Salon.com recently celebrated 10 years online by picking over some of its highlights and a few carefully chosen lowlights.

Among the good stuff dredged up was this article on The Kitschification of Sept. 11 (watching an ad required). In a bleak and angry analysis, Daniel Harris casts a scathing eye over the outpouring of grief and sentimentality after 9/11, particularly on the internet. Winsome angels, tearful eagles, bad poetry, the fervent repetition of blessings and platitudes that would never reach their intended recipients: all are symptomatic of a wider malaise:

As an experiment in democracy, the Internet has failed, for while it is true that the voiceless may have found their voices in a forum in which it is always open-mike and people are free to say virtually anything they’d like, in fact they do little more than repeat the clichés of their leaders, mouthing slogans that are the literary equivalent of the graphics created in the wake of the attacks. The photo-ops of President Bush and the inflammatory symbol-mongering that has dominated the discussion of the attack become the editorial Clip Art of the bulletin boards, the source of the generic patriotism and jingoistic hawkishness that the contributors right-click and copy, presenting them to the public as revelations.

Hang on though, isn’t that democracy? Anyhow, I’m not sure the internet ever was an experiment in democracy. I’ve always seen it more as a means of expanding the rights and freedoms of the individual over society’s pre-existing structures - including, on occasion, democracy. (Nowadays, the internet is a googlocracy.) Maybe what Harris really wanted was a technology that would make people smarter, more questioning, more thoughtful, more exacting, more rational, more skeptical. But that’s like hoping democracy will deliver up wise leaders.

The article was written in January 2002, when the blogosphere was beginning to coalesce. Today, Sky News has its own ‘Blog Spot’. Harris’ pointed criticisms of those internet users writing about 9/11 could be aimed at today’s bloggers:

The Internet is the grave of free speech, a monument to our lack of thought and autonomy. Freedom to speak amounts to freedom to repeat, to select a pictograph from an archive of icons, here a whimper of stereotyped anguish, there a defiant cry of militaristic fury.

Overblown? Hopefully (although I did just copy and paste that). But even if things aren’t that gloomy, it’s a thought that has bothered me ever since we were told that online newspapers would become completely customisable: what if you just block out what you don’t want to hear?

Apparently it’s known as the homophily of networks (bottom of page, interview with Kieran Healy) and it’s why sobbing eagles of a feather will always blog together.

From the start page of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. How’s it known by locals around the world?

German: Wikipedia
Italian: Wikipedia
Dutch: Wikipedia
Spanish: Wikipedia
Portuguese: Wikipédia
Swedish: Wikipedia
Polish: Wikipedia
French: Wikipédia
Irish: Vicipéid

A better comparison might be to look at how each language forms the suffix ‘-pedia’. If a language has a different way (from English) of spelling encyclopedia, does it also insist that Wikipedia be formed the same way? These languages have different ways of spelling encyclopedia:

German
Dutch
Swedish
French
Irish

These ones make Wikipedia fit how they spell encyclopedia (not counting accents):

Irish

I’m sure there are lots of good reasons justifying what amounts to the careful guarding of an empty safe. But still - making the French seem relaxed about anglicisation? Just… wow.

David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is all things to all people: a candid look at America’s dark underbelly, a courageous satire of popular American movie genres and Cronenberg himself, others just think it’s shit.

But whatever view you take, there’s no mistaking Cronenberg’s attempt to depict two physical passions - sex and violence - in brutal realism, and Croney goes more for the violence. From the opening scene where a child stands beside her Mommy face down in a crimson pool of blood to when Aragorn smashes a Dude’s nose into his brain, or when he has bits of brain all over his face after his son shoots Dude #2 in the back, it’s all convincingly realistic.

So why oh why did Croney shoot the worst movie vomiting scene ever? I mean, it was one of those Hurricane Katrina moments when the poverty of movie vomiting was laid bare for all to see. Everyone knows what vomiting really sounds like - there’s this ‘WHOOEEUUHHGG’ sound, followed by a gloopy splashing sound. Of course, the timbre of vomitular impact varies depending on the surface it hits, but even if someone was vomiting on an empty stomach, you’d just know by the wretching, you know, that facial expression where the face goes red and scrunches up, eyes bulging right before the ‘WHOOEEUUHHGG’.

