Man Flu, Potatoes and Me.

I have the Flu. Not the Swine Flu, not the Bird Flu, just the ordinary common or garden Man Flu.

Catching it was somewhat inevitable seeing as how The Very Understanding Girlfriend was herself similarly inflicted some days ago, and all the handwashing in the world was thus highly unlikely to protect me from its mucousy tendrils of infection. Despite the crushing predictability of succumbing to this illness I still greeted the appearance of its first symptoms with a sense of personal disappointment and a growing rage at the injustice of it all.

I am not a bad patient, just an impatient patient. I am no good at lying around in bed or on the couch waiting to get better, I lost the ability to vegetate in front of the television many years ago and now just find the whole day-time viewing experience akin to mummification from the en-mummied's perspective wherein my brain is slowly removed through my nose with a long none-too-sterilized implement that is the unloved offspring of a knitting needle and the bit on a Swiss Army knife theoretically used to remove stones from a horse's hoof.

Thus I have been pacing feverishly back and forth through the house, a phlegmy bundle of nervous energy unable to settle into anything and, frustrated at this sorry state of affairs, looking for someone or something to blame. After much list making and the consultation of almost two peer-reviewed journals, and despite the fact that I have nothing more sinister than Man Flu, I have decided to blame meat-eaters.

That's right burger-lovers, my misery is all your fault.

Despite being a member of a nation who until relatively recent historical times considered a live pig to be the pinnacle of domestic central heating technology, the way in which animals are housed in modern farming environments has always appalled me. One does not need to have read Michael Pollan's 'Omnivore's Dilemma' to know that battery farms are probably not the most hygienic of places and the sheer scale of antibiotics pumped into most confined animals simply to keep them alive long enough to be fattened up and slaughtered for our gastronomical delectation is staggering. And yet in spite of these industrial-scale pharmacological solutions infections do arise and cross over into the human biosystem with alarming regularity.

On the other hand one does not seem to hear of Potato Flu. No ominous Fox News segments have ever been given over to the liberal-like spread of Turnip Flu from South, West, East or even North of the border (damn those turnip-loving freedom-hating Canucks and their root vegetables of doom) and the death and depravity it brings. No matter how many beetroots one stores in dark and airless sheds, never able to feel the wind in their roots or see the blue skies above, stalks mercilessly trimmed to allow even more to be piled into the same confined spaces, no matter how inhumane the conditions they are kept in it is virtually impossible to catch the flu from them.

And yet by dint of our common humanity, anything that crosses over into my meat-farming counterparts is also easily transmittable to me. As a vegetarian I have not tasted pork in over nine years, yet thanks to thoughtless and uncaring meatetarians I am at risk of Swine Flu. I have not consumed chicken, turkey, duck, goose, pigeon, partridge, squab, grouse, pheasant, ostrich or swan in a decade, yet am just as subject to the ravages of Bird Flu as if I was an officer and a gentleman in the continental army of Colonel Saunders himself. On a daily basis my life and health is put at risk to suit the carnivorous blood-lust of my atavistic friends and family, whose self-centered dietary choices threaten my very existence through the hidden consequences of what I shall call second-hand meat.

And while my own malaise might be of the strictly Homo Sapiens variety, so enraged by the unthinking selfishness of my steak-savouring species was I that for a time yesterday I contemplated a daring break-in at the Dublin petting zoo, wherein I would violently sneeze upon the pot-bellied pig and cockatoo and thus transfer my Man Flu to them in a viral Circle of Life. While the resulting Man-Pig-Bird Flu would travel the globe and wipe out almost all of humanity, the survivors would understand the true cost of second-hand meat and a glorious Vegetarian Age would rise from the smoky and slightly succulent ashes.

While my apocalyptic vision is truly worthy of a vegan Emmerich, it is unlikely to come to pass as in my weak and enfeebled state I have been unable to summon the energy to leave the house, let alone make it to the Phoenix Park. Bedsides, it is really windy and rainy outside, no doubt all the pot-bellied pigs and the cockatoos are bundled up safe and warm inside, watching daytime TV.

I mean, who else could they be making Dr Phil for?

A long post about nothing

Yesterday, of course, was Thanksgiving in America, their national holiday that has something to do with giving small-pox infected blankets and syphilis to the indigenous peoples whose land they stole, while making them pay beads, shells and other wampum for the privilege of being conquered. In the pilgrims' defense, the indigenous folk almost certainly had weapons of mass destruction, oil, or just hated freedom (specifically, their own). In return the indigenous peoples gave the non-Native Americans High Fructose Corn Syrup and tobacco which between them kill almost 750,000 Americans each and every year. Slow and steady wins the race I say.

While living in the States the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I would host a Thanksgiving dinner each year, taking in the waifs and strays amongst our American friends who somehow didn't make it home to their folks for the holiday, along with a plethora of bemused Europeans who couldn't quite understand what candied yams were (I operate a strict 'don't ask/don't tell' policy about the presence of hoof-and-bone based confectionery in today's modern savoury dish). Being vegetarians the pièce de résistance of our festive spread was a yummy tofurky, which further added to the confusion amongst our fellow Europeans ("Mon Dieu, what is zis abomination?" they would surely have said in a comical Clouseau-esque accent had they been French) and pushed us dangerously close to Syria on the mental Axis of Evil recognition card our American friends constantly judged us against.

Alas since returning to the enlightened but ultimately irrelevant shores of Old Europe our celebration of this most festive of occasions has fallen by the wayside, though occasionally I try and recapture the Thanksgiving spirit by going home to my parents and having a massive argument. While the holiday itself is something uniquely American (and by unique I mean "also happens in Canada, though earlier, and almost certainly involves Death Panels"), the orgy of unfettered consumerism that immediately follows, known as "Black Friday" in memory of the great plague that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages, has spread Swine Flu-like to these noble shores via those dastardly internet tubes.

