Solid goaled

Check the end of the article for the upcoming tournament. It’s the playoff for a match against the CIA in September.

Here’s two things I’ve noticed: there is no website to speak of for the UCD College Tribune, and there is no good general website to speak of serving the general interests of UCD students. I’m guessing the reason why there is no Tribune website is that it is felt the benefits to the newspaper from establishing one wouldn’t be worth the time, cost and hassle (and anyway editors are only around for a short time), and the reason why there is no good website for UCD students is that the two organisations who have established general UCD websites - the college itself and the Students Union - are both too official, too unpopular and too uninterested, for their own good reasons, in the wider interests of students outside learning and union politics (I know the SU site has forums and other areas ostensibly covering non-political subjects, but they seem relatively inactive and therefore not good, probably due to students’ identification of the SU with boring politics).

Well, I think if the College Tribune were to set up the right kind of website it would stand a good chance of being very worthwhile for both the newspaper and students in general.

What would the right kind of website involve? Two suggestions: the Tribune ‘brand’ / reputation (independent, for students by students, interested in what students are interested in) should be used to draw people in but shouldn’t dominate their experience of the site (like The Guardian does for Comment Is Free), and content should be as student-driven as possible. So, it should include content from the paper, at the very least all the comment pieces online, but it should make every effort to encourage readers to leave comments so that conversations have the best chance to develop. It should have a fairly chatty blog of college-centric news and views written by the paper’s contributors. It should have an easy to use section for classified ads. Going wider, it should have sections for the various student societies, run by the societies themselves. It should have discussion forums. It could go even further and host student blogs, homepages, photo galleries and maybe (maybe) even a wiki-style guide to all things UCD written by students themselves. There are a lot of possibilities, and with something like this you need to be able to walk before you can run, BUT critical mass is important to social networks taking off, and bundling together different services makes users of one more likely to use another, making that critical mass easier to achieve. If it took off, it would be self-sustaining.

What would be in it for the Tribune? Well, if it worked it would put the Tribune at the centre of online college life and enhance its reputation and maybe even its print readership. It shouldn’t hurt earnings from ads for the print paper (since it’s a freesheet) and might even increase them, and if the site takes off the Tribune could sell online advertising. And finally, if the Tribune doesn’t do it somebody else eventually will. Social networking has been very good until now at linking people who live far away from each other, and it’s only now starting to link people who live or work close together but don’t interact as they might want to. A lot of the time people who live or work close together don’t want to interact online in any way at all, but universities, I think, are an exception, so I think we will eventually start seeing more and better community websites for particular universities starting up. I’d like to see UCD be first, and I’d like to see the Tribune do it.

Wouldn’t this be a lot of work? I think if you started with a small but scaleable set-up (like a Tribune Wordpress blog at a dedicated URL, total cost 20 quid or something like that) it needn’t be, and if and when it starts to take off it shouldn’t be too hasslesome to bolt on extra features such as forums using the free, easy and powerful software available. And it wouldn’t be hard to get one or two Computer Science students to maintain and tinker with the site as necessary. It’s surely worth a try.

So , that’s the idea. Any thoughts?

When you’ve got past the basic stage in learning a language, what you really need is conversational practice. But paying some native speaker just to chat to you is (a) kind of ridiculous and (b) expensive. What would be ideal is finding someone who speaks the language you want to learn and who wants to learn the language you speak. And if face to face conversation isn’t possible, the next best thing is over the phone. But that’s expensive too. Or at least it was, now that we’ve got free telephone calls with Skype. But how do you find a willing language-learning partner with Skype? Why, with The Mixxer. I haven’t actually tried this yet, because I haven’t decided which language to pretend to be fluent in yet. Maybe Swedish …

Ever since visiting the Barbican exhibition in the spring, I’ve been obsessed with Tropicália, the short-lived revolution in Brazilian art, music and culture of the late 1960s. I won’t try to explain the political and culural background (here are a couple of articles that do it pretty well), since I’ve only got a sketchy understanding of it, and in any case I’m more into Tropicalia for the attitude it embodied and the music, which was and is stupendous.

I tend to think that overall today’s European and North American music doesn’t really match up to the standard of what was produced in the mid to late 1960s, but even that stuff now feels pretty one-dimensional to me compared to what a few Brazilians were doing at the same time. The Beatles etc obviously revolutionised music, but they were working with a fairly limited set of influences (Chuck Berry and skiffle, to start off with). The Tropicalistas took rock ‘n roll and the Beatles, mixed it with the bewilderingly diverse heritage of Brazilian music, and created no end of fabulous tunes.

