It seems to have been a quieter year around my way, with the fireworks in short supply. There has been an attempt to crack down on the cross-border trade, so maybe that’s having an impact. Of course, it could be different down you’re way and perhaps you’re reading this while your teeth are being loosened by nearby explosions.

So, in the true spirit of Halloween (witness some spoilsporting by the Skeptical Enquirer) , I’m bringing something back from the dead - a piece I wrote this time two years ago:

It’s a good thing fireworks aren’t legal in the Republic. Otherwise, we might have a problem with them. As it is, there is only a brief time of the year when they become something of a nuisance, a three-month spell running roughly from September to November, when the sky is filled with flashing light, the nights echo to the sound of explosions, and soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder move to Baghdad to get away from the noise. (more…)

Meanwhile, a list of the “Top 100 Living Geniuses” was released this week.

4,000 Britons were polled as part of it. A quarter of the list is British. Genius.

Two are Irish: Seamus Heaney is at 26 on the list and - gloriously - Graham Linehan is number 83. If there was a Nobel Prize for Sitcoms…

Some other notables:

4. Matt Groening
15. Brian bloody Eno
32. Prince
72. George chartered-accountancy-as-sci-fi Lucas
73. Stan Lee
94= Dolly Parton
94= Morrissey
94= Michael Eavis
100. Quentin Tarantino

No Bono. I repeat, Bono is not on the list.

Before it comes to the end of its current run, listen to BBC Radio 4’s Genius. Presented by Dave Gorman, it invites listeners to send in an idea, and Gorman and guests decide whether it’s “genius” or not. It’s a kind of pointless Dragon’s Den. Pointless in a good way. Genius ideas have included:

- Claiming the east and west poles.
- Hooking up gym equipment to feed the national grid.
- Steel drum urinals – for musical trips to the loo.
- Using talking parrots to assist mutes.
- Getting old people living in homes to watch live CCTV and report misdemeanours, thus keeping them entertained and reducing crime.

Last week, The Last Word’s stand-in host Anton Savage interviewed “medium” Derek Acorah. Tough one for Savage, sitting in for a few days, given a total dud of a guest. But you didn’t need to be psychic to guess that an uninterrupted interview would allow Acorah to get away with saying pretty much whatever he wanted. So when Savage made a last-ditch attempt at injecting some reason into the chat, Acorah could say “sure there’s loads of scientific evidence” for psychic powers (mainly in Russia. Solid.) without any real fear of getting taken up on it.

Luckily, Jon Ronson’s Guardian piece on Sylvia Brown came along. Brown is a US TV “psychic” and a woman with a unique insight into missing children cases.

She’s become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on The Montel Williams Show on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, “Your child is dead” or “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.” (more…)

1. So, the government makes a bags of the provisional driver plans, and the nation takes it as a victory for “common sense” (ie, our right to ignore to an unenforced law/exploit a loophole on second provisionals/do what we bloody well want).

2. Memo to RTÉ: for the next People in Need Telethon, don’t just use several hours of desperately poor television to legitimise the notion that charity if the answer to the State’s negligence. Instead, don’t just rattle the busket, but raise awareness of how disgraceful it is that these charities need to assist people let down by the ineptitude of the government one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

3. By the way, “entertainment” is not defined as “Laura Woods coming on every 10 minutes to tell us how much has been bid on the People in Need auction on eBay”.

4. Nor is it the sight of a students’ union president stepping into a bath of honey while Shane O’Donoghue pretends that it is one of the television highlights of the century.

5. In New York, the population goes out of its way to come out in its millions to cheer on the marathon runners. In Dublin, people just wish they could cross the road where they always do, get the bus like they always do, and generally wish they could avoid those bloody marathon runners. We need to be more like New York.

6. Is there anything odd in complaining about the Taoiseach’s salary increase, while at the same time screaming for the new Ireland manager to be paid whatever he needs to get the job done? Just asking.

