It being Africa Day, it naturally poured rain in London today, so I stayed in instead and faffed around online.

• Great footage of the Kop, from a 1964 Panorama. Being in that huge mass of people must have been tons of fun most of the time, and it was mostly very safe - it wasn’t terraces per se but police incompetence that caused Hillsborough.
• Orson Welles treasure trove. Collects together in what is possibly the single best web page ever, every downloadable play, documentary and chat-show the great man ever did.
• Mind-boggling stop-motion animation on walls in Buenos Aires.
• How’s this for a scoop - an interview with Emily Dickinson. Yes, really - from the 1891 Atlantic Monthly.
• Japanese manhole photo collection.
• Two excellent economics blogs each with a particular twist: The Bellows and The G Spot.

And finally, some sage advice from Sesame Street and a cast of thousands (Jeremys Iron!)

Weighty things happening in Lebanon, apparently. Fortunately our correspondent in Beirut is on hand to explain it all in terms I can just about understand.

It is a great day for the historic underdog, admittedly the historic underdog with a phenoemnally powerful militia. Shia power! They came to Beirut unwanted refugees from the south, they toiled away, under-represented, discriminated against, reviled as a common and racially inferior underclass, and now their martyrs bedeck the chi-chi shopping malls of Hamra! the Sunnis, who are always telling you they “love life” (local racist code for not crazy martyr-obssessed like the Shia) have banners hanging where their precious Hariri once stood screaming “death is our glory, killling our habit, graves our cradles”. You have to love a revolution.

Seriously, there is an aspect of this whole terrrorist organisation supported by nasty Iran versus US-backed government whole thing which has been totally overlooked, which is that they were demanding representation for the Shia commensurate with their numbers, didn’t get it, shot some guns off, and got it. I’m not saying Hezbollah are the good guys, or that they aren’t serving an Iranian agenda, but for whatever reason they’ve made the political system less institutionally racist.

I was chatting to an Irish girl at a barbecue here the other day and she asked if I spoke Irish, and I was slightly embarrassed to say that I don’t. Part of the reason came back to me when I read this post by Maria over at Crooked Timber:

it’s Monday today, so my thoughts turn inevitably to the Teileagoir. (Irish for slide projector, a term I only learnt as an an adult, and pronounced “tel-a-gor”). Every Monday, the Teleagoir would be loaded with a new set of slides in Irish, something along the lines of ‘Mammy and Daddy and Sean and Maire go to the cinema’. Each slide would have a picture of the scene and maybe some vocabulary to prompt us. For each one, we memorised a sentence of the story. We would do a couple of new slides every day, and at the end of the week we would recite the whole thing as a group without the pictures. How this might ever have translated into being able to speak Irish, I’m not sure. But I do remember the gut-clenching boredom that set in around Wednesday as we went through the slides for the 20th time. There wasn’t much a teacher could do with the Teileagoir.

From the sounds of it Maria finished primary school in the late 1970s or early 80s, but I can vouch for the continued use of the Teilagoir and its deadly dull slides through to the end of the 80s. Thanks to the crappy teaching methods used back then I will always have a ready-made excuse for why I don’t speak Irish, handy for deflecting blame from what in retrospect was clearly incipient West Britishness.

Any time I’ve been lucky enough to fly over the land on a clear night, I’ve found the lights of cities below an beautiful but alien and almost ominous sight, without quite being able to explain why. The fantastic video below is by NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who rigged up a way (from spare parts on the International Space Station!) to capture high quality still photos of cities from orbit.

See also this article from NASA on snapping cities from space, which includes a great pic taking in Ireland, most of Britain and the North of France.

According to the Center for Global Development, Ireland ranks only behind Sweden in terms of positive policies towards development in Africa.

The index attempts to quantify the impact on development of a range of policies, not just the usuals like aid and trade but also policies on migration, the environment, security and so on. Ireland does well in large part because of its contribution to peacekeeping in Africa.

All y’all who bemoaned the lack of law-breaking in my cycle video will be pleased to hear that the Dear Leader himself is on the case. Thrill as Boris pedals nonchalantly through red lights as if nobody will notice! Cry as he asks a cabbie for directions to London Bridge! As he lives about five minutes from me his route’s actually somewhat similar, or at least it will be as soon as he works out that it makes more sense to avoid St. Paul’s.

