United 93

It’s the end of a fine hot day in Dublin. I went to see “United 93”, the Paul Greengrass movie about 9/11. It was very hard to watch, although it was extremely well done. I kept looking at the people sitting around me. There we were, a coincidental group gathered together by chance and by the fact that we all decided independently to go see this movie on a hot June evening. I’ve always been intrigued by pictures of people thrown together by chance. They are in the background of all our holiday snaps. Other people, there in that spot that you travelled to. Your companions for a moment in real time. Your eternal companions in the photo frame. It’s only when disparate groups are caught in some disaster that we look closely at them and see them merge in one big Munch like terror scream. As it was for the group who travelled on flight 93 that fine September morning in 2001. I was interested to see how the director would show Mark Bingham, a gay man who was one of people who tried to regain control of the plane that morning. His sexuality wasn’t mentioned, but I have read that the director did film a scene where he kissed his boyfriend goodbye in the airport before getting on the plane. Apparently, they dropped all the airport scenes because the weather in Newark airport was very bad the day they filmed there, in contrast to the reality of that fine September morning. Anyway, it’s a very strong and terrifying piece of work.

Surprise

Listening a lot at the moment to the new CD from Paul Simon. It's very good. Something great about the fact that someone older than me can still come up with the goods! Makes me feel things are still possible. Brings me back and forward too.

mistakes

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

macho greens

There was something a little bit creepy about Green Party TD John Gormley’s jeering about Bertie’s Ahern’s make up in the Dail today. His “queen of Drumcondra” jibe wasn’t one bit funny. He sounded like some sort of green macho boot boy, especially when he started on about DeValera turning in his grave at the thought of all this. For all their talk about equality there always was this ugly streak of machismo in the left. Their God is Castro. No make up there. I never really trusted anyone with a beard. Strangely, make up can be very revealing and truthful.

Good Advice

came across this list on Hugh Mcleod's site:

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

13. Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside.

14. Dying young is overrated.

15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

16. The world is changing.

17. Merit can be bought. Passion can't.

18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.

19. Sing in your own voice.

20. The choice of media is irrelevant.

21. Selling out is harder than it looks.

22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

23. Worrying about "Commercial vs. Artistic" is a complete waste of time.

24. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.

25. You have to find your own schtick.

26. Write from the heart.

27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

28. Power is never given. Power is taken.

29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.

30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

Better dead than............?

the arresting Damien Hirst designed front page of today's London Independent newspaper. Edited by Bono.

the minister for snow

Michael O Leary, former Irish government minister is dead at 70. “drowned in a swimming pool yesterday evening, and is to be buried in France” says the reports. Its strange , or maybe it isn’t, how certain politicians bring to mind stages in our lives. For me, Micheal O Leary is the early 1980s when I was a young man just about to move to Dublin. He is the “minister for snow” in the first months of 1982. Ireland had a rare prolonged snowfall and of course we were totally unprepared for it. A sort of a state of emergency was declared with Michael O Leary as the unofficial “minister for snow” I can still his face on the nine o clock news declaring that things were under control as the snow fell deep and crisp and even. He was a handsome man who obviously cared about his appearance in a time when most other Irish politicians looked like they fell into their clothes every morning.

Cybersexual Losers ?

a good piece in WIRED about The Myth of Cybersexual Losers

to blog or not to blog

in my continuing search for a reason for blogging I have come across another "anti" piece in the FT today. Not sure if I agree with a lot of it but I do love the images created in this last paragraph:

"And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

After the fall

NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Bulldozers rumbled into a giant pit on Thursday to begin building a new skyscraper to replace the World Trade Center in an act New York's governor said symbolized the city's comeback from the September 11 attacks."

and another one bites the dust!

And here’s another person who is giving up blogging! Sarah Helpola writing in Salon says :

One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I'd been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction—all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it.

In my other life I work as a writer, so this gives me pause for thought. God knows, the small amount of bogging I do doesn’t interfere too much with my work. In fact, I justify it to myself by thinking of it as a mental warm up exercise some mornings. There is a far more serious time waster for writers. Computers. And the internet. Much as I love them both I would not like to see the hours I spent sitting in front of my monitor added up. My first computer in the mid 1990s was an Amstrad PCW. I know that it barely qualifies for the term computer but to me it was a wonder. No more Tippex , no more cutting and pasting with scissors and sellotape. Think of all the saved hours! But the saved hours disappeared down the worm hole of cyberspace. Not that I’m complaining. I would never go back to harsh clicks of an electric typewriter. Images of smoke and the metal sounds of the industrial revolution came into my head there. We are in a transition period. Of a generation that knew the old ways, fascinated by the new but not yet able to make full use of it. I keep trying to use voice dictating programs but don’t stick with them, the mind to keyboard line is too ingrained. That’s just one example of not making the leap. There’s still time.

end of a blog

Russell Beattie whose blog I used to read, posted this today :



Well, I think it's time to put this weblog to bed.

Yep, after four years and almost 3,000 posts I've decided to close up the Notebook. There's lots of reasons, but generally this is a continuation of the full-reset I started back in January. At first I was actually thinking about just transitioning to a more of a weekly blog where I write less frequently and was sort of cleaning everything up with that in mind. But then I just decided that I really needed a break, and that I'd really much rather start from scratch at another URL some other time when I'm ready to write again. Lot less pressure that way to do something new later on, and a lot easier to get out of the habit of posting daily now.

