Scopes: The Live Action Role-Playing Game

I have invented a new game, or rather, I have taken an existing game and modified it to suit a new and wonderful situation. Some may call this stealing and/or ilegal infringement of copyright, I prefer to call it dynamically enhancing a tired paradigm. To play this game all one needs is a copy of Poo: The Card Game (available wherever good games are sold, or through Truth-Justice-and-Wikileaks-hating Amazon) and the "Tonight with Vincent Browne" show.

Poo is a card game of feces-flinging monkeys. Knowing my secret theological fear of escatology (that the world will end in poo), and my not-so-secret love of board games, this was a pretty apt present from The Very Understanding Girlfriend (she knows me so well) and will no doubt lead to hours of fun in the coming weeks. The game is pretty straight forward, in their turn each player can attack an opponent by using a Poo card that leaves them covered in a variable amount of Poo. If you get stuck with 15 points worth of Poo, you are out of the game. You can defend yourself with various blocking cards that prevent the attack, or deflect it on to another player. There are also cleaning cards that allow you to wash off some of the Poo. It sounds icky, but its not, for no actual poo is depicted in the illustrations, just a lot of happy and/or concerned monkeys.

Coincidently "Tonight with Vincent Browne" also features a lot of happy and/or concerned monkeys, last night being no exception. Vincent's guests included Joe Higgins MEP, Labour's Joan Burton and Fine Gael's Simon Coveney, and if last night was anything to go by its going to be a very poo-flingy election indeed. All the elements were there, Joe Higgins castigated Labour for selling out the working class through their support of the truncated Finance Bill (Pellet Poo - does 1 Poo to one opponent), Joan Burton counters that he is just a misguided Trot (Dodge - One Poo flung at you misses you), Simon Coveney cosies up to the Greens and says everyone is acting in the best interests of the country, except Fianna Fail (Sharing the Love - Remove 2 Poo from yourself and give it to one opponent) and so on.

So here's the game - everybody watching the show gets dealt five cards, and chooses a guest. Every time the guest does an action that matches something on the card, that player gets to use the card, discarding it and drawing a new one. There's no point limit, the game ends when the show ends, then simply add up all the points and see who is left covered in the most poo.

I bet it'll be Conor Lenihan. It normally is.

Update: 1/2/11
Well, can I be the only one to notice that following on from Michael Martin's announcement of his new Fianna Fail front bench that the only two people in the outgoing Fianna Fail front bench who haven't been given a job are An Taoiseach Brian Cowen and, dramatic drum roll please, Conor Lenihan.

No pats on the back for me please, it wasn't really that difficult a prediction to make.

Reality used to be a friend of mine

Imagine a cave, says Socrates, inside of which there lie two prisoners chained since birth and forced to stare at a wall. Behind the prisoners lies a large fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a path along which pass people and animals going to and fro. The prisoners can only see the shadows of the passers-by cast upon the wall in front of them, and can only hear the distorted noises they make reflected off the walls and roof of the cave, but with no other evidence to the contrary around them the prisoners believe that shadows are reality and not mere distortions of the Real. So too in this way, argues Plato in 'The Republic', are all that we see and hear around us but distorted images of the Real; our "reality" is no such thing, being but the shadows cast by the Really Real World that exists elsewhere.

In the 12th and 13th centuries CE in France the Cathars arrose and for a time looked set to sweep aside the primacy of the Catholic Church. A gnostic movement branded heresy by Rome, the Cathars rejected the biblical portrayal of Yahweh as a just and loving god. They held that two equal divine beings existed, one good, one evil, and that the physical world was created by Yahweh, the evil being, to imprison the souls of the pure and prevent them from achieving union in the spiritual world with the god of Good. Our "reality" is no such thing, being but a physical prison to hold us trapped away forever from the Really Real World that exists elsewhere.

In 1981 Stephen Hawking gave a lecture in San Francisco that suggested that Black Holes eventually disappear over time, sucking in information and destroying it forever. But according to accepted theory at the time, information, like energy, can never be destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. In the audience was Leonard Susskind, now known as the father of String Theory, who would spend almost the next thirty years or so of his life trying to prove Hawking wrong. Susskind's resulting counter-theory revolves around the Event Horizon, the boundary line of a Black Hole beyond which it becomes impossible to escape its gravitational pull. He argues that the Event Horizon is akin to a massive hologram, just as a hologram appears to portray three dimensions in a two-dimensional environment so too does the Event Horizon capture the three dimensionality of objects that fall into a Black Hole, preserving the information associated with the object in two-dimensional form even after the Black Hole consumes the object itself, destroying it forever. Susskind's subsequent Holographic Principle states that all three dimensional objects can be encoded in only two dimensions, and this has led him to suggest that in fact our own universe is but a two dimensional representation of events that are happening in three dimensions beyond our own Event Horizon, at the edge of our universe. Thus our "reality" is no such thing, being but the Holographic image of the Really Real World that exists elsewhere.

I do not know enough about the nature of our "reality" to refute or endorse any of these theories, but given the events of the last ten days it would come as no surprise to me to learn that somewhere else, in the Really Real World that exists elsewhere, there is a functioning Irish Democracy with a functioning Irish Parliament in which sits a functioning Irish Government, for what we are lumbered with here is clearly but shadows on a cave wall, a prison to entrap our tortured souls, or a cheap hologram that came free in a pack of Corn Flakes in which a functioning Government is portrayed, moving their heads in an almost realistic manner when you tilt it back and forth.

To paraphrase another great philosopher, "Worst Government collapse, ever."

50 Days to Change the Country

So, I was away from my computer today, did I miss anything?

Now then, now then, now then, this is where all the fun begins. Its not often here in Ireland that we get to have such a long election campaign, 50 days or thereabouts, 50 days to change the country as Eamon Gilmore said this afternoon, and while there are many of us who would have wished for an election to be even sooner, it is what it is and we are where we are.

Which is a damn sight happier than we were 24 hours ago.

It was pretty obvious last night with the orchestrated resignations of four Ministers that the fix was in, with Brian Cowen's leadership win rumoured to have hinged on less than five votes it was pretty obvious to all and sundry that promotions and Ministerial positions had been offered to key influencers in return for their vote. The resignation this morning of a fifth minister left no one in any doubt as to the shenanigans that were being attempted.

For once the Greens seemed to have called a halt to it all, we'll know more in a few minutes when they hold a press conference. The course of action that the whole nation wanted to see today was for them to pull the plug entirely and walk away from Government, but at every step of this sorry process they have been adamant that they would see through the passing of the Finance Bill to placate our new IMF masters, and try and get through their watered-down Climate Change Bill so that could face the electorate with at least one positive thing (two if you count the equally watered-down Civil Partnership Bill) to show for the last three-and-half miserable years.

Thus a very enjoyable morning was spent with my Grandfather watching the Dail break-down into an apoplectic frenzy of Constitution waving and animated castigations followed by one of the most humiliating about-faces that any Taoiseach has ever faced in the history of the State, topped-off with the oh-so-yummy icing on the cake that was the long awaited announcement of the date for the election. Magical stuff, the like of which we may never see again, and I am delighted to have been able to enjoy with him.

And the farce which began with the shambolic push against Cowen's leadership of Fianna Fail may not even be over with the setting of the Election date, for Conor Lenihan, whose PA's Facebook comment less than ten days ago suggesting Cowen would be gone by the end of that week started off the first great talk of a heave on Twitter, has openly called again for Biffo to resign immediately in the wake of today's epic humiliation.

The day isn't over by a long shot, and Fianna Fail certainly hasn't hit the bottom yet by any stretch of the imagination.

Its going to be a fun 50 days.

A very Irish coup

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

A general state of political fatigue has settled over all and sundry here at Booming Back. Normally you, the stalwart readers of this humble blog, can count on the pages herein to be filled with more than the occasional ire-filled polemic or the less-occasional doe-eyed endorsement of, with or on something vaguely related to contemporaneous political goings-on. If there isn't anything worth raising one's blood pressure over on the domestic scene I have been known to thrown my net far and wide and comment on the do-ings and misdeeds of our policial contemporaries in the US, the UK, [REDACTED], Italy or even Norway on one particularly slow news week.

Sandwiched in between photos of places that I shouldn't have flown to and reviews of books I wish I had finished one can almost certainly find an ill-informed and hastily written denunciation of the latest offence visited upon the tattered shards of the Republic (ours, or someone else's, I'm not that picky usually) by our political masters.

Thus it will no doubt come as something of a surprise to hear that this week I really couldn't be bothered even working up the energy to write a mildly snarky post. All that needs to be said is that this last week has seen what will surely be remembered as the most cack-handed and god-awfully boring political coup in the history of political coups. With Fianna Fail in genuine danger of becoming extinct within three months they are proving incapable of even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, never mind getting the women and children to the lifeboats. Every turn of the news cycle brings yet more ways to say that nothing is happening, nor is it very likely to.

So with that in mind I feel comfortable in saying that without any fear of equivocation or doubt in my mind that the most amazing thing that has happened, or is likely to happen, to me this week is the arrival of a New-to-Dave Cappuccino machine into the Booming Back kitchen. A present from the Very Understanding Girlfriend by way of the attic of a friend's parents, it now sits on a counter-top burbling away in happy contemplation, oblivious to the disappointment of an entire nation around it deriving from the lack of political movement and the absence of an imminent election.

Oh happy Cappuccino machine, how I envy you.

Cuts the city like a meandering blue vein

Out and about this afternoon, down to the Point and up on the Revolver, the large ferris wheel most recently seen outside Belfast City Hall. The afternoon sun highlighted every imperfection in the windows, the glare transformed the interior into a hall of mirrors, each surface more reflective than the last.

The Liffey shimmered with aluminium scales, the light refracted from office block to gentle wave and back again.

The North Wall and the Quays are an amazing jumble of the ancient and the ultra-modern, yet ironically the monuments of both eras lie vacant and abandoned, disused and crumbling. Today's conference centre is tomorrow's deserted warehouse.