An interesting statistic popped up briefly this week, over a year since its first fleeting appearance. The offences of driving unaccompanied on a provisional licence and the non-display of L-plates have not been in the top 3,000 cases brought before the courts in a given year.

There have been 3,000 illegal activities more likely to land you in trouble. You’d spend the rest of your life trying to guess them all, but each was considered more serious than driving two tons of metal and fuel at high speed, without proving that you even know which button works the window wipers.

This is about to change. Even before the new Road Safety Strategy was announced this week, a Kildare district court judge had announced that he was going to start disqualifying offenders. Among his first targets was a provisional driver, fined €150 for driving unaccompanied. That driver must have stared at the judge with simmering incredulity. Driving without a qualified driver? Sure, your honour, you’d need to fine anyone who has ever had so much as an impure thought about furry dice. The provisional licence is part of our culture, our heritage. Our fathers drove on them, and our father’s fathers before them. Some of them still do. (more…)

With the exception of the saggy A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson has hardly written a dull sentence in his life, and his short biography, Shakespeare: The World As A Stage, is another example of his ability to take otherwise dry subjects and make them hugely entertaining. In fact, much of the book’s strength through making a virtue of how little we actually know about the man. Plus, his descriptions of the living conditions and madness of Elizabethan London are brilliant. It’s not his best pop at history (Made in America is outstanding), but it’s a cracking read.

It led me to the drier, but very satisfying, Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography, by Janet Browne. Part of the Books That Changed The World series, it gives a rattling insight into Darwin, the science society of the time, his friends and foes and the beauty of both the idea and of his writing. One for the creationist in the family this Christmas.

Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us is a surprise bestseller in the States, with the public attracted to a book that begins at the end - the world after human extinction.

The book’s website has some animation of how quickly your house would rot away, as well as a slide show/timeline of what would happen to New York if humanity disappeared. There’s also a flash timeline here, which says that our TV and radio signals will still be out in deep space long after the Earth itself is consumed by the Sun. Just think, Nob Nation will be our legacy to the universe. (more…)

People in Need is selling items on eBay. There are some fine things here, but there are a handful you would need to be feeling very charitable indeed to invest in. What price:

An original artwork by Glenda Gilson (bidding is touching €4,000, art lovers).

A sketch of Jim Fitzpatrick - by Glenda Gilson (more…)

Four girls, 20-ish, gradually pushing themselves up the queue to the bar at Arcade Fire.

Girl 1: “Jack Daniels and Calpol is wild, apparently.”
Girl 2: “What?”
Girl 1: “Jack Daniels and Calpol. Wild.”
Girl 2: “It’s the Calpol that would worry me.”
Girl 1: “College is crazy.”

They keep shoving forward slowly, but deliberately. One of them elbows a woman in the back, who asks them not to push. Much bitchy, “do you hear her?”, whispering between the four girls follows.

Girl 3: “Beer or wine?”
Girl 4: “What?”
Girl 3: “Beer or wine? Which makes you drunker? They have both.”
Girl 4: “Wine. We’ll get wine. And some beers.”

They continue to elbow their way through the other patient punters in the queue. Yards from the bar, a big bouncer stops them, asks them for ID and when they don’t produce an official card, chucks them out of the queue.

The Arcade Fire last night: brilliant. A perfect balance between fervour and control; so good that they managed to overcome the severe dodginess of the sound. During the first two songs in particular it sounded like the drums had been replaced with bubble wrap. The tent was more impressive from the outside than within, and anyone going to tonight’s gig should prepare for a mighty queue for the bar. And because a big tent needs big pillars, there are several obstructed views. But it was easy to get in and out of, with far better transport than the Point ever has had. Nevertheless, as a venue, it might be handier for the punters than the acts, because it didn’t really do justice to the Arcade Fire - that they rose above it to such a degree proved just how good they are.

As an aside, thank you to the nice woman who found my wallet on the seat of the bus back into town. She handed it back without taking any of the contents: a small amount of cash, work swipecard, credit card and Laser cards and a small Fabergé egg. Much appreciated.