This blog started out as a personal wiki, actually... Back in 2001 I decided to finally organize my personal web server into sections - so I had the Notebook, Scrapbook and Guestbook. I had stumbled onto Ward Cunningham's original WikiWiki earlier that year and thought, "Wow! That's a much easier way to maintain my site," and so I whipped up a wiki of my own using JSP and used it for the Notebook section. But within a few months, I discovered blogs, and realized that was a much better way to do it. It took a while to really get into it - after trying a few other systems including Radio and Blogger, I finally converted my wiki software into my own personal blog system in May 2002 and started posting pretty much daily from that point on. Four years! It'll be weird to *not* be a blogger any more, I have to admit, but despite how good blogging has been for my life, it's time to move on.

If you've just stumbled onto this post in the months and years ahead, and are reading this now wondering who the hell I am and what I am talking about, feel free to roam through the archives and discover for yourself. For the rest of my readers, thanks for subscribing it's been great having you there to write for! Now please *unsubscribe* and give my poor server a break. :-)

Thanks!

-Russ

I'll miss reading his blog which was always good clear and thoughtful.

don't bring the boys into town....

I took this picture on the LUAS on my way to Easter Sunday dinner at my sister's house yesterday. A poster of the 1916 proclamation advertising an exhibition in the national museum. I watched part of the 1916 commemoration ceremony on the TV in the kitchen while the dinner was cooking. And here’s the weird thing, I found something moving about the lines of tanks and soldiers walking up O Connell Street! And this is me who really believes that it would have been better if 1916 never happened, that we really gained nothing only turning inwards and away from the world for a long time. I was very against reviving this parade. But watching it yesterday, I have to admit that the feeling that came across was one of safety, stability and security. Much better than the recent "riots" anyway. The “rememberance” tone of the thing made what happened seem a very long time ago, much longer than 90 years. Giving it the harmless status of a founding myth? I wonder how it looked to one of the foreign nationals now settling down in Ireland, with no memory or experience of living through the grey years that the rising made? Just soldiers marching and bands playing I guess, something that most people would have seen in their homelands. A solemn commemoration of, something. On RTE radio over the weekend the broadcaster Henry Kelly told a story about a member of his family who used to talk about 1916. I don’t remember the details of it but a line stuck in my mind. A relative of his talking to another member of his family on Easter Monday 1916 and saying “don’t bring the boys into town, there’s something happening at the post office.” Good line, and still good advice.

food for thought

I found this piece in today's New York Times strange, mildly disturbing and I have to admit full of wonder in the way that a good sci-fi plot fills me with wonder :

The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order

By MATT RICHTEL

SANTA MARIA, Calif. — Like many American teenagers, Julissa Vargas, 17, has a minimum-wage job in the fast-food industry — but hers has an unusual geographic reach.

"Would you like your Coke and orange juice medium or large?" Ms. Vargas said into her headset to an unseen woman who was ordering breakfast from a drive-through line. She did not neglect the small details —"You Must Ask for Condiments," a sign next to her computer terminal instructs — and wished the woman a wonderful day.

What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas's workplace here on California's central coast. She was at a McDonalds in Honolulu. And within a two-minute span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo.

Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, 150 miles from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald's outlets around the country. The orders are then sent back to the restaurants by Internet, to be filled a few yards from where they were placed. Read more here

interesting thought....

interesting line on Dave's Wordpress Blog:
"You need a village to raise a child, and you need an Internet to fully develop an idea."
not sure if either idea is fully true?

New York Times

Great redesign job on the New York Times web site

John McGahern

Sad to hear that the Irish writer John McGahern has just died.

Transamerica

Went to see the film “Transamerica” yesterday and enjoyed it a lot. A lot more than I thought I would to be honest. Listened a bit too much to the people who talked about the movie in terms of its calculated storyline. This film had humor and heart - and yes it has to be said a good dollop of Hollywood story archery. But it did its job and told its story well, made you feel it. Interesting too that its soundtrack is American country music something it shares with “Brokeback Mountain”. Another interesting feature of “Transamerica” is that it uses the type of song and lyric one would usually associate with the Christian right. It gives another whole new meaning to the term “born again” and this was probably the intention. A movie that’s braver and more original than might at first appear.

life on earth

just read this item, which puts us , our worries and our short little time spans in perspective:

KOLKATA, India -- A giant aldabra tortoise thought to be around 250 years old has died in the Kolkata zoo of liver failure, authorities said on Thursday.

The tortoise had been the pet of Robert Clive, the famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century, a local minister in West Bengal state said.

Local authorities say the tortoise, named "Addwaitya," meaning the "The One and Only" in Bengali, was the oldest tortoise in the world but they have not presented scientific proof to back up their claim.

"Historical records show he was a pet of British general Robert Clive of the East India Company and had spent several years in his sprawling estate before he was brought to the zoo about 130 years ago," West Bengal Forest Minister Jogesh Barman said.

"We have documents to prove that he was more than 150 years old, but we have pieced together other evidence like statements from authentic sources and it seems that he is more than 250 years old," he said.

The minister said details about Addwaitya's early life showed that British sailors had brought him from the Seychelles islands and presented him to Clive, who was rising fast in the East India Company's military hierarchy.

On Thursday, the tortoise's enclosure wore a deserted look.

"This is a sad day for us. We will miss him very much," a zoo keeper said.

Wild Aldabra tortoises are found in the Aldabra island in the Indian Ocean Seychelles islands. They average about 120 kg. It is believed that tortoises are the longest lived of all animals, with life spans often surpassing 100 years.

Can we be too Green?