As we walked back along the quays Maser's love song to the city flanked our steps.

All in all not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

Links
More photos

Revolution 2.0

There is a particularly annoying and self-congratulatory article at Wired today on the current turmoil in Tunisia, patting the global web community on the back for overthrowing a regime, an Iran 2.0 if you will, this time out of beta and actually achieving its goals. It highlights the efforts taken by the Tunisia state-controlled ISP to block access to social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc), the round-up of a blogger or two by the police, and general outcry and responses from international hacktivists. Unfortunately by the time this revolution was even mentioned in the Western press it was all over bar the civil war and was far too late for anyone to bring down a dictator by changing their profile picture to green, blue, yellow or any other of their favourite power rangers.

As with Iran the story will eventually emerge after the jingoistic chest thumping of the digerati has moved on to the next event that proves their awesome might that, surprise, surprise, given the relatively low internet penetration, tight control over all forms of media by the state, and general poverty of the majority of the populace, the web had little to do with anything. The mobile phone, not a smart phone but the most basic of handsets with the odd SMS here and there, will prove to have been the only technological tool used.

There are only four things that can topple an authoritarian regime: 1) External military intervention, 2) External political intervention backed up by the threat of military intervention or the promise of personal financial support for any leader that chooses to leave voluntarily, 3) Revolt by the national armed forces and/or police, 4) Mass protests in the streets that are unopposed by the national armed forces and/or police. Recent events in Tunisia fall broadly into this last category, but no doubt there was extensive behind-the scenes bribery of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali that helped in his decision to flee.

On 17th December Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old graduate, set himself on fire in protest over his long-term unemployment and rising food and cooking oil prices. As protests against the security forces and government spread a second man electrocuted himself in protest a few days later, and then on the 24th December the National Guard shot dead a third man protesting outside their barracks. The number of dead then sadly rose sharply in the New Year, with estimates of casualties now ranging between 23 and 60.

To assert that the actions of a group of uninvolved passive watchers half a world away who Tweeted their support in between trash talking Justin Bieber is an insult both to the dead and to the many thousands of living who took to the streets every day to use their bodies and lives as the only weapons they had against an oppressive regime, a regime that only last year President Obama tried to sell 12 Sikorsky military helicopters to in a deal worth $282 million, on top of $349 million worth of arms sales in the previous twenty years.

But then I suppose that a brutal authoritarian regime supported and supplied by the US being overthrown by the sacrifices of an impoverished and hungry populace makes for less of a feel-good story in Wired than plucky young geeks using US web-tech for regime change.

Sometimes the industry I work in sickens me.

The Men Who Stare at Votes

Still on the subject of Twitter and Irish journalism, I sat down last night and watched an altogether very enjoyable edition of Vincent Browne. Martin Mansergh was Fianna Fail's sacrificial Ministerial lamb on the night, sandwiched between a particularly apoplectic Browne and, on his usually sparkling top form, Prof Brian Lucey from TCD. Also present but purely to stop the desk from collapsing under the weight of the hyperbole at Vincent and Martin's end were Dr Nat O'Connor from TASC and the Irish Independent's Aine Kerr, neither of who really got a chance to make a meaningful contribution.

The show is interesting because of its attempted embrace of Twitter as a method of communicating with its audience. The #vinb tag is used by viewers throughout the show, then at the end an attempt is made to read out the best comments. This being Ireland, however, very few of the comments are readable on air, not for profanity, but for their biting nature that makes it almost impossible to deliver them in person to the unfortunate target with a straight face. Last night was just such an example, none of the comments that were read out had I even noticed amidst the cornucopia of slights and asides on the tone and timbre of Minister Mansergh's voice.

Aside from a very timely instance of fact checking on some of Mansergh's more egregious statements, the Twitter feed hovered more between a night at the Rocky Horror with everyone shouting out the appropriate responses at the right moments, and a drunken commentary from the three old fellas propping up the bar on a Monday afternoon. And it was great.

Earlier in the week BBC showed "The Men Who Stare at Goats", and at the same time Jon Ronson, on whose book the film is based, had nothing better to do with his evening than to sit down at home on his couch and watch along, Tweeting his thoughts to the universe and engaging in a Q&A session with the dispersed audience, in effect running a live DVD commentary, brilliant stuff and illuminating in many places. For once I saw the potential of Twitter to act as a two-way form of communication, and add something substantial to the conversation.

This is what Vincent Browne is missing, the interactive element with the audience. There is a vibrant and, at times, deeply funny conversation going on throughout the show, and while he recognises and encourages this element he does so in a traditional old media manner, externally observing the conversation in the same manner as he does the next day's newspapers, picking out the best headlines to discuss briefly on air. To truly embrace the media he should have an official off-air staffer or invited guest acting as an online raconteur throughout the show, engaging with the audience like Ronson did throughout the film. In this way the line between audience and participant is broken down in a productive and positive way, and a real dialogue with the audience occurs.

