RT╔'s often-excellent George Lee has been talking all week about a "V-shaped" recession - quick down, quick back up. By Wednesday's Tonight with Vincent Browne (RT╔ Radio Radio 1, Monday to Friday), his scepticism about what we can know about the future upside of the curve was to the fore; he speculated it might look a lot more like a U.
Around here, with our new-found status as one of the flagships of the Irish economic crisis, we'd be happy with the promise of an L. An upper-case L, please.
It was hard not to listen for straws this week, in clutch-mode. Listen (clutch), there's Vincent Browne saying, with a laugh, "RT╔ is far more likely to close down than The Irish Times". Of course, that's my straw to clutch; for more than a few readers of this column, that sentence will result in the loosening of a few crucial muscles. The best clutches were of the fantasy sort. Hey, imagine if I could have a new career working on archaeological digs. Studying the remains of prehistoric native settlements. In Alaska. Mmmmm, Alaska . . .
That clutch was courtesy of Heritage (BBC World Service, Thursday), a new four-part series in which Malcolm Billings visits far-flung archaeological sites. In Alaska, a team from the Smithsonian Institute has found artefacts from a series of seaside settlements on the rather remote and inhospitable coastline. What were people doing there? Why did they leave? Cool questions, some asked to a rainy, sub-Arctic soundtrack. But that was only after Billings had given us a surprise opening, visiting the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Anchorage, and telling us the fascinating and forgotten story of the 18th- and 19th-century Russian settlement of the south-west of what is now the second-most-ridiculous US state.
That was quite an ugly colonial episode. And the discovery of more than 1,000 of the ancient Alaskan sites has its more recent dark side: the clean-up after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill involved massive engineering works and rock-blasting. Inadvertently, these activities brought centuries-old, fjord-side native remains to light.
If such a background took some of the fantasy and romance out of Heritage, there remained, nonetheless, a sense of adventure. Billings clambered breathlessly through the stone and wood, then was carried by boat from one site to the next through icy, whale-filled waters, guided by trained eyes to the extraordinary clues left on the landscape by long-gone habitation. And he spoke with some of the young, culturally-bereft native Alaskans who were fascinated by the "really neat" prospect of learning more about their heritage.
We all have our own ideas about adventure. Alas, poor General Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) can't be "in-country" (he loves that 'Namspeak) with Bush's boys. But on Wednesday's show, he dropped a few daisy-cutters on those whingeing anti-Americans who have dared to question the War on Bad Guys.
Oh, let me tell you, Gerry was angry. It was mainly the Taliban's truly degrading treatment of women - Gerry's favourite gender - that had him so exercised, and rightly so: distressed callers who had watched Tuesday's Dispatches documentary joined him in outrage. Gerry's vernacular conclusion: we gotta take these Taliban guys out.
As of this column going to press, Gerry had yet to secure an interview with an Afghan woman in which she says: "Good morning, Gerry. Please rescue me and my children from this barbaric treatment by dropping bombs on our country, destroying hospitals and food depots and cutting off the flow of humanitarian aid so that thousands of us die. And, oh yes, while you're at it, please ensure that the Northern Alliance, with their documented record of systematic rape, are the front-line troops of our liberation." But it can only be a matter of time before she's on the Ryanline.
In the meantime, Gerry's trigger finger was so itchy that he pleaded for some anti-war callers for target practice. He let one on the air, and Susie struggled to make some points about addressing the Middle-East context for this conflict and finding alternatives to bombing. As she edged close to some telling arguments, Gerry couldn't take it any more.
You can't talk to the Taliban, he cried. "Susie, they hate you." In case she hadn't got his point, and to make sure she couldn't make hers, Gerry talked across her: "Susie, they hate you. Susie, they hate you. Susie, they hate you . . ."
The monotonous subject of the Taliban's antipathy to Susie - who by this stage must have been wondering when Gerry was going to slip an "I" in place of "they" - took Gerry up to the news headlines. But he magnanimously let her back on after the hour, when he allowed two more callers to have a go at her. After another 10 minutes of lopsided argument, Gerry wrapped up proceedings with a paean to the wonders of a democracy like ours, where open and vigorous debate thrives on the airwaves.
Gerry, me boy, if you think that's democracy, there was a mayoral election in New York this week that I think you'll enjoy hearing about. There's this guy Mike Bloomberg, see, who made a bomb (sorry, Gerry, just an expression this time) by cornering the market, as it were, on computerised bond-trading data. That was nice, but Mike liked his own name a lot, so he decided to set up a vanity media conglomerate so he could hear his name all the time on the radio and see it on TV. That got old, too, and Mike told friends he wanted a new title to go in front of his name, picked from the following: US president, UN secretary-general, World Bank president or New York mayor.
Mike's budget, for the moment, only ran to mayor. But what a budget. He ploughed millions of his company's dollars into advertising his radio station, which just happened to mean plastering New York with his name. Then he decided to bypass the city's election-finance laws entirely and put at least $60 million of his personal fortune (chump-change to Mike) directly into his campaign, so his name was all over every radio and TV station, not just his own. He outspent his rival several times over, and slickly and viciously to boot. As a result, the most desperately in-need city in the Western world now has a mayor it doesn't know, who has never spent a minute in public service, whose life is one long tribute to his devotion to Mike Bloomberg.
Go on, Gerry. Talk to Mike. He'll like your style.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie