Red horizon?

In other news, an Irish property investment company is advertising for the Martian colonies. Seriously.

Cool or what?

Brian Cowen’s astonishing statistics

For anyone who doesn’t follow Irish politics, our Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern last week resigned/was forced from office as a result of a litany of accusations of financial irregularities in the past. He’s being investigated by a tribunal for suspicion of taking bribes in the distant past and has spun a most unlikely web of explanations which have made less and less sense in recent months.

(Most notably, this politician held the office of minister for finance for several years, during which time he claims not to have operated a bank account. He took his wage cheques and cashed them. Seriously, this was in the 1990s, not the 1950s.)

Anyway, the king is dead, long live the king. Ahern’s replacement Brian Cowan has just been elected leader of the dominant political party in Ireland, Fianna Fail, and in four weeks time will be sworn in as the new Taoiseach.

Much as I detest Fianna Fail and the anti-liberal-cute-hoor-anything-is-okay-as-long-as-you-get-away-it mentality that goes with it, I think Cowen will probably be an improvement in the short term.

However, it remains a fact that in the last general election in Ireland held in 2007, Brian Cowen was elected to his seat in the Dail (house of parliament) with 19,000 votes.

That means that this guy is now the leader of a country with a population of over 4.5 million people, as a result of just 19,000 votes. If my maths is correct, that means he was voted for by around .41 per cent, or less than half of one percent, of the population. Is that correct? If anyone thinks I’ve miscalculated, let me know.

Otherwise, I’m astonished.

Today, a legend died.

Arthur C Clarke died today. It’s a sad day - this man was one of my heros - an astonishing mind with vaulting vision.

He will be sorely missed.

“It’s mine - you can’t have it.”

Very interesting interview with Dr Tim Berners-Lee (the-man-who-invented-the-internet) on the BBC website today, regarding the data grab being planned by some of the world’s largest ISPs, using web usage monitoring software.

The creator of the web has said consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet.

On the subject of web usage statistics and personal information regarding where we shop, what sites we visit and other patterns of online behaviour:

He said: “It’s mine - you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Derren Brown in Dublin

I went to Derren Brown’s An Evening of Wonder show last night at the Olympia in Dublin - a truly astonishing evening out. The show is really the most impressive thing of its kind I’ve seen, and lasted a lengthy two and a bit hours.

Since I was first captivated by this performer I’ve wacthed all his TV shows and read some books and so I can hazard a rough guess how he did some of the illusions and guessing games performed last night, but others completely confounded me.

His performance of cold reading from the audience was amazing - whatever about guessing that colin in the third row had a dog called benji who died years ago, guessing that ronan in the fifth row had recently stolen a fax machine from work and should be cautious because he was seen doing it was something else entirely. Perhaps he has plants wandering around during the break listening to people’s conversations? Perhaps statistically there will always be a light fingered audience member called Ronan and it’s a safe guess - I don’t know.

I also don’t know how me managed to levitate a table while a member of the audience rested their hands on it. I suppose she could have been a plant (A plant with a perfect Dublin accent on a 40 date tour) - I suppose it’s possible but not likely. This one really has me stumped - magnets, cables? No idea, and I don’t want to know. What was most impressive last night wasn’t the tricks anyway, but how they were done and the incredibly polished showmanship on display.
A truly fantastic night out and really very very impressive. This guy is something special

State of the musical nation

Alan Wilder (ex Depeche Mode) has written a very interesting pulic letter on the state of the music industry that makes for some good reading for anyone who loves music:

We live in a world of technology - exponentially increasing breakthroughs in all things scientific. So fast that we can’t even keep up with it. So why is it that the audio quality of music is degenerating? Music ’sounds’ worse. We have stopped listening, we don’t have time. We only have time to be smacked in the face by the loudest, most attention-grabbing blast of souped-up noise imaginable until ear fatigue sets in and the desire to ‘change the record’ takes over. Why are the adverts on TV twice the volume of the regular broadcasts? It’s the only way to get our attention in the VOLUME WAR.

In recent years, a revolution in processing technology has instigated a change in the way albums are mastered. In order to compete, A&R men, producers, even the artists are demanding that mastering engineers, via digital compression, crank up the level so high that all dynamic range is callously sacrificed.

You can read the rest of this here on the Sideline website.

