Some thing I have thought about, like , in the past fortnight:

1. 1. The low standard of Irish politicians is merely the product of the low standards of the electorate. From last week's Western People: "Mayo, it seems, remains loyal and steadfast in it’s [sic] support of the Flynn Dynasty, as Independent Beverly looks odds on, not only to retain her seat in Dáil Eireann, but to increase her share of the vote."
   
   
2. 2. “Auction politics”, which Seamus Brennan of FF has decried in a classic pot-and-kettle moment, is merely a rational response to the incompetence of the state's administration. Will the next government fix the health service? Solve gridlock? Will they *!£%! So then, who’s going to cut stamp duty?
   
   
3. 3. Would the British government’s sang-froid remain intact if speed-boats containing members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were patrolling “international waters” off the White Cliffs of Dover?
   
   
4. 4. Books recommended by The Richard and Judy Book Club are not necessarily rubbish. I very belatedly picked up “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver in Chapter’s excellent new store on Parnell Street. Shriver delivers a very smart work, although at this stage (page 170) I’m wondering if she's tipped the balance too blatantly in favour of nature versus nurture by making the eponymous spree-killer such a little demon from the moment he leaves the womb. 
   
   
5. 5. RTÉ claims its website, RTÉ.ie, does not receive any funding from the license fee. Considering 99% of the content on RTÉ.ie is provided by license-supported services, isn't this claim a bit of, er, a lie?
   
   
6. 6. Finally, did someone in Google consciously decide the take the mickey when configuring the algorithm for these directions (Link via Boing Boing). 

I sometimes mutter to myself when some bewigged windbag is described "as one of the finest legal minds of his generation." Given the absence of any real benchmarks for performance at the Irish bar, such a description can be charitably interpreted as describing a barrister who loses less than 50% of his or her cases. However, it is questionable whether it is even necessary to win at least the moiety of one's briefs to attain the status of legal superstar. For example, profiling senior counsel Paddy MacEntee, who recently headed a commission that examined the Garda's investigation of the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the Irish Independent colourfully asserts:

"During the 15th century, people accused of murder who wanted to be saved from the gallows were forced to memorize the 51st Psalm. Today, they brief Paddy McEntee. McEntee, a senior counsel and Godfather of Irish criminal law, is arguably the country's most successful criminal defence lawyer."

The paper then goes on to list some of the clients MacEntee has "saved from the gallows":

"Killer Catherine Nevin, Judge Brian Curtin and convicted murderer Malcolm MacArthur have all been represented by the Monaghan native. . . He has defended the killers of Garda Jerry McCabe...Although cases such as the Veronica Guerin murder trial (he defended Paul Ward) have made McEntee a household name..."

Perhaps my memory fails me here, but didn't everyone mentioned above, with the exception of Judge Brian Curtin (who did some pretty heavy legal lifting himself) all get sent down, and with hefty sentences?

Now, I don't expect legal representation to perform Johnny Cochrane/Barry Scheck class of miracles as a matter of course, but you have to wonder whether the fates of those represented by MacEntee would have turned out any worse if their counsel were merely some wet-behind-the-ears sprat from the Law Library.

From Saturday's Irish Times review of Susan Sontag's final collection of essays:

"Sontag incurred disproportionate approbrium for her initial reaction to the events of September 11, 2001"

I suppose it would also be disproportionate to ask the sub-editor who overlooked a howler like "approbrium" (opprobrium + approbation?) to submit to a yakuza-style yubitsume ritual?

These, alas, are the kind of things that get my goat...

I seem to be one of the few people in my circle of friends and family not to be a fan of the Channel 4 programme, Grand Designs. Sure, it's a cut above the usual celebrations of real-estate avarice, such as Property Ladder and the noisome Location, Location, Location (or is it now Relocation, Relocation, Relocation?) And it's several light years ahead of RTE's dismal contributions to/rip-offs of the genre, such as Househunters in the Sun (basically couples looking to splurge their SSIAs on a villa in Bulgaria).

You see, Grand Designs gets away with its format by pretending that it's not really about grubby property investment but is actually focused on the loftier concerns of architecture. So there's some superficial flim-flam about Bauhaus or Art Deco and mini-lectures on appropriate materials, particularly eco-friendly materials.

Yet, to me, these high-minded interests serve similar purposes to, say, Frank McDonald's articles in the Irish Times property section or the pious warbling of Duncan Stewart in some borderline infomercial shown on RTE1: they are merely fans and feather-boas designed to tease the salivating audience while the contours of some suburban Xanadu are slowly revealed.

A marble bust of Kevin Myarse's senatorial features deserves to be placed in Pseuds Corner in honour of the hack's paean to Manchester United's thumping of Roma during the week. Having gone through the formality of establishing his Decline-of-the-West credentials (" I don't particularly like modern soccer players, with their culture of overpaid celebrity, extravagant drunkenness, and cold-hearted sexual promiscuity"), he segues into the kind of purple prose (with a smattering of light misogyny masquerading as bluff common sense) that makes Cicerco sound like Bertie Ahern after six pints of Bass:

"Besides being incredibly rare, this kind of phenomenon is uniquely male; groups of women simply do not undergo such transforming alchemy. And when this extraordinary spell is cast over brilliant athletes whose bodies are perfect, and whose minds are attuned to one another, then a sort of athletic consecration occurs.