Apparently the biggest shopping day of the year in the US and the official start of the Festivus season, my inbox this morning is clogged with the flotspam and jetspam of a thousand merchants all exhorting me to buy, buy, buy because these are once in a life-time offers (presumably because either the world is going to end tomorrow, or I am; either way it is unlikely that anything I buy online today will be shipped to me before such an untimely demise so really this is not the most effective ad campaign I have seen, unless they were selling discounted indulgences, where shipping would not be so much of an issue).

This post-cranberry-and-turkey consumer Armageddon is, alas, not a new phenomena, and I read with some interest in BoingBoing (damn you all to hell Cory Doctorow) that Thanksgiving itself has been somewhat of a movable feast, subject to the unforgiving winds of capitalism. The holiday was held on the last Thursday of November every year until 1939 when the Retail Dry Goods Association petitioned President Roosevelt to move the holiday forward to give Christmas sales a boost by having a longer shopping period, which he did. There is nothing more sacred in America than the almighty dollar, everything else it seems is negotiable, even its foundation myths.

The converse to this story is also contained in a recent BoingBoing post (damn you all to hell Cory Doctorow), describing how even into the 1930's Thanksgiving was celebrated like the harvest festival it really was, wherein children would dress up in costumes and wander door-to-door begging for money. The fact that the country was in the grips of the worst depression it had ever experienced no doubt also contributed somewhat. The media of the day decried this custom and led a campaign to stamp out this tradition of poor people knocking on your door and embarrassing you into giving them money, and so by the 1940's the custom that had been part of Thanksgiving since the 18th century had died off.

Only to be replaced almost immediately by the stolen and warped Irish festival of Halloween wherein children would dress up in costumes and wander door-to-door begging for store-bought confectionery. See, the trouble with Thanksgiving Masking, as it was called, was that money passed directly from the householder to the begging child, with no intermediary in between, which is very un-American. To make it a real holiday some unassociated third-party needs to be able to make money on a private act of charity between two individuals, otherwise its socialism.

But despite this unfettered consumerism, or rather, because of this unfettered consumerism, some folks choose to take a stand on this most High Holy of Capitalism's Holy Days (of which there are quite a few). Introduced to a wider audience by the veteran Canadian anti-consumer magazine AdBusters, 'Buy Nothing Day' is celebrated today in the US and Canada, and tomorrow in the rest of the world. The premise is simple, for one day out of the entire year don't be a consumer. Don't feed the corporate pig. Don't add your 2 cents to the product-fueled ecological disaster that is engulfing us all.

Just buy nothing.

But more than that, don't be a passivist about it, be an activist. While its all very well and good for you to sit at home smug in the knowledge that you did your part today by not doing your part, its all the more effective if you let other people know what you are not doing, and why. Spread the word today, use those self-same tubes that are inundating you with offers of cheap Ronex watches and discounted Canadian Phiagra for good, rather than evil, and let your friends and family know why you are buying nothing today. If AdBusters is too US-centric for their tastes try buying Nothing(TM) from UK-based Green Thing, or better yet if you are in Galway tomorrow kayak along to Shop Street and join the Buy Nothing Day celebrations at 1pm.

If Unkie Dave, with his fatally low money-to-sense ratio and all-too-itchy internet-purchasing trigger-finger can wean himself away from the corporate teat of unnecessary white plastic and aluminium trinkets for this single day, surely you can too.

You'll be a better person for it.

Wave! Huh! Yeah! What is it good for?

I've been using Google Wave for a few weeks now, and at the moment it is definitely in the "Fax Machine" stage of development, as in the first fax machine was pretty useless until lots of other people went out and got one. Google are doing the same slow viral invite-only release that they did with Gmail, and as with that it has certainly made Wave this year's must-have-even-if-I-don't-know-why. TechCrunch did a pretty good overview of what it is and does back in May if you're unfamiliar with the Wave concept.

Amongst my friends a critical mass has finally built up that enough people are using it to make it interesting, but so far all it seems to have done is spark a hundred "my, aren't we all really bad spellers" conversations as everybody's pitiful attempts to write basic English phrases without the aid of a spellchecker are exposed in real time to all and sundry.

In a business or academic setting its applications are immediately obvious, especially to anyone who has ever run a conference call with multiple locations. In a previous life I used a precursor to Wave from Marratech (acquired by Google in 2007 and the spiritual progenitor of Wave, if not the actual code on which it is based) to host remote trainings, with integrated live video streaming of the presenter, a shared virtual whiteboard and real-time group chat sessions, just a perfect setting for distance learning environments.

But if the product is really going to revolutionize online communications it will have to find widespread adoption beyond the office and classroom, and that is where the API comes in, which allows developers to take the product in directions its developers never imagined by creating extensions and gadgets that increase Wave's functionality.

For example, I use SoundCloud to host demo music tracks and other audio works in progress, and some nice person has created a SoundCloud gadget for Wave that enables a track to be embedded in a Wave and played simultaneously to loads of people. All the participants in a Wave could be commenting in real time on the track as it was playing, and uploading their own tracks as well, so in theory Wave could be used to stage a 'live' participatory concert.

Hopefully Wave will be another Gmail rather than a Jaiku or Dodgeball, that gets widespread external adoption and proper internal Google support. Its potential actually excites me.

A SciFi critique of Economic Reason

I was re-reading part of Andre Gorz's essay collection "Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology" this morning, specifically an interview given to John Keane in 1990 entitled "Which Way is Left? Social Change in the Post-Industrial Age", and a particular exchange caught my eye in which Keane asks:

"In all the countries of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, virtually everyone today is in favour of the unhindered play of market mechanisms. Yet in your writings you argue for an increasing restriction of the sphere of commodity exchange. You are one of the few still to claim a central role for planning and for public control of macroeconomic decisions. But aren't market mechanisms, contrary to what Marx thought, something more than - and other than - characteristics of "bourgeois society? Aren't they necessary to some extent, if only to prevent shortages and bottlenecks? And doesn't the idea of abolishing commodity relations to make room for the self-management of production and exchange bear the imprint of last century's egalitarian utopias, which simply cannot be translated into reality?"

to which Gorz replies:

"You are quite right that there can be no complex society without commodity relations or markets. The total abolition of market relations would presuppose the abolition of the social division and specialization of labour, and thus the return to autarkic communities or a society of kibbutzim. Ursula Le Guin conjured up a planetary kibbutz of this kind in her novel The Dispossessed, which is the most striking description I know of the seductions - and snares - of self-managed communist, or in other words, anarchist society."