Review: The Gum Thief

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland. Bloomsbury, €15
Published November 11th, 2007, Sunday Business Post. Review by Alex Meehan.

Visiting Douglas Coupland’s smart Alec imagination isn’t for everyone, but in The Gum Thief, he delivers a witty, clever compelling indictment of modern employment while also saying something interesting about the fundamental sameness of people.

If nothing else, this is also an original book. Its structure is unique, with three intersecting perspectives competing equally for our attention and a storyline that brings together a middle-aged man with a cynical twenty-something woman who find common ground in their cynical, jaded view of the world.

First off we meet Roger, a divorced and reluctantly middle aged ’sales associate’ at a Staples office supplies store. Roger is a barely functioning alcoholic hiding from the real world in his yellow pack job while secretly keeping a journal that details the minute detail of his non-existence. In it, he delights in writing about how much he despises the other zombie-like employees of Staples and how angry he has become at the fact that life has left him behind.

The story begins when Roger’s journal is accidentally found by his co-worker Bethany, a 26-year-old goth who wears black lipstick and lives at home with her overbearing and overweight mother. Bethany discovers that not only has Roger been writing about her and her fellow co-workers, he’s also been writing mock diary entries pretending to be her.

Disturbed but strangely compelled, Bethany writes back and a relationship starts in which Roger and Bethany leave each other entries in the journal describing each other’s jaded view of life while also occasionally writing entries using the other person’s supposed perspective.

To make matters more complicated, weaving in and out of these main diary entries are chapters from Roger’s stalled novel Glove Pond, as well as occasional notes from Bethany’s mother and Roger’s ex-wife.

We learn that Roger started Glove Pond - modelled after ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?’ -years previously when he still had serious ambitions to be writer, but since the death of his son and the break-up of his marriage, he’s stalled not just on the book also on his life.

Unlike Bethany and the other short term employees at Staples doing summer jobs or filling in time before going to college, he’s a lifer and so gets away with drinking on the job and general all-round slacker behaviour. Both Roger and Bethany delight in petty theft, and so Staples suffers while they act out their sense of outsider indignity on a faceless corporation.

Coupland has done something difficult with The Gum Thief - taking the humdrum banality of chain store, mass market parking lot life and make it larger than life. The unusual structure works quite well and contrary to what you might expect, isn’t confusing at all.

This is a clever, smart, witty and entertaining book, the 12th from Coupland since his seminal 1994 novel Generation X. The Gum Thief follows confidently from this as well as his more recent successes Microserfs and JPod, offering something new and interesting while also differing enough to show a progression.

Pictures of you

I got sent this link earlier today by a friend who knows I’m a big fan of The Cure. It’s a newly released advert from Australia about the dangers of driving too fast that uses a version of a song by The Cure called Pictures of You to show the effects on people left behind. I clicked casually on the link and watched the commercial, not really caring but just wanting to hear a new version of a song I like.

It stopped me dead in my tracks and is a very powerful powerful piece of film making - perhaps the most powerful I’ve seen online. Everyone who drives a car should be required to watch this.

It’s very sad, and to my mind much more effective than the shock ads that are shown on TV here depicting people torn up in accidents. I don’t know about you, but I just change the channel when those come on TV. The truth is that the carnage of a road accident is temporary and is seen by very few people, whereas the emotional aftermath is long-lasting and devastating. Road safety authorities all over the world should watch this and re-examine how they try to build awareness of the dangers of driving too fasts.

www.picturesofyou.com.au

One day, on top of a mountain . . .

So the family unit decided to take a jaunt up the Sugarloaf in Wicklow on Sunday.

Now, we don’t have real mountains in Ireland, in the Everest/Pyrenees/Apennines sense of the word but we do have some pretty hills, and so off we set. It’s more of a climb than it looks from sea level, but it’s nothing that can’t be done in a few hours.

This is the view from close to the top.

Bob approved in particular of the day’s activities.

He told me so.

Somewhere over the Russian tundra . . .

I shot this out the window of a Boeing jet on the way back from Japan recently.

The flight passes over Russia, and gives you a good idea of just how big the world is. You can look out the window, and see nothing but a snowy wasteland as far as the eye can see - take a nap for five hours and look out the window again. You’ll still see a snowy wastelane as far as the eye can see. Savagely beautiful.