Last week, on his blog, Graham Linehan used the news that NBC has gone cold on a US version of The IT Crowd to outline the things he’d do differently were he to write the series again. The post and subsequent discussion are fascinating for anybody with an interest in his sitcoms, US sitcoms, UK sitcoms, any sitcoms and television in general.

A torturous train journey this morning - late, stuck between stations, standing, squeezed into a corner apparently reserved for a man with chronic flatulence - and, as ever, with no idea of when we’d get moving again or what time we’d get to work.

For a company which deals with the public in such a major way, it remains one of the worst for customer service - largely through its reluctance to communicate. How many times do you find yourself waiting for a train, and the first mention of its lateness will be when the mechanical voice eventually announces the arrival of the “delayed” train? How often do major delays lead to the digital readouts being out of service?

Those readouts have proven a ludicrous addition to stations. They appear to run in a different space-time continuum, in which 2 minutes might actually mean 15. In which the “next train” might be referring to the train after it. They are often the sole representative of Irish Rail on the platform. A diversion. A patsy. A reason for the human employees to believe that there is no need to use the tannoy to relay any actual, useful information to passengers.

I have a certain amount of sympathy for Irish Rail in how it has been left to deal with the legacy of urban sprawl and dreadful planning. But simple things would help it move from being some kind of enemy that commuters must battle on their way to work every morning, and into a service which has some empathy with their frustrations. For instance, the last time I tried to complain at rush hour, I discovered that the customer service people have already closed up and gone home at the same time that people are most likely to want to call them. Perhaps they wanted to beat the traffic.

Following JK Rowling’s revelation that Dumbledore is gay, Slate.com looks at the outing of fictional characters. It does, you won’t be surprised to hear, make several mentions of evangelical preachers as it references the male warthog and male meerkat in The Lion King, Bugs Bunny in drag and Bert and Ernie:

Predictably, the “urban legend” that Ernie and Bert were gay began to spread. In 1994, a Southern preacher named Joseph Chambers tried to get them banned under an old North Carolina anti-sodomy law. (He said they had “blatantly effeminate characteristics.”) The Children’s Television Workshop eventually had to deny the rumors, which have included an impending same-sex union. But the gay read on Ernie and Bert isn’t wrong because the creators don’t endorse it. The same goes for the Peanuts characters Peppermint Patty and her tomboy friend Marcie, who always refers to her as “Sir.” When Charles M. Schulz created the strip, he never imagined that Patty and Marcie would be claimed as protolesbians.

It’s focussed on American characters, so there’s no mention of, say, the bed-sharing Morecambe and Wise. Of course, British television has always had a healthy stock of gay characters, so is far less prissy about this than eagle-eyed American evangelists. As for Irish television - as we know, there were no homosexuals in Ireland before 1993.

[As ever, Slate is packed with good reading. Its explainer is particularly astute, filling us in on the big issue of the day: What to do if you’re attacked by monkeys.]

Brendan McWilliams - whose daily Weather Eye column has been an institution in The Irish Times - has passed away. (Ireland.com report here).

He had a rare talent for writing fascinating, erudite and entertaining articles, on a range of topics, while drawing on science, biography and the classics. And he did this six times a week for almost 20 years. (As a reader, I delighted in this; as a writer, I was exhausted by the mere thought of trying to do the same.)

His column was a daily treat for a great many Irish Times readers. It is an understatement to say that he will be missed.

In 2003, fifteen years after his first column, Brendan McWilliams gave a typically modest account of his routine:

Over the years there has evolved about the column a set of FAQ - an acronym which computer buffs will recognise as “Frequently Asked Questions”. The two most often heard are: Whence is thy learning? Hath thy toil O’er books consumed the midnight oil?

