That was the year that was

January Snow ice cold snow more snow Fintan O'Toole Žižek Avatar Haiti birthday Raj Patel Intermission February writing Jaron Lanier patterns Google Buzz coffee buzz Obama-lama-ding-dong country going to hell Shaun Tan Willie O'Dea Trevor Sargent tit-for-tat Fintan O'Toole (again) TASC linguistic paleo-archaeology March TASC (again) seals innovation Na'vi Dubz corrupt politicians city planning Gonja Sufi greenwash electric cars Powerscourt April Good man Fintan scoundrel Pullman crochet coral carrot bombs Squidgate resolutions May volcano UK election Eurostar Paris Convergence anarchist books June Paris (encore) Paolo Bacigalupi Stewart Brand Giverny Habermas Sligo sad sad goodbye Inis Mór bicycles Lasto-Glasto pretty pretty clouds July BioRhythm new parties only two posts boo August [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Žižek butterflies passport-hooray-hooray September bad phone sick grandmother NAMA-lama-ding-dong Jose Saramago country gone directly to hell not past Go not collecting €200 Cementgate revolutions internet makes people stupid October arise arise you wretched of the world ninjas tunes late sun getting old is scary Love Rhino New York urine on the cinema floor veggie sushi big bangs rescued miners ghost trains November Claiming Our Future One Percent Zombie tour revolting students Slovak shops Waterford IMMA moderns sixtieth anniversaries Maser loves me but I hate Dublin STRP stupid fecking government sold our country to the IMF and only 80,000 people take to the streets Fintan O'Toole (again again) snow snow snow December snow [REDACTED] snow snow STRP snow music snow sleep snow can't sleep snow snow snow and rest.

Thank you.

Goodbye and good riddance to 2010.

Roll on 2011.

Deep in the bosom of the gentle night

There is a hum, a hum that is following me around the house. Yes, I have become one of those people, the people who think they hear things that no-one else in the room can hear. I am kept awake at night by it, not every night, just often enough that I start to believe that it is a real, external hum, and not something just in my mind.

A low rumbling, somewhere between a washing machine on a spin cycle and a car in the lane outside with its engine ticking over. A rumbling that edges into a low frequency that sets my stomach on edge and makes my temples reverberate in sync with the awful queasiness induced by a dentist drilling through a blackboard made of ballons and fingernails.

It probably is a washing machine. We live in an apartment building with neighbours above and beside, some with babies that no doubt necessitate frequent clothes-washing. However frequently the rumbling coincides with my futile attempts to get to sleep sometime south of 1am, and putting a washer/dryer on at 1am is just rude.

If it's not a washing machine then it almost certainly is tinnitus, which would not be surprising given how late an arrival earplugs were to the Unkie Dave gig-going kit. Sad, but unsurprising.

Thus as I race around the house at 2am unplugging all electrical items, pressing my ear to each wall and wondering how many sheets of tinfoil are really needed to make a hat, I know I have no-one else to blame but myself.

or possibly my neighbours.

yup, its definitely my neighbours' fault.

Stupid neighbours.

(image: graphite filings reverberate atop a drumskin in sync with someone blowing through an improvised bellows below, during BioRhythm at The Science Gallery, July 2010)

Happy Crimbo!

Berries entombed in ice by the side of the Grand Canal this afternoon.

Its -10C outside, but the Algerian Boulangerie on Camden Street was open for a miraculous and totally unexpected cappuccino on the way home.

As-Salam Alaikum everyone!

2010 in Perspective

A number of years ago I came to the conclusion that the easiest way to avoid being in a ridiculous number of unflattering pictures was to be the person taking those photos. The irony was that once I had a camera happily ensconced in my grubby little hands I found that I really had no interest in taking photos of people, going out of my way to ensure that they were absent from any shots I took, and never seeming to bring a camera along to social occasions. Thus the cavalcade of unfortunate snapshots of me continues, exacerbated by the proliferation of online repositories where said photos will continue to haunt and embarrass me for decades to come.

So if I wasn't taking shots of people, what was I photographing?

