Price of subway fares around the world, as calculated by Treehugger:

Maybe Dublin’s going to sneak in from nowhere and steal our crown but we’ve probably got some whopping fare increases lined up just in case.

Good stuff from Bad British Architecture:

THIS BUILDING IS THE DEVIL, IT IS THE ENEMY, IT IS SO UNREMITTINGLY FUCKING GRIM THAT IT’S HARD TO EVEN LOOK AT THE PICTURE WITHOUT IT DAMAGING YOU.
IT’S A COMBINATION OF BOTCHED CURTAIN WALLING, WINDOWS THAT DON’T FIT THE HOLES THEY’RE IN, ALL TOPPED OFF WITH A HAT THAT LOOKS LIKE AN ARMY SENTRY POST IN WEST BELFAST. JUST NEEDS A BIG FUCKING GUN TURRET ON TOP AND IT WOULD FIT RIGHT IN.
SMALL OBSERVATION - I CAN HONESTLY SAY THAT I’VE NEVER SEEN EFFLORESCENCE ON THE MORTAR BETWEEN TERRACOTTA BOLLOCKING TILES.

And I really like Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest too. Hurling vicious invective is something that anonymous online malcontents seem particularly suited for, and when the targets actually richly deserve it that’s all the better.

NY Times today:

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of girls younger than 18 who were allegedly invited to a villa by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Mr. Berlusconi is alleged to have invited about 40 women to the villa, but only some of them were allegedly younger than 18 at the time, not all of them.

I’ve lost touch with the ‘bikes for billboards’ story over the last year so it was good to be updated by the comments to this post over at Copenhagenize about the rather miffed anti-JCDecaux stickers that have been appearing about the place of late.

So it’s all going to start in July, and there’s a map of the (potential, it says) stations here - clearly the council has taken the wise decision not to build any in West Dublin until you lot prove you can be trusted not to do wheelies into canals and so forth.

It’s going to be a grand total of 450 bikes, just enough to make it look like DCC are making some token effort towards increasing cycling but not really enough to make much of a difference to the overall modal share and probably not to contribute towards ’safety in numbers’ (but probably enough for taxi drivers to complain about). All that said, Jay and I tried the same system out in Paris last weekend and found the bikes endearingly clunky, more or less forcing you to slow down, which might not be a bad thing in terms of changing the image of cycling from one of an activity of interest only to hyper aggressive blokes in lycra, though that may be more of an issue here in London.

Right, that’s enough rambling. Any thoughts from actual Dubliners? Oh and lastly, this thread on boards.ie reveals the very Nordic fact that “In Oslo if you’re taking the bike after midnight you had to first solve a simple maths equation on the swipe card machine before the bike is released” in order to forestall drink driving, as if anyone can actually afford to get drunk in Oslo.

Last time I noticed David Feherty, which must have been at least ten years ago, he was known for being a decent golfer from Northern Ireland and a bit of a wit, for a golfer anyway.

He seems to have spent the intervening years turning into a charmless PJ O’Rourke wannabe, and is now attracting attention for this epically bad piece about the Bushes moving to Texas in which he fantasises about how every American soldier would like to kill prominent Democrat politicians. Oddly, some actual US soldiers are less than impressed at being depicted as mindless homicidal wingnuts.

Amusingly enough though, Feherty’s decline into Texas’s favourite dipshit golf waffler has been pretty well mirrored by a bizarre change in appearance from Daniel O’Donnell lookalike to some sort of sports-casual hellspawn.

Awesome. Yersinia Pestis has photographed all the old WW2 bomb damage maps from the London County Council archives, transferred them to flickr, and made this nifty Google map marking some but not all of the strike sites. It’s like Web 2.0 but useful.

View V2 rockets on London in a larger map

Apart from telling a story of great human tragedy, the pattern of these bomb strikes persists in London’s idiosyncratic urban mix to this day, in that the sites were very frequently used for the construction of social housing estates in the post-war decades. Some of these estates have suffered from poor design, construction or management ever since, and social housing in general has become more ‘residualised’ as access has been rationed to the most needy cases. Combine that with the fact that the bombers generally tried to target the kind of areas of heavy manufacturing that have also suffered the worst job losses since the war, and you have a lot of places that stand out as pockets of lasting deprivation, more than 60 years after the bombs hit.