The origin of the first - a thin veneer of apparent erudition - can be traced to a youth sans siblings and TV, combined with the blessing of a good parental library. I had the time and opportunity to delve into many of the classics, and the words and contexts sometimes make a ghost-like re-appearance from the dim recesses of an ageing memory.

And the midnight oil? There has been much of that, indeed, since 1988, given - to answer yet another FAQ - that each Weather Eye takes about three hours to write. And the final FAQ: How long will it continue? As long, I suppose, as health and God and Madam in D’Olier Street will allow. But my personal toast to Weather Eye tonight will be “ad multos annos”.

On Friday night, Michael Healy-Rae announced his participation in People In Need’s Celebrities Go Wild by amusing the Late Late audience by telling them of his fear of sharing a tent with other men, ho ho.

What better time, then, to revisit his 2004 appearance on Questions and Answers, when his articulate answer to a question on gay marriage included references to “that type of behaviour”, “that kind of activity” and his worry for the future of the human race if we all decide to marry the same sex.

And he does it all while wearing a black leather cap so gay the Village People would have rejected it for being too camp.

Go to 1:05 for Healy-Rae’s response, and then stay on for the great sight of him and Trevor White beside each other. It’s a collision of two worlds.

There are few more predictably inane moments of any week than when viewers’ comments scroll across the screen during The Late Late Show. How worthwhile is it to ask the public to digest the complexities of a social conundrum, and then invite them to comment on it in 160 characters or less?

It is why those comments tend to be a variation on the theme of “I agree with that man.” And because it needs a certain motivation to lift a mobile phone rather than a glass of wine on a Friday night, they also tend to be weighted towards the opinion that, yes, modern Ireland is dangerous/unfriendly/generally not as good as it used to be. And every week, it occurs to you that if you wanted reactionary, inarticulate and shallow opinions, then you’d have gone down to the dingiest corner of the pub hours ago.

This year BBC Radio 4 presenter Eddie Mair won a prestigious Sony Gold Award for Interactivity. His reaction? To rubbish the whole idea of interactivity. Mair wasn’t addressing the supposed “added value” given by broadcasters and newspapers - either through red buttons on the remote control or their sprawling websites - but the added avenue given to the public’s opinions. Traditionally, he said this week, “the only thing the listener had to do was listen”. (more…)

You can almost imagine the whoop of delight on Wednesday, when a journalist somewhere realised that Anne Enright had written a piece about the McCanns and, bingo, solved a couple of the media’s problems in one go:

1. How to turn a dry literary story into something exciting
2. How to keep the McCanns on the front page (more…)

In Saturday night’s Rugby World Cup Final I will be whole-heartedly supporting England.

I would say that this goes against the habit of a lifetime, except that two weeks ago I supported England against Australia, deciding that it would be fun to see the arrogance of the Aussies getting punctured by a bunch of disorganised no-hopers whom they treated with disdain during the lead up.

Plus, I have this daft need to root for the Northern Hemisphere. As if we’re all one big happy hemisphere. From Galway to Guangdong, rooting for our own. “Give me an N. Give me an O. Give me an R, Give me a T…” (more…)

Given the current focus on Irish writing, let’s examine one of the big trends for which we have been so responsible: Misery Lit. This is the age of misery lit (aka the Misery Memoir), to the extent that it is wandering horribly into parody. The latest example is from the writer Martha Long, who had, I’m sorry to say, a terrible childhood. Really terrible.

Born a bastard to a teenage mother in the slums of 1950s Dublin, Martha has to be a fighter from the very start. As her mother moves from man to man, and more children follow, they live hand-to-mouth in squalid, freezing tenaments, clothed in rags and forced to beg for food. The author tells the story of her early life without an ounce of self-pity.

That’s how you sell a book these days. Lay it on thick. But the title is also crucial, which increasingly has to be at least a paragraph long, heart-rending, and explain the gist of the plot. So Long’s book is subtly titled: Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes. (more…)

The Late Late’s website now has last Friday’s show online. It gives us a chance to to see two things:

1. The interview with Frances Cahill was a reminder of how The Late Late can still, very occassionally, produce riveting television. And that, with the right topic, Pat Kenny can be a fine interviewer. Here, he lets a very nervous-looking Cahill reveal her personal delusion.

