I admit that my posting regime over the past few weeks has been about as consistent as Bertie Ahern's explanations about his personal finances.

The reason for my most recent radio silence can be attributed to a short holiday en famille on the wind-blasted Clare coast, where I managed to spend an entire week without checking out The New York Times or, for that matter, The Superficial (entering a web cafe when you're away for just a week would simply be too sad for words).

It's also taken a while to adjust after a spell savouring dolce far niente--picking through the bones of the day's newspapers (why do we buy so many papers on holidays, just when the amount of real news to report is at its annual ebb?), enjoying an afternoon pint, and strolling on misanthrope-friendly empty beaches.

The one black cloud (a metaphorical one--there were more than enough literal ones to gaze at) that loomed over my trip was our dismay at the built landscape of rural Ireland. Once the dual carriageway peters out after Portlaoise, you're obliged to trundle through some pretty grim bottlenecks. According to our politicians and economists, we're in at least the top five richest nations on the planet--so why do many of these places along the N7 seem down at heel? Perhaps we all wear rose-tinted glasses when travelling in the rest of Europe, mistaking touristic shells for quaint hamlets. But at least such Potemkin villages make some effort to charm the driver into stopping.

And the holiday towns on the Clare coast, such as Kilkee, Lahinch (or Lehinch as some signposts would have us believe), or Miltown Malbay, that have been touched by recent speculative development have had their character damaged by the introduction of what amount to transplanted suburban estates. It's almost worthy of The Simpsons, with families from Dublin, Cork, or Galway leaving their home in Meadowbrook Lawns estate or wherever to spend two weeks in a terraced house that's part of development of 50 other anonymous cookie-cutter boxes.

But, hey, it all boosts those GDP figures--the only meaningful index of our national self-worth.

My critique of the "built environment" in Ireland's countryside might have struck a few readers as unnecessarily harsh--like Tom "Spar" Doorley reviewing the deli section at a Statoil station. And I suppose one man's sense of aesthetics is another's snobbery.

In my defence, I could say that I do bridle when I came across what seem like unfair digs at the oul' sod.

For example, when in Clare we picked up the latest edition of The Rough Guide to Ireland. The book features a "Culture and Etiquette" section to forewarn unsuspecting tourists.

Under the rubric Racism, the authors claim "The Republic and Northern Ireland remain among Europe's most backward places when it comes to racism, seemingly untouched by developments in more tolerant societies elsewhere." But where exactly are these vastly more "tolerant societies"? The Netherlands? Germany? France? Britain? or the United States?

And would it be bordering on jingoistic to offer the counterargument that, given the unprecedented international immigration into the country over the past decade, the Irish populace's treatment of this wave of incomers has been not been significantly worse than that shown to other immigrants in other putatively more tolerant nations?

Last week, I witnessed RTE's business correspondent flail on the 9 O'Clock News as he attempted to explain to an impassive-looking Anne Doyle why fears over subprime mortgages had fueled some scary dips in the world's stock markets. For those of you who remain in the dark about the connection between humble home mortgages and 300-point falls in the Dow, The New York Times has provided a helpful illustration of steps in the process whereby an improvident loan made to someone with a dodgy credit history is repackaged as a shiny "financial vehicle." In particular, step 4 in the process, in which the riskiest loans are transformed into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that can offer "AAA"-grade bonds seems like a manoeuvre of such brazenness that it would shame a three-card monte dealer.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, one of the areas worst hit by foreclosures, authorities in the Phoenix area are worried about mosquito infestations and the spread of West Nile virus, risks associated with stagnant swimming pools on abandoned properties.
At least if the Irish property market follows its U.S. counterpart off the cliff, only rotting fields of decking rather than malarial swamps will be the chief relic of the boom.

In late July The Guardian highlighted the UK's inability to deliver major infrastructural projects for a reasonable price by asking "Are these the world's costliest roadworks ?"--a reference to £2.9 billion budget allocated to the widening of the M6 motorway along a 51-mile stretch between Birmingham and Manchester. To hammer home the feeble ratio of expenditure to output, the journos calculated that the project works out at around £1,000 per inch of road.