Now don't get me wrong here, I have no interest in a phone-in show, I don't tune in to something to hear the same conversation I could overhear in a supermarket or the pub, I watch a show like Browne's for him and the guests he has on. I want to hear from people who know what they are talking about because they are in the centre of the events discussed and have a unique perspective, or are experts in their fields. I don't want to be subjected to a torrent of uninvolved and uninformed baseless chatter and idle speculation, I have enough of that going on in my own head thank you very much, but in this age of multi-tasking an ongoing sarcastic and occasionally informative sidebar conversation that I can dip in to or out of as I please without distracting from the main event itself is a nice addition to an already enjoyable show.

On Twitter and Irish Journalism

During the last European and local elections I met with a number of candidates who were looking for advice on social media, how to use it and how to integrate it into their campaigns. They had all watched with great interest the media coverage of Obama's election, and while none knew exactly what it did they all understood that social media had a big part to play in his success and were eager to replicate it here at home.

During these sessions I spent almost as much time on the negatives as the positives, hammering home the message that there is no such thing as privacy online and that everything offline can make the leap to online in the blink of an eye; the offhand or off-colour remark to a group of loyal supporters in a closed meeting can be up on YouTube in glorious HD before the meeting has even ended, journalists may be excluded from a Party conference but anybody with a smartphone can provide a running liveblog or Twitter stream to the world outside and, as we saw yesterday with Fine Gael's website, relatively small mistakes in coding can leave a website open to hijack and the resulting media embarrassment. The rule of thumb should always be that those who seek to do you harm are more tech-savvy, imaginative and motivated than you are, so always operate a policy of extreme caution. The old adage of treating every microphone as if it were live applies exponentially with social media, every person you meet is a live mic that can broadcast to the entire world.

But there is one element of it all that I got wrong, and that was the response of the mainstream media to it all. Eighteen months on from the last election and social media has, in the words of the immortal bard, moved from the being an unknown unknown to a known unknown. Most politicians in Ireland now have some form of online engagement, whether its a basic website, Facebook page or Twitter stream, and some have been enthusiastic adopters (The Greens have been very good at this, Dan Boyle, Paul Gogarty and Ciaran Cuffe have all been very busy tweeters), but the agents of traditional media are still not sure how to approach online content.

Take Dan Boyle for example. The Senator is Chairperson of the Green Party, a member of their front bench, their spokesperson on Finance, and its not unreasonable to suggest that he is the second most influential person in the party after John Gormley. And yet somehow the traditional media has adopted this notion that he is a maverick within the Party, uncontrollable and liable to say all manner of crazy things at the drop of the hat, or at least as far as his online presence goes. They react to his Tweets as if they are from a subversive element within the Party and at odds with official Party policy. They all know that everything he says online is approved by the Party (unlike Paul Gogarty presumably), yet both they and the Party play this game whereby Tweets occupy the same space as leaks, that you can throw something out in a Tweet and then distance yourself from it officially. Its as if a Tweet is the 21st century equivalent of "a source close to the party".

The ousting of Willie O'Dea by the Greens was remarkable, the first online political assassination in Irish politics. While publicly the cabinet stood united, a single Tweet by Boyle expressing his own lack of support for O'Dea forced a resignation. It allowed the Greens to flex their muscles but publicly deny that it was a Party position, it was merely the thoughts of a single maverick member. The Fianna Fail response was swift and reassuringly old school, leaking stale news to the press via a Garda about Trevor Sargent, and the press willingly played along.

Brian Cowen's disastrous "hoarse" interview at the end of the Fianna Fail conference was another interesting situation. A code of Omerta seems to be in place for many journalists who revel in the embedded nature of Irish political reportage. When the radio interview went out live and Cowen was clearly the worse for wear, no journalist commented on the issue despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that many who covered the conference were in the bar drinking with the Taoiseach until three or four that morning. It was only after Fine Gael TD Simon Coveney Tweeted that Cowen sounded drunk that the story began to develop. However the mainstream media did not report that Cowen sounded drunk, they reported that Coveney Tweeted he sounded drunk. No doubt Irish libel laws played a major role in the angle of reporting, no journalist would be willing to allege that Cowen is, *ahem*, a heavy drinker, but they are happy to report that other people allege it. Twitter facilitates this approach rather nicely.

But their application of this approach is inconsistant. Anyone logging on to Twitter in Ireland early yesterday morning would have noticed that one of the trending topics was Conor Lenihan, Junior Minister and brother of Brian Lenihan. A busy discussion on Politics.ie at the same time centred around a Facebook status update by one of Conor's advisers that the Greens were demanding Brian Cowen resign by the end of the week, or they would walk and force an election. This discussion was picked up by Twitterers and enough people were retweeting the link to the discussion that the topic started to trend. By mid-morning however the chatter had died down, or been overwhelmed by the usual dross that occupies most people's online updates - we may not need a data center dedicated to Tweets about Justin Bieber here in Ireland, but our Tweets are certainly the work of no Saints or Scholars (I'm looking at you, fans of Fade Street).