I can't believe that I didn't pick up on this before, moments like this are the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of my ecosocialist angst, where someone gets their neo-Marxist chocolate into the peanut butter of my secret SciFi-loving shame. These moments are what made Battlestar Galactica particularly enjoyable, with its Jungian robots in cocktail dresses thrown into a Mormon West-Wing, with the odd drop of Eugene Debs by way of John Henry. Who could resist such a tasty smorgasbord?

Of course "The Dispossessed" is not your typical SciFi book, written in that glorious age of the late 60's and early 70's when a wide range of authors used Science Fiction as a medium for exploring political, religious and cultural conceits in a way that does not seem to be prevalent in more contemporary offerings, where a greater emphasis is placed on space-opera potboilers and the four-colour fantasies of pubescent males.

The importance of this genre for socio-political and cultural exploration was recognised in part by the Nobel committee when it awarded the 2007 Prize for Literature to Doris Lessing, who has never shied away from the label of Science Fiction writer, and while Le Guin is unlikely to be similarly honoured, "The Dispossessed" remains one of the best political examinations in modern fiction.

There is a lesson here for philosophers, economists and political theoreticians though, in that one should feel free to make reference to genre writing as useful thought exercises to support one's current academic modeling, however when doing so one should carefully choose an author that will stand the test of time; Ursula Le Guin is a safe bet, Charlie Stross is not.

I'm looking at you, Krugman.

Links
Gorz and Keane quotes are from the out-of-print but occasionally available "Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology", page 81. You can read the rest of Gorz's response on Google Books on page 82. Interestingly enough the Le Guin quote doesn't appear in the available preview, though the three pages beforehand and the page after do. Make of that what you will.

The Dispossessed is much easier to find

The other Swine Flu

Two headlines that caught my eye in this morning's news feeds, from today's Irish Independent: "Gardai will turn blind eye to traffic offences", and from this morning's Examiner: "Garda arrested in trafficking probe".

To explain, one headline describes how our overworked and underpaid police force are going on strike on Tuesday and have publicly stated that they will not fine or arrest people for minor infractions of the law, the other tells how an upstanding and long-serving member of this resolute and noble institution has been arrested in Mayo for (allegedly) facilitating and participating in the trafficking of underage sex-slaves into this country from Nigeria.

Can you tell which is which?

Back in August the head of the Garda Representative Association said that “cutting the pay of young guards would make bribes from criminals more tempting.” Yes indeed, that was the leader of the police union threatening that his members would become even more corrupt if the government attempted to reduce their take-home pay. Before you start to feel too much sympathy for the hard working men and women in blue consider this, when a garda is on vacation they get an allowance to make up for the overtime they are not getting by being on holiday. This was just one of the perks recommended for abolition by An Bord Snip, and apparently the only thing preventing the police from falling lock, stock and two smoking barrels under the sway of our nation's master criminals.

If the holiday-pay allowance, rent allowance, uniform allowance, plain-clothes allowance, speaking-Irish allowance, working-at-Croke-Park allowance, embracing-change allowance and doing-paper-work-so-you-can't-claim-other-allowances allowance aren't enough to stop our police from (allegedly) engaging in acts of moral turpitude along the lines of, lets say, facilitating and profiting from the abduction of human beings and their enslavement and forced prostitution, then I say we must all support them in their day of action and call for the introduction of even more perks and bonuses.

How about a "not-participating-in-human-trafficking" allowance? I think we can all agree on that.

Yes, I know that there are many dedicated gardai that are in the job for the right reasons and genuinely risk life and limb every day on behalf of their fellow citizens, but seriously, every single day there are more and more revelations of ignorance, ineptitude and outright corruption and it is beyond a joke at this stage. Its not just one bad apple, its more a case of a few good apples in a rotten and festering orchard. Not even Bulmers could make anything with the pitifully manky fruit of these trees. This isn't expecting a free burger and chips from the local Super Macs, this is under-age prostitution and human trafficking. This is slavery, members of our police force (allegedly) facilitating actual honest-to-god slavery.

Every day as I better understand how this country of ours really works I die a little more inside.

Thoughts on a Hand and Foot

I have been somewhat distracted these last few days, or rather, I have been somewhat more distracted than normal. Has it been the latest "seriously lads, why do we keep letting them get away with this and why have we not yet sharpened a few sticks on both ends outside the Dail" salary revelations from AIB? Nope.

Is it the "43% of Americans don't believe in Climate Change so there's no real point trying to accomplish anything in Copenhagen, why don't we all go and see '2012' to take our mind off all these hysterical doom-mongers and their laughable claims" floods that seem to have wiped most of Cork, Clonmel and Galway off the map in the last 24 hours? Nope.

Is it the "Ah Jaysus, and to think that you were all worried about the Lisbon Treaty facilitating a few dodgy back-room deals that bring into power a group of faceless, unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. Well at least it's not Tony Blair" coronation of Belgium's Prime-Minister-for-a-day Herman van Rompuy and Baroness Catherine Ashton (who even her own country has never heard of) as the new EU President and Foreign Minister? Nope.

In fact for the last 48 hours I have been somewhat distracted by, deep breath, football.

That's right, football. (or sah-khah, as the Americans might say).

I am not a sporting man*, or rather, I do not follow or express any sort of interest in competitive team sports. I have been known to watch Formula One on a semi-regular basis, but that has more to do with my secret infatuation with the automobile**, despite actually being against the private ownership of cars in an urban environment. However beyond this I have never been able to join with the rest of my gender and generate any sort of passion, even feigned, for watching, following or supporting in any manner the practitioners of a competitive field sport***.

Except football (sah-khah), specifically Irish international games.