What yer wan did in A History of Violence is this: she pretended to heave and to indicate this, crouched down a little and put her hand do her mouth, like ladies do these days when they smile. Then she shot up, coughing, ran into the bathroom and ran the tap while continuing to cough presumably with her head in the sink. COUGH. COUGH. COUGH. COUGH. COUGH. Not “WHOOEEUUHHGG, WHOOEEUUHHGG, WHOOEEUUHHGG.” (OK, with some vomits, you don’t even get that sound, just the splash. I did that once in class in primary school.) I mean, I don’t know how coughing is going to get your dinner out unless you store it in your lungs, and anyway, when you’re in the throes of regurgitation, do you really immediately think of turning the tap on full blast? Or is it just a clever ruse? A trick of the trade to mask the fact that actors and directors can’t do vomit?

They should probably read this.

From the fabulous Spirit Fingers: Crazy Patents The World Has Not Yet Forgot.

Animal Ear Protection

Really, there has to be some better way than sticking two toilet rolls over your dog’s ears. What about some plastic banana clip combs or a velvet scrunchie, passe as they are in the human world. Food stains can easily be washed away but the image of your pet running around like a wannabe cheerleader will haunt you forever.

User operated amusement for kicking the user’s buttocks

Because it’s just so much more fun when you do it yourself.

More crazy patents here.

This shameless plug from the BBC ‘news’ site for the new series on insect life contains the following amusing little vignette:

The alcon blue butterfly (Maculinea alcon) of central Europe has long been recognised as a great con artist.

Its caterpillar emits sounds and a chemical signal which essentially “instructs” worker ants to pick it up and carry it back to their nest, where it is fed, cleaned and cared for as if it were one of the queen ant’s own brood.

The caterpillar can live for up to two years inside the nest before pupating into a chrysalis, from which a new butterfly emerges.

Ha! Take that, you lousy ants! But wait, what’s this?

It has an enemy, however: a parasitic wasp (Ichneumon eumerus). Unlike the ants, the wasp seems to know an impostor is present and, in what appears like a kamikaze manoeuvre, will enter the nest to find the caterpillar. [The] wasp avoids death by releasing a chemical signal, or pheromone, of its own. This not only repels the ants but causes them to attack one another.

One almost feels sorry for the ants at this point. Almost. But what’s the wasp up to now?

In the midst of this confusion the wasp seeks out the caterpillar and injects an egg deep inside its body.

When the wasp leaves the nest everything returns to normal and the caterpillar is once again fed and cleaned by the ants.

Yes, best to try to put that awful episode behind us and get on with your admittedly dysfunctional family life. After all, what else could go wrong?

But, when the caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, IT IS EATEN FROM THE INSIDE BY THE INJECTED WASP GRUB - and it is the wasp that emerges to fly from the nest, not another alcon blue butterfly!!!!

(emphasis added)

Ichneumon eumerus, I salute you - I thought the female praying mantis was a bad-ass, but that is ice-cold.

Nestlé is in trouble for its ‘No Wenches on the Benches’ campaign for its chocolate bar ‘Footie’.

This spokesbot quote is priceless:

The spirit of this is to reclaim chocolate for men, based on the consumer insight that there are not many things that men can look at and say that it’s just for him.

Hahahaha. Yes, not many things, except perhaps THE WHOLE WORLD SINCE THE DAWN OF CIVILISATION, which happens to include HIGHLY-PAID PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.

Oh, consumer insight. Is there anything you don’t know?

Misleading headlines ahoy, I just want to point out how stupid Dublin City Council is and how much money it must be wasting on useless and duplicated signage and weak, crappy bollards.

These pics were all taken near Smithfield, where I live.

Grrrr. That really grinds my gears. Grrrr!

A couple of weeks ago, The Belfast Telegraph carried a ‘story‘ saying that the Irish Government was going to stop the US army landing at Shannon Airport from 2008. Despite having their mistake pointed out to them by someone on Indymedia.ie, the Telegraph still haven’t changed their page at the time of writing.