One of those tunes is ‘Alegría, Alegría’, by Caetano Veloso. Billy might remember that we watched an old clip of him singing it at the Barbican exhibition. Happily enough, that clip has turned up on YouTube, and it’s great - a big joyful tune, oblique lyrics about not carrying identification papers, a triumphant chorus (which translates as “why not, why not?”, fairly rousing stuff considering Brazil was in the grip of a paranoid right-wing dictatorship at the time) and an audience going so mental Veloso can’t hear himself and gets way out of tune. Okay, the sound is awful, so here´s the album version.

Maybe even better is this clip of the face-meltingly experimental Os Mutantes playing a similar gig, with an audience split between the wildly enthusiastic and furiously antagonistic (music was a major cultural battle-ground between those who wanted to mix Brazilian and international influences and more orthodox lefties who thought rock ‘n roll was a form of imported imperialist impurity).

That guy playing the accordion is Gilberto Gil, maybe the most unusual of this very unusual bunch of people: having been eventually exiled from Brazil along with Veloso when the regime got tired of putting up with surrealist musical pranksters, he spent time in London before returning to release some madly eclectic albums, explore African spirituality, launch an environmental campaign and eventually, in 2003, become the Brazilian Minister of Culture. YouTube is rich in Gil-related clips: here he is playing ‘Domingo No Parque’ backed by Os Mutantes (again, the crowd’s reaction is fantastic), here he is with Stevie Wonder, here he is jovially accepting an open source beer from some Dane, and here he is doing ‘Could You Be Loved’ in Porto Alegre. Finally, this one isn’t from YouTube, but it is hilarious: Gilberto cavorting at the Salvador carnaval alongside U2, and neatly upstaging Bono when he tries to hijack a Bob Marley singalong.

Maybe one reason the Tropicalistas haven’t had much recognition until now is that none of the leading lights had the commercial sense to die young. They’ve all stuck around and haven’t really disgraced themselves, with the possible partial exception of Caetano Veloso, seen here doing a really awful duet of ‘Nothing But Flowers’ with David Byrne. But then there’s also his gorgeous song in Pedro Almodovar’s ‘Talk to Her’, so I think he’s still ahead on points.

So, I went a little helicopter ride today. Deadly so it was, and while dangling from the over-sized table fan, I snapped away and got one telling shot. Not great photography, but it sums up the environment quite well.

Being in a helicopter, especially on a comped trip for work, is great. Every job should have one.

Check out the fantastic series of globes made by Ingo Günther at WorldProcessor. A few of my favourites: car populations, Nuclear Powers and Shadow States, forest fires and migration to New York City.

This is rather sweet: it turns out the secret of Rafa Benitez’s success at Liverpool is simply …. a sophisticated software system that reproduces every movement of every player in every match based on the data from a bank of specialised cameras stationed at strategic points around the pitch. Won’t be too long before you have that kind of thing as an optional live accompaniment to the match itself, I would have thought.

It only took four months, but I’ve got some pics from Barcelona uploaded on flickr. Also newly added: Devon, monster plant from my mum’s back garden, and blu-tac sculpture.

The new lord mayor of Dublin, Vincent ‘Ballyfermot’ Jackson (yes, he’s one of those guys like Seán ‘Dublin Bay’ Loftus, although he’s dropped it recently) says it would only cost €2-4million to provide free, wireless broadband all over the city. It would involve the city council allowing its lampposts to be used as antennae.

I reckon it’s a Doctor Who episode in the making.

Note Eircom’s severe lack of enthusiasm compared to the other companies when asked if they would be interested in a public-private partnership.

YouTube is turning out to be a pretty good collective archive of obscure but entertaining tv clips of yore. Like this one of David Bowie on Dinah Shore’s chat-show in 1975 along with Henry Winkler. Dave is much more lucid than in this fairly stoned (or should that be caned, ho ho) appearance on the Dick Cavett show, although he does declare himself “a great fan of Fonzie” so maybe he’s just hiding it. Winkler himself appears to be absolutely bonkers, at one stage declaring apropos of nothing that “All change comes from fire!”, which even Bowie can only smile pleasantly at before Dinah hurriedly cuts to a break.

There then follows a short interlude in which a karate expert demonstrates how to kick Bowie in the crotch. Ah, the Seventies.