Can we be too Green? interesting line of thought here about how "....humans should take off their hair shirts, and enjoy the lifestyles which progress has created.

i grew up in europe....

funny quote of the day from Eddie Izzard

"I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from."
- Eddie Izzard

Hope in TIME

this article, from this week's TIME magazine is one of the most hopeful and inspring pieces I have read in a long time. In the spirit of what it is about , I hope they don't mind me pasting it in full here :

The Next Big Thing Is Us
Big, bold ideas used to come from small groups of experts. Now they come from you as well. Here's our annual look at what's new and innovative--from politics to movies, medicine to fashion, sports to tech
By LEV GROSSMAN

It goes against everybody's inner cynic to read (or for that matter to write) a sentence like the following: We are on the verge of the greatest age of creativity and innovation the world has ever known. It smacks of treacly dotcomism. It smacks of I Love the '90s. My inner cynic is a tiny bit queasy right now. But lately it's a conclusion I've had a hard time avoiding. Consider the following idea. Things, broadly speaking, used to be invented by a small, shadowy élite. This mysterious group might be called the People Who Happened to Be in the Room at the Time. These people might have been engineers, or sitcom writers, or chefs. They were probably very nice and might have even been very, very smart. But however smart they were, they're almost certainly no match for a less élite but much, much larger group: All the People Outside the Room.

Historically, that latter group hasn't had much to do with innovation. These people buy and consume whatever gets invented inside the room, but that's it. The arrow points just the one way. Until now it's been kind of awkward getting them involved in the innovation process at all, because they're not getting paid; plus it's a pain to set up the conference call.

But that's changing. The authorship of innovation is shifting from the Few to the Many. Take as an example something called the open-source movement. The basic idea is that while most software is produced by the aforementioned People in the Room, open-source software is offered to the entire world as a collaborative project. Somebody posts a piece of software on the Internet and then throws the joint wide open. It's like American Idol for software. In the open-source model, innovation comes from hundreds of thousands of people, not just a handful of engineers and a six-pack of Code Red. One open-source program, the truly excellent Web browser Firefox, has been downloaded 150 million times. SourceForge.net a website that coordinates open-source work, is currently host to almost 15,000 projects. Internet behemoth AOL, which shares a corporate parent with this magazine, open-sourced its instant-messaging service just last week.

The idea that lots of people, potentially everybody, can be involved in the process of innovation is both obvious and utterly transformative, and once you look for examples you start seeing them everywhere. When Apple launched iTunes and the iPod it had no idea that podcasting would be a big deal. It took the rest of us to tell Apple what its product was for. Companies as diverse as Lego, Ikea and BMW are getting in on this action. And it exists in the cultural realm too. Look at websites like YouTube, or Google Video. Anybody anywhere can upload his or her little three-minute movies, and the best ones bubble to the top. Who knows what unheralded, unagented Soderbergh will come crawling out of that primordial tide pool? Granted, some of the movies are of people falling off jungle gyms. But some of them are brilliant. Some of them are both.

Two things make this kind of innovation possible, one obvious and one not. The obvious one is--say it with me--the Internet. The other one, the surprising one, is a curious phenomenon you could call intellectual altruism. It turns out that given the opportunity, people will donate their time and brainpower to make the world better. There's an online encyclopedia called Wikipedia written entirely by anonymous experts donating their expertise. It has the unevenness you'd expect from anything that's user-created and user-edited, but it's still the most useful reference resource anywhere on- or off-line; earlier this month Wikipedia posted its 1 millionth article.

You would think corporations would be falling all over themselves to make money off this new resource: a cheap R&D lab the approximate size of the earth's online population. In fact, they have been slow to embrace it. Admittedly, it's counterintuitive: until now the value of a piece of intellectual property has been defined by how few people possess it. In the future the value will be defined by how many people possess it. You could even imagine a future in which companies scrapped their R&D departments entirely and simply proposed questions for the global collective intelligence to mull. All that creative types like myself would have to do is sit back and harvest free, brilliant ideas from the brains of billions. Now that's an idea my inner cynic can get behind.

Great Men

Nancy Banks-Smith reviewing the Kenneth Williams biopic which was on BBC 4 television last night says : “Fantabulosa! was a drama about his (Williams) undramatic private life. It was based on Williams' lacerating diaries. He is one of the great diarists. Great diarists are never great men.” Is this true? And does this make me a great man? (since my diary is fairly pedestrian) Very annoyed with myself that I forgot to watch “Fantabulosa”, but I’m sure it will be repeated as everything is on BBC 4

Oh to be in America tonight where the last season of "The Sopranos" starts on HBO!

Voltaire on Blogging?

quote of the day comes from Voltaire:

"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."
- Voltaire

wonder what he'd make of the fact that a new blog is created every second?

Future Me

I’ve always liked the idea of FUTURE ME. It’s one of those very simple ideas that goes deep. You write an e-mail to yourself to be delivered at some date in the future. This could delve as deep as Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” or simple as a “to do” note yourself. It’s great fun to read the public entries. Here’s a random entry:

Dear FutureMe,
Are you out celebrating with your friends or are you stuck at home watching tv while sitting on the couch wishing you were out with your friends? So, it's 2009, the year you're going to graduate from high school and finally go to college! YAY! Well, I hope you are having a good New Years Day. You'll probably get this on the 1st, rather than the 31st because it doesn't set the particular time to send it. And plus, what the hell would I be doing at 12AM on the internet on New Year's Day. So, have you sent in your applications for colleges and scholarships? Are you on your way to being valedictorian? Are you still popular because I bet by now, people have seen your competitive side and knows you act like a bitch when you do stuff like that. Hopefully, not because I'm working on that attitude now. Are the parents still on your case and vice versa? Any boyfriends? Are you still friends with the Melissa, Kalyn, and Denise? If so, are ya'll crazy as ever since it's senior year? What about a job? Please tell me I got one and got some new clothes!!! God... how about the SAT and ACT? High scores or average? Did I find the college I wanted to go to. Well, anyways, I just wanted to say have a fun (not boring) New Year's Day!

