Film: An Inconvenient Truth: Al Gore presents a compelling case, delivering another nail in the coffin of the argument that climate change is a debatable/distant threat. (And mid-way through a spookily mild winter who can be confident that our weather is not seriously screwed up?). However, I did have a bit of an issue with all that footage of Gore pensively looking out the portholes of airliners.

Film: Intermission: Caught this on RTE. Entertaining, even if it ploughs familiar ground by being set in the world of "colourful" working-class Dublin. Also provides much-needed evidence (after the debacle that was Miami Vice) that Colin Farrell can act.

Book: House of Meetings, by Martin Amis. Acceptable, if not really deserving of a berth in many critics' best-of-2006 lists. Amis's zealous research into life as it was experienced in the USSR's GULAG is assuredly woven into the narrative, but an insuperable problem is posed by the relationship between the two incarcerated brothers, the nameless memoirist and his brother, Lev. Given Amis's ludic style, the exchanges between the two sound less like the exhausted encounters of two zeks and more like the callous chatter of the two siblings from one of Amis's earlier novels, Success--which was entertaining precisely because of its unburdened levity.

Book: The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. Along with Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, Percy's 1961 novel has been hailed as a rediscovered masterpiece. Not entirely sure if such veneration is merited (to me, the narrator Binx Bolling seems more a (slightly smug) connoisseur of angst than a victim of it), but it does contain passages that seem to capture a scene or fleeting mood quite perfectly. For example, this simple line, in context, makes you feel as if though you're loitering on a New Orleans street corner at dusk, sometime around the middle of the 20th century:

"The street lights make golden spaces inside the wet leaves of the live oaks."

And, as others have noted, the influence on Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy is evident.

...by ignoring it! This extract from an Indo report details how monied (and oblivious) Irish folk are doing their bit in baking the planet:

MOTORISTS are turning away from smaller family-style cars for higher performance vehicles. [...] The trend shows how increasing prosperity is driving up the size and quality of car bought by tens of thousands. [...] Therefore, we can expect more SUVs and people carriers (MPBVs) as sales have risen by 2pc in overall terms since 2000. Such a trend is also seen at the super luxury end of the market where annual sales of BMWs, for example, have now topped the 4,000 mark.

A while ago, I decided that in the upcoming general election, scheduled to take place sometime in the first half of 2007, I would bite the bullet and give Fine Gael candidates my first preferences. It was not a case that I'm wildly, or even mildly, enthusiastic about the party's leader or policies. My support derives from purely negative factors--anger over the incompetence and corruption that characterise the present Fianna Fail-led government. By this stage, the sight of Bertie Ahern's cheeky-chappy grin (he can't believe what he's got away with) fills me with something approaching existential despair. I just want his lot out...

But just as I've accepted FG as a quasi-palatable choice, party backbenchers are emerging from the undergrowth to remind us that the blueshirts can match FF when it comes to fielding inarticulate gombeens. This morning I heard one spluttering TD, Damien English, deny and then confirm his support for remarks made by a colleague, John Deasy. Deasy, who pretty much inherited his seat from his father, the equally truculent Austin, stated that Enda Kenny should resign if he fails to become Taoiseach. To make such a statement with an election looming would seem--not to beat around the bush--to be the actions of a gobshite. But what can one expect from a politician whose chief claim to fame--apart from claiming almost 86,000 euro in expenses last year--was to light up a cigarette in the Dail bar in the days following the introduction of the smoking ban (Deasy was the party's Justice spokesperson at the time)?

But Deasy's mutinous behaviour will probably be tolerated because he can supposedly hoover up the votes in his Waterford constituency. Just like Michael Lowry in Tipperary, Beverly Cooper-Flynn in Mayo, Ivor Callely in Dublin, Jim McDaid in Donegal, Sean Haughey in ....

