Sunday, the first day of July, rain for what seems the 127th day on the trot. Time for some high culture, as if to persuade ourselves that uninterrupted sunshine rots the intellect. As the Barry clan makes its pilgrimage to the Lucien Freud exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, we are confronted by this object looming up from the wild grass outside Kilmainham hospital. Initially, I mistake it for a specimen of egomaniacal installation art by some Damien Hirst acolyte, but the reality is far more interesting.

The James Webb Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013, is designed to peer even further into the cosmos's origins than the celebrated Hubble Telescope, which it will replace. It's difficult to imagine that this enormous contraction decaled with Norththrop Grumman and NASA logos (or rather the real, working version, complete with 6.5 meter diameter mirror) will be hurled a million miles from Earth in less than ten years. The scale of the machinery, and the near-hubris of its mission, could make the creative endeavours (of radically uneven quality) housed in the museum building beyond seem little more than sterile variations on the Lascaux cave drawings.

Still, we need both cultures, Science and Art, even if the former gets all the money.

And Lucien Freud? Well, I can confidently say that when it comes to painting middle-aged scrotums, he is unequalled.

Look who drives a "huge, jet black Toyota SUV."

No doubt it will soon put on the block to help pay all those legal costs.

There's more than a whiff of fiddling-while-Rome-burns about the upcoming Zimbabwe International Book Fair, scheduled to kick off at the end of July. According to the rather lean-looking web page posted by Zimbabwe's government-backed newspaper, The Herald, the theme of the fair will be "Transforming Lives Through Literature." Among the various high-minded panel discussions taking place, there will be one "on issues to be considered in authorship with a difference and building the talent for tomorrow's literature: proposed strategies from a young person's view."

I suppose one strategy for encouraging new Zimbabwe talent might be to ensure that budding authors "with a difference" receive, let's say, at least 2,000 calories in food per day.

(Hat-tip to the Complete Review )

It is challenge to the powers of empathy to squeeze out a tear over the fate of Baron Black of Crossharbour. Still, from an Irish judicial perspective, you might wonder whether the prospect of several decades in the clink for ripping off institutional investors and fellow plutocrats is a bit harsh. You would be hard pressed to get a 20 year sentence in Ireland for cold-blooded murder, a crime most of us view as marginal more heinous than federal mail fraud.

A cynic might also speculate that heavy sentences for rogue CEOs serves as a safety valve during a period when income inequality in the United States is at near-Gilded Age* levels. They help persuade the worker-drones in the middle classes to buy into a nobody's-above-the-law/everybody's-got-a-fair-crack-of-the-whip vision of US society that no longer exists, if ever it did.

And yet...it's undeniable that corporate theft is punished in a way it simple isn't in Europe. And perhaps one or two present and former Irish heads of public companies, who sometimes appeared to treat their shareholders' property as if were their own, tugged uneasily at their Charvet collars when they heard of Black's conviction. Then they might also have thanked their lucky stars they never had to deal with headhunters along the lines of Patrick Fitzgerald or Eliot Spitzer.


*From Sunday's New York Times:

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

The differing approaches to major stories taken by RTE and the next largest media organisation in the state, Independent Newspapers, are highlighted in their respective coverage of yesterday's tragedy, in which a couple in their eighties and their 40-year-old son were found dead in their farmhouse in county Wicklow.

RTE seems to expect its audience to read between the lines to grasp what actually happened:

"Two rifles were recovered from the scene and gardaí say they are not looking for anyone at present in connection with the deaths."

But the Irish Independent leaves the reader in no doubt about what occurred: the headline banner reads "Mystery as son kills parents and himself."

In theory, the journalistic approach taken by RTE deserves approbation, as it reports the facts while going some way to respect the privacy and grief of the surviving members of the Sleator family. However, the media consumer, detached from the immediate context, will always want (and usually get) the unexpurgated, leave-nothing-to-the-imagination details. People might tut-tut the Indo's approach, but they are also equally likely to read the paper's articles, searching for the nuggets the more high-minded broadcaster has decided to shield us from.

PS: Interesting, the Irish Times does not explicitly identify the son as responsible for the shooting. Perhaps it is assumed that the Times's ABC1 readership does not need the dots joined for them.

I very much like the look of this, but I have to agree with some of the quibblers: where would you rest your arms?

Perhaps, like most people's bookshelves, it's there to be admired than actually, y'know, used.

MCD has a lot to answer for. The company's incompetent organization of the Barbra Streisand geezer gig caused the national airwaves and press to be inundated with plaints from the well-heeled and tin-eared. During a pretty slow news week (just the usual mayhem in Iraq and the risible efforts to turn the Rachel O'Reilly murder trial into some sort of homegrown O.J. circus), radio and newspapers have treated tales of trying to leave the carpark after the concert as though it were an experience only marginally less harrowing than clambering onto the last Huey out of Saigon .

If things weren't grim enough, the whole debacle prompted David McWilliams's patented Insto-Stereotype Machine to whir into life. And, lo: in today's Indo we have...The Streisand Generation!

"The real economic significance of the Streisand debacle, which from the reports sounds truly appalling, is the commercial power and influence of this new group in Irish society - this Streisand Generation. These are middle-aged rich kids who have loads of cash and they are spending it. This is the generation that refuses to age."

Sounds like an argument for mandatory euthanasia...