It all stems back (as it does for most Irish folk of my generation) to the glory days of Italia 90, where a heady stream of wins and draws fueled by numerous pints in the salubrious environment of the Summit Inn in Howth helped to forge a genuine sense of community spirit with friends and complete strangers that I would never, ever speak to again once I escaped the insular and parochial bounds of my youth and, upon hitting the decadent and cosmopolitan flatland of Rathmines somewhere around my 20th year on this earth, never ever looked back on.

However every now and then when a match is on, somewhere deep inside of me some spark flickers and bursts again into flame, powered by the memory of those few heady nights almost twenty years ago when for one brief moment in time it seemed like literally anything was possible****. Every time the World Cup roles around again, this spark is reignited. While living in the US during Japan/Korea 2002 I would get up at 5am to watch the match on a local Spanish language channel, or listen to it in work at 8am streamed on the internet, it was a direct connection back to those glory days in 1990 as a 17-year old with my whole future in front of me.

Thus on Wednesday night I, along with almost everyone else in the country, sat down and watched the best game that Ireland had played in a generation, beating the French at home in the Stade de France, with the hopes and dreams of a nation riding on their shoulders all the way to South Africa and the World Cup Finals next year.

Then Thierry Henry handled the ball, twice, a goal was scored, and we went home empty handed.

Back to a nation riddled with injustice and inequality, massive fraud perpetrated by bankers and supported by the Government, a devastated economy, 10% unemployment, vaccine-resistant swine flu, oh, and torrential rains caused by climate change that have destroyed half the country.

Welcome home.

Perhaps this is why I follow no sport, the crushing depression brought on by defeat is too much to bear even once every four years. The thought of feeling this way every week is too much to even contemplate, for the highs of winning surely cannot compensate for the lows of losing. Perhaps this is why sports fans follow so many teams and so many sports, like a junkie that tries crack when their heroin no longer delivers a big enough kick, or knocks back a few pills when the trip becomes too intense.

But oh, to feel the invulnerability of being 17 again*****. Roll on Euro 2012.

* Given the opportunity by Lance Henriksen to place a series of wagers on the likelihood of Jean-Claude Van Damme escaping the clutches of a team of mercenaries hunting him through the streets and backwaters of New Orleans, I would almost certainly bet on Van Damme. No doubt Lance would be upset by this, which is why I tend not to place too many sporting wagers.

** See also my hidden shame of Top Gear viewership. They're smug Tories who are actively out to destroy the world through the glorification of oil, and I can't seem to stop watching.

*** Except The Green Bay Packers. Damn you Mr Tim and all the bottles of Mountain Dew you enticed me with. Why did you make me care? Why are the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I cursed to be the only people in Ireland who take the transfer of Brett Favre to Minnesota as a personal slight that can only be redressed with the depositing of an animal's head in a bed, preferably a big one. The animal that is, not the bed. I never thought I would have anything in common with the US Military Police in Baghdad, but now I do. Thanks for that Mr Tim, really, thanks. Why, Mr Tim, why did you make us feel this pain?

**** And then we lost, and it wasn't.

***** Not really. Being 17 sucked, big time. I would never wish that upon anyone, ever.

Eigenharp Pico first impressions

This, my friends, is the Eigenharp Pico, the first bundle of electronic joy from Eigenlabs, baby sibling to their much larger (and horrendously expensive) Eigenharp Alpha, due to be released in December and the future source of many a missed mortgage payment and repossessed house. The Pico is fun, quite complex, and unfortunately rather buggy.

With the Pico you can control a variety of loops, samples and instruments via 16 playable keys (multi-directional, and very pressure sensitive), a control strip (with a variety of functions from simple pitch bend to acting like a bow for the software-modeled cello), and a breath pipe (to use with the included Clarinet model). In addition to its own expandable sample library it will play any of your own Audio Unit Plugins, as well as any Midi instruments, and has an inbuilt looper that allows you to record and playback multiple instruments and samples. The overall build quality is good and the controllers feel highly responsive. While lacking the strings of the larger Alpha, there is more than enough to keep any level of musician occupied for quite some time, and I have to say I haven't enjoyed any piece of kit as much as this since the Tenori-On.

For the moment it is Mac-compatible only, with around 5Gb of software mainly comprised of the instruments, an impressive array of drum loops and the EigenD application and browser used to access the soundfiles either via the Eigenharp or directly on your computer. Unfortunately this is where things start to get a bit frustrating, as the software is just not ready for primetime. The Pico was due to ship last week but experienced some delays apparently due to higher than anticipated demand, however I wouldn't be too surprised if there was still some last minute work being done on the software side of things, as it just doesn't feel fully finished. Although it was built specifically for Mac it doesn't really operate like any standard piece of Mac software (Command-Q doesn't quit the program, for example), and the UI just isn't that great to use. The EigenD app isn't playing nice with my soundcard, even at low volume levels there can be a fair bit of distortion on bass sounds (specifically on the cello when played over any of the drum loops), but worst of all, it crashes.

A lot.

Basically the application will keep running but the Pico just freezes or goes dead and switches off, which is odd as there is no actual on/off function (once the Pico is connected via USB and the EigenD application is launched the Pico switches on; the only way to switch it off is to close the application or disconnect the USB). Initially this made me think that the USB connection was loose, but after the fourth or fifth time it definitely seems software related, like it gets too many signals at once and just gives up (I'm running it on a 3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4Gb of 800Mhz of Ram, so I don't think its a problem with memory or processing power). All you can do then is quit out of the app and relaunch; it all makes me wonder if there are some OSX 10.6 compatibility issues.

The included documentation isn't that helpful either, consisting of a quick start guide and illustrated reference booklet that shows what all the buttons are, but not how to use them. Two enclosed video tutorials, and a third online, give an introduction to the most basic functions, but there are no real guidelines on how to use the more advanced features, or even how to get it to work with any other programs you have, like Abelton (thanks to a tip on the forum I'm using Cycling 74's Soundflower, but its not pretty). This is a very complex instrument, a nice big fat manual wouldn't have gone amiss.