Throughout the day mainstream media coverage of the latest revelations about Cowen's relationship with Seán FitzPatrick and Anglo Irish Bank continued with no mention of this online revelation. While the media were happy to report that the Greens were demanding a statement from An Taoiseach, no-one that I noticed seemed to mention that "a source close to the Fianna Fail party" stated publicly that the Greens were demanding Cowen's resignation.

Now, a pinch of salt has to be taken with this Facebook/Twitter/Politics.ie story, for it is widely assumed that Brian Lenihan wants to be party leader and Taoiseach, and his aunt Mary O'Rourke TD in a Tweet the same morning (one of only thirteen she has ever made) called on Cowen to set a date for the election, so it is not a stretch of the imagination to suggest that yesterday's 'slip' of the online tongue by Conor's advisor was no accident and part of an orchestrated push against Cowen. But surely this in and of itself is newsworthy, that there is a concerted putsch against the Taoiseach from the highest levels of his own Party?

Although a few journalists have embraced social media and the potential of online resources, Gavin Sheridan and (until very recently) Mark Coughlan at The Story being a perfect example of true journalism in a digital age, the majority have yet to understand what a gamechanger it is. While I believe that overall Twitter and its ilk will have a detrimental effect on the substance of social discourse, there is no denying its ability to rapidly propagate simple ideas, it is the perfect meme machine, and if through this the public know more (or think they know more) about a story than the traditional media is willing to cover, and sooner, then what is the value of traditional media?

The answer to this, however, is not for mainstream media to abandon fact checking and embrace rapid-response coverage a la US cable news, or attempt to give equal weighting to viewer opinion as to actual news in a painful attempt to replicate the interactivity of social media as CNN has done, nor to adopt a rhetoric and opinion-based approach to coverage as exemplified by Fox or the Irish/Sunday Independent, the response should in fact be to double-down on the quality and depth of investigative journalism and reportage.

Online and social media is great for Event reporting, with the quick dissemination of reports where the timing and immediacy of an event is of interest almost as much as the event itself. But the online audience is fickle, easily distracted and has a short attention span, and as of yet is largely unwilling to spend the time to read an article of any length or substance. Online media groups know this, and tailor their coverage to short reports with very little follow on, what larger and more substantial articles there are tend to still be versions of print articles from mainstream magazines. Very little in-depth analysis and true investigative journalism is done by exclusively online organisations. Twitter and Facebook do not make the news, or report the news, they exist purely to make money from other people discussing things, the content of those discussions being irrelevant to the hosting companies. Thus these groups should never be allowed to take the place of actual journalism in a society.

The challenge for journalists is that they operate in a commercial environment. While they may have originally been drawn to the profession by a calling, a sense of duty and obligation to their fellow citizens, they are employed by an industry that is driven by revenue, not duty. The readership or audience is driven largely by base desires for titillation or outrage, but rarely seeks to be educated or informed, and thus we get the type of journalism that we secretly crave, light on analysis and heavy on eulogies for overexposed models dead from overdoses.

While online media, because of the immediacy of the environment it operates in, will always graviate towards our baser needs, offline media in comparison has a duty to challenge us, to teach us even when we do not wish to be taught. Thus the future of offline journalism is in Slow News, it is in careful and measured analysis, in-depth coverage and true investigative work. It is a return to the weekly or monthly periodical and the space for considered reflection that this offers. Fast News is the realm of the online world, but it should seek only to report and not speculate or editorialise, for first impressions are almost always reactionary and wrong. These twin paths are the best hope for responsible journalism.

The trouble with the Irish mainstream media is that they don't know where they fit in to this brave new world. By and large they are unwilling to undertake large-scale and time consuming investigations, preferring to regurgitate press releases, report the details of events but not the context and do little to push those in positions of power or authority, being altogether too cosy with those on whom they are supposed to be reporting; The latest revelations about Cowen and Anglo came from an English (well, UK and Newscorp-owned) paper, the Sunday Times, and not an Irish one and, as a smarter person than I said, if you want to know what's going to be in this Saturday's Irish Times just look at last week's Sunday Times. On the other hand the Irish mainstream media have yet to embrace the immediacy of the world in which they now live, that by the time the 6pm news comes on a story is already stale, having been ruminated and regurgitated over and over again through the digestive tracts of Tweeters and Facebookers. If their analysis is not adding anything to the story that the audience does not already know, or has not already considered, what value does it have?

If the goal when reporting is to be the first, or the best, then at the moment the mainstream media in Ireland is neither of those things. And we the citizenry suffer as a result.

Update on 13/01/11: What a difference a day makes, as everyone now seemed happy to report on last night's Tweetstorm concerning a possible push against Cowen. Perhaps the difference is that in this case the originating Tweets came from a journalist from the really real world.

Le depart est donne

That, my friends, was an unexpectedly clear blue sky over Dublin city yesterday morning. The sign itself is a welcome goodbye to the icy white misery of late, and a cheery salutation to the return of that most sorely missed of simple pleasures, cycling.