I am fascinated by vanishing points, specifically single-point perspectives, where parallel lines in an image seem to converge on some central spot in the imagined distance, giving a feeling of depth to a two dimensional image. I remember as a child watching an Open University program at some ungodly hour of the morning on Renaissance art, this being long before the days of 24-hour TV when the only thing on before lunchtime was the OU and the test card, and seeing line drawings overlaid on a number of paintings (the identity of which are sadly long forgotten to me) to show how the painters tricked the eye into believing a flat image had depth. The old Star Wars arcade game fascinated me for a similar reason, the line vector graphics being as big a draw as the cockpit and H-shaped controller.

A second element that I'm drawn to is artificial light, and the effect it has on outdoor environments. The light given off by Irish street lamps bathes everything in an incredibly warm orange glow, and I'm also fascinated by the fuzzy halo of lens flares surrounding the lights themselves, something that only exists on the captured image, created by the act of photography itself.

In fact it is the UnReality of both these elements that I am drawn to, the subjective nature of the reality created by the observer through the act of photography; the observer overlays a false sense of order onto a flat image creating an artificial geometry that exists only in the mind's eye, or a new reality is created within the camera by the flawed process of image capture itself, the interaction of light and lens distorting the Real to create something new, and wonderful.

These are the moments that I try to capture, to create the UnReal, to see the Other.

I'm not saying I'm any good at it, just that its something that fascinates me.

And with that in mind, allow me to present a pictorial reflection on the year that was 2010.

Adelaide Road, January 7th, the first snowfall of the year started on New Year's Eve and continued on and off for a week. I don't think any of us had any inkling of how big a role the snow and ice would play over the course of the year.

Grand Canal Dock, March 19th. I don't think there is any bigger symbol of the Celtic Tiger Years than the Dublin Docklands. Bold, brash, defiant and ultimately doomed to failure. A cold and half-deserted neon wasteland, the closest that Dublin has to a Gibson streetscape.

Whitehall, London. Election night, May 6th. The streets are oddly deserted. Maybe everyone stayed inside to contemplate the horror that they had unleashed upon themselves. The lights are brighter, but glow with a harshness, clinical and unwelcoming.

Montignac, France, May 19th. The bridge over the Vézère river is deserted, along with most of the streets, a quiet walk after earlier visiting Lasceaux.

Dún Dúchathair (The Black Fort), Inis Mór, June 17th. Reachable only on foot, parallel lines of Chevaux de frise, upright stones placed in defensive lines, pull the eyes towards the stone fort hugging the cliff face. I sat here in solitude for hours, happy, quiet, at rest.

Gan Ha'em station, Haifa, July 29th. The Carmelit is a subway, but unlike any other. An underground funicular railway, the stations and the train itself are all stepped and set at a sharp angle. The carriages serve six stops, rise about 275 meters and never sit perfectly level.

St Stephen's Green, October 7th. Another railway image, and a rare photo with people in it. Although at times I find it hard to love Dublin, I do love living in the city centre. The Luas is an indelible aspect of my sense of place, an icon of vibrancy and the inverse of the Grand Canal Dock, a sense of futurism in the city that works and inspires. A great piece by Frank Kiely sits on one of our walls and this shot reminds me of the sense of movement he captured.

Strijp, Eindhoven, November 20th. The birthplace of electrical giant Philips, the former factory complex is reborn as a campus for hi-tech start-ups, media groups and artists' studios. Blocky geometric buildings from the twenties bristle with brutalist additions from the sixties and seventies.

Grantham Street, December 2nd. The same white blanket that swaddled the newborn year looks set to shroud its corpse. The sky glows with a colour that exists only within the camera, the false orbs that hover above the street illusionary wisps that guide us away into the imagined distance.

Winter dreams

I dreamt last night of my grandparents' house, but I never dream of my own.

My mother and an imagined neighbour stood arguing over a boundary line in the dirt where now ten feet of hedgerow grows. I stood between them, acting as mediator, holding back their hands as both drew rival lines of demarcation in the soil with outstretched index fingers. The afternoon sun shone with a light only present in remembered childhood summers.