That piece emerged from the back of my mind after reading today's Irish Times story by Frank McDonald on the estimated bill for the much-bruited Metro North line connecting St. Stephen's Green to Swords via the airport:

"Although all monetary figures in the documents are blacked out, it is possible to discern that the estimated cost of the 17km metro north line was put at €4.58 billion in 2004 prices. With construction inflation and additional expenditure, it would now be well over €5 billion."

A quick back-of-the envelope calculation (perhaps similar to the kind done in the Rail Procurement Authority), dividing budget by line length, yields a cost of around 2,942 euro per centimeter (or, in old money, slightly over five grand sterling per inch).

You might argue that the comparison between British roadworks and the Irish metro line is unfair, as the latter includes some underground tunneling and stations. But a difficult sod might then ask why the Swiss, for example, were able to build a 33-kilometer rail line (running 6,500 feet below the surface of the Alps) for around 2 billion euro less than the hardly-as-breathtaking engineering project destined for north Dublin?

Hodges Figgis, on Dublin's Dawson street, is having one of its periodic stock-clearance sales that may make you regret coughing up full price the first time around. One of the stacked books I spotted on Sunday was Home Land, by Sam Lipstye, going for a near-steal at €5.99 (or was it only €4.99?).

This epistolary pisstake comprises a series of profane newsletter updates (destined never to see the light of day), Catamount Notes, written by one Lewis "Teabag" Miner to his fellow high-school alumni. Lipsyte's literary godfather seems to be Frederick Exley, whose A Fan's Notes represents the Ur-text of over-educated slackerdom. (For example, the 1968 "fictional memoir" features a chapter entitled "Journey on a Davenport," which recounts Exley's increasingly delusional year spent on his mother's couch watching daytime TV.)

Like Exley's autobiographical proxy, Lipsyte's creation is lugging heavy baggage (Miner's mother has died from cancer and his girlfriend seems way too interested in her brother, a neurotic Hollywood actor). While occasionally stirring his bubbling cauldron of despair (he insists "I did not pan out"), Miner shares observations about his contemporaries: some successful and so well rounded as "to be almost spherical," others, like his former school principal, suitable for forcible commitment.

The plot's thin, and teeters into farce toward the end, but it's Miner's voice, delivering an unfeasible number of funny, dark, and often pretty filthy lines, that make it worth bringing this novel to the counter.

A family-friendly example of the Miner spiel, lifted from an NYT review:

Warned by a former locker-room bully to stay out of the mall, Miner observes: ''It was a silly thing for him to say, Valley Cats. No man can tell another man to stay out of the mall. . . . That's not what the framers intended.''

Leavening tracks from the latest band du jour from Montreal with golden oldies from Bowie, Mozzer, et. al, Tom Dunne's evening show on Today FM, Pet Sounds, offers thirtysomethings who have long fled the Somme-like fields of our summer music festivals a painfree way of keeping up with "the kids." Last night the show played "Illegal Attacks," the new single from the former frontman of The Stone Roses, Ian Brown.

Dunne described the track as "political," and I suppose it is, in the same way a daubing by a three year old can be called a painting. On the level of popular music it throws a punch, with Brown's er, unique Manucian rambling underscored by a militant, almost righteous beat. Filigreed by strings, Sinead O'Connor's contribution adds an ethereal element--her trademarked Earth-Mother voice could sing the AA Roadwatch update and still make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. But as for "politics" it's cartoonish, yoking together Afghanistan and Iraq and dragging in oil, Nasdaq, Palestine, the Taleban, air war--all overseen by (yawn) the Great Satan, the US of A.

And isn't a bit rich hearing a sermon from the simian Mr. Brown about the evils of "illegal attacks"? This, remember, is the same guy who was jailed in the late 1990s from threatening to cut off an air stewardess's hands. And on the evidence of this footage, anyone who attacks his security personnel is not only a thug but doesn't exactly deserve to rub shoulders with Noam Chomsky.