2. I know I’m not the target demographic for Menopause: The Musical, but following a taster, the question is: Just how hormonally banjaxed would you have to be to enjoy this?

A letter in today’s paper responds to my column last Saturday:

Madam, - I write in response to Shane Hegarty’s feature “Pop goes the healthy ad slogan” ( Weekend Review, October 13th), which refers to information on our website regarding one of our most popular brands, Kellogg’s Coco Pops. (more…)

On Monday, a friend who works in the book world remarked casually: “The Booker is a lottery.” Maybe and maybe not. The Guardian today describes the voting process, as explained by chairman of the judging panel Howard Davies:

The judging process was, Davies said, “tight”. Every book “had its advocate”. He described the judges as “a congenial group of people” but not necessarily one from whom consensus easily flowed. Accordingly, as befitted the director of the London School of Economics, he devised what he called an ingenious selection of voting systems: a weighted system, a simple ranking system and single transferable vote. Each confirmed Enright as the winner.

That piece, by the way, also put UK sales figures as follows:

Enright’s book has so far shifted just 3,253 copies. The latest figures from Nielsen BookScan show that the McEwan has sold a total of 120,362; Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, 11,097; Mister Pip, 5,170; Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist 4,425, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People 2,589.

Regardless of the system used, Eileen Battersby, writing in today’s paper, is baffled:

Sometime, somehow, perhaps next week, next year or perhaps a century from now, in a galaxy out there, there will be a sufficiently intelligent life form capable of explaining the Booker Prize, not just how it is won, but why.

The choices made in that process, the politics, the hype, the marketing and the final decision.

Ireland’s Anne Enright won with The Gathering . Perhaps not the best book of the subdued final six, but certainly the loudest and the angriest - and this in a shortlist including novels about international terrorism, a real-life environmental disaster and a real-life genocide in New Guinea.

(more…)

Before tonight’s Man Booker announcement, here’s some crib notes on Anne Enright courtesy of last night’s The View and Sinead Gleeson.

UPDATE: Anne Enright wins. Well done to her. And well done to Aertel which announces accurately yet inanely: “Irish woman wins Man Booker Prize”. When John Banville won, was its headline “Irish man wins Man Booker Prize”? I’m guessing not.

Whatever about my recent gripes about Kellogg’s marketing, it has come up with a great US commercial for All-Bran. See if you can spot the subtle message.

I really like this photograph of Ali and Michael J Fox, both Parkinson’s sufferers, as photographed by Mark Selinger for his In My Stairwell project - a book published in 2005 and a travelling exhibition now making its way to Manchester. The Times has an interview with him today, and you can see more of the pictures of celebrities in his stairwell at his website.

The Greatest Wits poll mentioned below was brought to you by the channel formerly known as UKTV G2. It’s new name? Dave. Really. As in “switch over to Dave” and “what’s on Dave tonight” and “Dave is a ridiculous name for a television station”.

Dave is warm. Dave’s your mate. Dave’s the funny bloke in the pub, who possibly has an underlying drink problem. And it leaves you wondering what names other stations would have if they were to go all casual.

RTE1’s a bit wooden, still traditional, doesn’t take well to criticism and likely to struggle with humour. So let’s call it: Pat
RTE2 wants to give the impression that it thinks RTE1 is so, like, duh: Becs
TV3’s really a British station with occassional outburts of Anglicised Irishness: Jamie
TG4: Caoimhe

Because there hasn’t been a ridiculous poll for a few hours, here comes: Britain’s Greatest Wits.

Oscar Wilde at the top, predictable. Jeremy Clarkson four places above William Shakespeare, wonderful. Liam Gallagher on the list, hilarious. Here’s the full list. I have nothing witty to say about it - but then again I’m not British.