(written Tue Dec 27, 2005, to be delivered Thu Jan 1, 2009)

secret of life

Good Quote of the day today:

"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well."
- Horace Walpole

Good Night and Good Luck

So I finally got to see “Good Night and Good Luck” yesterday afternoon. While I enjoyed it I wasn’t as fond of it as I thought I would be. I agreed with its view point and purpose but I thought it lacked feeling somehow. It was made in black and white which looked great, I just wish the screenplay itself had a bit more colour in it. Like the Johnny Cash movie, I was fascinated once again by 1950s America. Add McCarthy to that weird soup. There was so much hysteria around, good and bad. The word Atomic kept coming into my mind. Everyone (apart from the George Clooney character?) smoked in the movie. There was a fog of it all around. Cigarettes definitely worked better in black and white. I loved the interview with Liberace. Saying he would “settle down” when the right woman came along! Yes, we do live in better times. And yet, there was definitely something happening way back then…..

Rebel Rebel.

Predictably, the social commentators have jumped aboard the Dublin riot bandwagon. I think its utterly disgusting how this shower of “analysers” are always waiting to pounce and pronounce any sign of unrest as proof that society isn’t working. It’s like they spent their lives praying for a revolution.

There is something adolescent about it all. And many of these guys (most of them are guys) are no adolescents. Many of them are probably deluded enough to believe what they preach. A fantasy where the mob tears down the rotten state and starts again. In this fantasy, the mob , having destroyed the status quo will suddenly be transformed into a peace loving group living in harmony and sharing in the just society they have helped to establish. Yeah, right.

Cabana

During yesterday's Apple launch of the new apple boom box, Steve Jobs talked about it as being portable enough to take .".. out the cabana or the pool..” Lovely word , Cabana. Very pleasant word associations. Definitely designed in California. The boom box itself is , unfortunately, no new Apple icon design wise. The bigger you stretch white plastic the cheaper it begins to look?

after the deluge

Interesting piece on “Aaron’s” blog (http://icedcoffeeandabagel.blogspot.com/2006/02/digital-grandma.html) claiming that New Orleans may be fast becoming “…one of the most technologically advanced cities in the U.S.” Because the infrastructure was banjaxed it seems that everyone his gone wireless. Every cloud?

yesterday's kerfuffle

in relation to yesterday's kerfuffle, I though this photo caught it well :
(photo by : http://www.flickr.com/photos/o6scura/)

Ads by Google

Ads by Google can get it so wrong! Yesterday I wrote a piece about the riots in Dublin city center , placing the blame at the door of republican followers. Today, my “ads by Google” include a number of links to this murky world which I have spent my whole life steering clear of! How wrong can you be, dear word analyzing computer. So I guess the thing to do is put in some words that might steer you in the right direction? Shopping, entertainment, beaches, sunny days, music, good books, computers, sexuality, philosophy, evolution, the future. These are a few of my favourite things.

A Riot

There was a riot in Dublin City Center today, where it not for the fact that I got a text from my sister I’d probably be in the middle of it as I was thinking of going in to see the movie “Good Night and Good Luck” The Unionists had come down to hold a protest march and republican supporters had organised a protest. It soon got out of control and the eager and angry young men who are always plentiful at such events started burning looting and robbing. Days like this, you’d just wish the whole lot of them would melt away back into the past, where they live in their heads anyway. It’s such a rotten cauldron, that Northern mix of fascist republicanism and Unionist bigots. And the Irish government is talking about holding an Easter rising military commemoration in April, God when will they get into their heads that this is the last thing we need? It’s no coincidence that our fortunes started to change for the better when the Irish soccer team (led by an Englishman) where paraded down O Connell Street in mid 1990s. There was something new and forward looking about that. Guns at Easter, even if they are state guns, should be kept far away from O Connell Street. Are you listening Bertie, get a grip will you and cancel this parade back into the damp and dismal days.

ONENOTE

There is a piece of software made by Microsoft called ONENOTE that I have been using for some years. Apart from Photoshop, I think its my favourite application. I think that it was originally invented for the Tablet PC and I imagine it works very well on that platform – in fact I often considered buying a tablet PC just to use ONENOTE. I use it on a desktop PC and also on a Sony Vaio laptop. Beautiful, intuitive and practical aren’t words usually associated with Microsoft but beautiful, intuitive and practical is what ONENOTE is. And no, I have no connections whatsoever with Microsoft. It just occurred to me, that once in a while, we should speak up in praise of our favourite tools!

Walk the Line

Went to see the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” this afternoon. I saw the movie described somewhere as “sweet” and this describes it well – “sweet” in the best sense of that word. Complexities are ironed out leaving a clear well constructed plot line that is very enjoyable to watch. It’s only on reflection that one misses the complexities and the jagged edges of a real life. Joaquin Phoenix gives a great performance as does Reese Witherspoon. One thing that struck me watching it was the vitality of mid 1950s America. There was definitely something in the water over there at that time! To think of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and many more touring the country, playing blazing music in sleepy small towns – sounds that had not been heard in mainstreets or in mainstream before. And at the same time, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac – the beat generation were all howling away in the big cities. No wonder the era is still a touchstone that can still be raw and dazzling.

Dubai

There’s an article in today’s Guardian about the city of Dubai. It’s really worth reading for a view of a possible and unforeseen future.
(http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1708395,00.html) The biggest city ever constructed is rising out the sands of the middle east. With a strange web of influences as its bone structure, its skin is pure Disneyland with Pharaoh and Aztec pigmentation . Something about the project also reminds me of the online world “Second Life” A world based on history and the human imagination, nothing startlingly new about it but using borrowed ideas and images to make a gigantic mirror of the way we were as a civilisation. But a mirror where hundreds of thousands of people can live. The muslim culture of the middle east is a strange anchor for such a venture, especially in the times we live in. With much of Islam obsessed with the medieval it’s a shock to see a part of that world engaged in this venture. The article made me want to visit Dubai. The article’s closing paragraph asks whether “…Dubai, (is) in fact, the fulcrum of the future global trading and financial system? Is it, in embryo, what London was to the 19th century and Manhattan to the 20th? Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.” The continuing story of the new world?

light evening

Every year around this time there comes an evening that startles you with its brightness and allows you to eat dinner in daylight again. That was today, my empty dinner plate on the table at 5.23pm, still daylight outside.