They’ve confused the issue of the compulsory Shannon transatlantic stopover for civilian aircraft which has been ‘being phased out’ for as long as my memory stretches, which is about 20 years. It is a purely economic device designed to wring a few extra dollars or euro or axe heads out of frazzled travellers by making them make an otherwise unnecessary stop for an hour and a half in the hope that some of them might get so pissed off that they decide not to reboard and instead take themselves off for a nice little overpriced holidiay in the Burren. All of which is at great cost to the environment in the jet fuel used in take-off and landing.

But now that we have about 300,000 US troops a year flying through our version of Vladivostok on a brisk January morning, this isn’t so important, which is why I started this post (sorry if it took a while to get to this point).

Not only are the troops there, the airport is also likely being used as a staging post for US extraordinary renditions (ie, torture in Egypt, Syria, Limerick, God knows where) of prisoners and bringing them to and from Guantanamo Bay which bizarrely is in Cuba. No doubt the prisoners would be more than happy to avoid the inconvenient stopover too.

Two weeks ago, Defence Minister Willie O’Dea, who as well as posing with guns likes to sport a one of the world’s last great moustaches, went mad over what ‘radical’ Muslim lawyer Anjem Choudary said at a college debate:

If you are going to allow your country to be used to refuel a US plane which is going on a bombing raid, what do you expect our reaction to be? This is not neutrality […] A US pilot is no different from the Irish person who allows the plane to land. They are collaborators […] It is better for the Muslim to tell you this reality so we can change this and to make sure what is taking place in other countries will not happen in Ireland.

While Justice Minister Michael McDowell now has the perfect opportunity to bring in draconian press control laws on the back of what the worst paper in the world did to the dead Liam Lawlor, O’Dea has also promised to somehow crack down on freedom of speech while not infringing on freedom of speech:

Mr O’Dea said the existing legislation could be “calibrated or refined” to deal with issues such as Mr Choudary’s remarks. He said he did not believe that any such amended legislation would infringe on freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech had to be balanced by security considerations. Mr O’Dea said US forces had been using Shannon for over 50 years and that there had been no change in policy in this regard. He also stressed that Ireland was not part of any military alliance.
“How dare anybody come here to stir up these groups to do something like what happened in Madrid”, he said.
The Minister made his comments in the Curragh Camp at a demonstration of hostage rescue and anti-terrorist capabilities by the Army Rangers Wing.
As part of the display Army Rangers - who are the elite special forces unit in the Defence Forces - abseiled from helicopters, stormed a house using explosives to blow a hole in a wall, and carried out a mock rescue of a “captured UN official”.

Captured UN official my hole.

Stating the obvious that Ireland is not neutral on the Iraq and Afghan wars is mild by Choudary’s standards. In 2002 he organised a conference on “the positive outcomes of September 11″ (there have to be some, right?) and he said Britain was also to blame for the July 7, 2005, London bombs.

I’m sure he’s a horrible man, or maybe he makes killer banana daquiris and tells a mean two-suicide-bombers-walk-into-a-hotel joke, but probably not.

So what’s the difference between what Choudry said and what Richard Boyd Barret of the Socialist Workers Party wrote in August in The Irish Times?:
“By allowing US troops to travel through Shannon to Iraq this country is linked to the occupation. To suggest there is no risk is a lie.”
(Btw, the SWP always advocate censorship of speakers such as Nazi apologist David Irving, with their ‘no platform’ policy, ie threatening the organisers until they cancel).

Or what’s the difference between Choudry’s statement and what Kevin Myers wrote in March 04:
“We - rightly - allowed Shannon to be used to assist in the military operations against the criminal and despotic regime in Iraq, and our Islamic fascist enemies will try to make us pay the price.”?

Or what Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said in the Dail in February 03:
“Three weeks ago it became clear that Shannon would become a centre for protest and a target for protesters and-or terrorists.”?

Or what umpteen people have said again and again? They, like Choudary, are just stating the bloody obvious.

