome.
I haven’t seen it. I don’t know what happens. But I have a growing idea. And I also know that any mention of the subject is enough to have me fling a newspaper across the room.
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Whatever responsibility you have in your job, at least you don’t have to hand-write a letter dictating what your country should do in case of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. That’s one of Gordon Brown’s first jobs. Blair’s face drained of colour when he was told, apparently. John Major took a weekend off.
Link: Go to Australia or Use Your Own Judgement (The Guardian)
A British pub has declared itself an embassy of a small Caribbean island in an effort to avoid the smoking ban.
Link: “>”I don’t think anybody could stop us doing it.”
Mistakes happen. Journalists should know this as much as anyone. But it’s hard to resist pointing out this one.
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The global value of the iPod explained (451 parts, converging from across the planet).
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BoingBoing has a round up of iPhone articles, including a nice picture of The Passion of the Jesusphone
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This is strange on so many levels.
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Wednesday’s Guardian featured Gareth McLean writing about the emergence of sci-fi and fantasy as the genre of choice on television and how the genres have become mirrors of our time.
This is science fiction for the 21st century. What’s more, it’s sci-fi about the 21st century. Fans of the genre have long known that quality sci-fi and its sister genre fantasy hold up a mirror to the times in which they were created, but never before have the TV shows involved seemed so resonant or indeed so influential. Science fiction has never been more now, fantasy never more real.
Largely, it was a piece about how the genre had become more concerned with ordinary heroes and complex political and moral issues in a - here we go again - post 9/11 America.
Meanwhile, in the wider world, the event that has made sci-fi and fantasy palatable, and indeed positively appealing, to a mainstream audience is 9/11. 9/11 shook value systems and certainties, making the heretofore incredible seem not so outlandish. In a world in peril, we look to the fantastic for succour. The fin de siècle feeling that pervaded culture at the end of the 19th century, when the end was thought to be nigh, produced a burst of enduring science fiction and fantasy literature.
In a nutshell: Star Trek is out, Battlestar Galactica is in. It was interesting, but wrong. He may go hard on Star Trek, but well before 9/11, the series had begun a trend towards darker, over-arching plots, especially with the arrival of the Borg into The Next Generation, and later with Voyager. Sure, they were serialistic, predictable, comforting and no matter how often they smashed up the ship it was fixed the next week, but they began edging us to where we are today. And Battlestar Galactica’s sexy cylon owes a lot to the true siren of the fanboys, Seven of Nine.
As for realistic sci-fi, no credit is given to the short-lived mid-90s series Space: Above and Beyond, in which an excitable bunch of recruits went to war involving a supposedly psychopathic alien enemy, rebellious cyborgs and oppressed test-tube humans - only for everything to become morally muddy and deeply pessimistic. It drew from Aliens in getting rid of the futuristic spandex and keeping with combat armour, and it had a habit of killing off its major characters way before Lost did it. Plus, it had R. Lee Ermey (drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket: “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?” ). That earns it extra space credits.
Anyway, Space: Above and Beyond has been largely ignored since, but anyone with an appetite for sci-fi could do worse than track down its two series.
Missing: One acerbic, addictive and briefly relevant online publication
Last seen: Making a quick call home on June 21st
What is especially worrying about this disappearance is that a sibling also went missing back in March.
Do you know where they are?
UPDATE: I’ve been told by someone in the know that it will be back. And it turns out that Unarocks asked this same question yesterday and has been told the same thing.
Gavan at the Singing Stranger links not only to Curry Chips’s take on John O’Donoghue’s elevation to “gong clanger”, but also points everyone to the official Dail transcript of Tuesday’s ridiculous scenes. It didn’t help that descended into Life of Brian “you’re making it up as you’re going along” silliness. Or, as a more accurate cultural reference, we voted these people in to power - only for them to go all Lord of the Flies on poor John “Piggy” O’Donoghue. Wonderful. 
Bernard Manning died on Monday, and, as sometimes happens in such matters, the British papers had a collective thought: “The racist, misogynistic, homophobic, 1970s relic Manning is dead, but is his spirit still alive?”
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British artist Jason Taylor has created an underwater sculpture park on the seabed off Grenada.
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Is this journalism’s Diana moment? Probably not.
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“Hippies are old hat; skinheads have come and gone; grunge is yesterday’s news. Why does goth alone remain undead?”
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Interesting article. Really interesting picture.
Link: New museum showcases DNA, amputation saws and Napoleon’s toothbrush
TV3 has confirmed the details of its terrestrial coverage of the Rugby World Cup matches, including Ireland’s matches. It comes after Setanta had secured the exclusive rights to the competition from the International Rugby Board, but the Irish games are part of the Broadcasting Act’s list of protected events that must be made free-to-air. It’s a huge deal for TV3, which has targeted sport as a way of chipping away at RTÉ. It also means that RTÉ has lost out on another major rugby tournament, now that the European Cup is shown live only on Sky Sports. It had originally negotiated with Setanta in 2006, but it seems that it considered the price too high.
Viewers will be without McGuirk, Pope and Hook (as well as Ciaran Fitzgerald and the excellent Conor O’Shea). On the brighter side, it means we don’t have to put up with Ryle Nugent’s commentary. If there’s been a substitution that he hasn’t described as a player being “called ashore” then I haven’t heard it.
However, TV3’s Champion’s League coverage has often proven itself capable of sucking the life out of even the most wonderous of matches. The set looks like it’s broadcast from inside a glacier. Its hosts lack the insight of an O’Herlihy, and its pundits the fire of Brady, Giles and Dunphy. John Toshack’s voices sounds as if it’s rolling words off a cliff.