Update: Coincidentally, a new edition of Phyllis Pearsal’s original London A to Z from 1936 has just been published, and there’s an accompanying online map viewer which enables you to see some of the areas that suffered during the war, such as the stretch between Moorgate and Long Lane now occupied by the Barbican centre.

At the weekend there was a rugby match, apparently. The great and good turned out to see Munster buried under the burning rubble of Croke park after a conflict so colossal it made the Hiroshima bomb look like a fart in the bath. It was a war to end all rugby. Leinster, victorious, each will receive a thousand virgins in paradise. Munster, vanquished, will have their souls consumed by the terrifying Limerick hell-beast. Lions glory does not await Paul O’Connell, for only his vacant zombified body will be roaming the pitches of South Africa feasting on the brains of unlucky touch judges.

Hyperbole aside, it was a good match. However, what caught my eye was the coverage in The Independent the following day, a paper that rarely arrives in our house. On page five, Willie O’Dea proclaims ‘We May Lose, but We Never Surrender’ in an article utterly devoid of purpose. I imagine the scene, wherein O’Dea asks to write it, to jump on the bandwagon and get some publicity, and the editor who just thinks that it’ll fill up a few column inches and doesn’t care what goes in it. WOD goes on to say “Ah, sure, sport’s great, and Munster are good, and Leinster are good too, we’re all pals. Good times, but do you remember the time when something else happened, that was good too….” I may have paraphrased a bit there.

On further inspection, I realised that the picture of old Wills is not, in fact, a puppet of Wille, but the real O’dle himself. Frankly, I can think of no politician more hilarious and terrible to look at than O’Dea, but this picture really brings it home. Obviously, the counterpoint of Bertie Ahern, who, it seems, had to quit high office after deciding to spend his days eating the children of his constituency, provides some gravitas.

Still, it’s a testament to the new multicultural Ireland that a super-marionette can become part of the government. No more are they blocked by the string ceiling.

Councillor Maurice Ahern was canvassing for the local elections in June and came around our road on Saturday. He and his team were all looking a bit sheepish, seemingly only knocking on the doors of houses that looked like nobody was in.

And they put this leaflet through the door:

But mainly at election time.

Here’s a story from the Guardian about a fairly ordinary speculative libel case against Sacha Baron-Cohen and Channel 4. What’s interesting is not the case, but the method Channel 4 used to defend themselves.

Jim and I saw this guy randomly in the Mezz in Dublin a few years ago and he rocked, in as much as singer-songwriters can.

Now he’s doing a YouTube thingy from New Zealand.

This painstakingly crafted isometric portrait of Lower-to-Mid Manhattan is pretty amazing. It turns out such a stylised representation actually gives you a much clearer sense of the shape of each building and of the area as a whole - when you’re in the middle of it you can get this sense of an almost endless forest of towers but large swathes are ‘only’ medium-rise. Also, having been brought up on isometric ‘God-games’ like Civilization and SimCity my immediate instinct when presented with this kind of picture is to look for areas to demolish and replace with vast monuments to my greatness. Nice knowing you, Lower East Side! I’m starting to understand how Robert Moses might have felt …

It’s made by the same Chinese company that did similar maps for Hong Kong, Shanghai and others. I’m curious as to whether there is some automated way of creating these maps or whether they’ve got hundreds of pixel-artists slaving away in some graphic-design sweatshop.

Also known as Jay’s new blog. Our friend Francie is also blogging, brilliantly.

After a morning’s work, I journeyed to the cinema and saw The Boat That Rocked, which I had expected to be a bit disappointing, but it was on at the right time, and there may, I thought, be some diverting aspects. How wrong I was.

“Disappointment” does not do justice to the level of offence caused by this shambling wreck of a film. There are three identifiable story-like substances contained within this film. One sees a ministerial agency attempting to close down sea-borne pirate radio. The second sees a young man come of age after being sent to the ship by his motherm and later starts to wonder about his parentage. The third involves several of the DJs aboard ship generally doing stuff.