That I dream of my grandparents' house is no surprise. For almost eight years from my eleventh birthday I called it home, the longest period still that I have ever spent in a single house. These were also the most formative years, my personality being molded into shape by environment, both in tandem with and opposition to the life that revolved around this house.

That I dreamt of my grandparents' house last night is also no surprise. It sits atop a hill, one of a row of jagged mismatched teeth that grin out across the water, from a great distance still identifiable by the missing incisors to its left and right. In summer the breeze that rises in and up from the cliffs and across the farmland carries with it the cries of nesting gulls entwined with disgruntled bellows of cattle shuffled slowly from one field to the next. In winter the wind breathes frozen anger straight down from the arctic, rattling the windows with demanding hands hungry to wrap themselves around all who hide inside. Though my grandparents are never alone, my mother living with them and my uncle on the same road, this winter has been like no other, the cold usurped by snow and ice with roads that quickly become impassable without all-wheel drive, and yesterday early in the afternoon I found myself setting off on foot up their hill with a bag full of items that on any ordinary day would barely rate as trivialities, but are suddenly elevated to the rank of necessity when faced with the prospect of their prolonged absence.

In the house life goes on as normal, the larder is well stocked, the oil tank full, the weather no impediment to the tv signal. The radio plays to an empty kitchen measured by the five-clock metronome tick-tick-ticking across the walls, each second hand moving slightly out of time with the rest, tick-tick-tick-tick-tooock, tick-tick-tick-tick-tooock. My grandfather's voice raised in the other room narrating in near-real-time events he just saw on the television to my half-deaf grandmother, lost in her world of books and crosswords, thunder and lightning, lightning and thunder, the flash of light from the TV image scattered across the wall followed moments later by my grandfather's voice. I count the seconds in the delay to see how far he is sitting from the screen. My mother is elsewhere, forever trying to carve out her own space in the detritus left by fifty years of memories.

That I dream of my grandparents' house is no surprise. It is in my blood, it is my blood. I close my eyes today and can smell and taste jumbled up visions of ten years, fifteen years, two years past, all overlaid as exact as a calculated dreamscape, a Tex Avery country where the background remains immobile while the characters in the foreground repeat the same cyclic action over, and over again.

tick-tick-tick-tick-tooock.

tick-tick-tick-tick-tooock.

That I dream of my grandparents' house is no surprise. The question of interest is why I never dream of my own.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to gods

It is now time to start sharpening the stick at both ends.

On Wednesday of last week after two hours of what was euphemistically called "debate", the IMF/EU bail-out plan was passed by the Dail. The single most important piece of legislation to pass through the Dail in our lifetime was presented to Deputies at 11:40pm on Tuesday night, and then on the following afternoon after each of the Parties had their opportunity to present their preprepared opening statements barely 90 minutes remained for the debate. To a near empty chamber individual Deputies played to the cameras, soundbites prepared and faces of stoked ire or poker-crafted indifference were carefully affixed, and all the words were but a meaningless charade for the outcome of the vote was never in doubt once "Independents" Michael Lowry and Jackie Healy-Rae announced their support.

On the same day a small article in the Examiner mentioned that Healy-Rae's daughter had been appointed to a Government quango in the run up to the December budget, with a salary and generous expenses allowance.

Never be in any doubt of the way in which our political masters work, as Gloucester says in King Lear, "They kill us for their sport".

Thus on this, the literal low-point of the year, the Winter Solstice, the shortest day, the end of the annual ever-decreasing cycle of diminishing returns, and finding myself once more surrounded by a blanket of impenetrable white and a thermometer that told me it was -10C outside, thoughts and inevitable reflections on all that has come before began to rise unbidden with the steam from the lidless cappuccino that nestled in my protective arms, swaddled like an infant Messiah, as I navigated the unnecessarily treacherous walk (no more than twenty meters) from the coffee shop to my desk.

