are a strange bunch:

Upper Street pile-up

Shoppers looked on when a Nissan Micra Tempest got stuck on top of a Ford Mondeo after a collision near the junction with Islington Park Street at 4.10pm last Thursday.

Ambulances, police and firefighters rushed to the scene, but no-one was injured and traffic was flowing again half an hour later.

Eyewitness Brent Bidlake, 30, a publisher, said: “The driver of the Micra did a hard U-turn and ended up on top of the other car. It’s made my day.”

Kevin Smith, 39, a sales worker, said: “I walked up here just now and that same car had hit a transit van. Then I walked back a few minutes later and saw it on top of a different car. It’s quite impressive.”

Rich people queuing outside Joe’s house in Dublin, today.

The German ambassador has spoken openly about the tragic hell of life in modern Ireland. Gay Mitchell, member of Ireland’s largest opposition party, wants nothing to do with it.

During his address, the ambassador referred to Ireland’s wealth, saying Ministers of State earn more that the German chancellor, and 20 per cent of the population were public servants.

In a reference to negotiations over hospital consultant contracts, he said doctors who were offered salaries of €200,000 a year had described the salary as “Mickey Mouse money”. Mr Mitchell said last night they were the only words the ambassador said in English and that the audience laughed at the comments.

They laughed! Oh, now they’re laughing at us! Who were these “audience” and why was no-one taking names?

Mr Mitchell said Mr Pauls also criticised the Government’s immigration policy, saying Ireland learned nothing from Germany’s experiences. He told a story about attending the National Concert Hall when an announcement was made for the owner of a 93D-registered car to move it. He said no one moved as all Irish cars are ‘06 and ‘07.

He said that US visitors had stopped coming to Ireland because of the heavy traffic and that Ireland has a bleak time in the past due to the Famine and had a history “sadder than Poland”. Mr Pauls said a house had sold in Clontarf for over €20 million and one could buy a skyscraper for that in Frankfurt.

“Sadder than Poland”? Nicely glossed, Mr Ambassador.

Of course it will all blow over, because Pauls regrets… any misunderstanding that might have arisen from his words.

The audience in question, members of the ZGV (German Federation of Buying and Marketing Groups), was far more diplomatic in reporting the ambassador’s remarks on its own website. Read in German here or roughly:

[The ambassador], to his audience’s surprise, dispensed with the usual diplomatic attitude and gave an unexpectedly critical account of the social, political and economic developments in Ireland. In particular, he slammed the “fatally congested” traffic situation, a healthcare system that devoured money, and exceptionally high house prices.

A scientist has made the following smug and, I suppose, terrifying announcement:

We’ll be able to synthesize the voice of anybody saying anything, based on hearing just a sentence or two of them speaking…This gives rise to a notion of what I call vocal terrorism as a possible scenario in the future and we should be thinking about that now

Well I am thinking about that, now. And according to my copy of The Best of Myles, he was thinking about that then:

The trouble I referred to the other day began like this. A lady dumbbell hired out what she took to be a genuine WAAMA Leage Escort, and went with him to the Gate Theatre. Before the play and during the first interval dozens of eavesdroppers were astounded at the brittle cut and thrust of the one-man converstaion. The lady herself, who barely knew how to ask for her porridge, was pleased at the extraordinary silence that was won by her companion’s conversational transports. Quite suddenly he said loudly: ‘By the way old girl, is that your old woman’s dress you’re wearing tonight?’

Simultaneously, the unfortunate client found a printed card shoved under her nose. It read:

‘Don’t look round, don’t move, and don’t scream for the police. Unless you sign on the dotted line promising to pay me an extra fiver for tonight, I will answer in the affirmative, and then go on to talk about your wretched tinker-woman’s blouse. Play ball and nobody will be hurt. Beware! Signed, the Black Shadow.’

And so it is over.

During the night before I left for Mumbai, I had one of the most pleasant and apt dreams of my life. A certain young lady, for whom I have abiding longing, looked at my face and said “I don’t remember you ever smiling as much as this.” There was a moment of simple, romantic, connection with this figment, and I woke.

The smiling continued on the plane, and even onto the gas powered taxi in Mumbai. I grinned as we rattled past cows and dogs sleeping in the road; auto-rickshaws weaving around each other; children washing in puddles; and mangroves slowly eating buildings. Drums and cymbals banged and clanged as revellers celebrated Ganesh.

The hotel smells of musty wet clothes hidden under the stairs, and the streets are different only when they smell of urine or burning incense. The city seems to be falling apart, slowly eroding itself. You can imagine the grand colonial age of pristine Victorian architecture, hidden somewhere behind the fading and flower-decked portraits of Gandhi and Neru, and the ramshackle street vendors. The remarkable city scape has become a petri dish, and the human population is growing all over it, seeping into every corner, falling off the pavement onto the road.

The ability of people living here to go to sleep anywhere is amazing, and though they sleep on the streets and in doorways, there’s always a brush to tidy it up, and there’s no psychotic ranting. There’s only the gentle insistence of taxi drivers and tour touts.

Early tomorrow, I move on to Delhi.

The Guardian’s science correspondent:

Ian Sample

Yesterday, after a year and three-quarters, two fifty degree summers, endless arguments, two corpses, and many millions of monies, the station went on air. The opening ceremony featured a passive crown prince enjoying the delights of a poorly rehearsed children-are-the-future style song and dance routine. Kids and adults shambled around confused, rarely dancing in time, while the singers made great strides in advancing the art of poor lip-synching.

Cut to the news, where shambolic rehearsals led to the director throwing a chair around and banging the production desk so hard it buckled. The weather lady was so frozen in the headlights that she was cut, the anchors had to talk nonsense about how great the station is because the satellite feed of the reporter live from the ceremony didn’t show up.

In the evening, the news ran six minutes long, a cardinal sin in telly, and was barely any better. It didn’t go out live, but even with that, it was still broadcast in an awful state. They spent three hours doing it again and again and again, and couldn’t get it right. Edited items didn’t come in on time, the weather lady couldn’t do her bit again, the interview guest couldn’t hear anything, because the battery ran out in his belt-pack, and said so on camera, lines were fumbled all over the place, and cues weren’t hit.

It was declared such a success that everyone got the day off today.

Also, I’m bitter because I didn’t get an invitation to the party afterwards. Gits.

Looks like wherever you are, parents always disapprove when their kids want to become pop musicians, just not always in the same way. Just read this about Stephen Osita Osadebe in African All-Stars:

Osadebe was now established. He gathered his backing musicians into a band, the Nigeria Soundmakers International, and met with wide, but by no means universal acclaim. The real dampener came from his father. “When he heard my voice, over the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, he had a telegram sent to me saying he was dead”, says Osadebe. “Finally my uncle persuaded him to let me continue”.

From Reuters:

Bin Laden to release 9/11 anniversary video

Jolly good. Will this include remixes by the Neptunes, a duet with Kylie and never-before-seen footage of a young Osama doing a karaoke version of Unchained Melody?

This blog’s “YouTube clips of 1970s American TV ephemera” content has now been outsourced to www.classicshowbiz.blogspot.com. Unless they miss something really good.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Waldspirale building in Darmstadt is pretty amazing:

More about it here, and here’s the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, and the Green Citadel (if I’ve translated that right) in Magdeburg.

I can see how some people would hate this kind of thing, especially that last one, but it works for me. Dunno whether it’s a good idea to encourage artists and architechts to go down this kind of road though, or we’ll just end up with a production line of horrors a la Will Alsop.