This is (apparently) a fairly old piece of news among the techno-savvy, but I was happy to hear about it over the weekend and perhaps you might be today. According to TechCrunch, the latest version of Google Earth features a "secret" flight simulator that can be summoned up using the key combination Ctrl+Alt+A (for Windows machines--it's Command+Option+A for Macs).

I wonder if Google does this sort of stuff just to impress us with all the excess brainpower they have on tap--as if to say, oh, yeah, we just clean forgot to tell you about that little feature that allows you to try taking off from a runway in Kathmandu in a F16.

I missed the debut of RTE's "gritty" new drama about life on the fringes of the Celtic Tiger, Prosperity. However, RTE has obligingly not only made it possible to watch the first episode on the web, but allowed aspiring writers to download the series scripts for perusal.

Here's page 1 of "stacey's story," copied and pasted from the PDF. (In other words, I promise this is the actual un-interfered-with script, not some lame InterWeb parody.)

INT. STACEY’S BEDROOM. B+B
The bedroom of a B+B in the North Inner City of Dublin. The bedroom is shabby and basic. A small bed, a window, a sink for washing in. There is also a child’s cot. Still sleeping in the bed is STACEY. Stacey is 17. There is the sound of the house waking up. We hear people on the stairs and sounds of children crying. Gradually Stacey wakes. She sits up. She stares for a time at the child’s cot. Stacey has a reserved, quiet persona, almost cold or damaged. Eventually she rises and stands beside the cot. Inside is her three month old daughter LORNA. The child is still sleeping soundly. Stacey watches her a moment.

STACEY
(softly)
Baba, baba, baba.

She tucks the child in, gently. She moves to the window. There is a ‘no smoking’ sign on the window. She opens the window and then lights a cigarette. She sits on the window sill and smokes and watches the world go by. We see that she is in the centre of the city. Occasionally she looks back into the room to check on Lorna.

CUT TO:
2 INT. HALLWAY. B+B - 0804 2
Stacey is coming out of the communal bathroom. She has showered. There are others milling about. A rough looking woman called LINDA is having an argument with another woman. There is a four year old boy watching.

LINDA
What the fuck are you saying?

WOMAN
I’m not saying anything Linda.

LINDA
Better not be.

WOMAN
Why?

LINDA
Cause I’ll sort you.

WOMAN
You will?

LINDA
I will.

WOMAN
(to her four year old kid)
Go on into the room Darren.

STACEY'S STORY Shooting Script. 1.
(CONTINUED)

But as "Linda" might say, I don't f**king want to.

*For those who are blissfully ignorant of the reference, see here.

Irish Independent, March 26, 2007

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern promised an extra €300m a minute to voters as he took pre-election auction politics to a new level. In the course of his 23-minute address to the Fianna Fail ard fheis, he promised €6.9bn in tax cuts, pensions and public service spending.

Irish Times, September 5, 2007

A tough budget could be in prospect for December as new figures show that weakness in the property market is feeding through into the public finances.

Exchequer returns released by the Department of Finance yesterday reveal a €268 million shortfall in stamp duty receipts since the start of the year.

Minister for Finance Brian Cowen has told Cabinet colleagues that the rise in Government spending next year will be sharply below that allowed this year as a result of the disappointing trend in the Government's finances.

*To honesty, not economics

The news that Dublin's central library will move from the rather grim precincts of the Ilac Centre to the grandiose, albeit down-at-heel, Ambassador cinema building seems like evidence of one of Dublin Corporation's less calamitous planning meetings.

The relocation will not come cheap: "The city council will become sub-tenants paying €1.2m annually in rent and €11.8m for fitout and tax costs if the scheme receives planning approval."

But with some imagination impressive things are possible, viz. El Ateneo bookstore in Buenos Aires:

(I came across the existence of this book palace through the Maud Newton blog, which is running a series on independent bookstores. Dublin's Winding Stair bookshop and Kenny's Bookshop in Galway (recently dematerialized into cyberspace) are also featured.)

Snapshot of what's concerning readers of the online Daily Telegraph as of lunchtime, Friday September 7:

(The thought struck me today whether the obsessive focus by the media on this individual tragedy isn't some weird displacement activity, distracting our attention from the hundreds of lives lost weekly in the Iraq hellmouth.)