And the inescapable result that one must come to after such chilled and frosty analysis is that our current political system, and any faith that a thoughtful citizenry could have remaining in it, are no more. No good will ever come from the Dail for it is rotten to its very core and thus the time for rational discourse on how to work within the existing political framework is long past. We are left with the inevitable conclusion that we must now steal away Piggy's glasses, smash the conch to oblivion, and sharpen up a great many sticks on both ends before the IMF arrive to rescue us, castigating us for not being able to put up a better show than that...

Or we could all stay in where its nice and warm, drink some beer, eat some mince pies and watch "The Top One Hundred 'Top One Hundred Shows of All Time' of All Time Show", again.

Which we will.

*sigh*

Like the days can only get longer now, things surely can only get better.

2010 in Music

According to Last.fm, this year I have mostly been listening to The XX, Bibio, Fuck Buttons, Plaid and Nosaj Thing, which is interesting because sadly all of the albums associated with these stalwarts are from last year (either released or purchased by me). Thus the assumption could be made from this that 2010 had little to offer in the way of memorable tunes, that nothing quite grabbed me in the same way as last year's highlights, or perhaps that the year saw me stuck in the mud, musically directionless, with little sampled in the way of new or notable artists or albums.

By way of explanation then perhaps a few provisos should be offered; the first is that Last.fm only tracks what I listen to at my computer, or on my iPod. It does not track what I listen to on CD (yes, remember those?) on my grown-up proper sound system. The second is that this year I have actually ended up listening to a far wider range of music than last year, with many, many more albums hitting Unkie Dave's ears and consequently far fewer making it on to heavy rotation. Thus much of the lyrical wheat has been lost in the audio chaff that Last.fm carefully measures and catalogues.

So what, therefore, would I highlight as the best of the year?

Music release of the Year

Without doubt the music release of the year has to be the Ninja Tune XX box set, their simply stunning collection that celebrates the label's 20th anniversary. Six cds of new, old and remixed tracks, six 45s of rare and unique material, posters, decals and the coup de grace, a hardback 192 page book part-retrospective part-encyclopedia of all things both Ninja and Tune-y, and further material available exclusively to box-set owners online both in the form of downloads and extra vinyl shipped out in the post. This is as much a gift to fans as it was a celebration of the label, and following on from last year's WARP 20 collection the bar high for future label retrospectives has been set very high indeed.

Albums of the Year

Autechre - Oversteps - Long one of my favourite artists, in recent years Rob Brown and Sean Booth have descended into the realm of experimental noise with disastrous consequences. Too focused on finding out how far they can push their self-designed software at times they forgot to make the resulting sounds actually listenable to. As with Plaid, in recent times I have largely given up seeing Autechre live because the experience is quite simply not that enjoyable. Oversteps puts an end to all that, with tracks that not only are musical in nature, they echo, boom and soar with a bass and reverb that truly deserves a good sound system to appreciate. Not an album for your typical PC speakers, and no mp3 player will do it justice. Sit back, find the stereo sweet spot and let it wash over you.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for 'Move of Ten', their rapidly released follow-up of extras and out-takes. Consistency is no longer their watchword.

Gonjasufi - A Sufi and a Killer - Glitchy trip-hop and lo-fi neo-spirituals, this was one of my most eagerly awaited releases following the inclusion of "Ancestors" on WARP's 2010 preview album. At times reminiscent of a drowsy Saul Williams singing in a smokey shower, this was the sound of Spring on the Booming Back hifi, and got a well deserved second life in October with the release of "The Caliph's Tea Party", an album of remixes by Oneohtrix Point Never, Bibio, Broadcast and many others.

Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here? - takes the place occupied last year by Fuck Buttons' 'Tarot Sport', a long sweeping electronic panorama of epic ambient lushness, particularly the 12 minute 'Genetic' with a rich soundscape that is impossible not to get lost in. In an age of digital downloads that forever proclaim the dual death of the album and any care for the quality of the sound, Emerald's latest release is a gem. Many years ago a friend used to use Amorphous Androgynous' 'Tales of Ephidrina' in the hifi shop they worked in to demonstrate to customers the quality of the speakers and separates he sold, 'Does It Look Like I'm Here?' would be a solid contender for a more contemporary test.