Although overhearing Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh's febrile radio commentary at an impressionable age inoculated me against any interest in GAA sports, I can understand the appeal of making the pilgrimage to Croke Park. Jaded by the cash and bling of the Premiership, or alienated by the Burberry-clad smugness of rugger, spectators in search of the endangered amateur spirit can witness (I am told) passion and skill, fuelled by pride rather than money.

However, an e-mail I received yesterday from a friend (a Waterford fan coming to terms with an unexpected defeat by Limerick in the hurling semi-final) highlighted one of the downsides to the GAA's continuing commitment to its origins:

"I'm was intrigued to see how the GAA regards its patrons' taste in music, vis-à-vis the half-time entertainment: a girls' brass band belting out "Kelly the Boy from Killane", "The Patriot Game" and "A Nation Once Again". Does the organization think we've all been stuck up in the mountains for the last eighty years, drinking poitín, and on the run from Free State forces? ("The Patriot Game" in particular, is a well-dodgy song.)"

For those of unfamiliar with "The Patriot Game," here's a few verses:

Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one's country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

My name is O'Hanlon, and I've just turned sixteen.
My home is in Monaghan, and where I was weaned
I learned all my life cruel England's to blame,
So now I am part of the patriot game.

This Ireland of ours has too long been half free.
Six counties lie under John Bull's tyranny.
But still De Valera is greatly to blame
For shirking his part in the Patriot game.

They told me how Connolly was shot in his chair,
His wounds from the fighting all bloody and bare.
His fine body twisted, all battered and lame
They soon made me part of the patriot game.

It's nearly two years since I wandered away
With the local battalion of the bold IRA,
For I read of our heroes, and wanted the same
To play out my part in the patriot game.

It just makes your eyes brim with emotion, doesn't it? And I'm sure this level of entertainment would make those handful of players from "the other tradition" (such as Darren Graham ) feel right at home.

The ongoing hoo-ha over Aer Lingus allocating its Heathrow slots to Belfast at the expense of Shannon offers insight into how Fianna Fail manages to stay in power. It's a twist on the old "divide and rule" policy—except in this case it's the party in government that is divided. FF TDs with seats in constituencies clustered around "the Pale" (Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey, for example, with a seat in Meath West) either keep schtum or dismiss the plaints from the West as exaggeration (thus playing on the suspicions among some on the East Coast that they enjoy wallowing in their oppression in that part of the county).

Meanwhile, TDs from the same party in Shannon's catchment area, spearheaded by Minister of Defence, "Corporal" Wille O'Dea, position themselves as the plucky opposition to a Dublin-based "establishment" remote from the needs of people beyond the M50 commuter belt.

Such a stance is particularly ludicrous in the case of O'Dea, a member of the cabinet that made the decisions leading to the very action he is now protesting. But this is not the first time that O'Dea has sidestepped the concept of collective responsibility for cabinet decisions in a flailing effort to buttress his local power base. When the PDs pushed to deregulate the taxi industry back in 2000, O'Dea told a meeting of Limerick taxi drivers to keep up resistance to the changes. When confronted with his duplicity, O'Dea offered the pitiful excuse that he didn't realize his comments to the taxi drivers were being recorded!

O'Dea's ad hominem attacks on the Aer Lingus's chief executive, Dermot Mannion, comparing him with Oliver Cromwell, are both disgraceful and hollow. Hollow because the only secure way to keep the Shannon-Heathrow routes in place would be to re-nationalise Aer Lingus—and O'Dea isn't going to forfeit his seat at the big table by making that demand. But his histrionics, and those of other protesting FF TDs, are probably sufficient to convince voters that they have a man "in their corner." Likewise, the silence of FF TDs elsewhere convinces commuter-belt voters that the government is not getting worked up over howling from vested interests.