A quick perusal of the forums shows that I'm not alone with these issues, and the software and UI really seem to be everyone's main bugbear at the moment, that it feels more like a beta than a full blown version. But here's the silver lining, Eigenlabs seem to have top notch customer service. For any problem that has been posted on the forum that they haven't been able to resolve online, they've actually phoned the customer directly to talk them through the issues. This has already led to the first update to the EigenD application, mainly to resolve issues with specific soundcards. Anyone who has had contact with the Eigenlabs team is enthusiastically singing their praises.

This is why I'm not too worried about the issues I'm having, as I'm confident they'll get sorted out. I just hope they get them sorted out before the release of the Alpha, which at £4K a pop would have its credibility destroyed by any software issues like this.

Bottom line, this has the potential to be something really amazing. Even with all the issues I've experienced, I love it, but at the moment it feels like I'm playing in the developer sandbox rather than with a full release. With that caveat in mind, if you feel like getting in on the ground floor of something quite special, give it a go.

Rainbow over Aungier Street

I am often quite disparaging about the quality of the iPhone 2G camera, specifically accusing it of being basically inoperable in anywhere but the permanent summer's daylight of Southern California. At night, or your typical Irish daytime, it is altogether a rather frustrating affair for anyone used to a recent Nokia with its Carl Zeiss lens. But with a few of the numerous Camera Aps available one can occasionally make something a little more interesting from the 2 Megpixels of inbuilt disappointment that Cupertino saw fit to laden their initial offering with.

The above shot was built on the iPhone itself from a number of photos taken in drizzly conditions on Aungier Street and meshed together with AutoStitch, from Cloudburst Research, currently $1.99/€1.59, and even given the poor light and rainy conditions it still manages to convey a sense of what this afternoon was actually like.

Which was pretty miserable.

Dayvan Cowboy

I was reading about this earlier this morning and it reminded me of the above video for "Dayvan Cowboy" by Boards of Canada, possibly my favourite video of all time, just perfectly timed archival footage that captures the ebb-and-flow soundscape of the song.

The footage is mainly of Joseph Kittinger's parachute jump on August 16th, 1960, from a high altitude balloon at over 31,000 meters (officially he jumped at 102,800 ft). He fell for four and half minutes, and hit a top speed of 714 mph, and a great interview with him on the jump can be found here.

It is one of those videos that once you've watched it make it impossible to hear the song again without seeing the video's imagery in your mind; director Melissa Olson has created a perfect blend of sound and vision that is completely hypnotic to watch.

Thoughts on the Internet and Ireland's Public Sphere

And so yesterday the NAMA Bill passed all stages in the Dail and is due to be signed into law by the President next week, and Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan expects the €54 Billion worth of bad loans to be transferred from the three participating banks and two building societies to the taxpayers before Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone.

The above poster has been hanging on the walls of Tripod/the Pod on Harcourt Street for the last few days, an increasingly popular location for political campaigns aiming to target the hip young kids of today. Pretty nice poster, on target with snappy Stiglitz and 'Economist' quotes to add a bit of gravitas and substance to what otherwise might be written off as a bit frivolous. The only problem, and its quite a big one, is that the website it directs you to, enoughisenough.ie, is simply appalling. Maybe it looks nice in IE, being a Mac user I can't tell, but after viewing it in Firefox, Safari, Camino and Chromium its quite simply an unusable dog's dinner.

There is so much information that could be put up on an anti-NAMA site, detailing why it is wrong, what the consequences are and most importantly what a viable alternative would be (for my money nationalistaion of the banks is the only sure-fire way to protect the interests of the tax-payers). The poster by itself is very effective but the whole campaign is let down by the stunningly bad website.

This is what I am coming to think of as "The Obama Effect". In the run up to the local and European elections I met with a number of candidates and groups that all wanted to be on "the Internets". They didn't know what "the Internets" were but by Jaysus they knew they needed to be there. My advice to all and sundry at the time was that you didn't need an online media strategy at this stage in the evolution of our political environment, but if you were to have a presence then you'd better make sure that it's done properly; you have little to gain right now in Ireland from a good web presence, but an awful lot to loose from a bad one.

The ignorance with which our political elites approach the "internets" continues to both embarrass and amuse, with Tánaiste Mary Coughlan exclaiming last week as she officially opened Facebook's new Dublin offices when asked if she had a Facebook account: "You must be joking. Would I trust you guys?".

Hilarious.

I stopped working with politicians shortly before the European elections, disillusioned by the caliber of people I met. I grew increasingly frustrated with the realities of representative democracy, its major flaw being the people we choose to act as our Representatives. In a nation as small as Ireland, the opportunities for true Democracy should be great, and the internet should facilitate the realisation of Habermas' 'Public Sphere', wherein the major issues of the day are debated by knowledgeable and interested citizens and a consensus is reached that has a real and positive effect on the lives of all citizens.

Instead the actions of the current Government show an extreme and blatant disregard for the Public Sphere, the enactment of the NAMA legislation being but the latest and most extreme example. On the other side the reactionary and inflammatory heckling that all too often passes for debate online is an embarrassment for any who actively promote the internet as a form of communication, as explored in the interesting and impromptu point and counterpoint between John Waters and Hugh Linehan in last week's Irish Times Online.

All this leaves me somewhat dispirited. I feel that there is great potential for our democratic processes to be so much better, more inclusive and positive, and the Internet can facilitate this transformation, but I despair that there is something in our national psyche that will prevent this.

All the same, it could be worse; we could have Birthers and tea-parties.

Something Old, Something New

I've been reading a lot of Habermas lately, particularly his more recent commentaries on the nature of a European identity. Emerging from his long standing disagreements with Derrida in May 2003 to jointly publish a plea for a common European Foreign policy in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, continued in a series of interviews with both Derrida and Habermas on "Philosophy in a Time of Terror", and culminating last year in the publication by Habermas alone of "Europe - The Faltering Project", the concept of a shared European identity and role in opposition to and occasional collaboration with US hegemony in the 21st century is one that has been occupying most of Habermas' work in this later period of his career.