1 Oscar Wilde
2 Spike Milligan
3 Stephen Fry
4 Jeremy Clarkson
5 Sir Winston Churchill
6 Paul Merton
7 Noel Coward
8 William Shakespeare
9 Brian Clough
10 Liam Gallagher

The Man Booker winner will be announced tomorrow. It’s been a very readable shortlist, not just because of the quality but because only Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, at over 800 pages, is a doorstopper.

I’ve read four of them, and I’m unlikely to get through either Darkmans or Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People before tomorrow.

On Chesil Beach is excellent, dense but involving despite its brevity, and actually improves and accelerates towards a haunting conclusion. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is finely paced, and walks a fine line both in terms of its theme and a slow burning underlying plot. It is, like On Chesil Beach, really a novella (there’s even an acknowledgment of this in a passing remark by the main character) and it’s probably written a little much from the author’s own experience to deserve to win over some of the other efforts. Anne Enright’s The Gathering, meanwhile, is stylistically excellent as it takes on a traditional Irish theme of the dysfunctional family.

However, of those I’ve read I really can’t see beyond Lloyd Jones outstanding Mister Pip. It is vivid, beautifully written and genuinely moving, and it is distinctive, both in voice and plot.

Whatever the result, Mister Pip is likely to be the big winner from this. By the middle of September, it had sold only 880 copies in the UK, according to the Daily Telegraph (Animal’s People had sold only 231 copies at that stage). Apart from McEwan, each will have gotten a boost from the shortlisting. Should it win (maybe even if it doesn’t), Mister Pip has potential to accelerate - maybe not quite in the way Life of Pi did, but it will have wide appeal.

There’s a Coco Pops ad campaign at the moment that informs mum just how healthy a bowl of it is for the kids. As the Kellogg’s website says: “Not only can your children enjoy the fun and adventure of Coco and his gang, you can be sure that they are getting a great start to the day!” Oddly, the website mentions how much of a child’s daily allowance of vitamins and calcium an average serving contains, but not its average sugar intake.

Less surprisingly, it doesn’t mention the most important selling point about tucking into a bowl of Coco Pops - one that Kellogg’s was once more upfront about - which goes along the lines of: “Hey kids, it’s chocolate for breakfast!”. (more…)

If you like political debate that descends into two people shouting over one another while the host tries to lob in a question, then you’ll have been very impressed by last night’s Prime Time during which John Gormley, Fergus O’Dowd and Mark Little dealt with the incinerator issue. At least, we presume they did. It became hard to tell.

Watch out for the strange moment at about 6:50 in, when Gormley is distracted by what sounds like a sneeze or someone spitting water in shock.

After deciding against the original proposal, the new winning design for the U2 tower has been revealed, and it’s this fine-looking effort from Norman Foster (although I’m always wary of the artist’s drawing since the Spire was initially made out to be an orgy of spotlights rather than the dim candle that it is).

According to Frank McDonald in today’s paper:

The sensational new scheme has the rock band’s eggshaped recording studio suspended beneath a battery of vertical wind turbines and a huge solar panel at the top. This “energy centre” will raise the overall height from 130m (427ft) to 180m (591ft).

The tilted triangular tower, designed by Foster + Partners, will include a public viewing platform offering panoramic views over the city and Dublin Bay. This will be located just below U2’s “pod” studio, which will be separated from the structure for acoustic reasons.

And:

In addition to the tower, which will largely comprise luxury apartments, the scheme includes a five-star hotel in a flanking building to the south, oversailing a block of 34 social and affordable apartments, which comprise 20 per cent of the overall residential content.

The area certainly need a landmark building. For all the redevelopment, there’s been nothing to stop you in your tracks - as does, say, Newcastle’s Sage concert hall, which I saw a couple of months back and realised just how naked Dublin’s docklands are in comparison.

