Blowin' In The Wind

So, Ireland, then...

It all seemed like such a daft but doable idea at the time: Eamon wanted to go and watch the last Finn Harps match of the season and if anyone wanted to come along, they could.

Nine others, including me, said it might be fun. So arrangements were made, flights were booked and money handed over.

I think the original idea, by the way, was that the Harps might have been in contention for promotion from League 2, as it was, they were in contention for fifth place rather than sixth. Nobody cared much about this, but perhaps it was a premonition.

The journey to Ireland was almost entirely without incident. Everyone turned up on-time and there were no roadworks or other delays —no shipwrecks and nobody drownded, nothing to laugh at at all— and we were in Stansted before we knew it. The couple of breakfast beers in Salzburg Airport helped here, as I think I read about two lines of my book before dropping off.

At Salzburg I had noted how one or two of our fellow travellers had a funny idea about hand luggage, and exactly what was needed for a weekend of Guinness drinking, but the Airport staff had been quite accomodating and not too inclined to fuss if one or two of the group had packed for a month in the Antarctic. Apparently a laptop computer is an absolute essential for both an Antarctic expedition and a weekend on the piss in Ireland. Who knew?

I also noted that Harmony from Angel was in this month's Playboy and it would go very well with my Cordelia edition...

The staff at Stansted were not so accomodating. The whole idea of just hand luggage was that we could breeze through the airport and leave the time that would normally be used waiting for your luggage to turn up for the more important things. Like drinking. Stansted employees were deaf to our alcoholism. Still, it wasn't too bad, only a couple of us needed to check in our bags and Derry airport, we just knew, was going to be a Nissen hut by the side of a runway. That just left 5 hours in Stansted and not much else to to besides drink Guinness and eat as many things containing bacon as possible. It was all so easy...

More later.

Brings A Tear To The Eye

This has been across the 'Net and back -- I've been in Ireland over the weekend is my excuse, about which more later -- , but just in case you haven't seen it, there's that weird bank person doing a parody of U2's One and David Cross doing a faithful cover of it over at WFMU.

At least, I think it's faithful cover, I tried to listen to the corporate bloke but I couldn't last more than about 30 seconds before cringing in embarassment for him and having to make it stop.

Dictionary Updates

It seems the Guardian is giving David Thomson space every couple of weeks to update his Biographical Dictionary of Film. So far he's done Will Ferrell and Christopher Nolan.

I get the sense that with both of them he has slightly less to say than write, not that he doesn't fill up the column well, but one of the delights of the BDF was that Thomson could sum up careers in a few careful sentences. Here, though, he may have had to write more about Nolan and Ferrell than you feel they are worth.

Still, it's a column to keep your eye on.

Tom Tom Club

Tom Robinson listens to Tom Waits' new album and finds it hard work. He also steals Ten-Bob Dylan's headline.

I think, though, Tom has it wrong. Orphans seems to be an album made up of things from Tom's vault, songs he probably spent much time crafting but didn't have an album to give them a home on. I don't think it's meant to be listened all in one go, or even an album at a time. It seems to be made to put your mp3 player and lost in the shuffle, the occassional Waits track that you've never heard before showing up and giving you pause to listen. That's how I'm going to do it anyway....

Outlining All My Chins Was Humbling

A while ago somewhere I followed a link that gave you a tutorial on how to turn a picture of someone into a pop-art style pic.

Having no time what-so-ever, but being a narcissist I tried on a photo of me. I didn't work out great, so I tried again with a something I had on my hard-drive of Eamon from the Irish pub...

That worked a bit better, but it's not something I'm showing the Internet until I've tried again. So I went back to my favourite subject, me! And tried again, I think this one worked out just fine:

That's Brand Awareness

The Guardian in saying goodbye to an American senator, Rick Santorum, -- "that accident has now been corrected" -- end the article with the words "Santorum has been flushed away". It's a pity FailedPenalty in the comments felt that he had to include the link that explained why this was so sly.

Reasons I Don't Understand America Part 10

Actually, I completely understand Fox News running this headline: No Matter the Results, the Election Will Change Little. I just don't understand why anybody would give any credence to anything Fox News ever said.

Of Course, No-one Saw This Coming

Health drive puts pupils off school meals. That's right. Kids don't want healthy eating and they certainly don't want Jamie Oliver ramming it down their throat.

Big Brother Is Watching You Watch Big Brother

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Texting As Spelling Reform

Over at Comment Is Free Simon Jenkins has decided that illiterate teenagers are leading the way to streamlining the English language, or something...

It is plain silly to regard doughnut as "better" than donut. The same goes for alternatives to night, through, colour and wholesome. When the great Noah Webster invented American spelling after independence, he left British English immured in bigotry. He chided "even well-bred people and scholars for surrendering their right of private judgment to literary governors". To Americans, spelling reform was the sovereignty of common sense. For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar and, worst of all, American.

And, well, it gets sillier:

Spelling is the last fig leaf of empire, the last bastion of nanny (or Lynne Truss) knows best. It is stuck in the tramlines of the past, and nobody thinks straight on the subject.

Before going totally bonkers:

Can texting finally spur revolution? Young people have evolved both a new script and a cost-effective reason for using it. They are breaking free of spelling dogma and expanding the alphabet with emoticons.

Emoticons are curse on the internet. If you can't imply "tone of voice" with your writing adding random punctuation at the end of a sentence rarely helps. In my experience it often used some thing like this "You wanker :-)" as if smiling about being openly insulting somehow makes it OK. Far from clarifying a text they tend to obfuscate it, making the text harder to read and adding information about the authors intent that is at best weaselly.