Contains “spoilers”, but then, I don’t think you can spoil rotten meat.

Giving the film its due, there is some nice production, decent sets, generally alright lighting and a period-specific use of wide-angle lenses that at least gives the film some stylistic authenticity. That authenticity is as far as it goes. The dialogue is anachronistic. The era of free love has turned into a safe-sex ship. Honestly, DJs, drinking and running amok at sea, and when a woman shows up after weeks of floating about alone, they refuse without a condom.

This is all forgivable, we shouldn’t expect authenticity from light entertainment. What we should expect is, in no particular order: jokes that make you laugh, dramatic tension of some kind, a story structured in any way, good performances, and such like.

The three main storylines do not inform one another and are so shambolically slapped together as to make drama impossible to achieve, the jokes uniformly fall flat (what few there are), and the acting is poor across the board (sad though it makes me to say it of our fellow alumn). Bill Nighy stick-insects his way around the film, half vampire, half Edwardian dandy. His achingly bad fist-pump at the end of the film is like a final insult to your intelligence and your mother. If you were to describe the plot in a sentence it would be “things sort of happen”. The pirates vs. government story is terribly contrived, as is the repeated joke of Mr. Twatt. You heard me, Mr. Twatt, again and again mileage is made of it, and they are long, tough, barefoot-over-hot-coals miles.

Indeed, Twatt could in the final reel could make a connection with the crew of the boat, providing a conclusion to that story and a redemption for that character. Instead, they opt for the not quite, but almost, deus ex machina, and Twatt just disappears from the film, Magic. Indeed, throughout the film the two groups on either side of the protagonal divide only brush against one another once, but the encounter is meaning, and purpose, free.

I’ll skip over the second “story”, cause it’s shit.

The third story, and that upon which the film hinges isn’t a story. It’s just a group of people hanging about, getting into scrapes that aren’t very scrapey (think diseased sheep), mostly having a bit of a laugh. The lows don’t mean much to the characters, including a sham marriage, sexual betrayal, serrupticious attempted rape, public embarrassment, and bodily injury. None of these things seem to matter. It’s just a group having a generally good time and playing some music. If this was my life, I’d look upon it with fondness, but it’s not. It’s someone else’s life, and they’re telling you the story in the pub about the time something almost happened to them, and you’re bored and looking at other people across the bar fiddling with the rim of your glass.

I have become rambling and incoherent with the mental strain of thinking about this film. It’s the kind of cinematic experience that leaves you questioning humanity. I’d best stop here before I need anti-depressants.

Still, some decent music.

Duff McKagan of Guns’n'Roses has some cool dating tips, from the obvious to the insane:

NEVER say someone else’s name in the throes of lovemaking. If you mistakenly call out your old girlfriend’s name, make some shit up, and QUICK!

Ok that was easy. Anything else?

The three A’s: Attention, Affection, and Appreciation. … Here are two examples, one good and one bad:

Bad: “Hey you, you are HOT! [Attention.] Give me a hug! [Affection.] That felt good! [Appreciation.]”

Good: “Are you wearing new lip gloss? Let me kiss you! I like it!”

Actually, both of these would work, and neither of them are stellar, but you get the idea.

“In theory it might be possible for a high-net-worth individual to remain in a panic room for days or even weeks without us knowing.”

Some perfectly fabulous jackbootery has been going on over the Cowen portraits, no need to detail it all here I suppose. The artist has been brought in for questioning ‘under caution’ (eh?). RTE apologised for its news story on the painting, and then whipped the report off the website. Not that one, obviously.

The best bit of outrage comes from the highly-excitable government press secretary, Eoghan Ó Neachtain, who complained on behalf of the Taoiseach’s office without telling anyone. According to the Irish Times:

He particularly objected to an art expert being asked for an opinion on what was clearly a hoax painting…

That makes no sense at all, but if you squint your eyes a bit you can see how it must make such perfect sense to Eoghan. For a laugh, here’s what the Sunday Business Post had to say about Eoghan on his appointment two years ago:

O’ Neachtain would be best advised to try not to see himself as being too important.