William Labov is the founder and probably still the leading light of sociolinguistics, basically the science of analysing apparently random speech variation as they link to social relationships and long-term language change. He makes this sometimes very technical field interesting, which it should be, really, and here’s a nice clip of him talking about his recent work on language change in North America and how regional dialects are actually diverging despite the influence of mass media.

This is the kind of seemingly random political crime that, were it to happen in Gotham City, would mask something even more sinister. Although it involves a damsel in distress, it’s not really Superman’s bag.

A Fianna Fáil member of Donegal County Council who had a piece of glass pressed against her throat by an intruder said yesterday she was “still trembling like a leaf” after the incident in her home early on Sunday.

Marian McDonald (62), said the hooded man pushed two large pieces of glass against her throat and ordered her not to support a plan to build a sewage treatment plant on the outskirts of Moville.

…My friend rang as I stepped into the house. She said she had left her mobile phone in my car. As I spoke to her I walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. There was the man. He was wearing jeans, a hoodie and was just over five foot in height.I screamed. He came at me and pressed the pieces of glass against my throat. I could hear my friend shouting on the phone ‘What’s going on Marian?” He heard my friend too and that kind of panicked him and he left but before leaving he shouted at me ‘This sewage plant cannot go ahead’.

According to An Taisce, Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole’s holiday home extension is very bold indeed.

He has supported the bane of golfers and farmers’ sons wanting to build remote bungalows on their fathers’ unserviced plots of remote scrubland in the past. They later apologised. When the Times reported the original ‘criminal’ objections, they left out the rather important word ‘criminal’ for some reason.

Also, George Monbiot would surely be furious that Fino has a holiday home. He says he works there and will eventually live there full time.
Also, Chewy couldn’t resist.

Elitist activists, acting in concert with elitist commentators, have imposed their agendas for social change not through winning hearts and minds, still less by virtue of the objective value of their ideas, but because they have privileged and instant access to the public conversation.

I know, John, I freakin hate when those freakin assholes with a weekly column in the paper of record who use it to further their own personal peeves. You’re just miffed cause you are both the only elitist activist and commentator. Nice dig though.

Now all he needs is a column in The Dubliner and the circle of life will be complete

Sent-off Zidane named best player

The jury: “Headbutting Materazzi to the ground like a maddened bull elephant demonstrated just how complete a player Zidane is. We shall never see his like again”.

Here’s something else from the BBC news department. If you’ve spent years in school and at MIT trying to learn about science, despair! Here is the simple explanation for that Einsteinian subject: physics.

“Imagine if we had a pile of tin cans that we knocked over, you couldn’t tell how those tin cans were going to fall because it would all depend upon how you hit them, which angle you hit them at, and how they fell to the ground and how they reacted with each other, fell off the table and onto the floor. That’s physics.”

My antique cans! Look what you done to my antique cans. Well, sheeit.

Polish politics particularly puzzling

It’s fairly traditional these days to bemoan the quality of commentary you get watching football on TV, and no doubt any concerted campaign to replace your Hamiltons, Motsons and Tyldesleys with marginally less delirious individuals would provoke a backlash, but I still wonder sometimes why we put up with this chuckling punditocracy. The obvious answer is that there isn’t a choice - if I wanted to watch Germany v Portugal this evening the two choices of audio accompaniment were (a) nothing and (b) Mark Bright.

But wouldn’t it be pretty easy to set up an alternative? Within the confines of your own living room you can be your own commentator simply by talking incessantly over the dulcet tones of David Pleat or whoever, but that doesn’t help anyone else. These days, though, it’s easy enough to broadcast and receive decent enough live audio freely over the web - so why not subject the whole world to your thoughts through some sort of streaming live commentary website? Then anyone with a decent connection could choose to listen to your commentary just by setting up speakers beside the telly and muting the official source.

Okay, so probably nobody would want to listen at first, but if the commentary was any good at all you’d surely get more and more people tuning in each time. And if you let users set themselves up as commentators you could get some decent competition going. Anyone think this would work?

Russell Brand’s World Cup column in the Guardian has been consistently great, so here they all are for your retrospective enjoyment.

June 17th: Crouch, even in name, seems like a Victorian oddity - “Igor, fetch ‘the Crouch’ from the catacombs, we’re going to the graveyard.”

Roman battalions kept an elephant among their ranks, not because they contributed much from a military perspective, but because of the gawping delirium this berserk addition to the artillery would evoke in opponents. And to witness the affable gangle-tang of limbs sans gorm must at least bemuse our foes.