Sixteen F**cking Years of G-Stone Recordings - A double cd of classic tracks and remixes from G-Stone, Kruder & Dorfmeister's Vienna label. I've been hooked on K&D and their downtempo sound since their eponymous 'Sessions' back in 1998, and this is a pretty solid retrospective, with classic tracks from K&D, Tosca, Peace Orchestra, Urbs and Stereotyp augmented by newer material from Rodney Hunter, Makossa & Megablast and DJ DSL. A great introduction to the label.

Danseizure - This is Danseizure - recorded between Edinburgh and Damascus, by way of Bosnia and Berlin, this latest release by musician, activist and all-round good guy (and friend of us here at Booming Back) Dan Gorman oscillates between tender solitude, glitchy minimal electronica and outright dancefloor jumpiness, with a dollop of 80's acid nostalgia thrown in for good measure.

Honourable mentions go to Belbury Poly's rereleased 'Farmer's Angle' and Broadcast and The Focus Group's 'Familiar Shapes and Noises' from the excellent 'Study Series', both from the ever impressive little Surrey label Ghost Box, Rustie's 'Sunburst EP', and 'High Velvet' from The National, definitely not as strong as 'Alligator' or even 'Boxer', but certainly worth brooding over with a moody espresso on a frosty morning.

What need is there for fish to sing?

A few weeks ago I hopped over to Eindhoven to catch up with friends, check out a music and technology conference, and see Underworld, pretty much in that order. Geography, the economy and time have conspired together to throw what was once a quite tightly knit group of friends out to the four corners of the globe (and Wicklow), and now it seems that holiday festivities and festivaling holidays are the only things that regularly bring folks together once more.

With a chalet for BangFace 2011 already secured, and Festivus Drinks just around the corner, it was as much the need to Be Elsewhere and away from our ongoing national nightmare as the desire to be social and see good friends that drove me to a former Philips factory in the shadow of Philips Stadion (home of PSV Eindhoven), just a stone's throw away from the small unassuming building in which Anton and Gerard Philips started to build lightbulbs in the 1890s and founded an industrial giant that is pretty much responsible for everything in this part of town, for STRP 2010, and all in all a good time was had by all.

The festival consists of series of art/music/technology workshops, an area of interactive technological art, and two weekends of live music (the weekend I was there included Underworld, Chris Cunningham, Modeselektor, Hudson Mohawk and many others, the following weekend was headlined by M.I.A. and Soulwax). Overall the music was good, I was surprised to find I liked both Chromeo and The Bloody Beetroots live (altogether cheesy, but perfect for a festival), really disliked Chris Cunningham (his video set was marred by portraying a distressing amount of violence against women, any amount is unacceptable and this was altogether rather offensive), and Underworld did exactly what it is that Underworld do best, new song, old song, new song, old song, bum-tish-bum-tish-bum-tish-bum-tish, shouting lager, lager, lager, and rest. Thank you. And I feel obliged to say that after initially disliking their latest offering 'Barking' I had come around to it by the time I saw them perform it live, not their greatest album, but not altogether bad either.

Gig-going in the Netherlands is something altogether different. I am 6 feet tall, but occasionally I too end up standing behind someone even taller, blocking my view and swaying in an unpredictably pendulous manner, threatening at any time to come crashing down on top of me in an implosion of beer and cigarettes. This happened a lot at STRP. However it was almost always women. Giant Amazon women soaring above me into the sky, who still seemed to find the wearing of high heels a necessity. Giant Dutch Amazons soaring into the sky with sharpened knives descending from their heels. Before you laugh, a friend required an emergency trip to the hospital the following afternoon when his stiletto-pierced toe became nastily infected.

Now you may laugh.

Despite the lack of a Three AM pasta break I acquitted myself quite well in the "staying up well past my bedtime" stakes, and the morning after my body wasn't objecting too strenuously to the indignities heaped upon it the night before.

Reports of me moving in a rhythmic syncopated fashion to dubstep are, however, greatly exaggerated.