I also like Brad DeLong’s analysis:

Q: What is the Geithner Plan?

A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world’s largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off–in either case at an immense profit.

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money?

A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

The rest of it is genuinely insightful, if not as funny/terrifying.

The bit with the bear nearly killed me.

Oh my. Google’s automatic face-blurring technology might have got a bit over-zealous:

Unfortunately they’ve fixed it now. Thanks to Google Sightseeing for the spot.

Here’s my local pub, as photographed by Google with a camera on a stick on a car:

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They’ve done the whole of London, and more besides.

Here’s the car they used, reflected in a window on Holloway Road - a more inconspicuous vehicle than used elsewhere.

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I reckon it’ll provide freesheet fodder for weeks to come: the photos are so detailed tons of people will be able to recognise themselves or others, even with the face blurring on, and there’ll be no end of ‘Is this you?’ emails flying about. Sometimes the blurring seems to miss completely, such as this fellow on Bishopsgate:

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I suggest some sort of ‘Streetview Bingo’, where people get points for spotting Boris Johnson breaking a red light, Pete Doherty asleep in a doorway, etc.

Among the people who might be slightly concerned about their privacy are my next door neighbours:

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I’m guessing it was largely done on a Saturday morning, judging by the weather and crowds. Here’s Piccadilly Circus:

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And here’s a pretty good view of Westminster Bridge:

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Vastly more to follow, I’m sure.

My favourite analysis of the credit crunch so far comes from commenter Njorl on the Geithner plan to kick-start a market for toxic financial assets:

Consider a bunch of guys selling meatball sandwiches from carts. Some of them have purchased tainted beef and made some of their meatballs with it. How much is a meatball sandwich worth?

I don’t need a meatball sandwich so badly that I’ll pay even a penny for one of those.

If you know that the sandwich is ok, it’s relative value shoots up.

If you can tell a good meatball from a bad one, you can buy the sandwich and toss the bad meatball.

If you know a cart has nothing but untainted meatballs, the value of the whole cartload goes up dramatically.

When you think all of the tainted meat is gone, people will buy sandwiches again. Many will have a bit of tainted meat, but only enough to make them queasy, not dead.

If all food is tainted meatballs, we eat the guys who own the carts.

I’ve found the Irish Economy blog useful too. This graph of theirs speaks pretty loudly:

I think that’s what economists call an ‘oh shit’ moment.

Look here for my reel, since it’s a private video for now, the password is “reel”. Have at your criticism, and don’t tell me the music sucks because I hate it already.

New York proposes pedestrianising a chunk of mid-town Broadway. This is a great idea from just about every perspective - the New York DOT even says it will improve traffic flows by eliminating a few of those acute-angle junctions, which makes sense.

The story reminded me that I’d like to see something similar done for quiet residential streets but on a much more informal basis. Lowman Road, where I live, is closed off one Sunday afternoon every year for a street party, featuring the usual elements of live music, outdoor drinking, weird tat-stalls, sun-stroke, and communist balloons for children. It gets crowded, partly because it is obviously a special occasion, but also because lots of people on the street come out and stay out, chatting to each other or playing footy with the local kids, etc. It’s all very nice, and each time I think “hey, we should do this more often”. Not the whole party rigmarole - just close the street (it’s about 100m long) to through traffic so that people can use it without fear of being run over without warning. It’s not as if there would be a massive impact on traffic - in half an hour last Sunday afternoon, I counted eight cars going past, two of them local residents coming or going. So the displacement onto the parallel Jackson Road would be about one extra car every five minutes, hardly enough to notice.

There are a lot of residential streets in London like mine, where the traffic flow is high enough to scare off children playing and other casual use but low enough that diverting it elsewhere every so often won’t make much difference. In policy terms, closing these streets off to through traffic once every fortnight or month in summer could do a great deal to promote outdoorsy fun, improve physical health, boost that kind of neighbourliness all politicians seem to be in favour of, and make the city a more pleasant place to raise children. It may also bring about a more subtle psychological shift, from the perception of streets as places where cars rule and people fear to tread, to places where people rule and cars go slowly.