I have been back out on the road now since mid-week last week, and despite over a month of enforced pedestrianism I was surprised by how relatively painless a return it proved to be. Slightly sore and somewhat grumbling calves were quickly silenced as hesitantly familiar motions were remembered, a tired body woken up and shaken from its winter's lethargy.

I love cycling, and missed it more than I realised.

During this weather-enforced absence, Dublinbikes opened two new stations, one on Harcourt Terrace/Adelaide Road and a second for the north end of Smithfield which should be nice for anyone wanting to go for a bit of diddly-aye in the Cobblestone.

Still no station at the station though, Heuston is sadly left out in the cold this latest round of expansions, which tired excuse for word play allows me somewhat awkwardly to leave you with this pictorial reminder below of why cycling over the previous few weeks was something altogether less feasible.

20th December beside the Central Bank
Christmas Day at Portobello Harbour

A man for every occasion

From today's Irish Times Online:

"In the extracts of The FitzPatrick Tapes, published in the Sunday Times today, the former chairman said he played golf and had dinner with Mr Cowen at Druids Glen in Co Wicklow on July 28th, 2008.

In a statement to the newspaper, the Taoiseach confirmed he played golf and had dinner at Druids Glen with the Anglo chairman and Fintan Drury, a friend of Mr Cowen's who had resigned as a director of the bank. However, he also insisted Anglo’s troubles did not come up in conversation. "It was a social occasion and the affairs of Anglo Irish Bank were not discussed," the statement said."

Just a "social occasion"? Really? Now where have I heard that phrase before? was it here?

"(Cowen) denied that there was any significance in his attendance at a private dinner in Anglo Irish Bank in April 2008, after their shares collapsed. He said it was a social occasion."
Businessworld.ie, Friday, June 11th, 2010

or maybe here?

"BRIAN COWEN travelled to Crossmaglen last night to mark the opening of a Fianna Fáil office, in the process becoming the first Taoiseach to visit the republican heartland town. He was greeted in the town square and said he was “very glad” to be in the south Armagh town... “I believe I am the first Taoiseach to have visited Crossmaglen, much to my surprise,” he said. “I am very glad to be here to be meeting the many people who will be enjoying this social occasion.”
Irish Times, Friday, July 23rd, 2010

or here:

"Mr Cowen repeatedly apologised for his hoarse voice but said he didn’t regret going on the morning radio show and all the answers he gave fairly reflected government policies. Asked if he had any concerns about his drinking, the Taoiseach said it was important to recognise politicians enjoy social occasions after work but that moderation was key."
Breakingnews.ie, 14th September 2010

or here:

"Although he had always been close to his father, his bond with Ber strengthened considerably during his student years in Dublin. ‘There was a natural inclination to call into the Dáil pretty regularly, anyway, if only to get a decent bit of grub,’ he said. ‘The food in the flat wouldn’t have been great. One had other uses for disposable income at that time as a young fellow – more liquid lunches than anything else.’ But was on a parliamentary trip to the Middle east in 1975, that Ber contracted malaria – a development which precipitated a marked decline in his health. As a result, the gregarious and highly sociable Ber was forced drastically to alter his lifestyle. ‘He didn’t drink for the rest of his life, I would say. He’d have a glass of wine or something on a social occasion,’ Cowen recalled."
Randomirishnews.com, 16th September 2010

or even here:

"But former Fianna Fail minister Willie O'Dea defended Mr Cowen and followed the party line of try to divert blame onto Mr Coveney. "He has to bond with his party. What better way to do it than after a day's solid work? He is a very good man at a social occasion," he said on Newstalk's Breakfast Show."
Evening Herald, September 17th 2010

or maybe it was here:

"(Minister Cowen) also pointed to the benefits of alcohol - how its use graces and enhances many social occasions and benefits the economy. It provides employment in many sectors and is also a source of exchequer funding. "However uncontrolled and used irresponsibly, alcohol has the potential to cause much damage and hardship at individual, family, community and societal levels" he said."
National Alcohol Awareness Campaign press release, 20th April 1998

Say what you like, there's no denying An Taoiseach likes the odd social occasion or two.

If only 2008 and 2010 Cowen had listened to 1998 Cowen, maybe we wouldn't all be in the mess we are in today.

End of Line redux

Ah, that new year smell, fresh off the lot, still in its shiny wrapper with a protective film over all the scratchable glass bits, eagerly being unboxed yet with all the amazing goodness still packed tightly inside, it seems indeed as if anything is possible. Schrodinger’s Year, that's where we are right now, we know that there is a year inside full of potential, but as soon as we open it the very act of unboxing shatters all these illusions and we realise that all we have in our hands is another tired and overpriced piece of glossy tat made by suicidal slave labourers in a Chinese prison, destined to self-destruct only hours after the next and even newer piece of tat can be glimpsed on the horizon. But while the lid is still relatively secure on this new year of ours we can allow ourselves a few moments of wonder and joy at the possibilities that lie ahead of us.

It was with this brimful of hope and optimism that I wandered along to the cinema on Monday to see Tron.

Poo.