That Dublin's traffic chaos is world class. A New York Times article comparing Beijing's auto mayhem with the Irish capital's explains how skyrocketing car ownership in Ireland is canceling out environmental improvements elsewhere (in power generation, for example):

"No trains run to the new suburbs where hundreds of thousands of Dubliners now live, and the few buses going there overflow with people. So nearly everyone drives — to work, to shop, to take their children to school — in what seems like a constant smoggy, traffic jam. Since 1990, emissions from transportation in Ireland have risen about 140 percent, the most in Europe. [...]

In Ireland, car ownership has more than doubled since 1990 and car engines have grown steadily larger. Meanwhile, new environmental laws have meant that emissions from electrical plants, a major polluter, have been decreasing since 2001."

So pause next time you start pontificating about Yanks and their ridiculous SUVs. Er, like this new one (from supposedly eco-conscious Toyota).

The hoopla over Apple's iPhone appears to reaffirm Steve Jobs's famed ability to generate a reality distortion field. The virtual demo at the Apple site certainly looks slick. However, two questions come to mind, one reasonable, the other curmudgeonly. First, how are blind people or people with impaired vision expected to interact with this "advance" on the old-fashioned button-centric phone? Perhaps they're not part of Apple's demographic.

The second question, prompted by the band showcased in the Apple demo, is whether the world needs yet another vector for the distribution of U2's music?

As someone who sees himself as part of the "reality-based community", I would argue that the iPhone is merely the latest tool designed to fill up every available sentiment moment with the consumption of media "content." After all, why get involved in the nasty, solitary business of confronting the reality of one's all-too transient existence--a mere teardrop in the ocean of time--when you can have fresh tracks from the Arctic Monkeys pipped directly into your cerebral cortex!


I'm sounding like an old fart, aren't I?

Yeah, I really had your there for a moment. Real headline--Robert Fisk: Bush's new strategy - the march of folly.

Incidentally, for Christmas, my brother bought me Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (1,392 pages) and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (1,104 pages).

I didn't know whether to thank or throttle him.

An Irish Times piece on Saturday by Shane Hegarty has pre-empted today's blog rant but had not appeared when I brought up the subject with two friends on Friday night (during the earlier, more coherent stages of my birthday celebrations). I announced that I found it hard to stomach the fact that my local community college, in its list of evening classes, was offering a course entitled "Angels in Your Life." Presumably, I spluttered, this New Agey rubbish is being subsidised by taxpayers' money (I'm not sure if I even said, "hard-earned taxpayers' money.") My two friends shared my opinion of this pseduo-spiritualism (is that tautologous?).

Then, I went too far. I began to slag off another course on the menu, on Enneagrams, which seems to be yet another gimmick designed to exploit people with fragile egos. But one of my interlocutors halted me in my tracks: "Ah, Enneagrams, now there's actually something to that..."

Meanwhile, the Zetetic Astronomy group will be meeting in the sixth-year common room...

A rule of thumb for living in the Irish capital is that most activities are, unless you're a government minister, about 20-25% more awkward than they should be. Making token gestures at environmental friendly behavior is no exception. Public transport is shambolic, so you fume at a bus stop or (eventually) take the car. Bottle banks seem to be emptied every six months, so they degenerate into ad-hoc landfills. And even something as apparently pain-free as using the Web to shrink your Yeti-sized carbon footprint can be problematic.

Airtricity is a Irish-based company--a subsidiary of NTR (the people who brought you the West-Link bridge)--that "generates its electricity entirely from natural resources, such as the wind, so there are no harmful emissions." The company has launched a campaign designed to attract new customers by guaranteeing a freeze in energy prizes until 2010.

However, further delving reveals that this offer is open only to business customers. OK, you think, the offer to residential users seems to promise bills no higher than ESB's (I think that's what the phrase "at current EBS tariffs" means). So the same cost but for electricity generated from renewal sources--a no-brainer, right? Where do I sign up?

Well, it's not as simple as filling out an online form and clicking the submit button. You have to download a form (in irritating PDF format), print it, and then post it to Airtricity. Geddit? You have to make the effort to give the company your money.