THE ABBASID CALIPHS

this was one of the best radio programmes I have listened to in a long while. Really worth the download! What tangled webs we weave to make sense of our place in the cosmos.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

2001 comes around at last...

I just read this report in the Moscow Times :

A spacesuit tossed out of the international space station was supposed to float through space, talking to radio operators around the globe.

The suit, stuffed with old clothes and a radio transmitter, orbited Earth twice on Friday, giving off faint signals to Japan. But then the suit, called Ivan Ivanovich, apparently went silent.

"It may have ceased operating very shortly after its deployment," said NASA spokesman Rob Navias.

Navias speculated that the suit's batteries might have become too cold.

The Russian Orlan spacesuit, stuffed with rags and other trash, was released early Saturday Moscow time.

It looked like an astronaut tumbling helplessly 350 kilometers above the central Pacific Ocean, beginning a gentle downward spiral that will end in four to seven months when it incinerates in Earth's atmosphere.

Its transmitter was to broadcast a limited lineup: First an announcement via voice synthesizer that said, "This is SuitSat-1, RSORS," followed by greetings in English, French, Japanese, Russian, German and Spanish with "special words" for students to decode.

Then SuitSat was to relay its vital signs in English -- temperature, available battery power, the elapsed time of the mission.

The whole thing was to take 30 seconds, after which SuitSat was to rest 30 seconds and broadcast again.

SuitSat arose in late 2004 as the brainchild of the Russian space station team and the Space Radio Amateur Satellite Corp., a nonprofit that promotes education and amateur radio satellites.

Unlike the United States, which recycles its spacesuits, the Russians use Orlans for about two years and then discard them.

The Russians suggested a variation on this theme: Why not hook up radio gear to an old suit, toss it into space and make a satellite out of it?

International space station commander William McArthur and flight engineer Valery Tokarev began the second spacewalk of their six-month stay aboard the space station at 1:44 a.m. on Saturday.

Its primary purpose was to secure a cable cutter on the mobile transporter that moves the station's robot crane.

But first they had to get rid of SuitSat. The old spacesuit, weighing several hundred kilograms, had last been used by NASA astronaut Michael Foale during an August 2004 spacewalk.

On Friday, a radio antenna poked out the top of the backpack.

The idea of a quick departure was apparently a good one, for SuitSat first got in the way of closing the airlock door, then balked at being wrestled into position.

Finally, with video cameras recording the event, it was gone.

"Wonderful picture, Valery," mission control said. "Thank you very much."

The New World

Went to see Terrance Mallick’s film “The New World” this afternoon. Enjoyed it a lot. There’s something kinetic about his style of movie making that appeals to my brain. Something in the way that he uses cuts, fades and music that adds up. It makes sense and is almost mildly hallucinogenic, for me anyway. I loved the scene where the Pocahontas character arrives in London towards the end of the film. You experience the sensation of what she sees, the buildings, the strange shapes that the human mind have made. This is for her “the new world”. And maybe at its core this is what the film is about. That our quest for change is unstoppable. That whatever order lies at the heart of things depends on this flux. . It’s a good love story too, not in the “Brokeback Mountain” league, but then I don’t expect anything will for a while. A fine movie though.

Dublin Skyline

The snow that has been falling over most of Northern Europe hasn’t reached Ireland yet. It’s getting colder though. I took this picture of the skyline from my window this morning. Portentous?

the way we were

I Just watched a TV programme on BBC about genealogy. During the last number of weeks they have had well known people tracing back through their family tree. Tonight they had the actor Stephen Fry who traced his family on his mother’s side back to Slovakia. Being European Jews, living where they lived in the last century, it was no surprise to find that members of his family perished in the concentration camps. No surprise but raw every time it is revealed again. I went to the BBC web site to find out a bit more about the programme and found they have a section of the site showing people’s family photos, with an open invite to anyone to send in JPEGs. Here’s the link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/your_history/your_photos/ Browsing the photos I came across a photo of a woman taken in Suffolk in 1955. Ester Everitt in her sweet shop.

With this description: “An interior view of an old fashioned sweetshop, showing the owner (my grandmother) Esther Everitt in the mid 1950s. The shop sold a large selection of wrapped and loose sweets which were sold by weight, usually weighed in 2oz or 4oz paper bags. Alongside the open boxes of sweets, chicken feed, corn and meal were also sold, sometimes making the sweets a little dusty at times, but I lived to tell the tale having had many free samples in my time. A black manx cat always sat on the doorstep. The shop closed in the late 1950s.” The photo was send in by C Everitt.

farewell jewel cases

Last night of Christmas. Spent most of the day taking audio CDs out of their jewel cases and putting them into folders for easier storage. I hardly ever use them nowdays as I have most of them on my ipod. Now, I only remember my old CDs when a song I haven’t heard in a while comes up on shuffle! How quickly we have become digital. I couldn’t imagine myself doing this years ago. I loved the shape and the look of CDs, and the artwork. Mind you, I am saving the sleeves and the artwork just in case I ever feel the need of buying jewel cases and putting them back on shelves again. I doubt it very much.

History

not sure if this is true?