The difference is that Enda Kenny probably wouldn’t have too much in common with people who believe the September 11 bombers were only marvellous, unless perhaps they also believed in compensating shareholders who lose money on the stock market.

What Choudary says in public is irrelevant. It’s what he says to his mates that matters, and if Shannon is going to be bombed it’s too late to stop the bombers from deciding that. They probably decided one way or another a long time ago.

But there’s another problem: last week, in response to Liz O’Donnell’s grandstanding on ‘phone calls between All Hallows and Government buildings’ we learned that our Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, doesn’t believe in interfering in the affairs of the Church. Does that include mosques?

That was way too long.

Help! Am I Richard Littlejohn or Nigella Lawson?

My friend Orla is starting up her regular short-film night again. She writes:

Starting on Sunday, 8th January 2006, Sunday Ghetto will be running on the second Sunday of every month in the Sugar Club, Lower Leeson Street, where I will be screening a programme of Irish and International shorts, followed by a DJ til late, all for only a fiver per person.

I used to go to the Sunday Ghetto during its first run a couple of years ago, and it was always fun. Orla managed to get all sorts of people to send her all sorts of short films from all sorts of places, and the wildy variable quality became part of its charm. And sometimes the film-makers would turn up and give a touching little speech before making way for their five minute opus about killer shoe-boxes or whatever. The duds were actually in the minority - there are a lot of good short films knocking around, you just tend not to come across them in the normal run of things.

So I heartily recommend you check the Sunday Ghetto out. Oh, and if you know anyone apart from Ruadhan who makes shorts, point them in Orla’s direction - she’s always looking for new stuff to show. Ask me for the address if you need it.

Living in Kuwait is to constantly bounce from the sublime to the ridiculous to the terrifying. People are responding well to a commercial I made here (sublime/ridiculous). I have to make a video greeting for Oprah Winfrey (ridiculous). And, I have moved into my crumbling flat with a 52 year-old flatmate. He’s here working in management training, and was formerly part of the armed forces (terrifying).

Last night, when coming home from work he pinned me at the front door for an hour long rant about how terrible it is to work here, especially for his current employer. It took me thirty minutes to get to the kitchen. This was blessed relief compared to the preceding week. The first three days averaged at six hours rant, including two hours military tales, the following four days were a mixture of rants and tales between two and six hours, but not as consistent. These tales usually end with the phrase “…and we slatted those cunts, we fuckin’ gat them” in a thick Northern Irish accent.

My stories, in comparison, seem utterly tame, but thankfully humane.

The 2006 Calendario Romano is now available.

Don’t let the fact that these young and reasonably beautiful Catholic priests can be casually perved over whilst never themselves knowing sexual intimacy* put you off your rhythm. For some of us, that’s the real turn on.

*in theory

Dear Human,

Upgrades may be available for you.

I searched and searched but apparently the only genitalia that require upgrading are women’s.

This map from Google’s whizzy but silly new Analytics service shows the location of each and every visitor to WOWblog in the last 24 hours:

That’s seven from Dublin and three from London. Also, please note that this counts visits, not visitors.

From Stunned

Parasite is a guerilla projection project by Berlin artists which involves attaching a projection system to the side of the metro train with suction pads to project on the tunnel walls between stations, includes video step-by-step instructions.

I thought it was just a wacky concept but no, they’ve actually done it - see here for a nice video.

Here’s the abstract of “The War for the Fare”: How Driver Compensation Affects Bus System Performance. I do love that last line.

Two systems of bus driver compensation exist in Santiago, Chile. Most drivers are paid per passenger transported, while a second system compensates other drivers with a fixed wage. Compared with fixed-wage drivers, per-passenger drivers have incentives to engage in “La Guerra por el Boleto” (”The War for the Fare”), in which drivers change their driving patterns to compete for passengers. This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment provided by the coexistence of these two compensation schemes on similar routes in the same city. Using data on intervals between bus arrivals, we find that the fixed-wage contract leads to more bunching of buses, and hence longer average passenger wait times. The per-passenger drivers are assisted by a group of independent information intermediaries called “sapos” who earn their living by standing at bus stops, recording arrival times, and selling the information to subsequent drivers who drive past. We find that a typical bus passenger in Santiago waits roughly 10% longer for a bus on a fixed-wage route relative to an incentive-contract route. However, the incentives also lead drivers to drive noticeably more aggressively, causing approximately 67% more accidents per kilometer driven. Our results have implications for the design of incentives in public transportation systems.