While Habermas is often accused of defining Europe solely as the "Core Europe" of Germany, France, the Benelux countries and occasionally Spain and Italy based on a shared Judeo-Christian heritage and Napoleonic law, two areas that serve as the biggest distinguisher between US and European values are common to all EU nations: the private nature of faith and the sanctity of human life. On the issue of faith in politics he writes:

"In modern Europe, the relation between church and state developed differently north and south of the Alps, west and East of the Rhine. In different European countries, the idea of the state's neutrality in relation to different world-views has assumed different legal forms. And yet within civil society, religion overall assumes a comparably un-political position. We may have cause to regret this social privatization of faith in other respects, but it has desirable consequences for our political culture. For us, a president who opens his daily business with public prayer, and associates his significant political decisions with a divine mission, is hard to imagine." - Habermas & Derrida, 'Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe', p10

Later on in the same paper he touches on the historical basis for the moral prohibitions on a State murdering it's own citizens:

"Contemporary Europe has been shaped by the experience of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and by the Holocaust - the persecution and the annihilation of European Jews in which the National Socialist regime made the societies of the conquered countries complicit as well. Self-critical controversies about this past remind us of the moral basis of politics. A heightened sensitivity to injuries to personal and bodily integrity reflects itself, among other ways, in the fact that both the Council of Europe an EU made the ban on capital punishment a condition for membership." - Habermas & Derrida, 'Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe', pp11-12

These thoughts were fresh in my mind as I read this morning of the execution last night in the US of John Allen Muhammad, who together with an underage accomplice killed 10 people in the Washington DC area with a sniper rifle from the back of a modified car over a three week period in October 2002. I remember those events quite vividly as I was living in the US at the time; much was made by the media of his name and faith and the tragedy was easily weaved into the American tapestry of Islamophobia, much as last week's incident in Ft Hood is doing now. No questions were raised about the availability of high powered sniper rifles to anyone with an ID and money.

As a theologian what often puzzles me is the disconnect between the theocratic nature of American society and its love of weapons, violence and the death penalty. For a nation where a sizable portion of its citizens believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God, it is quite jarring that those same Christians do not seem to believe in the literal words contained within the Bible. It is a nation where successive generations of preachers have sought refuge in the fire-and-brimstone of the Old Testament, and interpreted the actual teachings of Jesus such as "Love thy Enemy" as "Love them by converting them to your beliefs at gunpoint", "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" as "God wants you to make money", and above all others the central Commandment of "Thou shalt not Kill" as "Thou Shalt not Kill unless it is in the name of Jesus". The words of God have been cynically warped and mangled to suit the needs of Man.

The public influence of a conservative faith and the subsequent stigmatizing of the "other" that accompanies it has shaped almost all aspects of the US penal system, with 25% of the worlds prison population being in the US, 1 in every 9 African-American men between 20 and 34 being currently incarcerated (and 13% of all African-American men having no voting privileges as a result of previous or current convictions). The US prison population has doubled since 1990 and increased 367% since 1980 (all data from 'Mother Jones' July/Aug 2009, pp 46-54), all corresponding to the rise of conservative Christian evangelicalism in the public sphere, while in godless Netherlands a decline in criminals is currently forcing the closure of prisons or the leasing of them to neighbouring Belgium.

And then there is the death penalty, where US juries openly consult bibles before reaching a verdict. According to Amnesty International:

"the following countries carried out executions in 2008: China (at least 1,718), Iran (at least 346), Saudi Arabia (at least 102), USA (37), Pakistan (at least 36), Iraq (at least 34), Viet Nam (at least 19), Afghanistan (at least 17), North Korea (at least 15), Japan (15), Yemen (at least 13), Indonesia (10), Libya (at least 8), Bangladesh (5), Belarus (4), Egypt (at least 2), Malaysia (at least 1), Mongolia (at least 1), Sudan (at least 1), Syria (at least 1), United Arab Emirates (at least 1), Bahrain (1), Botswana (1), Singapore (at least 1) and St Kitts and Nevis (1)" - Amnesty International, 'Death Sentences and Executions in 2008', p8, pdf link.

The US occupies a unique position amongst nations with majority Christian populations in its eagerness to murder its citizens, something that puts it in good company with its atheist Communist foes or the mainly Islamic Axis of Evil. It is no understatement to say that American popular faith is almost unrecognizable as Christianity to non-US Christians,.

As a cultural, linguistic and economic satellite of the UK (itself little more than America's Airstrip One), at times Ireland can feel even further away from Europe than its isolated position as a tiny island on its westernmost fringe. However in our nation's approach to the sanctity of the life of its citizens and the anathema of State-sanctioned murder, we can firmly and proudly call ourselves European. While we still have some way to go on the full separation of Church and State as evidenced by the recent Blasphemy Bill, the fact that Biffo with all his many flaws does not begin the day with a public prayer is a sign that despite occasional evidence to the contrary Ireland is genuinely an enlightened nation.

Let's try not to forget that.

Warp20 (Unheard)

A while back I waxed lyrical about Warp's 20th anniversary box set, and in the subsequent days I was somewhat disappointed to see that they were to release separately an additional CD of the unreleased tracks that were only available on vinyl in the box set, wondering why a digital version of those tracks weren't included in the box set in the first place.

I was thus rather delighted to find the following mail in my inbox this evening from bleep.com, Warp's online store:

"Dear Customer,

As you may have noticed we have now made the "Unheard" tracks that are on vinyl in the boxset available as downloads. As someone who purchased the boxset we felt that you should also be entitled to the digital version of these tracks. We have made these available to download from your Bleep account for free so you have both a digital and a vinyl copy for your collection.

Just log in and go to your downloads section. There you will find a new order with "Warp20 Unheard" available to download as a high quality MP3.

Kind regards,
Bleep"

This is really good customer service, and proper order too.

Just a pity that they didn't send me the mail before I ordered the CD from Amazon.

Oh well.