But to me the funniest thing is that if he’s getting to City Hall through Potter’s Field as below then he mustn’t be aware of the rather large GLA underground cycle parking facility (with showers and everything, it’s great), the entrance to which he must have whizzed past on Tooley St.

Here’s the new Tánaiste, Mary Coughlan, in a picture I found infinitely depressing.

And if that arms-aloft, shoulder-raising, parish flag-waving doesn’t get you down, how about this from the accompanying report:

Thousands poured on to the streets in Bundoran, Ballyshannon, Ballintra, Laghey and Donegal town as victory rallies were held in each before the Tánaiste, who is also Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, reached her destination…

Why, what could be less creepy than a victory rally held when no-one has won anything?

She pledged: “I’ll be doing my best for the people of the northwest, particularly my own county.”

Oh… I see. As you were, Donegal.

What with Abbie’s somewhat understated reporting style (”Now the fighting’s outside my apartment. Still, have a lot of vodka and Day Today references to keep me entertained”) I hadn’t quite appreciated that civil war is basically breaking out in Beirut with real bullets and everything. I’d still like her to get that Pulitzer-winning story, but preferably from the vantage point of, I don’t know, Turkey or something.

Many things in this Irish Times article about Ulster-Scots made me giggle, guiltily. First, and all too predictably:

The guttural pronunciation, which is almost Germanic in its harshness…

Glad we got that out of the way. Next, some guff from the natives about its advantages over English.

“Instead of a standard English phrase like ‘it’s a nice day’, we would say ‘it’s a brave nice day the day’,” explains Young. “Ulster-Scots is more descriptive. You can pack a whole lot into it.”

Yes. You certainly can pack more into a sentence with seven words than one with four. Now, as we all know, no minority language can possibly survive without some sort of government agency poking around at it. What would that agency be?

The development of Ulster-Scots is being overseen by Tha Boord o’ Ulster-Scotch (the Ulster-Scots Agency)

That’s right! Tha Boord o’ Ulster-Scotch. Or however you pronounce it - probably just like that. Except with a straight face.

As a vernacular rooted in rural life and with a tendency for retrospection, Ulster-Scots lacks equivalents for certain modern words used in standard English. Cue the neologism langblether, meaning telephone (lang for long and blether for talk).

“Somebody decided to create these words that didn’t make sense,” says Cromie. “We had to tell them to stop making words up.”

Right. So it’s a very descriptive language except when it comes to describing everyday objects. Then, whatever you do, you don’t make up a new word. You just stare at the telephone and jab your finger at it repeatedly.

Apparently there is quite a debate about whether Ulster-Scots (why not just Ulster-Scotch, if that’s its proper name?) is a dialect or a distinct language. I can’t offer an opinion but I note in this dictionary the entry ‘thruither’, which apparently describes a disorganised person, and is very similar to the word ‘throughother’ that my northern Granny used for a messy room and was presumably borrowed.

Oh bravo, Dublin City Council:

Bikes-for-Billboards” scheme exposes major planning flaws
Archiseek / Ireland / News / 2008 / May 2

Plan Magazine

It sounded like a fairytale, yet what was initially hailed as “free bikes” has become one of the biggest planning controversies to hit the capital in years.

The so-called “metropole” plan – whereby advertising company JC Decaux is to swap city advertising space for 450 bicycles has exposed major flaws in the capital’s planning system – with elected representatives left out of a deal where they should have been instrumental.

Over the Christmas break of 2006/ 07, 70 applications were filed, followed by another 50 for billboards which are to be erected on public footpaths.

Remarkably, nobody seemed to tell the then Lord Mayor – or indeed the other councillors of this; this despite the requirement under section 183 of the Local Government Act which specifies that the release of public lands is a reserved function, necessitating a vote by councillors.

Yet councillors have not even been allowed to see the already-agreed contract, which officials describe as “commercially sensitive”.

What councillors were told was that the non-cash deal was worth €85m to the city, although subsequently it has been claimed that the revenue generated by the billboards is only worth €1M per annum over the 15 year terms.