However, if that were not hurdle enough for the dilettante environmentalist, the form you download is actually the same one companies are expected to use.

By this stage, most sane people would have given up the ghost. However, despite what experience has taught me, I sent an e-mail to Airtricity asking how were residential customers expected to sign up using the form intended for commercial customers?

No reply, of course. Not even a boilerplate acknowledgement.

It seems that if this is the effort competitors make to poach customers, ESB won't be forced to raise its game by much. As for the future of renewal energy in Ireland...

See http://www.airtricity.com if you think I'm exaggerating...

So, less than an hour after I posted my why-oh-why plaint about Airtricity, the following message arrived, from the company's Senior Marketing Executive no less:

"Hi Shane

Thanks for your email

The current Customer Agreement Form can be used by both commercial and residential customers signing up to Airtricity. We should have the new Residential form up on the website tomorrow, but in the interim all customers can use it.

If you have any questions completing the form, please ring one of the Customer Services team on 1850 40 40 70"

Well, now I'm about 50% mollified/chagrined--my query e-mail was sent on Monday morning and replied to by Tuesday afternoon. Not bad, I suppose. But I still think it should be easier for would-be customers to sign up--a PDF form doesn't really cut it any more.

Tuesday's New York Times featured an article (Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad) that provided a superficially breezy survey of advertisers' increasingly invasive strategies for getting customers to eyeball their messages:

"Supermarket eggs have been stamped with the names of CBS television shows. Subway turnstiles bear messages from Geico auto insurance. Chinese food cartons promote Continental Airways. US Airways is selling ads on motion sickness bags. And the trays used in airport security lines have been hawking Rolodexes. [. . .]

No consumer, it seems, is too young. Some school buses now play radio ads meant for children. Last summer, Walt Disney advertised its “Little Einsteins” DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in 2,000 pediatricians’ offices, according to Supply Marketing, a company that gives doctors free supplies in exchange for using branded products.

Some people have had enough. Last month, after some “Got Milk?” billboards started emitting the odor of chocolate chip cookies at San Francisco bus stops, many people complained"

But sometime after reading this article, I had a queasy epiphany--perhaps one not uncommon to males in their mid-thirties who read too many yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz sci-fi novels in their youth. It struck me that today's world--where it will soon be impossible to walk down an urban street without being sold something--is rather like one of those science-fiction novels penned in the late 60s and 1970s. Not, you understand, one of those bright-eyed speculations produced by, say, Arthur C. Clark, but rather closer to those dystopian visions of John Brunner or Robert Silverberg (only geeks will recognize those names, I fear).

But what's next? Perhaps once the man-made space is cluttered beyond repair, the "natural" world will be exploited. Just think: genetic manipulation of chloroplast to enable leaves to display the Toyota logo...ripening tomatoes marked by the Nike swoosh... songbirds chirping the new Windows bootup tune...

For all those boys from
Belvo / Gonzaga / Clongowes / Crescent
who claim that the Jays made them the successes/borderline neurotics they are today, the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time features an enlightening discussion on "The Jesuits--The School Masters of Europe."

Over the weekend I caught Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también). I liked that it took seriously the implications of its scenario (a world in which no baby has been born in 18 years) rather than treating it merely as a plot device used to get the hero up and perspiring (Minority Report, anyone?).

With the world ending not with a band but a whimper, the London depicted has slipped into sullen malaise--although the dystopian vision of trash-choked streets, bleery pubs, and public transport running the gauntlet of newly minted Morlocks seems not overly divergent from the less salubrious parts of the real metropolis.

There is, however, a wonderful scene that exemplifies one of the unique pleasures of speculative fiction--it can make us nostalgic for the present. In this case, Theo Faron (Clive Owen), on an errand to see his plutocratic cousin, is ushered through security gates at Admiralty Arch. Once through, a simulacrum of the deceased world, with guardsmen parading and bands playing, lingers in the sun-dappled "green zone." (And one momentarily wonders if the film's spectre of a childless world is actually a sly way of smuggling in a message about Britain's upward-swooping Gini index).