Most sensible people, I think would welcome the prospect of Ireland finally getting a postcode system, but some of these commenters on an RTE poll seem to think that the glaring absence of a clear, rational basis for addresses represents another internationally appealing feature of Irish culture, like Riverdance or the Book of Kells. So we get contributions like this:

We don’t need a postcode system, let’s keep some kind of originality rather than copying everything everyone else does.
Rebecca, Laois, Ireland

And the same goes for vaccination! Jacinta from Dublin raises another important consideration:

I’m originally from Tipp and I don’t like the idea of being know from Tipp 2 or Tipp 3. Sure there been all sorts of commotion as to who would get Tipp 4.

http://www.theregister.com/2005/11/11/tinfoil_hats_as_government_plot/

My friend Abu said something funny yesterday: “look aftered”, as in “they’re not very well look aftered”. Seems to be a case of the verb “look” and preposition “after” being joined into the verb “look after”. Google reveals a few examples of “look aftered“, many in classified ads or discussion boards, apparently quite a few of them from South Asian speakers (Abu was born in Bangladesh but raised in London).

Since there are also examples of “look aftering” and “look afters“, it does seem as if “look after” has become a simple verb for some people. I can’t think of any other examples of this kind of process, though.

Coincidentally, one of the results for “look aftering” leads you to the new album “lookaftering” by Vashti Bunyan, her second in 35 years, and which seems to be getting rapturous reviews. I might have to get it, if not for the sake of linguistic research then for the “intimate, unapologetic beauty drained of gravity or mystery that invites and comforts in one stroke, stronger than the gravest clock and gentler than a stray sigh” (Stylus magazine). I just don’t get enough of that kind of thing these days.

I like Tyler Cowen’s take on political parties:

I just don’t believe that any political party can be mass-captured by the intelligent and brought around to sanity. Parties exist, in part, to enforce feelings of interpersonal solidarity and to make people forget about critical thinking. We cannot avoid parties in a democracy, but there is already too much interest in parties as a vehicle for ideas.

Reading this morning’s papers, I’m sure Tony Blair would agree. How much simpler his life would be if he didn’t have to drag the damn Labour party along with him on everything. And political parties really are strange organisations - the issue being decided last night was unarguably very important, but most of the politicians and journalists involved seemed to treat it like office politics on an absurdly large scale.

In the beginning, there was New Man. New Man held the baby, grinned into the camera and gurgled ‘Inne great?’ to hawk Milton sterilising fluid. And oh, how women swooned at the very thought that a man would be prepared to pick up his own children!

But New Man was a bit drippy. He lacked ‘tude. Men naturally got a bit cross, so marketers decided to cut them some slack. How did a second youth and no responsibilities sound? For a while, it sounded absolutely great. New Lads were everywhere, allegedly. Unfortunately, being a slob and buying the occasional magazine doesn’t really involve spending a lot of money.

Metrosexuals fixed all that. Hip. Young. Definitely not gay. Something about earrings. For a while, they reigned supreme, a seemingly unstoppable narcissistic consuming machine. But, never being up for a fight, the hapless metrosexual was ambushed while gawking in the mirror by (oh irony!) the latest fashion: übersexuals. This new strain of manhood apparently signals a ‘return to old-fashioned, masculine values: fine wines, cigars and red-blooded heterosexuality’.

Do I really need to say that at the heart of this supposed cultural shift there lies a book that needs flogging? So it seems all you need to do to capture the Zeitgeist is to say you’ve captured it, declare the old one dead, write a book about it, tack on a celeb or two, stand back and profit.

Fine. Death to these übersexuals! Die, George Clooney! Fie upon you, Pierce Brosnan! Go home, Bono.