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
- Voltaire

new year

Feel asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow last night – though I did listen to a little bit of Melvin Bragg and his panel talking about the “Oresteia”. Didn’t do much today. Went into town and bought a cookery book by Nigel Slater that was reduced down to €9 because it had two missing pages. I’ll probably never do much cooking from it, I just love reading the way he writes about food. Had a ciabatta roll and a coffee in “Insomnia” while reading a magazine that came with a part work of “Dad’s Army” that has just been released. Another British institution that I love. I must stop myself from collecting the “set” as part works hope you will do. At this stage of my life I need to start divesting myself of “collectables”

days between Christmas and new year

Always mean to do so much with these few days between Christmas and New Year. Plot some new course for the new year, come up with new ideas before the old year ends. But I always end up watching old movies on TV and going into town to see if there is anything in the sales I might need. That’s how I spent today. Didn’t buy anything, watched a bit of an old “Dad’s Army” movie on TV. I always loved the TV series but movies seemed to stretch the idea too much and exposed all its weak points.

March of the Penguins

Went to see the film “March of the Penguins” yesterday. I was sort of avoiding it because of the way it has been appropriated by the religious right in America for their own purposes. I thought it was an amazing piece of work, the film itself and also its subject. I knew nothing about the life of the Emperor Penguin and its harsh strange life. The creatures themselves are so strange to look at, so alien and so lifelike at the same time. Their existence and reproductive cycle seems so harsh and impractical and yet at the end of it all I would have to agree with the filmmaker and say that the emotion that comes through is something akin to what we call love. I know they are birds and that it can be dangerous and foolish to attribute human feelings to other species, but I suppose that’s the only way our own species can begin to make sense of the universe. I looked in awe at the whole thing, couldn’t even begin to find reasons. What Bertrand Russell once wrote comes to mind: “The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.”

my new ipod

I bought a new ipod recenty. Although my 3g one is still working perfectly, I couldn’t hold out any longer when I saw the new video 5g ipods. So I bought a 60GB black one. It’s absolutely beautiful and I don’t feel as guilty as I was expecting to - €450 for an ipod I didn’t! I’ve used the other one every day since the day I bought it nearly 3 years ago. I always tell myself I could have worse, and more expensive, habits and addictions?Here’s a photo I took of the ipod in my bag, with my M&S food . The sun was shining through the red Dixons bag, the photo reminds me of a rose in bloom when I look it from a distance!

Pavee Lackeen

Went to see the movie “Pavee Lackeen” this evening. Didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. It thought it would be too much in the “be nice to travellers” school of drama. Instead, it was more like looking at series of living photographs (it was made by the photographer Perry Ogden) tender in a realistic sort of way that ended up making me feel more human and humane in some way that I can’t put my finger on. I honestly think it was “art” in the best sense of that word.

excepting the dog

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.
- Maurice Maeterlinck

animals and middle age

Nuala O Faolain said this in an interview in the Irish Independent today:
"I hope I don't sound like some kind of crazed old English spinster but the fact is that animals are the great discovery of middle age. They have taught me about my parents' limitations. They had no spare heart for animals and for along time neither had I. I've felt more tender about that dog than I have about anything ever, and I know that sounds completely mad because she's only a dog. But it's true."

supervised burning

They had a parade and a “burning” in Smithfield Square this evening.It was a bit of street theatre with supervised burning of made up “baddie” effigies to try and appease the local kids who are not allowed by law to light their own private bonfires anymore. They could have made a bit more of it all, included some music maybe. There was a short deflated sense about it all. Still, let’s hope it full fills its objective.The use of colour filters on three of the Smithfield brazier lights was interesting, I think maybe they should leave them like that, take a bit of the clinical look off the place?

Happt Birthday LUAS!

The LUAS (Tallagh Red Line) is one year old today. Took this phone photo at Smithfield.

changes

and here's a picture of the new Guardian, taken from the blog site they are running. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/editors/
Can't wait to get my hands on the morning edition. I'm a net junkie but still a newsprint junkie too, especially when a change like this happens. After all, I'm a middle aged middle class European!

The Guardian

“The Guardian” newspaper published its final broadsheet edition today. It’s being published in a new format they call “the Berliner” from next Monday. I’ve been a fan of the paper for many years but recently find myself buying the “Independent” more often since it became a tabloid. Looking forward to seeing what the new format will look and feel like.

Skirmish

This photo is on thefront page of the Irish Times this morning. What they describe as a "skirmish" between Cork's Brendan O'Sullivan and with Kerry's Séamus Moynihan just before the end of the first half of the All-Ireland senior football semi final at Croke Park yesterday.

Stumbleupon

I installed an extension toolbar called “Stumbleupon” into Firefox this morning. It’s really good, gets you random pages on subjects you are interested in – it can be as wide or as narrow as you like. I’ve always liked the idea of randomness as there is always something in the back of my mind questioning the whole notion of randomness. And yet, for all its perfection, sometimes it seems that the whole of the cosmos is random. But then it can’t be, can it? Anyway, I just clicked on “stumbleupon” and up came this page : http://www.nokama.com/tao/index.cfm?fuseaction=chapter&ch=73

the home page came up and I randomly chose chapter 73 which was this :

Chapter 73

A brave and passionate man will kill or be killed.
A brave and calm man will always preserve life.
Of these two, which is good and which is harmful?
Some things are not favored by heaven.
Who knows why?
Even the sage is unsure of this.
The Tao of heaven does not strive, and yet it overcomes.
It does not speak, and yet is answered.
It does not ask, yet is supplied with all its needs.
It seems at ease, and yet it follows a plan.
Heaven's net casts wide.
Though its meshes are coarse, nothing slips through.

I like that line about the brave calm man. It’s a hard thing to do and to be, calm and brave.

Saved

Great photo in the papers today of two firemen saving a baby from a fire in a Dublin apartment building. The flip side of Edward Bond's old play, "Saved" is what came into my head for some reason.