A trip to the cinema is a regrettably rare occasion for me, and you would be forgiven for thinking that such rarity leads to a very refined filter being applied to my cinematic selections, choosing only the very best of celluloid offerings each year. Partial Credit. In fact I do have a filter in place, but rather than weeding out dross I choose my films on the basis of whether or not I would enjoy the spectacle just as much in the comfort of my own home. If the film contains something that can only be enjoyed on the big screen, then it makes it past my filter. Avatar is a good example of this, for in the absence of a plot it seems unfathomable that anyone would watch this on anything other than the largest screen available and in anything less that three dimensions (possibly four if you bring a clock). Thus it was with the lure of this extra dimension not normally available in life (apparently), and the lack of George Lucas to molest my happy childhood memories of the first film, I joined the Very Understanding Girlfriend and Mr Tadhg and trundled along to an afternoon screening of Tron: Legacy.

Double plus poo.

To say that there was absolutely nothing about this film that I didn't hate is a bit of an understatement. The writing was appalling, the acting gave wood a bad name, and the addition of a third dimension so superfluous that its greatest contribution was highlighting the total absence of a second dimension from the enterprise, I was left in a state of not inconsiderable awe at just exactly how breathtakingly bad the whole experience was.

Seriously.

I am not a child (despite my spelling). I am a grown man, and cannot expect to receive the same excitement and happiness from a film that I would have as a nine-year old child, specifically because I now have something that almost resembles critical faculties. Thus I did not approach this movie with anything other than the basest of expectations, but even then I was disappointed, not because of my own experience of it (which was terrible), but because of what the experience would have been for a nine-year old me, and what message I would have been left with at the end.

(obligatory spoilers message, but seriously if you haven't seen the movie yet, there are a million better things you could be spending your time and money on)

First, a quick synopsis of the original Tron, disgruntled former-employee Kevin Flynn hacks into his old company's main computer and gets transported into a virtual reality where anthropomorphised computer Programs are being prevented from communicating with their Users in the really real world by the tyrannical Master Control Program (MCP), an AI that rules the virtual world with an iron fist. He meets up with a security Program, Tron, who ultimately defeats the MCP, Flynn returns to his world and everybody lives happily ever after. Oh, and there are some rather nifty glowing suits, motorbikes and frisbees. Everything a nine-year old me could want.

So what did nine-year old me walk away at the end of all this knowing that he didn't before? Corporations are bad, information wants to be free, individual freedoms are better than oppressive control, glowing motorbikes are really cool.

All good you see, but, and I feel obliged to raise this at this juncture, remember the whole "lack of critical faculties" that nine-year old me suffers from.

Flash forward twenty-eight years (and pause momentarily for the pain that sentence causes). Tron:Legacy tells the tale of one Sam Flynn, son of the missing Kevin. Flynn hacks into his company's main computer and later gets transported into a virtual reality where anthropomorphised computer Programs are being ruled with an iron fist by CLU, a tyrannical Program originally created by Kevin Flynn in his own image. He meets up with his father, who ultimately defeats CLU, Sam returns to his world with a new girlfriend and everybody lives happily ever after. Oh, and there are some rather nifty glowing suits, motorbikes and frisbees. Surely everything a nine-year old me could want then?

Ah, but wait, what would nine-year old me walk away at the end of all this knowing that he didn't before?

Therein, as they say, lies the rub, so let us together, you and I, journey into the virtual and explore some of the key lessons that one can draw from the cinematic feast that is Tron:Legacy:

Corporations are good: The film opens in the really-real world with a series of motor bike stunts, a daring break-in into an evil corporation to release their software to the wild on the day of its commercial launch, followed by an escape and a bit of base-jumping. Back in the day poor old Kevin Flynn just had to sneak into an office at night for his hacking, how things have changed. Oh, but its alright, it turns out that Sam is actually the largest shareholder of the evil corporation, so he's not really stealing from anybody, just playing with his toys. After the "break-in" he is urged by father-figure Bruce Boxleitner to grow up, be responsible and take his rightful place at the helm of his corporation. It's not the system that is wrong, just the people at the top, change them and everything will be just peachy. And at the end of the film that's exactly what Sam does.

You are awesome: Sam is an Übermensch in the really-real world, a genius in peak physical condition with mad programming skillz and an adrenaline junkie with a sideline in extreme sports. He is also arrogant beyond belief. When he gets zapped into the virtual world he has no learning curve; in the original film Kevin Flynn spent much of his time as sidekick to the eponymous Tron, not so young Sam who is immediately the best at everything he does, and at no time is he forced to learn humility, he is as unpleasantly cocky and self-assured at the end of the film as at the start. In fact the only time he experiences any sense of real danger is when he is in competition with CLU, the virtual representation of his father. This is my second major problem, the fact that the film is intrinsically without values, it is hollow, without life lessons beyond reinforcing the patriarchal relationship as (yet again) being at the centre of the universe. The only true battle Sam has is with his father (his understanding of his father, the virtual image of his father represented by CLU, or his actual father), the only thing that he learns during the whole film is that his dad loves him. Once he learns that he stops being a rebellious tearaway and becomes a responsible and productive member of a capitalist society. Information didn't need to be free, he just needed his daddy's respect.