Taking an opsimathic interest in the history of my hometown, I've been contentedly engaged by Maurice Craig's landmark publication, Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City. Craig's aphoristic style ("[In] Dublin luxuries have always tended to come before necessities.") and interest in the wider intellectual milieu combine to produce a book that transcends the category of architectural history*. The author's inclination to colourful digression is demonstrated by the following anecdote, which shows that the gougers of yesteryear could have given the dead-eyed killers of today's city a run for their money:

"The 'Liberty-Boys' . . . were the most turbulent and independent section of the Dublin populace. Extravagantly protestant, they were neither the first nor the last example of immigrants whose behaviour has done so much to secure Ireland her reputation for light-hearted faction-fighting. They nourished a deadly hatred against the butchers of the Ormonde Market, who were mostly Catholic. All through the eighteenth century the quays and bridges would become impassable for days on end, as fierce battles, attended with atrocities and reprisals of the utmost barbarity, raged throughout the centre of the city...The vanquished were treated with incredible ferocity; the Butchers cut the leg-tendons of the Weavers with their long knives, or the Weavers hoisted the Butchers and left them hanging by the jaws on their own meathooks."

*Unfortunately, this re-issue of a work first published in 1952 bears the marks of a negligently supervised scanning job. Eighteenth-century events are given 20th century dates, Lord Mornington (father of the Duke of Wellington) is referred to as "Momington" more than once, and the founder of the Rotunda hospital, Bartholomew Mosse, is laughably called "Mouse" at one point.

Watching General David Petraeus's attempt to sell President Bush's surge strategy to U.S. senators, I've been distracted by the matrix of ribbons and badges adorning the general's chest, the profusion of which would not embarrass the late Leonid Brezhnev. Some of this luxuriant military "flair" is glossed here.

The above image, which displays a mesmerizing swathe of esoteric technology, comes from a New York Times article that explains how IBM researcher Stuart P. Parkin is using nanomaterials in an attempt to create vastly improved electronic storage technologies and "to take microelectronics completely into the third dimension and thus explode the two-dimensional limits of Moore’s Law."

Although Parkin's work is undoubtedly mind-boggling from a layperson's perspective (how exactly do you "stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip"?), the report made me think back to a book I read a few months ago, The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton. In a provocative if flawed work, Edgerton argues that our fixation on innovation distracts us from understanding technology as it actually used. In other words, long after the media and popular prejudice consider a particular technology to be "obsolete," it is still quietly puttering away, oftentimes produced and used in greater numbers than the product or process it has supposedly been replaced by. Edgerton's book is replete with examples: for example, the number of bicycles produced is, even today, more than 2 1/2 times the number of cars manufactured. Back in World War II, the German war machine, epitomized by Blitzkrieg twins of the Stuka and Panzer, was largely horse-powered. (The 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union used more horses than the Grand Armée of 1812 and took longer to reach the outskirts of Moscow.)

Edgerton's book is undermined by the fact that he never really develops his thesis, as he's so busy jumping to the next did-you-know? example. (But those examples do keep you reading.) In addition, he never nails down what he means by "the old." From his examples, the old could encompass the 19th century, early 20th century, and the decades after the Second World War. In other instances, the "old" label is applied to companies that are still around but associated with mature technologies (car companies are a primary example, but IBM, who are bankrolling Mr Parkin's research, could also be ranked with the geezer corporations considering it was founded in 1889).

At this moment the world's economy is looking considerably shakier than it did even a month ago. Of the two main causes of this weakness, one is prehistoric, the other merely very, very old. The first danger is oil--the residue of "ancient sunlight"--now threatening to become a real issue at $80 a barrel. The "knowledge" economy, with its thirsty server farms, international conferences, and SUV-driving consultants, does not run solely on hot air and Starbucks.

Second, the 21st-century credit crisis centred on the United States stems from a collapse in the housing market--and the first ever real-estate slump probably occurred in the city of Ur when a speculator built too many mud-brick huts with a view of the Ziggurat.