If it was such a great idea people would be doing it already though, right? Maybe, or maybe it’s one of those things that people don’t do because they don’t see people doing it, a tipping-point sort of thing. I can also see councils treating it as more of a pain in the arse than an opportunity to improve local quality of life, so there’s a natural role there for any mayor who wanted to promote the idea, if he can be bothered.

I’m really impressed with how the consultation for the Dublin strategic transport plan is being done. You can give detailed feedback on a huge list of potential measures to improve transport, including quite a few pretty radical ideas. Okay, some it’s pie in the sky (land value taxation?) but there’s also plenty of feasible, sensible measures that would really improve things along the general lines of making walking, cycling and public transport safer and more attractive. Some of these things are more likely than others but they could all benefit from some evidence of public support. So if you’re in favour of that kind of thing get on there and vote for it, not least because there’ll probably be any number of petrolheads doing the opposite.

I initially thought this was somebody doing a Werner Herzog parody.

But no, it’s the real deal. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Werner Herzog decided to make an entirely straight-faced Werner Herzog parody and not tell anyone. Link from Matthew Yglesias, who claims that Herzog’s new documentary Encounters At The End Of The Earth is better than Man on Wire, which hardly seems possible.

This is based on Census data going back to 1801, and is an attempt to illustrate some key trends in the spatial development of London, such as:

- The original ‘City’, ie the square mile, starting out as incredibly dense then losing population - first gradually, as transport improvements opened up the outer boroughs, then precipitously as commerce displaced people.
- Intensive growth (packing more and more people into the central boroughs) in the 19th C replaced by extensive growth (spatial expansion) in the 20th, only for the city centre to show signs of bouncing back towards the end.

Unfortunately I think 1801 is about as far as we can go back. I’m also looking for data on the number of dwellings in each borough over this period, but figures I’ve seen for Islington indicate huge levels of crowding until roughly the second world war.

Try distance on the X axis, pop on the Y axis and bubble size, and density for the colour. Or whatever takes your fancy really.

Not quite the same as that film, but close. This time the corporations save the day.

I wonder if it’s just a PR job after the Eircom downloading settlement.

Tacheles iis one of the few surviving artist squats in East Berlin, although the ones that last probably aren’t that visible or slap bang in the middle of Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin’s kind-of equivalent of Temple Bar crossed with Leeson Street.

It’s been ‘being closed down’ for years, but it looks like its number might finally be up

The first notable thing that springs to mind is this horrible story about a young woman who jumped out of the window.

The second is that in Tacheles in 2000 Jim, Caroline and I saw what I am going to confidently call the most amazing gig of all our lives and your lives too, the world’s only living rock’n'roll star, British-born Darryl Reed.

There was a screening of his film Remember A Day, in which he played a character based on Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. I can’t remember if that was before or after the music. There was fire coming from the walls and you could smoke inside. It was like being in heaven.

I’ve never seen someone that drunk on stage. He kept brushing his afro combover across his thinning scalp and calling for straight vodka from the bar, which arrived eventually. Meanwhile, the backing musicians, The Black Cats (earlier The Black Dudes - they were black, but, apparently thought it politic to change the name) smiled and nodded and kept the whole show on the road.

Until I come across something better, Darryl’s words, shouted repeatedly from the stage to the half-full room, are going on my grave: “Fuck the government, fuck them from behind!”

I was there, baby.

From Irishtimes.ie

ALMOST THREE-QUARTERS of cyclists killed on Dublin roads are hit by left-turning heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), according to a new report from Dublin City Council.

Putting 8 over 11 and calling it “75%” makes it sound like a lot more bicylclers die, but the point stands I suppose.

In keeping with my habit of noting pointless errata, just as one should on a blog, I will recount today’s experience.

As I approached the local supermarket, not twenty yards distant, I was accosted by a ruddy-faced chap. I caught his eye, and he sidled up to ask “Can you get me a plastic bag from the Supervalu?” I declined, baffled as usual. He wasn’t a child looking for some kindly adult to buy booze. He may have been mad, or disabled, but surely if he had the capacity to ask me for this favour, he had the ability to buy a bag. We will never know, and civilization is the lesser for it.