Where the grumpy started

Since we're taking an enforced detour down memory lane today, here is a photo courtesy of The Very Understanding Girlfriend of Unkie Dave at Glastonbury 1998, back in the days when he was still just "Dave", having yet to earn the right to use the "Unkie" moniker of longevity.

As you can see from the photo this was just before it got really muddy. I was already down to my last remaining clean clothes but had not yet been forced to buy an emergency pair of Bolivian goat-herding trousers two sizes too small for decency from Joe Bananas due to the near disintegration of all other items of my clothing from the after effects of the toxic sludge in which we camped.

Good times, good times.

Proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy

Believe it or believe it not I am not much of a drinker. In the halcyon days of my youth and/or early-to-mid twenties I might have been known to enjoy the occasional quaff but alas time and tide have been unkind to my constitution and as I can no longer, as they say, do the time, I no longer do the crime.

Long gone are the days when I could enjoy a well-earned pint after work, for now the experience is more likely to send me right to sleep within moments of the first drops hitting my blood stream. Throughout my career I have enjoyed and endured in equal measure many Company nights out, and as a responsible manager I instituted a rule upon myself, that if I was to drink with my team late into the evening I must show decisive leadership by ensuring that I was the first person into the office the next day, the message to my staff clearly being by all means eat, drink and be merry but do not let it interfere with your work the next day. This was a stupid, stupid rule, and I curse the day it ever sprung forth fully formed from my mind, for many was the morning that I sat slowly rocking back and forth in my chair at 8:15am hoping for a major catastrophe to befall the office just to ease my Dionysian pain, as over the course of the next two or three hours bounded in the rest of the department, fresh-faced and seemingly immune to the ravages of school-night folly, no doubt helped in great part by their average age being ten years my junior.

Youth, and livers, are most definitely wasted on the young.

Armed with the knowledge of my extreme light-weightedness, and coupled with the fact that as a rule* The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I do not drink at home and when I do it is normally whiskey**, it will no doubt come as something of a surprise to find that this morning I am raving about beer, or rather a specific beer, Fuller's Brewer's Reserve.

This is altogether a rather tasty ale. When I was not so much of a lightweight I was an ale drinker, and a pint of Smithwick's was a little bit of mass-produced heaven for me***. Smithwick's is the dishwater they feed Clydesdale horses to make Budweiser from their urine in comparison to this little gem. A dark, ruby ale, aged for 500 days in 30-year old single malt oak casks it is a warm and smoky beer, with a delicate hint of whisky infusing every sip. It is bottle-conditioned, meaning that fermentation continues in the bottle, allowing the beer to last a long, long time and improve with age; some can even be lain down like wine, though this is so tasty I can't see it lasting too long in my house. Bottle-conditioned beers also tend to be a bit stronger, with this one coming in at 7.7%. Simply one of the best drinks from a major brewery I have ever had, and a snip at €5.99 a bottle (roughly the same as a City-Centre pint), but unfortunately produced in very limited quantities. The off-license I bought them in only had a few bottles left and they won't be getting any more in when they're gone, and so the hunt begins.

If you do find a bottle I heartily recommend that you snap it up, but don't tell me that you have as it means one less bottle for me. Which would make me angry. And you wouldn't like me when I am angry.

Just ask anyone involved in the great Ben & Jerry's Oatmeal Cookie Chunk tragedy of 2003.

If you can find any survivors willing to talk.

* not an actual rule, more of an observation, a sad, sad observation.

** Since a fateful trip returning from Glastonbury in June 1999 on a ferry three days before duty free was abolished between the UK and Ireland where bottles of Midleton were being sold for less than half price. This also left me with unfortunately expensive tastes. We once resorted to making Irish coffees with 18-year old Glenfiddich because it was the worst whisky in the house. People cried.

*** When we moved to the US and I was unable to find Smithwick's, or its exported cousin Kilkenny, I used to wax lyrical abut it over unloved pints of local dishwater. On the eve of my 30th birthday, on our last night in Dublin before returning to the 'Have from our annual Christmas homecoming, I managed to find a single can of Smithwicks after searching through multiple Rathmines off-licenses. I carried it lovingly back to the US wrapped in layers of protective bundling and deposited it safely in my fridge to be enjoyed as a special birthday treat. On the night itself, after djing for a few hot and sweaty hours I went to retrieve it, the anticipation building to a fever point, only to find that someone at the party had opened it, decided they didn't like it after a single sip, and then turned it into an ashtray. I cried. I think this was preemptive karma for the Glenfiddich/Irish Coffee travesty. Curiously enough upon returning home and being able to avail of Smithwick's on tap at every licensed establishment it somewhat lost its gloss, for in truth it really isn't a very good beer. Manufactured scarcity made for artificially raised desire, somewhat like diamonds really.

Icke! Icke baby! (to go)

Ah, the endless and fetid regurgitation of once-cherished childhood memories by the military-industrial-entertainment complex continues apace in a form so artificial and manufactured that it is destined to circle the great gyre of the cultural seas for all eternity drawn ever inward until it finally lies suspended in the Pacific Trash Vortex of humanity's soul (located somewhere near Hollywood).

As a hungry and inquisitive ten year-old, ever looking to the stars and wondering what more lay out there, with an imagination fertilized by stolen volumes of Heinlein, Asimov and EE 'Doc' Smith purloined from my father's bookshelves, few moments of television can compete with those two May nights in 1983 when I somehow convinced my parents to let me stay up and watch "V". It had spaceships, alien lizardmen eating hamsters, cool uniforms and lots of ominous warnings about the abuse of power and the dangers of rigidly obeying authority, all music to the ears of a hyperactive ten year-old.

Watching repeats of it twenty+ years later exposes all of its many-evident weaknesses, the acting is wooden, the writing is appalling and time has not been kind to the special effects, and don't even think of mentioning the big hair. But none of that dulls the warm and happy memories that nestle in the cockles of my heart, it remains forever frozen in amber untouched and unsullied, a perfectly preserved moment of childhood joy and wonder.

Until last night.