The technology part was very interesting, mostly the work of Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf, you could immerse yourself in an artificial snow storm, experience a sushi-conveyer belt from the sushi's point of view, have plates hurled at your face and smash inches away from your eyes (more fun than it sounds) and, most amazingly, be suspended ten feet above the ground, shrink-wrapped and vacuum-packed between two giant sheets of plastic. There were robots playing football (sock-ah), chromatic walls whose colour changes were controlled by motion sensing cameras passing over flowers, morphable mazes, face-recognition software that only seemed to match you up with serial killers, and much much more.

This is what the Science Gallery would be like with a bit more alcohol and a lot more space.

The installation that most fired my imagination, however, was created by visual and conceptual artist Marlena Novak, neurobiologist and engineer Malcolm MacIver, and composer and sound designer Jay Alan Yim, with whom I had the opportunity to chat for a while. Entitled 'Scale', the installation featured twelve perspex tanks each containing a single fish. The fish, each from a different species of Amazonian electric fish, each produced an electrical field that can be heard with the naked ear, though each tank contained a microfone, the output of which was run through an amp and controlled through a Lemur multi-touch controller. While Yim explained that some of the fish produce an almost perfect sawtooth wave, they decided to include two basic filters in addition to the volume control on the Lemur to give users a wider range of variations to play with. Thus Yin and his colleagues have created a live synth using fish. Yup, fish.

I had to be dragged away from this room kicking and screaming.

Good friends, good tunes and musical electric fish. What more could a body ask for?

Links
STRP website
Scale article from Northwestern University, home of its creators.
More Photos

The winter of despair

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way." - Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

The two cities in question these last few days being Dublin and London, and it has indeed been both the best and the worst of recent times, at both a national and at a very personal level.

Let us first dispense with items of a national import. What can we say about the budget that has not all ready been written about at length? There were no major surprises in what was announced on the day, the Government had clearly signaled its draconian intents the week previously as part of its plan to appease our new IMF masters, however once the numbers started to be examined in more detail* something rather startling began to emerge, it would appear that not only will the budget affect those on lower incomes disproportionately more, those at the other end of the income spectrum, particularly those self-employed individuals earning more than €200,000, will actually be paying less tax than before.

Tom McDonnell over on TASC's Progressive Economy blog produced the table above, which uses Deloitte's 2011 Tax Calculator and the Government's own income and pension contribution models to show that on average a single self-employed individual earning more than €200,000 will in fact be better off under this budget, with those earning more than €1 Million paying over 5% less tax than last year. Given the fact that our current economic crash was caused by these self-same high net-worth individuals in the private sector, the injustice of further rewarding them for their actions while simultaneously cutting the minimum wage by €1 should send people out into the streets to condemn this Government in the loudest possible way.

Which is exactly what I did.

Tuesday saw me brave the chill of winter and the glare of the cameras and take up position outside the Dail with a small group of friends armed only with our trusty (and somewhat rusty) pots and pans, and for close to four hours while the budget was being debated inside we joined with up to a hundred others outside making as much noise as possible, surprisingly rhythmically at times, and coming perilously close to being a drumming circle, continuously banging pots, pans, plastic barrels and whatever else came to hand and made a satisfyingly loud bang. Based on the Icelandic Pots and Pans protests (though this being Ireland, with nothing like the numbers seen in Reykjavik) that brought down their government, this was an attempt to give people an opportunity to protest outside of the political system, with no speeches, no leaders, no party newspapers being foisted upon you or placards being thrust into your hands**. This was just a group of ordinary women, men and children, citizens all, who really have had enough, and it was a welcome alternative to the depressingly larger horde of Shinners on the other side of the street whose mob-like behaviour culminated in an old man in a cloth cap being chased down Kildare Street, with bottles and sticks being hurled at him, all because they thought he was Jackie Healy-Rae.

Somehow in the midst of all the noisy chaos I even managed to be interviewed by "Morning Ireland" without sounding like too much of a reactionary idiot***, which was nice.