Eleven men are transubstantiated into a single harmonious unity, playing to a conductor of intuition they cannot see or hear, but whose instructions they understand and follow. [...]

And it's strangely comforting that such magic happens. It confirms that science understands so little about human nature, when the mysteries of the male-pack instinct combine with sheer physical perfection, at a time and place which no one has the power to choose or predict. A synthesis of the brilliance of both the team as a whole, and of all its individual players, is thus briefly conjured out of the ether, before the unknown catalyst responsible for it vanishes like the Pied Piper, perhaps never to touch any of their lives again." [And so on...]

Recently I was driving down Dublin quays, from Parkgate Street on to O’Connell Street. Fortunately, it’s not a route I need to take often, so I gawked at my surroundings a bit more than usual. Whereas there’s been a lot coverage of the Dublin Boardwalk—and the drug addicts who tend to frighten the office workers lunching al fresco—the architectural debacle of the recent construction flanking the Liffey tends to be forgotten. The handiwork of Zoe Developments and other aesthetically challenged property vehicles, the apartment blocks on either side of the river fill the observer’s soul with wintry gloom. Such is the tackiness of the blocks that the buildings' gestures at balconies seem more like grills designed to prevent the occupants from hurling themselves out the windows.

But even my negative reaction to this sham urban regeneration seems cheerfully mellow when compared with the bile gustily unleashed by a character called Vitali Vitaliev in an article on Dublin posted on a site called "Travel Intelligence."

"From my very first day in the Irish capital, I could clearly see that Dublin in its entirety was not a beautiful place. Even so, having looked down at the capital from the top of the chimney, I found myself thoroughly unprepared for the sight “of unparalleled charmlessness, an absence of grace so total that it was almost the thing of wonder”.

Even the poor, benighted locals get a lashing from the dyspeptic Vitaliev:

"First we shape buildings, and then – buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill once famously remarked. And wasn’t it the architectural turmoil of Dublin that had eventually “shaped” it into a depressive and largely dysfunctional metropolis, with high crime rate, all-permeating corruption, unworkable transport system and one of Europe’s worst dressed street crowds - in short, into a city that is much less attractive than its painstakingly created PR image?"

I think the chances of Mr. Vitaliev getting freelance work from Discover Ireland are looking slim...

Despite having about 120-seconds' worth of facts to report, the 24/7 news channels have devoted 1200 minutes to the carnage at Virgina Tech. CNN International has yielded the airwaves to its U.S. big brother, allowing viewers to witness improbably burnished anchors pepper dazed students with questions of staggering inanity. Meanwhile, camera-phone footage of the event is shown on an endless loop.

Although the killings are unarguably horrific, the excessive television coverage (an hour ago, BBC News 24, Sky News, and CNN all broadcast the "convocation" held at a campus basketball arena) has given some loser posthumous fame and turned the grief of a community into a global spectacle. More significantly, the approach to this tragedy throws into sharp relief how little the ongoing slaughter in Iraq now disturbs the news agenda.

According to a press release from Iraq Body Count (IBC), 26,540 Iraqi civilians were killed in the past year (20 March 2006 - 16 March 2006). This figure may well be an understatement as IBC's total figure for the number of civilians killed since March 2003 is under 70,000--a fraction of the 654,965 fatality total estimated by a John Hopkins study.

But let us, for the moment, accept the IBC figure of 26,540. This figure is roughly equivalent to the total student body at Virginia Tech. Or, looked at other way, 26,540 breaks down to a rate of 73 civilians killed per day. That's slightly more than two Virginia Tech "spree killings" per day, every day for the past 362 days.

Yet even that doesn't quite capture the enormity of the barbarism unfolding in Iraq. As Iraq's population of approximately 27 million is roughly 11 times smaller than the United States, the impact on the population at large is equivalent to 22 Virginia Tech massacres per day.

Covering the interminable contract dispute between hospital consultants and the state, the Irish Independent today described the latest offer on the table:

“On top of the €205,000 for a 39-hour week, they [the consultants] would also get an additional €40,000 if they meet targets for treating patients.”

But for some, the prospect of a quarter-of-a-million a year wedge is risible:

“Dr Josh Keaveney, an anaesthetist in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, said yesterday the salaries were so low they will only attract those not at the top of their profession and want a 'cushy number'.

And he described the salaries as being 'mickey mouse'.”

As someone who would happily wear a pair of Disneyesque mouse ears 24/7 for such an income, I find Kearney’s statement a bit alienating. Perhaps this lack of empathy is exacerabted by the fact that the man’s first name is “Josh”.

However, at least his comments are comprehensible. The same cannot really be said about the remarks made by “PJ Breen, another hospital consultant and negotiator for the IHCA, [who] asked: 'What kind of house could you buy for €205,000?'"

Someone should really tell Mr Breen about a handy device known as a mortgage. It allows people to take on crushing debt in order to occupy houses that cost more than your annual gross income. Even with paltry earnings of 200K, Mr Breen would have a good chance of finding a mortgage vendor willing to be of assistance.