As a civilization, it seems, we may now be able to wrap a billion wires around a chip smaller than a postage stamp, but we are still in thrall to the same forces that were already wearily familiar when great-grandparents complained about them.

The controversial speech made by Germany's ambassador to Ireland, Christian Pauls, demonstrates that you don't have to be a diplomat to head an embassy. Offering a bleak overview of his host country, Herr Pauls apparently told his audience --a group of 80 German industrialists gathered at Clontarf Castle--that Ireland was a "coarse" place where the natives were obsessed with money. Not exactly pulling his punches, Pauls went on to marvel aloud that junior ministers in Ireland were paid more than the German chancellor and that "Irish doctors who were offered annual salaries of €200,000 (£138,000) to work in the public sector turned their noses up at what they called “Mickey Mouse money”."

There was plenty of more digs during Mr Pauls stand-up routine, although his quip that Ireland's history was "even sadder than Poland['s]" might be viewed as a tad unwise for a German representative to utter.

It was speculated on RTE's Morning Ireland that as Mr. Pauls is approaching retirement, he felt liberated to breach diplomatic protocol by making an honest speech.

Although much of what Mr. Pauls says about the culture of coarse avarice is true about Ireland (similar criticisms about arid prosperity were aimed at Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder years), his insights aren't exactly startling at this stage of the game.

Plus, thanks to the prodigious output of characters such as David McWilliams (returning to our television screens this evening with his pantomime creations, "Bono Boomer" and "Botox Bettie") and Eddie Hobbs, about the only thing we don't need to import from Germany is would-be comedic observers of the Irish economic scene.

One of the more invidious preemptive strategies of the big players in particular industries is to fund "front" organizations supposedly charged with educating us about the messy side-effects caused by the very products its patrons churn out. It's called being a "good corporate citizen." So we have the drinkaware.ie website, which is developed by the McCarthyite-sounding Mature Enjoyment of Alcohol in Society Limited (MEAS). MEAS's list of members encompasses all the major booze companies and lobby groups operating in Ireland. (One wonders how delighted MEAS's members really would be if the Irish took them up on their advice and sipped--Mediterranean-style--two drinks over the course of the night.)

And, obviously, anti-smoking campaigns are often bankrolled by the major tobacco companies. Now oil companies are not only heartily embracing the green agenda, or at least telling us that they are (see BP's Carbon Reduction spiel or Chrevron's Will You Join Us? initiative), they are sponsoring meetings by groups who prophesy the extinction of the entire petroleum industry in the near future.

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) held its sixth annual conference in Cork earlier this week. Among the conference's sponsors were a handful of state agencies, some bio-energy outfits, National Toll Roads (the people who brought you the West Link Toll Plaza), and Maxol, Ireland's largest independent oil distributor.

Crank that I am, I can't help pondering whether it's just the reward of being a "good corporate citizen" that prompts an oil company to sponsor a conference organised by a group warning that petrol will soon be, litre-for-litre, pricier than a bottle of Evian.

It's good to see that The New York Times has abandoned the irritating TimesSelect model, which required the web audience to pay a subscription to read columns from op-ed contributors such as Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman (check out Krugman's interesting new blog here). Now the paper has moved to an ad-supported approach, not only are the columns now available for free but so are the paper's archives stretching back to 1987--a considerable resource.

And after Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.'s purchase of The Wall Street Journal, the issue now being debated by the paper's executives is "Should the Journal fall in line with the rest of the industry and make its 11-year-old paid-subscription Web site free?"

The traditional argument for paying for online journalism was that although casual browsers might be reluctant to shell out for news available from an array of resources, business customers would be willing to pay for potentially valuable "market intelligence."

If the WSJ goes for an ad-based revenue model, it seems like the last support for paid online subscriptions is kicked away. Against such a background, you have to wonder why The Irish Times, which offers considerably more fluff than market intelligence, continues hides the bulk of its online content behind its "Premium Content Subscription" wall. If The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal can't make this approach work, why does editor Geraldine Kennedy and the Irish Times board think they can?