Statue

A statue is to be erected in Dublin today in the memory of Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott

busy woman

I love this ad from the ESB in Dublin in the 1950s.

reminder 2 me

http://www.neatimage.com/

the demise of the dinosaurs

From today’s London Independent……..
Did double whammy of volcano and asteroid wipe out dinosaurs?
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 16 August 2005
Volcanic eruptions may have triggered the demise of the dinosaurs.
Many scientists believed that an asteroid caused the mass extinction 65 million years ago. However, a new study points to a more complex event that began with a series of eruptions which took place in what is now north-western India. The Deccan Traps in Maharashtra state are flows of lava resulting from huge outpourings of molten rock and ash. A mile deep, they cover about 200,000 square miles. Vulcanologists have long thought the eruption, dated to about 65 million years ago, could have caused the extinction.
However, the Deccan Traps resulted from a series of eruptions that occurred over perhaps a million years. This would have given the global climate plenty of time to adjust. But the study shows a major part of the eruption occurred over a short period.
Scientists from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Pariscalculated that at least 2,000ft of lava was deposited in 30,000 years, which could have greatly altered global climate. They have also shown that the Traps were erupting when the asteroid crashed into what is now Mexico. This was a spectacular and almost unprecedented double whammy for Earth.
Mike Widdowson, a vulcanologist, said it seems the end of the dinosaurs may have begun with climate change brought about by the eruptions and ended with the asteroid. "The eruptions pre-conditioned the global environment toward a catastrophic tipping point before the impact occurred. The asteroid was the coup de grâce," he said.

JAWS

JAWS

Steven Spielberg's groundbreaking film was released 30 years ago this summer.

There are times when I wish that my camera phone had a better lens and more pixels. It was very hot yesterday afternoon in Dublin. I went for something to eat and sat watching people coming and going on the bench a level down. I couldn�t have taken this photo with my Nikon D70, didn�t have it with me and even if I had I probably wouldn�t have used it in such a public place. I love the way this group of people sit there, together for a short time never to sit together on the same bench again. The four young guys, the young woman with her child, the old woman with the Dunnes Stores bag. I hope none of them mind being having this moment immortalised.

took this in Grafton Street today with my Nokia phone. Warm and sunny all day.

Apple goes Intel

So it’s true. Apple have just announced that they are switching to Intel chips in their machines. I think its an interesting move for all sorts of reasons. They obviously learned many lessons from the popularity of the ipod which exploded when it became possible to run itunes on a PC. I’m in a strange position here, my soul has always been Apple , I love the design of the OS system and the look of the machines but at the time I began buying computers I couldn’t even think of affording to buy a mac. That was back in the mid 1980s when the only computer I could afford was an Amstrad 8512.

Design wise, and every other wise I guess, it’s a machine that was a long way from the Apple Mac. I thought about it a lot while watching Alan Sugar in “The Apprentice” on BBC television recently. On the one hand, it was a machine that delayed my introduction to what might be considered “real” computers, but on the other hand it allowed me and thousands of others to ditch the typewriter. It was a cheap(ish) beige bridge to the world of computers for many writers. The next computer I could afford was Dell 486. From there on in, my files became too “Intelised”to consider making the move to Apple, even when I got to the position where I could afford it. And also, perhaps I never felt entirely comfortable with Apple’s claims to exclusivity and all that “think different” stuff. I think I appreciate the finer things in life as much as the next man, and by nature, sex , native language i am in a minority. I don’t have to think different, I am different. Ah but maybe this is all about having a bit of a go at Apple because I couldn’t afford their machines all those years ago? And I have to admit that I’m one of those sad people who, from time to time. use Windows Blinds to make my windows XP look like the Mac OS. But then, maybe that’s not so sad anymore, maybe us intel users with our XP transformed screens were just a bit ahead of the pack all along. Anyway, I think a lot of interesting stuff will arise out of this move by Apple today. My favourite piece of computing equipment today is an ipod. I am fascinated by machines and the way we interact with them, the interfaces and the icons we create to talk in binary. If Apple released a version of Tiger that I could install on my machine would I do it? Yes, definitely. But I think I’m too long with Windows now to completely abandon it, I’d at least look for a dual boot function and see where that took me. I still have that old Amstrad in an attic, and last time I looked it still worked. All in all, what a great journey we’re on in this human/machine mating game!

woody allen broke my ipod

I had a strange dream last night. I was making a movie somewhere, I was involved in the writing of it, and Woody Allen was there. He was the younger Woody Allen not the way he is today. Anyway, I had my iPod with me and he took it in his hand and looked at it.It fell to the floor and broke. I was full of sadness as I picked it up and looked at the cracked white face. Woody said that he would replace it immediately and he called to a young woman who came over holding a notebook and asking what my iPod cost. Woody told her to go out and buy me a new one right this minute. So I ended up really happy as we were working in America and I figured I would now have a brand-new American iPod at the end of it all!

The Denaissance

I loved this piece in the OBSERVER BLOG today , http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/

The Denaissance starts here

By Rafael Behr / Science 03:02pm

The blog was very taken with Peter Watson's comment piece in the newspaper yesterday asserting that the late 20th Century and beginning of the 21st have been poor for good new ideas.

We flatter ourselves to think that we live in interesting times, Watson suggests. In fact, we just live in hectic times. Not the same thing at all. He concludes:

The sheer lack of fundamental innovation now may explain the tenacity of traditional religion and why contemporary art seems so flat, banal and repetitive.

Apparently our times compare poorly to, for example, 1050-1250AD or 1750-1950AD -periods of real upheaval and intellectual ferment. It is an interesting thesis and one that deserves to be explored on the blog.

It is, we have decided, time for a new movement. Something to fire the imagination. A new school, like Romanticism or Modernism, that can be applied across the spectrum of human endeavour. But since we are not clever enough to come up with something entirely independent, we thought we might be able to cobble one together with some sticky-backed plastic, a few prefixes and suffixes and a little something from the intellectual dressing up cupboard.