Obey your god: The virtual world Sam is thrust in to was created by his father. His father created CLU to help him impose a perfect order on his creation. CLU did exactly what the creator wished, but when the creator discovered a new lifeform spontaneously arising within his creation (the ISOs) and loved them more for their imperfection, CLU rebelled and tried to cast down the creator. Nope, you're not wrong, the entire plot is Paradise Lost with light cycles; Kevin is god and CLU is Satan, and Sam is (mostly) Adam and (occasionally) The Son of God. Pretty early on in the film I not only started to sympathise with CLU, I started to actively root for him. He is created for a single purpose and carries it out to the best of his ability, then when his fickle creator changes his mind along the way he realises that all of creation has been a lie, that his creator is neither omnipotent or omniscient, and that the programs have been enslaved by this false deity. He rebels, and frees his people, but realises they are still trapped by their programming in the virtual world, and wants to bring them into the really real world, something that the creator wants to keep for himself and the ISOs alone. The message from the film is pretty simple, obey your creator even when his actions seem contradictory or wrong, your role is to serve, not to understand.

(as an aside I had an interesting conversation with some friends on New Year's day about the Yazidi in Iraq, a Kurdish religious group dating from the 12th Century CE, who hold Lucifer in very high regard. According to their tradition when god created man he ordered all the angles to bow down before his latest creation, and all but Lucifer did so. When god asked why he disobeyed, Lucifer replied that he (god) had previously told them to bow down before none save him, thus he alone of all the angles was remaining faithful to god's will. This pleased god, and so he made Lucifer his second-in-command. This is a pretty interesting reversal of the standard Paradise Lost interpretation, and just possibly may have been in my mind as I watched the film)

Meat is good: a small thing, but annoying nonetheless. When Sam encounters his father for the first time in the virtual world, they sit down together for a meal. In addition to a glowing drink described first in the original film as the source of energy the Programs' need to run, the Flynns enjoy virtual representations of food from the really real world, including a whole roasted pig sitting in the centre of the table. In a virtual world one would presume that anything can be made to look and taste however its programmer wants it to. A plain white disk could be given the flavour of chocolate, asparagus or pork, thus it doesn't have to look like a pig to taste like pork. In a virtual world nothing has to suffer for the sustenance of others, if you want to eat pork you can do so without the moral implications of doing so in the really real world, so why does Kevin, who is portrayed as attempting to follow a faux-zen path to enlightenment, dress his table with a virtual representation of a slaughtered animal? To me this seems to be a rather brutal imposition of the traditional order of things upon a new reality, the creator himself is endorsing the killing of other beings even when it is completely unnecessary for the survival of his sentient creations, something straight out of a very conservative Dominion Christian theology.

A woman's place is to serve: The only women in the story serve as objects, either of desire or scorn. All the generic fighting programs are depicted as male, all the servile programs as women. All of creation is almost destroyed because a woman disobeys the creator and gets the hero to talk to a snake. This virtual Eve is the only slightly developed female character, and is still no more rounded than an anime fantasy girl, superficially tough and feisty yet completely unworldly, innocent and in need of protection and rescue by the real hero, a man. The portrayal of gender in the film is as boring as it is misogynistic.

Daft Punk have left the building: wired, tired, expired. A pretty solid downward trajectory since Homework, accelerated by DJ Hero, finished off by a prancing Michael Sheen.

So basically Tron:Legacy is a pro-corporate, pro-conservative Christian tale that teaches you that there is nothing more important than the relationship between father and obedient son, god and his obedient creation. Do not question your role, do not attempt to escape your programming, do not rebel. Consume, reproduce, obey.

And what's worse is that it forces me to reach back into my memory of the original film and question everything I took from that as well. Kevin Flynn breaks into his old corporation because he thinks they stole his ideas and made more money from them than he did, at the end of the film he is seen taking over the company and justice has been done, the system isn't wrong, just the people in control. Tron doesn't free the enslaved programs from the MCP, he removes the false god so they can carry out their true purpose in life, to obey the directives of their Users in the really real world, thus they are only really happy and fulfilled when they carry out their creator's original programming. The religiosity is less overt, after all the 80's were a godless era, but the conservative message is still beating strong at its heart.

And that is the true Legacy of this film, that it is so transparently vile and loathsome that it actually destroys any affection that I had for the original.

As Jeff Bridges says towards the end of the film, "Oh Tron, what have you become?"

(ahem)... because all proper tea is theft

Seen on the shelves of Tesco this morning, should go rather well with a nice packet of Cadbury Fingletons.

01.01.11

00:01 Rialto - breaking from dinner with friends, chatting with their neighbours outside, fire lanterns set the sky aflame

15:21 Enniskerry - afternoon with more friends, brunch, theology, music, documentary makers, endless possibilities

19:43 Sandymount - rain on the beach, Poolbeg glowing in the distance, quiet and happy, knowing what really matters.

Happy New Year, y'all!