The new Zeitgeist is omnisexual. This bold new breed rejects exclusive sexuality but importantly, shops like a bitch. For marketing convenience, it comes in both male and female flavours. Famous omnisexuals include David Bowie, Angelina Jolie and Jack Barrowman’s character in Doctor Who. And, uh, how many words in a book again?

One of the great things about Wordpress is that it makes you feel like some kind of coding genius. For example, there’s this plugin called ThemeSwitcher which when installed allows your blog readers to switch between different designs for your blog according to their whim. And it’s so easy to set up any idiot can do it. In fact, any idiot just did - to the right you should see a sidebar section entitled ‘Themes’, with a list of alternatives to the current layout for you to try out.

Currently my favourite is Rin, which I think has loads of potential for customisation. There are a couple of design bugs there, but hopefully they can be ironed out easily enough.

Hmm, looks like if you click on Semiologic you can’t get out of it. Better not do that, then. I’ll see about deleting Semiologic this evening.

I impulse purchased ‘Freakonomics’ by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and, unlike many other impulse book purchases, I managed to read it. That’s because it’s exceptionally easy to read.

Keeping it simple is fine. And yes, there are many assumptions neatly disposed of. Did you know that increased spending on an election campaign has almost no effect on the outcome? I certainly didn’t. Did you want to read that information spread over three pages? Me either.

Before I read this book, I naturally assumed that microeconomics had to look beyond pure formulae to the behaviour and motivations of the people in the systems it examined. So the revelation that microeconomics looks beyond pure formulae to the behaviour and motivations of the people in the systems it examines… wasn’t, really.

Still, it’s no great hardship to read things like this:

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn’t keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn’t win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.

And economics is the tool to do it!

… there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.

Hmm. I’ve always believed pretty much the exact opposite. Am I wrong?

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how.

Well, exactly.

Sometimes ‘Freakonomics’ seems less like an novel way of using economics to explain the world and more like Journalism with Advanced Statistics. Responsible, fair and intelligent use of statistics as well as caution in their treatment has long been advocated for journalists - and anyone else who doesn’t want to look an idiot. David Randall, writing in ‘The Universal Journalist’ in 1996 had this to say:

Far from innumeracy being some badge of literary worth, it is, for the modern journalist, a fatal weakness. If you don’t know enough to question data then you really are impotent as a journalist. Sources play tricks with numbers all the time. Without the rudimentary knowledge to sniff out the bullshit figures, you will have to swallow what sources tell you, and faithfully reproduce it. The result? Your readers are mislead and misinformed, and you look - and, indeed, are - foolish.

Levitt and Dubner aren’t all about you finding out how to sniff out bullshit. They’re all about showing you how great they are at doing it. And they are good.

So I’ll leave the last word to them.

Aviva may be the one modern Hebrew name that is ready to break out: it’s easy to pronounce, pretty, peppy and suitably flexible.

From www.alan-partridge.co.uk’s ‘Alanisms’ section: a short clip of Pat Kenny doing an Alan Partridge.

And look - an Alan Partridge film, due in 2007! Actually don’t look, I’ve already told you everything imdb knows.

DeviantArt is like flickr only interesting, and home to among others the excellent neotzc, who does interesting things with respirators:
.

It’s also got a lot of annoying manga.

Nice Woody Allen interview at suicidegirls.com. I liked his description of his struggles as a creative artist:

Q: You do a movie a year, is that difficult at all?

A: I finish a movie and then I sit around. I heard Neil Simon say the same thing once, you sit around for a week and what do you do? You go to the Bahamas and go fishing? So I start writing something else and when I finish it, I put it on. It’s not rocket science. You write for a few months, you finish a script. You cast it; you shoot it, editing goes very fast with an Avid. So the whole thing is not that big a deal.

And this is quite interesting:

Q: What do you want to do that you haven’t been able to?

A: I would like to make some films that are bolder than I’ve made. I’ve made romantic films and comic films but I would like to see if I could come up with something that was bolder, more aggressive. I’ve always been a passive comedian. I’ve always been a comedian in the mold of Bob Hope. Someone that’s victimized, a coward, a failure with women and a loser. I’d love to try a picture where I was a winner just for the fun of it.