The government is in disarray—but Fianna Fail is thriving as both government and its own opposition (especially as there has been little more than a whimper from either Fine Gael or Labour). I suppose it's one way to stay in power, but it's no way to run a country.

For the past week I've been meaning to flag a provocative article discussing theories forwarded by Gregory Clark's new economic history, A Farewell to Alms. In the spirit of Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition, I'd say the core of Clark's thesis is that the prime mover of the Industrial Revolution was the upper ranks of English society having more (surviving) children than the poor for about 500 years. This inverted population pyramid brought downward social mobility as the children of the wealthy were forced to take up occupations traditionally considered beneath them. But these new poor brought with them a "middle-class" ethos and, according to Clark, '“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving.”

Clark apparently backs up his argument with staggering archival work, examining reams of medieval wills to demonstrate that "The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages.”

By abandoning conventional rationale for why England was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution (a coherent polity, agricultural reform, rich natural resources, and a more meritocratic outlook are the usual suspects) for an evolution-based theory, Clark's book seems to raise troubling questions.

First, can "values" be transmitted across generations? Lamarckism, the idea that an organism can pass on behaviours acquired during its lifetime, is largely discredited. So, relying on a conventional reading of Darwinian natural selection, you might conjecture that the medieval poor occasionally had offspring who, by chance, were better adapted to an emerging middle-class existence (presumably these characteristics would encompass an ability to stay still for long period, appreciate the magic of compound interest, and refrain from debauchery during the working week).

These "mutations" rose through society and eventually had children themselves. Having marginally better diets and less toxic working and living environments than the poor, more members of the nouveau riche succeeded in hanging around long enough to procreate. Although this virtuous cycle--middle-class values creating the circumstances suitable for breeding more people with middle-class values--might continue for generations, it would sometimes be disrupted by economic crises and lack of opportunities caused by too many people chasing a limited number of "appropriate" jobs.

The genetic legacy, inherited from the first striver who decided to learn book-keeping rather than drink sack all day, was now passed to those destined to rejoin the poor (whose numbers were shrinking relative to the healthier rich). However, the "new poor" were (presumably) genetically more inclined than the "old poor" to buckle down and apply their noses to the grindstone. And so, by increments, a society is transformed.

Plausible or far-fetched?

Second, does such a evolutionary reading of economic progress imply that only a brutal shake-out of the poorest strata of the poorest nations will grant them future prosperity (after a few hundred years to allow bourgeois values to percolate through society)?

And finally, if murder, infant mortality, and general ill-health once thinned the ranks of the "feckless" poor, what is supposed to happen to a rich society when these Malthusian shackles are off?

I can envision some wingnut bloggers exploring, in lurid detail, the implications.

Leona Helmsley, the famous "Queen of Mean" hotel heiress, died yesterday aged 87.

Her notorious quote--"Only the little people pay taxes"--has served as a de facto motto for a generation of Irish tax exiles, much lauded for their à la carte charity work.

The searing images captured by Nina Berman of wounded U.S. troops returned from Iraq dissolve any false comfort that might be derived from separating the injured from the dead in casualty statistics.

In particular, the photograph titled "Marine Wedding" makes you want to go out and grab a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq--one of those still cosily ensconced in a think tank or op-ed pulpit (Christopher Hitchens, Irving Kristol, or Charles Krauthammer come to mind)--and force them to stare at the picture until they vow never again to mouth off in public.

A wise man, who has risen above the distractions of mere commonplace things, will eventually discover that much can be achieved by apparently doing sweet FA.

One of the lazy generalizations about blogs is that they are merely electronic diaries--fluffy, self-absorbed journals that are no more interesting than the authors who pen them. While this characterization can be applied to some of the several million blogs in various states of maintenance, it is also fits some of the "professional journalism" that is supposedly under attack from the "cult of the amateur".