Tenacious debunker, Ben Goldacre is interviewed in Mongrel by Larry Ryan. It touches upon several issues, including my professions often appalling approach to science and pseudo-scientific stories:

My tenuous theory, which I think holds up to scrutiny, is that the media is run by humanities graduates who don’t understand science. They create a parody of science through the way that they present it, and then they critique that parody as if it was what science was really about. They create this idea that science is all about authority figures in white coats making sweeping didactic statements, and by making it about authority figures rather than evidence they open it up for bogus authority figures like Dr. Gillian McKeith Ph.D, or Dr. Andrew Wakefield [architect of the MMR scare in Britain]. They present the idea that science is about brand new discoveries, when in fact science is about the gradual emergence of new themes supported by a wide raft of evidence from different disciplines. It’s an example of how ill-suited science is to being covered in a news format, because new breakthroughs or amazing new experimental data in science, by virtue of being surprising and new, are actually very likely to be wrong.

A colleague overheard three girls talking on the Dart this morning, as one of them announced, crestfallen, that she has “an allergy to fake tan”. In modern Ireland, this could be social death. Let us mourn.

It’s an illness particular to Celtic Tiger Ireland. What else is lurking out there? An Americano allergy? A phobia of farmers markets? An illness that makes your nose swell on contact with cocaine?

Nobody is safe.

Naomi Klein has had a pop at the “Bono-isation of protest” and at the way that the internet offers a hobbling “instant catharsis”. The movement against the market economics that led her to write No Logo, she says, has fizzled out because:

It’s safer to mouth off in a blog than to put your body on the line. The internet is an amazing organising tool but it also acts as a release, with the ability to rant and get instant catharsis . . . it’s taken that urgency away.

Regarding Sir Bono’s style, she says:

The Bono-isation of protest, particularly in the UK, has reduced discussion to a much safer terrain … It was the stadium rock model of protest – there’s celebrities and then there’s spectators waving their bracelets. It’s less dangerous and less powerful [than grass roots street demonstrations].

She went on:

I think it’s fantastic when celebrities engage with politics and stick their necks out. I think more people should do it, in less safe ways. My problem with Bono is not about him being a celebrity or being rich. It’s that his model of organising is dated. My analysis is that change isn’t popular. It comes because a real counter-power emerges which carries negotiating power, which leads to change.

In terms of the movement this gentrification of the protest space by the Bonos and the Geldofs has had a really corrosive effect. I really don’t think it’s a good thing.

On a slightly separate note, this is well timed, as much because it’s that time of year when we once again meet the ridiculous suggestion that Bono is a Nobel peace prize favourite. He’s as short as 10-1 with some bookies, apparently, although anyone who puts money on that should be up for Nobel Idiot of the Year. And if any Irishman is going to win it, surely it’s likely to be Willie O’Dea.

The Drinks Industry Group is understandably concerned with protecting its members’ interests, so it’s about the least surprising thing on earth to see that its chairman Michael Patten writes in today’s Irish Times that “pursuing a ban on advertising will achieve nothing”. He makes a few of points, including the rather disingenuous one that a pre-watershed TV ban wouldn’t mean much because young children spend more time on the internet than watching television. That’s a little like saying that you shouldn’t ban cigarette advertising in magazines because people spend more time looking at TV than reading magazines. A kind of “why bother, they’ll see it anyway” approach.

There was also his argument that the pre-watershed ban is meaningless because under-18s don’t go to be before 9pm anyway. Hey, why don’t we get out some nudity during kids TV too? Or let them say “fuck” on Home and Away. (more…)

Christopher Hitchens reviews Philip Roth’s new novel Exit Ghost in this month’s Atlantic. He doesn’t like it. Really doesn’t like it. You would think that even if Roth wins the Nobel Prize for Literature tomorrow (though he probably won’t) even that mightn’t cheer him up after this astounding swipe by Hitchens: (more…)

Straight in at number one - Menopause: The Musical. Starring Linda Martin and Twink.