If the Pirate Bay has been good for anything, it has been reducing the time between the US and International screening of shows. US networks have been encouraged to allow international markets to broadcast new shows almost immediately after they air domestically, and international networks now snatch up broadcast-rights on the basis of unaired pilots for fear of loosing their audience to file-sharing. No longer is there the three-to-six month lag that made it almost impossible to watch anything without being exposed to the inevitable spoliers. Thus two nights after airing on ABC our own TV3 showed the first episode of the 'reimagined" series of "V", even before any UK network.

Whereas the old series was a dumbed-down allegory of the rise of Fascism, the new series is a dumbed-down allegory of the rise of Obamaism. But wait, says middle America, what's the difference?

A charismatic leader with a big toothy grin arrives to spread a message of hope and change, reaches out to the French and the Arabs and speaks to them in their own language (and without preconditions) with a message of universal peace, the media falls in love with them and gives them an easy ride, they use the internet to spread their message to an easily swayed and disillusioned youth, they champion technology as the cure for all society's ills, the nation's law enforcement stops worrying about the threat of terrorism now that the leader is here to save them, and finally, horror of horrors, the leader offers to save the world through the roll-out of (wait for it) Universal Health Care (dum-dum-dummmmmm!). Oh, and did I mention the leader is really a humanoid lizard intent on using their death panels to eat your children?

Yup, my cherished childhood tale has been transformed into the bastard love-child of David Icke and and Glenn Beck. Tea-parties, birthers and the evil machinations of the Duke of Edinburgh have all been poured into a giant cauldron of banality and from it a ladle of trite and hackneyed "Real America" chowder has been emptied scornfully over the wistful food of my youth.

Poo.

I seriously doubt that the writers and producers have actually conceived of this show as a Republican vehicle, but what tires me is the lazy writing "ripped from the headlines" and the pandering to an unthinking lowest-common denominator audience, who will absorb it with an anaerobic ferocity and then on numerous You-Tube threads excrete a misspelled "Make's you think, though?" comment.

In retrospect what made the original "V" so memorable was, quite simply, that I was a ten year-old, and that's why the writing, plot and acting appealed to me. Twenty-six years later and the writing, plot and acting of the remake still seem to be aimed at an audience of ten year-olds. This is what frustrates me about US mass-market television, why does everything have to be so simple that a child could understand it, is the target audience really that emotionally and intellectually stunted? Can a viewer only engage with simplistic and formulaic black and white scenarios? Is complexity taboo, reeking as it does of liberal elitism? Why must spectacle triumph over substance every time?

It probably won't stop me from watching the rest of the series though, but I will do so under protest, and with a sneer of congratulatory superiority on my face as I root for the lizard people, and all their godless Windsor-Mountbatten-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Bilderberg allies as they try to impose a one-world government and single Amero currency through swine-flu vaccinations and climate-change legislation on a tireless and redoubtable group of freedom-loving libertarian resistance fighters armed with nothing but their faith in Jesus and their Second Amendment rights.

Hoo-ra!

No one you see, is smarter than he

There is an interesting article in today's Guardian examining the intelligence of dolphins.

It starts by recounting the behaviour of a dolphin called Kelly at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, who in response to fishy rewards from trainers for giving them litter that ends up in her pool, has learned to hide pieces of paper at the bottom of the pool, in effect banking her favours to be redeemed at a later stage. What's more she has learned how to get a return on her investment:

"Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming."

This immediately brought to mind the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Bedouin goat herds in 1946, who quickly discovered that they would make more money by ripping up intact scrolls and selling them as individual scraps of paper rather than by selling whole scrolls, as antiquities dealers foolishly paid by the item, not by the square meter. Biblical scholars kept coming back to buy more parchment scraps and the scrolls continued to be torn to shreds, and as a result are now scattered in public and private collections around the world and their subsequent translation and publication remains a source of ongoing controversy.

All this suggests that dolphins are at least as intelligent as Bedouin goat herds, and that their handlers are as trainable as Biblical Archaeologists.

In both cases the original intent of the purchasers was subverted by the sellers through the inevitable flaws of the capitalist system*. The handlers wanted a litter-free pool, but by monetizing the clean-up they in fact incentivized the production of litter by the dolphin herself. The biblical scholars wanted the scrolls, but instead their behaviour ended up destroying the very artifacts they coveted. The introduction of a monetary reward in both cases led almost immediately to the seller trying to game the system.

It was thus with a sense of crushing inevitability that I read this week of the Minister for Finance's decision to cede control of the banking and property fiasco to the private sector. After creating the state-run National Asset Management Agency to use €54 billion of public money to buy bad assets from the banks at above market rates, Brian Lenihan has now decided to create a Special Purpose Vehicle that will administer this public money and manage the toxic assets. 49% of the SPV will be owned by NAMA, and 51% by private investors. The private sector, and in all probability the same individuals who created the financial collapse, will now be handed complete control over the vehicle that will further reward their reckless behavior by cleaning up their mess at above market rates using money borrowed by the government that successive generations of tax-payers will be paying-off for many, many years.

Yesterday alone in the High Court 76 cases involving mortgage defaulters were heard, resulting in 18 repossessions. According to today's Examiner one person has been sent to jail for non-payment of debts every single day since the bank bailout began:

"The official Department of Justice figures show the problem of spiraling debt led to 306 cases of imprisonment last year and 186 cases up to June of this year – the latest date for which figures are available. This does not include the estimated 25,000 cases of homeowners in mortgage arrears."

While ordinary citizens continue to suffer Minister Lenihan further rewards the financial leaders that created this crisis and now is incentivizing their destructive behavior with public money.

Brian Lenihan has been well trained by the dolphins and goat herds of our banking classes, who continue to shred our economy into the tiniest of fragments knowing that each scrap they present will be amply rewarded.

It's not every day that I get to draw upon my experience as a Biblical Archaeologist to offer advice to a Minster of State, tune in tomorrow when I explain how stoning could be an effective deterrent against short-selling.

* hopefully you could tell where I was going with this from a mile away.