But this moment of national defiance was overshadowed for me by events of a personal nature happening elsewhere. An injury to a loved one abroad became the main focus of my attention for the last week, contrasting sharply with the more joyous preparations for my sister's wedding in London. The two events overlapped, somewhat unsuccessfully, on Saturday, but, as became the phrase of the week, "It is what it is", and nothing more could be done than was done. As I sit here this morning all injured parties are now safely at home and on the mend with a full recovery predicted, and the happy couple are now on the other side of the world en route to a honeymoon of hiking in New Zealand, the next stage of their voyage together begun.

And so my attention can return, once again, to our ongoing national nightmare, and whatever joy and light we may wrest from it.

* TASC have a great analysis of the 2011 budget, a summary can be read online here, or the full and comprehensive report (.pdf) downloaded here.

** For more info on the protest, and to find out more about future events, you can check out their Facebook page. Yes, I know, I'm sorry, but they don't seem to have any other website. *sigh*.

*** Yes, I know I say "Five Year Plan" in the broadcast - while it is still officially a four year plan, we have been given an extra year to hit all our agreed targets - I clarified that afterwards but it didn't seem to make the edit. Oh well. As I said, I don't sound too much like a reactionary idiot.

Bad Santas

Observed on the streets of Dublin last night amidst all the snow and ice, a horde of intoxicated Santas attempting to gain entry to a nightclub.

The terse and monosyllabic response from the doorman, "No", and off they went on their Merry way.

Ho Ho Ho.

Of easy wind and downy flake

Well now, if you have ever had any doubt that god was on Dev's side you can dispel it now. The worst winter weather in decades just happens to coincide with the Government trying to ram an unconstitutional international bail-out through the Dail without debate, and with the budget just around the corner on Tuesday we are told that the cold snap will last until Thursday at the earliest.

All very convenient if you ask me.

Roads are closed, whole counties are impassable, the airports shut for hours at a time. The Government could slash the State Pension in half on Tuesday and you wouldn't hear a peep from anyone over 60, they'd all be too busy huddling in their homes trying not to freeze to death. Even if people wanted to protest they couldn't make it anywhere to do so. And even if a few determined fools braved the worst the elements had to throw at them to do so, with the airports closed the foreign meeja can't get in to cover it.

All very convenient indeed.

There also seems to be some sort of curfuffle going on about leaked documents and undiplomatic Americans, or something, also conveniently taking the international meeja's eyes off of Ireland and our apocalyptic contagion just long enough for the Government to try and sneak in a quick fix or two.

Curiously enough while our own meeja found a little bit of time after all the interviews with stranded travelers and shots of cars abandoned in ditches to report on these leaks, they somehow managed to do so in somewhat circumspect language when it came to leaked cables from the US Embassy in Dublin. The Irish Times reported that:

"In the September 2006 cable, which was classified confidential, James C Kenny acknowledged that “segments of the Irish public . . . see the airport as a symbol of Irish complicity in perceived US wrongdoing in the Gulf/Middle East and in regard to extraordinary renditions”.

He went on to detail the “more cumbersome” notification requirements for equipment-related transits at Shannon introduced following the Lebanon war in July that year."

which sounds bad, but not too bad, until you realise that "equipment-related transits" is a euphemism for "Apache helicopters being shipped to Middle Eastern allies through Ireland illegally", as Al Jazeera reports:

"After the Israel-Lebanon war, the Israeli military said it needed to restore its depleted ammunition stocks, but the cable from James Kenny, the US ambassador to Ireland at the time, indicates that the Irish government was making it increasingly difficult for Israel-bound US weapons shipments to pass through its airport.

Kenny said that the Irish foreign office had protested to him over an incident in February 2006, when Apache helicopters were sent to Israel via Ireland without the local authorities being appropriately informed."

When RTE eventually reported on the leaked Dublin Embassy cables, it gave only a few minutes to the subject and only referenced US troop movements through Shannon en route to Iraq and Afghanistan and the Shannon Five case, no reference to arms sales and shipments was made, and then it was back to shots of happy children on makeshift toboggans.

Hooray!

A more cynical (and verbose) man than I would declare that the heavens have opened and hidden away all the Government's sins under a thick white blanket of innocence renewed.

I just say that they're a bunch of sneaky chancers.