Take, for example, The Irish Independent (sound of shotgun discharging into fish-filled barrel). The paper regularly features the syndicated ramblings of someone called Catherine Townsend, who recently tackled the monumentally boring "subject" of the dating scene in Los Angeles. Taking a leaf out of New Journalism playbook, Ms Townsend makes herself the centre of the story:

"On our first night, we went to a house party in the Hollywood Hills. When I saw the sea of silicon-enhanced, permatanned starlets, I figured that my chances of getting laid were roughly the same as their jean size: zero."

Just as we begin to fret over our reporter's damaged self-image....

"So I went to a corner and drank alone - until I met Richard, who had piercing blue eyes and said he was a plastic surgeon to the stars.

We had a very graphic conversation about how he saws through bone, stretches muscles and injects silicon into the cheekbones and buttocks of aspiring actresses. "What would you do to me?" I asked him teasingly. "Nothing," he said. "There is nothing sexier than a woman who is secure about herself." I knew it was a line, but it worked. He asked me out to dinner for the following night."

The West's woes continue...RTE's website leads with the chilling news that "Belavia has confirmed its once weekly winter service between Shannon and Minsk will cease on 25 October."

Meanwhile, in the backroom of his beleaguered constituency office, a haggard-looking Willie O'Dea peers over the shoulder of his PA. On the computer monitor the pixallated expanses of Belarus slowly come into focus...

While she was alive Diana Spencer had the power to turn stolid middle-aged men into gibbering idiots (c.f. Alastair Campbell's toe-curling accounts of his encounters with the dysfunctional aristo). But even beyond the grave, she exerts her dangerous gifts on hacks of a certain age--particularly those charged with sharing their pensées with the great unwashed several times a week.

In today's Irish Independent, Kevin Myers channels the waspish spirit of Kenneth Clarke in an effort to pad out a half-page of aesthetic meditations on beauty. Although by the end of the column the connection between the golden ratio and poor Diana's conk still eludes me:

"They eyes didn't have it by themselves. The nose was central to their effect, for together they achieved the mystical golden mean, that mathematical conjunction which, for reasons no-one [sic] has been able to explain since it was discovered 2,500 years ago, seem to convey a compelling sense of beauty. She hated that nose: but it made possible the perfectly astonishing face [...]

Ten years on, we should remember not just the eyes, far finer than anything Hollywood has ever produced, but also, and most of all, the imperial nasal ridge which so devastatingly defined them: Goodbye England's nose."

First, the Catholic Church crumbles, then David McWilliams tells us we're all filthy-rich HiCo decklanders, but this news threatens to cut the last, frayed ropes tethering us to auld sod:

From The Guardian:

"My goodness: Nigeria overtakes Ireland in Guinness sales

Nigeria has overtaken Ireland as the second-largest market for Guinness as Diageo pushes the black stuff internationally.

Although the world's biggest drinks company did not reveal precise numbers, it said net sales of Guinness in the year ending June 30 were up 18% in Nigeria.

Strong growth across Africa helped to make up for a decline in Britain - the stout's biggest market - and Ireland. Guinness sales fell 7% in Ireland and the volume drunk fell by 9%."

Then again, Nigeria does have around... quick check of CIA Factbook--murky organization but a very handy website)...130 million more people than Ireland.

First some background: As you might have heard, piffling issues such as the war in Iraq and the stalled reconstruction of New Orleans were brushed aside this week by many U.S. media outlets. Instead they focused on the arrest of U.S Senator and (erstswhile?) member of the Singing Senators Larry Craig, who was unfortunate enough to pick an undercover cop to play footsie with in the stalls of the toilets in a Minnesota airport.

Enter TV pundit Tucker Carlson, a noisome jerk who wears bow-ties in lieu of an appealing personality. Joining the media scrummage over family-values Craig's faux pas, this talking head boasted to his chuckling cable host of indulging in a bit of manly gay-bashing after being "bothered" by a man in a restroom in a Washington, D.C.

So, without further ado, I introduce you to the rather excellent "Savior of the Men's Room."

Link via James Wolcott's blog.