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.

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

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.

Bringing out the big guns

I’ve just checked my blog stats for the last few days, and as a result of me posting my guns piece below, there has been a massive increase in visitors over the last few days - with 180 people visiting today so far.

Neat or slightly freaky? I don’t know - maybe some of you could leave some comments and let me know why you’re searching wordpress blogs looking for references to the word ‘Gun’, ‘Guns’, ‘GUN’ or any variant therein. Is there some tie in to a news story concerning guns in the US or some other reason why people are doing this search today, but not yesterday?

Enquring minds want to know!

EDIT:Please? A further 222 people have viewed this page since I put this up (on top of the original 180) and not one comment? Come on, put us out of our misery - why are you searching for the word ‘gun’ on the internet? You don’t work for the CIA do you?

Frozen Grand Central

Thanks to Liam F for the link and the good people at www.improveverywhere.com  for the video. This is a very neat piece of performance art. Excellent stuff. You can check out more of their stuff at the address above - I particularly like the one where they got 111 guys to go into Abercrombie and Fitch and then take their shirts off. Very funny.

I was Lost (season three) but now am Found (season four)

Yeah, Lost is back tonight. I can’t wait. A generous Christmas present and a recent long haul trip abroad left me with both the time and means of re-watching the entire third series of Lost so I’m stocked, primed and ready to go.

Not only have I watched the first, second and third series all the way through, I’ve watched the extras and special features on the box sets, listened to the podcasts and carefully combed my way through the fantastic and encyclopaedic (literally!) www.lostpedia.org in order to get my plot lines and conspiracy theories in order.

Will it be worth it? The season finale in Season three got me excited and re-engaged with the story, so I’ll be tuning in tonight and I’m hoping to revisit an island that’s given me some of the most engrossing storylines and fantastic writing of the last ten years worth of television.

It’s may not be as good as the Sopranos (and on that matter, I feel another blog entry coming along any day now) but it does scratch my sci fi/fantasy/thriller itch in a way not much has recently, and that’s good enough for this viewer.

EDIT: Right, I sat down last night in plenty of time for the season premiere and even had the patience to live pause it for ten minutes so I could fastforward through the ads when they came on. Was it worth it? Absolutely - vintage Lost. I loved it and can’t wait to get more.

The writers look like they may have done it again. For Lost fans, series one was all about the crash and the mystery of the island, its monsters and of course, the horrror of The Others. The series ended on a massive cliff hanger with the discovery and opening of the mysterious hatch. Rarely have I shoved a DVD into my player as fast as I did disk one of the second series, and series two did not dissapoint - more excellence as we learned more about the Others and the Dharma Initiative.

This series did dip a little at the end, but came back from another cliffhanger and Series three started with the excellent scene of the Others’ camp at the time of the crash and the revelations regarding Jacob, the ‘magic box’ that produces whatever you want it to, and the story arc concerning the submarine and Ben’s tumour. Truthfully though, this series didn’t grab me as much as S1 and S2 - I think possibly because this was the first series I watched as a series - one episode a week.

The previous two series I’d watched on DVD and so got a different sense of pacing. Three dipped a little, but things are looking up for Series 4. For starters, we now know we’re going somewhere - the writers have announced that there will be another three series (including 4) of 16 episodes each and then it’s finished. The problem with Lost is the lingering suspicion that there’s no end and the makers are just making it up as they go along, but the end is in sight, so it’s go to be wrapped up in 2010.

This first episode has me more excited about Lost since I have been since the end of series 1 - the writers have introduced a totally new story arc and it looks like it’s going to work. A totaly new group of people are coming to the island and through the new technique of flash-forwards, we now have a story being told in three time periods, the past, present and future. Presumably these will all come together as the story is resolved. Bring it on!

Italian fantastic

Went to Italy last weekend. The wife had to go on business, so we paid for me to go on the cheap with Ryanair. Ryanair sucked (Seriously, the decent into Forli airport prematurely aged me. The pilot took four goes to land the plan, aborting each at the last second to go around again. We were in the air for an extra hour due to “adverse weather conditions” but the sky was clear and there was no wind on the ground. Not funny at all. All that was missing was a hysterical woman standing up and screaming “we’re all going to die!”)

Anyway, Italy rocked. I’m a major foodie, much to the detriment of my waistline, and this was a great trip to a place called Campofilone around two hours south of Forli and two hours north east of Rome. A very nice place that’s totally off the tourist trail. We spent a fantastic two days stuffing ourselves silly with fantastic cheeses (various pecorino and scarmorzi served with different honeys), deep fried artichokes, stuffed olives, broadbeans in garlic oil and the best pasta I’ve ever had.

We visited a pasta workshop where some very skilled women hand made different kinds of fresh egg pasta such as tagliatelle, pappardelle, spaghetti and the regional speciality macaroncini – a sort of thin vermicelli-like pasta. This place was incredible and extremely cheap. I also learned quite a bit about pasta that I didn’t know. The place we visited makes a pasta dough using tipo 00 extra fine durham wheat, and then hand rolls the pasta out on large marble slabs using long wooden rolling pins. The lady there told me that the reason this is better than factory produced pasta is that in factories, the pasta is made using teflon moulds and as such is perfectly smooth. Handmade pasta has a rougher texture which allows it to hold sauce better than the mass produced version.

She’s obviously doing something right because her pasta is fantastic, and also, she is extremely busy supplying restaurants in her area - they all buy from her rather than make it themselves and having tasted it, I know exactly why. Fantastico!

In the local restaurants we had spaghetti in lemon sauce, tagliatelli with truffles, gnocchi with sage and butter and a sort of risotto made with radicchio lettuce. The carnivores had 101 different types of sausages and hams, steaks in greenpepper sauce, pork chops in prune and congnac and lots of excellent wine. Fantastic. Anyway, more anon.

It’s Trek Jim, but not as we know it!

So I’m wandering around the web this afternoon, and a friend directs me to Star Trek New Voyages

What the . . . ? “These are the new voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise, boldly going yada yada.”

This is an incredibly complex web-only fan created TV series, set in the original Star Trek universe with amateur actors playing Kirk, Scotty, Uhuru and the others. Bizarre!

My first thought was how were they able to do this without having 17 different kinds of hell reigned down on them from Universal’s legal department! However, it seems to be a web only thing, and presumably because of it, doesn’t infringe copyright (That sounds increasingly unlikely as I type this . . . Anyone out there know the deal?)

They’ve got some of the original Trek actors to reprise their roles in the early episodes, so it’s obviously got some industry goodwill behind it. The effects are good – easily on a par with anything from The Next Generation series, and the space scenes are spot on. Some very nice CGI work has gone into this. In addition, the sets look fairly well made – replicas of those from the original series abound, and the whole thing is surprisingly convincing.

However, the acting is just awful. Bad actors, with ill fitting costumes, dodgy wigs and lighting that’s just . . . off somehow, contribute to making it look like what it is, a fan-created facsimile of the original with a tiny fraction of the budget. The few real actors that appear in it show up the bad acting shockingly. (It makes you realise how much of the acting we all watch on TV every day is actually quite good. If it wasn’t, you’d notice!)

However, do you know what? I actually really enjoyed it. Let’s face it, the acting in the original Trek series was pretty ropey to begin with, so it’s not liking they’re charting brave new waters with this one. The stories seem to be mostly well written, and there is obviously a LOT of passion in this. For all it’s faults, I realised after about ten minutes, I was watching an incarnation of Trek. Not as polished as the big budget versions, but the spark is there.

Very cool (in a highly nerdish uncool kind of way.) Check it out.