And because it's Monday, and Monday is unofficial list day on the Observer blog, we thing we ought to present our results in that hallowed form. So here are ...

The top 10 new movements not yet invented but sure to rock the world in the 21st Century.

1. Denaissance - The undoing of the Renaissance. People reject all aspirations to emulate the cultural achievements of antiquity, or for that matter 16th Century Europe, and take refuge in blinkered Mediaeval certainty.

2. Neo-Luddism - Combining hostility to technology in the workplace as embodied in the apocryphal figure of Ned Ludd, but retaining it and worshipping it in the sphere of private life. So, for example, it is OK to have a mobile phone, but it is illegal for work to call you on it.

3. Obscurism - The inevitable backlash to our current obsession with celebrity. Complete anonymity will come to be regarded as the supreme moral virtue. Obscurist artists and writers will produce great works, but no-one will know about it.

4. Post-Ageism - Because of demographic changes in society, combined with constant vilification of young people in the media, old age becomes incredibly fashionable. Youth is despised and comes to be seen as physically repulsive. New plastic surgery techniques to artifically wrinkle skin become very popular.

5. Post-Conservatism - Conservatives realise that so much has gradually changed and evolved since they started being conservative that to get back to where they started they will have to become radical revolutionaries.

6. Masculism - Like Feminism, except instead of formulating a coherent analysis of the power structure in society the proponents just make lists of things in society they like and dislike the most.

7. Groucho-Marxism - Class struggle with a sense of humour.

8. Post-itism - A theory proposing that all worthwhile human endeavour is most accurately expressed on little yellow bits of paper with an adhesive strip on the back.

9. Neo-nlightism - A theory proposing that all worthwhile human endeavour is most accurately expressed in lurid coloured bright lights on Broadway. A schismatic movement focuses on Piccadilly Circus.

10. Schmism - A theory proposing that all worthwhile human endeavour is most accurately expressed by repeating key words and inserting 'schm' as the first syllable. For example: 'Shakespeare? schmakespeare!' 'Capitalism? schmapitalism!'

Went to see Edward Albee’s “The Goat” at the Project tonight. At first, and even about almost half way through I didn’t think much of it. I thought it looked like what it was, an old man trying in vain to write something as startling as his “Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” But then, almost at a turn - well it was during a speech made by the central played by Bryan Murray, I fell for it. And by the time Susan Fitzgerald , playing the wife, walked on stage carrying the bloodied head of the slain goat , I think that I too saw the goat through the eyes of the man who loved her. There’s been a lot of talk about what this play is saying, some of it from Albee himself, about whether its possible to do tragedy anymore etc. But what I will remember from the drama is that speech where the main character tries to describe the indescribable, what is like to look into the living eyes of another and see love there. How that moment can set you off on a road that may put you beyond the pale. And how impossible it is to explain or to justify the fall that may ensue. And yes, I think we can still do tragedy.

video days

Continuing my big Spring clean up, I tackled the living room yesterday. I unplugged the video recorder and put it into a cupboard. I hardly ever use it nowadays, I always watch DVDs and don’t really record any programmes off the TV anymore. I plan to get a DVD recorder later on this year, but I have reached the point of finally realizing that copying and storing programmes that I may never watch is a huge waste of time.
Still, unplugging the video was a big moment. Like the unplugged fax machine it had a short interesting life. I bought my first video recorder in the 1980s, it was actually stolen from my house – videos were expensive machines back then. We bought tapes and collected programmes like we were going to have them forever, the wonder of being able to go out for the night and have the video recorder tape the programme was the pinnacle of technology. It didn’t matter that you might never watch that taped programme, it was there – that was the thing. It demystified TV in some way and was the beginning of “lean forward” viewing and interactivity with mass media.

Bicycle Mark

I really like this picture of one man and his new computer. I came across it this morning on a blog site I sometimes read. Bicycle Mark describes his site as: “"The exaggerations of a Portuguese-American, radical, activist-journalist, pretend-academic, university employee, podcaster, blog fanatic, living in Amsterdam".” The photo shows him in bed with his brand new PowerMac G4, in love with a new machine. God, I know that feeling. Last January, while visiting LA I bought a Sony Vaio. I have a photo of myself in bed in my hotel room with my Vaio the morning after I bought it. Are we all mad or just evolving into something else?

O Comments

Not one single solitary person has left a comment on my site yet! This is not surprising; my blog is one of a million other blogs out there blogging about in cyberspace like a message in a bottle. Would a message in a bottle stand a better chance of being read? At least for a message in a bottle there is the chance someday of being washed ashore. Cyberspace, like the universe, just keeps expanding no shores in sight. Maybe there is a secret reader out there waiting with baited breath for my next note? After all, I visit many blogs and rarely leave comments. Too lazy, but I also have this feeling that I’m defacing them when I leave a comment. It was the same of course back in the 20th century when I was once a pen and ink letter writer. I used to love getting letters but didn’t look forward at all to sitting down and replying. Should I, dear reader, tell you more interesting and personal things about my life that might provoke you to comment? I could resort to the tricks of the trade to get my blog noticed. But why would I do that? Because we write to be read I suppose. But blogs are different, closely related to private diaries they have that same duality about them. The need to be private and the need to be exposed are two side of the same coin I think.

The Pope

The Pope is dead. Hard to think of his life without thinking about the past 26 years, the prime of my life and how his passing in some way signals the passing of those years. Despite the fact that he was never really a friend of me and my kind, I feel sadness at his passing. I also feel in some way that this is the real end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21^st.

Call Center

Saw this photo in the paper today. A call centre somewhere - India? And do you know what? no one looks sad or miserable in it.