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.