This scheme has been hit by a number of criticisms – chiefly that by virtue of a single project being split into 120 applications it was project-split and applied to an authority that had a vested interest in approving the scheme. Critics claimed that this meant that to comprehensively appeal the scheme to the Bord would have cost €30,000.

Fortunately for JC Decaux, all applications left with Dublin City Council were approved – with city planners staunchly defending the scheme and denying that there was any conflict of interest for the council to adjudicate on applications arising out of a scheme in which it has a vested interest. However some 24 units were appealed to An Bord Pleanála, resulting in two dozen successive hearings over three days in October – which an inspector herself described as “unprecedented”.

Bizarrely the billboards all seem to have been earmarked for less well-healed areas; no application was lodged for Donnybrook, Ballsbridge, Sandymount, or Rathgar. Yet applications were made for Ringsend, Dorset Street, Coolock, and Fairview.

So how much are 120 billboards worth? Intriguingly it is claimed that the larger electronic billboards, displaying 3 different adverts, should each generate €8,000 per month – netting approximately €7M per annum, with the 50 smaller billboards making another €3M per annum. Hence over the 15 year terms the deal may have been worth €150 Million to JC Decaux.

So one estimate now puts each of the “free bikes” in the original deal at each costing the city over €300,000 in terms of foregone revenue. But that’s not the only problem. In recommending that the Bord reject all units under appeal, Inspector Jane Dennihey reasoned that the applications were “premature”.

One reason for her recommendation was the use by senior city planners of a map, entitled “Zones of Advertising Control”, as now exclusively reproduced by Plan.

The hitch here is that councilors claim to have not even seen this map previously – never minded voted on it.

This throws suggests that key planning documents are being decided without any consultation with either the public or elected councillors, resulting in what An Taisce often calls as “rezonings without due process”.

Notably the document is broken into areas that correspond with Dublin City Council Development Plan maps – yet equally notable is the absence of an official City Council stamp, or for that matter a date. So the question must be asked: who drew up the map? And by what authority? It is now being acted upon as if it were already adopted policy?

Now the Bord has rejected 18 of the 24 units, permitting some of the smaller bus-shelter size units in pedestrian areas – while refusing all of the larger “Metropole” units which were to be7 sq m and standing 2m off the ground – primarily on grounds of road safety.

The ratio of bikes yielded by billboards was less than 4 per unit, although in Paris JC Decaux provide 13 bikes per unit as well as an annual rental of €2,085 per billboard over 10 years – while Dublin gets no cash over 15 years.

Paris also rolled out a programme of putting in place an additional 300 kilometres of cycle-ways in advance of their scheme.

Intriguingly, the original deal required 75% of all applications to be passed for the scheme to go ahead. However, even though only 72 billboards are now permitted, the deal is still going ahead – and where JC Decaux was to remove 100 existing billboards, as stipulated in each planning permission, city planner Jim Keogan is now saying that only 50 are to be removed – a change which critics say is unlawful.

The units are already under construction although no rental bikes are expected until next spring – and the units are distinctly different from that which was illustrated in the applications, with brown metal mesh detailing replacing what appeared to be solid chrome stands.

Split applications, dubious rezoning maps, and the Bord rejecting all “Metropoles”: to add to this the Dublin City Business Association has written to Minister John Gormley asking him “to investigate”. The only question is what’s next? It’s over to you, Minister.

I’m not familiar with much of the background but on the face of it this seems a pretty stupid way to have gone about things. DCC appear to have assumed that bike hire schemes can only be carried out with the co-operation of JC Decaux, and that means economic logic can go out the window. For granting them the privilege of plonking big brown advertising hoardings all over town we’re going to get a measly 450 bikes maximum, and probably less given all those planning defeats. In comparison there are more than 2,000 bikes in the free bike scheme in Copenhagen, a city of about the same size. Critical mass is very important if this scheme is going to catch on, have a marked impact on driver behaviour and encourage more cyclists to take to the roads, and 450 bikes is unlikely to be enough. What scope is there for enlarging the scheme - will we have to put up more billboards? And why this connection with street advertising in the first place? Given the many positive external benefits of increased cycling such as better health, reduced congestion and less strain on public transport, there was surely a case for actually spending some money on it (y’know, like we do by the billion for other forms of road transport) and making some back with user fees and selling advertising on the bikes themselves.