According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

If we keep Fitzgerald's definition in mind, the comment from a judge (another one?) at the interminable Mahon tribunal that Bertie Ahern's explanations about his finances given at different times amounted to "polar opposites" is less a criticism than a testament to our Taoiseach's innate brilliance. His explanations about his activities in the 1990s have transcended mere evasiveness and have entered the realm of quantum uncertainty, a place in which money simultaneously existed and did not exist, was perhaps denominated in several currencies at once, and popped up in suitcases, safes, and bank accounts with the randomness of quarks. However, whereas particle accelerators have at least a fighting chance of unravelling the origins of the universe, there is little hope that the Mahon tribunal (about the same price as a particle accelerator) will ever plumb the cosmic mysteries of Bertie's money.

When I was young and green I truly believed that having a No. 1 single and a spot on Top of the Pops was enough to retire on. This was before I learnt that the disposable income for a pop performer is, after various deductions by the record companies, managers, and assorted hangers-on, usually about the same as a checkout operator's.

A slightly more highbrow version of this fantasy is the belief that having your novel shortlisted for a major literary prize will deliver, if not a payout of Lotto dimensions, at least enough to buy a new car. But even these modest dreams turned to ash after reading a report in The Daily Telegraph about the startling (in a bad sense) British sales figures for all but one of the books shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize:

"While [Ian] McEwan's novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal's People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in this country by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted.

Nicola Barker's Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright's The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan's rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it."

From the ABC news blog: "Bush's UN Speech Full of Fone-eh-tick Pronunciations for World Leaders"

"[This] year, a glimpse of how the President sees his speeches was accidentally placed on the UN website along with the speechwriters' cell phone numbers.

Pronunciations for President Bush's friend French President Sarkozy "[sar-KOzee]" appeared in draft #20 on the UN website. Other pronunciations included the Mugabe "[moo-GAHbee] regime" and pronunciations for countries "Kyrgyzstan [KEYRgeez-stan]" and "Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a]."

When a friend recommended the HBO series Flight of the Conchords (currently showing on BBC4) by claiming it featured "comedy songs that are actually funny" I was sceptical. I had visions of whimsical ditties fresh from an airing at the Edinburgh Festival, where alcohol and the slight hysteria of a live show commingle to extract laughter from the lamest performances.

But no, no, Flight of the Conchords is still funny when you're sober and sitting in front of the box on a Tuesday night. Along with the show's rather sweet storyline about two fish-out-of-water New Zealanders trying to break their "band" in a supremely indifferent New York City, the quality of the songs won me over.

Wonderfully true to the singers' guileless personas, they often start with empathetic warbling characteristic of James Blunt's supermodel-coaxing ballads before running it over with the sort of literalism a high-functioning Aspberger's sufferer brings to his to-do list.

Even without the pitch-perfect delivery, the lyrics for "I'm not crying", performed in the first episode, still makes me go "Ha ha ha-ha ha":

"I’m not crying
It’s just been raining on my face
And if you think you see some tear tracks down my face
Please don’t tell my mates

I’m not crying
No, I’m not crying
And if I am crying
It’s not because of you
It’s because I’m thinking of a friend of mine who you don’t know who is dying
That’s right, dying
These aren’t tears of sadness because you’re leaving me
I’ve just been cutting onions
I’m making a lasagna
For one
Oh, I’m not crying
No

There’s just a little bit of dust in my eye
That’s from the path that you made when you said your goodbye
I’m not weeping because you won’t be here to hold my hand
For your information there’s an inflammation in my tear gland
I’m not upset because you left me this way
My eyes are just a little sweaty today
They’ve been seaching around
They’re like searching for you
They’ve been looking around
Even though I told them not to
These aren’t tears of sadness
They’re tears of joy
I’m just laughing
Ha ha ha-ha ha"

And here's the obligatory YouTube clip of the duo "in concert":

From Reuters: "President Bush thanked Minister Yang for China's assistance in facilitating United Nations Special Envoy (Ibrahim) Gambari's visit to Burma," Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said."

It's encouraging--China's leadership is facing up the responsibilities concomitant with its emerging superpower status. It's helping to put pressure on a corrupt autocratic regime that has lost any moral authority over the country's best and brightest.

Burma 2007

China 1989