It hasn’t claimed a sport yet: in the way that soccer still belongs to RTÉ; in the way that the All-Ireland would be unthinkable anywhere else. And just as rugby has never seemed right on ITV, TV3 is going to have to work very hard to convince both the general viewer and rugby’s hardcore allicadoos that the sport belongs there. If it is going to use sport as a weapon with which to beat RTÉ, then it would be good if it started doing it justice at some point soon.
At least its World Cup coverage will have a decent line-up, including Matt Cooper, Paul Wallace and Jim Glennon - so there is hope. The commentator is Conor McNamara, who (and this may be apocryphal) in the first live soccer game broadcast on TV3 famously mentioned the Irish centre back “Cunny Kenningham”.
Ten years ago, I went to the Edinburgh to compete in the So You Think You’re Funny competition, where I proved categorically that I wasn’t. It didn’t help that I had crafted a routine that involved me doing various techno dances, which went down very well in the International. But 30 seconds before I was due to go on the Edinburgh stage, the host - Michael Smiley - did a routine involving him doing various techno dances. His “big fish, little fish, cardboard box” routine, in fact, became mildly seminal - making it onto Simon Pegg’s Spaced. My routine didn’t.
Instead, I performed to a crowd that had got their tickets in a two-for-the-price-of-one deal, and seemed to resent that. 10 minutes of near silence later, I waved them a cheery goodbye (”I’ve been Shane Hegarty, you’ve been a great audience. Goodnight!”) and bounded off the stage forever. Peter Kay went on to win the competition that year, so every time he comes on the TV now I get a flashback to my big night of comedy torment.
I mention all of this because blogger Lorcy (The Life and Times of Jimmy Homonculus) has stepped on the stage for the first time and to mark his moment has linked to several comedian v heckler videos. It’s a chuckle-filled blood sport.
The finest heckle I’ve heard was at that Edinburgh Festival, about 3.30am in the Gilded Balloon, when a comedian whose name utterly escapes me right now told a repeated heckler: “Every time you open your mouth I hear a little voice inside pleading ‘Kill me’”.
Link: YouTube Hecklefest
As a bonus, here’s a clip from the Seinfeld episode in which George struggles to come up with a great comeback to a colleague’s heckling.
Link: Jerk Store
The summer issue of the Dublin Review of Books went online this morning - and it’s a treat. There are articles on: the firebombing of Germany; Muldoon as poet and critic; early modern Irish cartography; Scottish Gaelic poetry; Englishness; and Milan Kundera. It has certainly followed up on the promise of the first issue.
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This week, gardaí searched an area in Boyle, Co Roscommon, in relation to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Their source? A psychic “tip-off” relayed to them by Interpol.
The result of the search? Nothing. Except to remind us that in any major disappearance or murder case, one thing is all too predictable: half the continent’s self-declared psychics and clairvoyants will insist on “helping”.
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- Reading Tim Guest’s Second Lives: Journeys Through Virtual Worlds, and he makes a passing reference to how many people reckon the Burning Man festival is the closest thing real life has to Second Life. Having been at Burning Man, and having spent a little time in Second Life again recently, I’d agree with him. A sense of freedom, of the art of the possible, of the surreal, or re-invention and the ridiculous. Guest also makes direct comparisons between Second Life and the cult he grew up in: not just in the adoption of new identities but also in the preciousness of the creators and some inhabitants, and insistence of rules within supposed freedoms. I’m reviewing the book for the paper, so I’ll be back to this at a later date.
- Listening to (and watching) Bruce Springsteen and the Sessions Band Live in Dublin, and having been at one of the shows my greatest regret in life is not having gone to all three.
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- For all you Troy McClure fans out there, here’s a selection of the late, great Phil Hartman’s finest moments. This includes a sketch featuring both Hartman and John Lovitz, so you might need to sit down for that one.
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Why did RTÉ’s Nine News cut away from the drama of the Mansion House, where John Gormley was about to speak, just so we could hear some re-heated analysis from Charlie Bird and David McCullough? Was there a post-result media blackout too or did it just feel it was what the nation needed at that moment of real history?
Could it have stuck around with coverage for a bit longer, or did it decide that what the viewers actually wanted was for The Village to start on time.
Two weeks ago, Ciaran Cuffe caused a bit of fuss when blogging that any deal with Fianna Fáil would be “…a deal with the devil. We would be spat out after 5 years, and decimated as a Party. But, … would it be worth it?”
Today, he’s finally had his gag removed. His reaction to the deal? “Sometimes the devil has all the best tunes”.
Personally, I think he might yet be right about the party getting decimated in 2012…
Link: Ciaran Cuffe’s blog
Watching RTE’s promo for Miriam O’Callaghan’s chat show, I wonder why they don’t plug Prime Time by having men talk about her as a “thinking man’s crumpet” or as someone who has “lots of kids”. They’d be able to plug Mark Little as “the thinking woman’s Man from Del Monte”. Although, as inane RTE promos go, nothing will ever again match the Ryan Tubridy as Agent Smith masterwork - unless it’s Gerry Ryan as John Rambo.
You want to see a real promo: check out this outrageously over-the-top one for an American channel’s weatherman. Gary England. Hero.
On last night’s Nine News, David Davin Power was speaking live to the studio on how the coalition talks were going - but had his back to the action suddenly unfolding behind him…
Belatedly, following last week’s Big Brother racism row, it’s an opportune moment to point out this bit of Daily Show genius. Send one white guy and one black guy out on the streets to ask about attitudes to the “n-word”. But only one of them can actually say it. Best line: “Do you understand how rap works, councillor?”
Was in Ethiopia last week - for a wedding. Here are some photos.