In today's post, Twenty Major--the Irish blogosphere's answer to Jim Davidson--cracks some laboured gags about the "little things" that annoy him.

To give a flavour of the comedic mind at work, "dwarves" are listed.

But, reflecting his position as Ireland's premier blogger, Twenty Major does not shy away from the major stories of the day. A throwaway remark indicates he's cogitated long and hard about the big issues:

"Look at Ho Chi Min [sic] who carried out the Virginia shootings."

Deluded killer originally from South Korea, 20th-century Vietnamese statesman (Ho Chi Minh)--hard to tell the difference, those Asian types look all the same, eh?

The New York Times website offers a beguiling multimedia feature on the enigmatic patterns formed by huge flocks of starlings that gather in the skies above Rome during Autumn and Winter. The final photo in the selection suggests, to my eyes at least, a haunting sketch of a winged, humanlike figure descending.

Bonus info: apparently, the collective noun for starlings is a "murmuration".

As the great and the good (as well as John Major) filed into Moscow's reconstructed Christ the Saviour cathedral to pay their last respects to Boris Yeltsin, the debate over the legacy of Russia's first elected president was only just beginning. As the more generous appraisers of our own Charles J. Haughey were apt to say, he was a man of great talents as well as great flaws. He was skillful enough to outmanoeuvre Mikhail Gorbachev and courageous enough to defend the democracy emerging from the ashes of the USSR. (Alas, the "controlled democracy" ushered in by his successor, Putin, illustrates that such a term is not a mere paradox, but a grim oxymoron.)

Then there are the flaws. Aside from the 1993 order to shell the same Parliament building he had defended two years earlier, perhaps the greatest blot on Yeltsin's record was the rise of oligarchs during his watch. Indifferent to the trivia that goes with prudential accounting, Yeltsin overlooked and even encouraged the vultures who swooped down to devour the carcase of the Soviet economy. The result: Russia has gone from a state in which---in theory--everybody had a share in everything to become one of the world's most unequal societies, in which "a quarter of [the] economy is owned by 36 men." (See this BBC report on "Moscow's suburbs for billionaires).

But is Russia unique in suffering from a parasitical class of super rich? A New York Times report this week covered a list that estimated the earnings of top hedge fund managers:

"To make Alpha’s list, a manager needed to earn at least $240 million last year, nearly double the amount in 2005. That is up from a minimum of $30 million in 2001 and 2002. Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion — enough to pay New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years."

And some of these characters made hundreds of millions of dollars for providing a return on capital investment that would be shamed by a decent post office account:

"Raymond T. Dalio, head of Bridgewater Associates, which has more than $30 billion in hedge fund assets, for example, took home $350 million last year even though his flagship Pure Alpha Strategy fund posted a net return of just 3.4 percent for the second consecutive year."

Maybe there's some money to be made from re-issuing Das Kapital...

Now I have an environmental as well as an aesthetic justification for the somewhat crepuscular vibe at The Monkey's Typewriter.

Click here for the "low-wattage" palette.

(Thanks to Catriona for the tip.)

"You have the right to remain silent..." The cop shows have taught us that the accused in the interview room has the option to keep schtum while being grilled by the fuzz. This prerogative is not something we usually associated with a head of state looking to renew his contract. But this is Ireland, and this is Bertie Ahern. After catching the establishment on the back foot with an early morning visit to Áras an Uachtaráin to ask President McAleese to dissolve the 29th Dáil, Ahern proceeded to baffle assembled hacks by reading a prepared text but refusing to take questions afterwards. Here we had the bizarre spectacle of a campaign being launched with the awkward reticence of a resignation scandal.

But this was only the beginning of bizarre. The Irish Times today broke a story on Bertie's finances that makes last year's "Paddy the Plasterer" incident seem like the model of transparency:

"Businessman Michael Wall gave £30,000stg in cash to the Taoiseach's then partner Celia Larkin in December 1994, the Mahon tribunal has been told. The money was placed by Ms Larkin in an account in her name and was used to fund work on a house in Drumcondra owned at the time by Mr Wall and being rented by Bertie Ahern, the tribunal has been informed. Mr Ahern later purchased the house in 1997."

If this wasn't GUBUesque enough, the report goes on to say:

"The tribunal has also been told Mr Wall made a will in 1996 in which he left the Drumcondra house to Mr Ahern in the event of his, Mr Wall's, death. Mr Ahern has told the tribunal he knew nothing of this at the time."

What the...? A landlord leaving his house to a tenant, who knows nothing about such extraordinary munificence? The only thing harder to believe is that the wannabe coalition of Fine Gael/Labour are, according to one pundit I heard on Matt Cooper's show, are reluctant to pursue this fantastical tale, for fear the electorate might start feeling sorry for the Taoiseach--who can look as forlorn as Droopy Dog when he's caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

And the curtain has just gone up on this entertainment...

PS. The only prediction I can make with any degree of certainty about the outcome of May 24 is that, whatever happens, renegade TD John Deasy will not have a seat in cabinet in June.