Because everyone’s looking at the crack in the Tate floor and wondering for, oh, the gazzilionth time, “is it art?” and “what is art?” and “thank god for silly art, it fills news pages”, it has meant that Banksy has been overshadowed for once.

The Rude Lord, a portrait he bought for £2,000 and gave a single-fingered airbrushing too is expected to fetch a top price of £200,000 at auction. Then again, his prices have gone wacko over the past couple of years. Not to everyone’s delight, though. This July piece by the Guardian’s art critic gave him a thorough going over.

Taking a drive across half the country on Friday and Saturday, it was another reminder of how the island seems to be buried under several million orange cones, while operating on a stop-go system that only ever seems to be stuck on stop. Well done to anyone who bought shares in the company that makes temporary traffic lights. If you did that five years ago, you’ll be wealthy enough to travel by helicopter. Or to build your own private road.

You should have seen the cars abandoning the traffic jam crawling towards Moate on Saturday lunchtime. Drivers greeted the tailback as if they were bank robbers spotting the cops. Meanwhile, the junction at the Lucan exit is currently considered Europe’s most hair-raising rollercoaster. And thanks to the new diversions at the Red Cow, the journey now involves doubling back on yourself and driving through your bathroom to get to the other side of it.

Someday, we hope to wake up and find the landscape to be a gleaming web of completed roads, on which it’s possible to go from A to Z without:

- A tailback at B, caused by a diversion at C
- Temporary traffic lights in operation at D, F, G, J, L, M, N, O, R, S, T, V, X, Y
- Falling into a giant hole at H
- Missing the junction for K because of no signposts
- Having to stop for a pee at the side of the road near P, because there are no toilets along the motorway
- Getting snarled at traffic lights at a roundabout at Q
- Giving up and abandoning the car at W

They’ve been knocked out of the World Cup again. It’s a catastrophe for the Kiwi nation. So, how did one New Zealand newspaper lift its readers on this Monday morning? By putting a big picture of Bertie on the front page.

The question is: if that tactic really works so well, how come the Irish are so miserable at the moment?

We all make mistakes. (Full disclosure: you can find one of mine here. Stupid internet. Stupid me.)

On an average Monday, maybe the award for Gaff of the Weekend might have gone to Newstalk’s soccer commentator, who on Sunday screamed: “And it’s a hat trick for Robbie Keane!!!”, only to realise that he was watching a replay of Keane’s second goal.

Instead, it has to go to poor Ryan Tubridy. On his Saturday night chat show, he was giving away a trip to Chicago plus thousands in spending money. What followed went something along these lines:

“Ever been to Chicago?” he asked the caller.
“No,” she replied.
“Well then, all you need to do is tell me which actress won an Oscar for her role in the
movie Chicago.”
“Renee Zellweger?”
“…is the correct answer. You’re going to Chicago!”

The band struck up a congratulatory tune. The caller might even have shrieked a little with excitement. And then Tubridy’s face plummeted.

“Actually, it’s the wrong answer. You’re not going to Chicago…”

The band stopped playing.

Tubridy apologised repeatedly and promised a consolation prize of some sort, and then asked the next caller for the answer and gave the prize to her. All the while, he looked like a man who wanted to run away and never, ever be found.

It was excruciating, and a reminder of the horrible dangers of live television and what it can be like to have a bad day in the office watched by over half a million people. But at least it means that those terrible movie-pastiche promos are no longer the most embarrassing thing about the show.

Saturday’s show has not been posted on the Tubridy show website yet. Will it ever be?

I won’t be posting again until Monday October 8th, but comments will be updated. Until then, here is…

1) A look at future episodes of RTE’s The English Class. After its opening episode, here’s the big question: is it funny in any language?

2) A review of British half-man/half-monkey mini-series First Born, shown 19 years ago and almost forgotten until the Sci-Fi channel reached the bottom of its barrel.

3) A look at those ads for the Dublin Theatre Festival. “What will you think?” Oddly, not one thinks: “I wish I’d gone to the movies instead.”

4) A little light music

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