But this is also an action movie, and our hero does get the opportunity to act heroic. The last section of the movie is a virtuoso immersion in urban warfare, with the camera giving the sort of first-person POV that made me think of my all-too-brief experience with the XBox game, Gears of War. However, the moment that a hail of gunfire spatters the camera lens with arterial blood was simultaneously darkly exhilarating and oddly distancing. Rather than making us feel vulnerably present at such carnage, this cinema verité technique only reminds us how safe we are when we vicariously experience on-screen death.

The Economist, in a story about migration in Europe (the greatest wave since the end of the Second World War), includes an anecdote that, if accurate, provides an alarming insight into the intellectual skills of those occupying the lower tiers of the British economy:

"ROBERT, the Polish-born head of a group of British removal men, can read and write English easily, unlike his British colleagues who after packing their cardboard boxes label them as “clovs” and “shuse”."

Before any Irish reader falls into the standard pose of pointing to the superiority of the Republic's education system, it's worth noting that, with a reported functional illiteracy rate hovering at around 22%*, Ireland probably also requires a steady influx of Poles with PhDs to ensure that removal crates are at least labeled accurately.

*Apparently marginally higher than the UK's.

Anyone who has stared with unseemly fascination at Charles Minard's famous graphic charting the near-annihilation of Napoleon's Grande Armée during its ignominious retreat from Moscow is likely to appreciate IBM's new project, Many Eyes.

It's still early days, but the site provides you with a very simple way of transforming datafiles into "visualizations" that provide an at-a-glance insight into trends and significant outliers. For example, it took me about five minutes to copy and paste CSO data, upload it, and create this basic treemap that underlines the Irish capital's overweening status.

Yes, I'm really that sad.

A New York Times article on Ireland being the exception to the stereotype of aging European societies ("The Irish, Young in ‘Old Europe,’ Strain Schools and Housing"), confirms two hunches I have long harboured:

1) About 35% of Irish girls under the age of 6 seemed to be called Ella, Ellie, Evie, or some other two-syllable name beginning with "E". (This unwanted popularity is a source of some distress to middle-class parents (including yours truly) who thought that "Ellie" was appealingly novel, steering between the Scylla of "Tazmin"-style deracinated preciousness and the Charybdis of fada-decorated titles faintly remembered from folk legends.)

2) There is a journalistic code that specifies if an article mentioning Irish demographics or economics appears in an non-Irish publication, it must feature a quote from David McWilliams, who will in turn "explain" the whole shebang in one digestible and hugely iffy quote. Viz: "Since the overall Irish population and the immigrants are both young,” he said, “there is less of a confrontational attitude. Young Irish see young immigrants as a dating opportunity more than the employment threat a 50-year-old would see.”

Or even a 55-year-old, like Enda Kenny?

When it comes to the field of history, what engages the "common reader" can be radically different from academics' fare. Take the Roman Empire. Anyone who has read Tom Holland's rollicking tale of the fall of the Roman Republic, Rubicon, will have been regaled with juicy tales of captured Roman governors having molten gold poured down their throat, conspiratorial huddles on the steps of the Forum, and plenty of I Claudius-style bed-hopping. In contrast, "serious" academic study is a far more sober affair, concerned with the quotidian aspects of culture and society rather than the edited highlights.

For example, as if to parody the academic inclination to focus on ever-more narrow slices of experience, Matthew B. Roller's book is entitled Dining Posture in Ancient Rome. According to Roller, whether you lay down or sat up while eating indicated a lot about your status in Roman society. However, Emily Gowers's review (TLS December 22&29 2006) makes one suspect that some cosmic force arranged the publication of this volume simply so that a single pun can be hatched out: Praising Roller's efforts, Gower asserts "he has modestly rewritten the Recline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

Incidentally, this review did yield another nugget: "At any rate, Leonardo da Vinci got it wrong: according to the Gospels, Jesus and the apostles ate the Last Supper lying on their sides."