June 24th: Rooney is at least keen, even were he not so sublimely blessed. His touchingly apparent frustration mirrors the fans’ and he has a crackling authenticity no amount of media training can emolliate. If he carried Max Clifford around in a knapsack relentlessly muttering into his constantly incarnadine lughole he’d still eff and blind and lash out at dug-outs.

How many pairs of boots did he remove on Tuesday? Every time the camera cut back to him he was petulantly tossing aside another boot. Was Sammy Lee acting as an obsessive-compulsive blacksmith re-shoeing him to prolong the outburst. It went on interminably. “There’s Rooney throwing down his boots in disgust.” It was like a tantrum from a centipede.

July 1st: One can see why Scolari was so thirstily courted by the FA. He exudes potency, and though aesthetically he lacks a single beautiful feature, he has attractive obvious authority and charisma.

I don’t want to harp on like a gigglesome Heat devotee about “magnetism” and “fellows” but the man has qualities that inspire admiration. He is bold where Sven is insipid; confident where Sven is meek. I imagine that after victories “Big” Phil strides, nude, into the team bath and embraces his charges, guffawing and proud as the gleeful players unwittingly release inadvertent spurts of grateful widdle.

Sven, I expect, enacts some nutless shuffle from tunnel to limo perhaps issuing handshakes to the more senior players. I bet he wears pants in the bath.

July 8th: Eriksson presented an awkward withered arm of consolation to Crouch, like an uneasy stepfather to a detested child. Attempting to quell another failed Christmas. Crouch just looked embarrassed. Mind you he never looks that comfortable, he looks like playing football hurts him - mewling and gasping.

Nor did I much care for his speech where he urged us not to “kill” Rooney. It seemed to me like Marc Antony reassuring Rome that Brutus “is an honourable man”. Eriksson’s words appeared to be designed to divert blame from himself and nominate young Wayne for national backlash and culpability.

And his apprentice don’t inspire much hope either - Steve McClaren has been present throughout this drab catastrophe, blushing in his shorts like a suspect PE teacher dogged by vicious rumour …

From the letters page of Wednesday’s Irish Times

Madam, - A. Roden (June 27th) calls for respect for the feelings and rights of others. Yet the letter is marked by aggressive and distorting language - “indulgence”, “exhibiting their naked bodies”, “parading herself naked”.

It is a pity that he/she does not show a bit of respect for those who live their lives in a slightly different manner. If he/she is going to be upset at finding some naked people on a beach, there are plenty of other beaches to choose from. - Yours, etc.

JOHN GOODWILLIE, Old County Road, Crumlin, Dublin 12.

Brilliant! Bob Dylan’s radio shows, well most of them. Listening to the Mother’s Day special now, it’s great.

Via Stunned, here’s Pitchfork’s 100 Awesome Music Videos [that are available on YouTube]. From the first 10, I particularly love Triumph of a Heart from Bjork and Spike Jonze:

It’s that same old song: Girl is vaguely but essentially dissatisfied with cat; girl leaves cat and goes out for night of debauchery and soul-searching; soul-searching turns into a cappella orgy and bruises to the forehead; cat (who has undoubtedly been peering into his soul as well) picks up girl from the side of the road, immediately recognizing the passionate young pixie he fell for all those year ago; couple basks in renewed love and performs dance of happiness (and also cat becomes huge). Love is the answer.

Speaking of Spike Jonze, here’s a quite sweet short documentary he did about Al Gore in 2000.

Do you need a real-time weather report for central London showing current temperature, rainfall, wind speed and direction complete with interactive graphs up the wazoo? You do now. (From these people).

Today my train went over the Menai Strait between mainland Wales and Anglesey, scene of one of my favourite spectaculars from ancient history:

Meanwhile, on the far bank, thousands of tribesmen gathered. Whilst the Druids invoked dark forces on the invaders, the tribesmen beat their shields with the flat of their swords and cheered, jeered and insulted the Romans. Women - wild painted, shrieking madly - danced naked through the irregular ranks and waved torches of fire to warm their men folk to the heat of battle. The Roman historian Tacitus recorded that many of the soldiery stood ‘watching fearfully, their limbs shaking in terror’.

Okay, then the Romans massacred them, but still - could those Druids put on a show or what?

I love the frustration and defeatism in this comment on ireland.com.

Fianna Fail will get back in power anyway.Regardless of what they have failed to do,some CABBAGE always votes them back in.

You could write a lot about modern Irish politics, but surely nothing truer or pithier than that.