Which could be inconvenient as I fancy the knickers off him. Who are you? Via the younger Farrell siblings who are thinking of setting up a blog just to discuss the books, the George R.R.R.R. Martin Ice and Fire personality test.
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Maria
This post should probably be called The Pope in Ireland II, following Kieran’s post of a couple of days ago. But I’m not quite ready to finally delete the shreds of a posting I keep re-writing that keeps getting overtaken by other posts and events in the meantime.
Anyway, this morning Slugger O’Toole points to the most beautiful antidote to the dolorous (and, frankly, condescending) blanket coverage of the pope’s death by CNN. Slugger kindly reproduces in full Fintan O’Toole’s superb essay placing JPII’s reign in the context of Hobbes’ description of the papacy as “nothing other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof”.
If, like me, you can’t bear another moment of mock-mourningful journalists raking out endless and unseemly titbits of human interest and pointless kremlinology-like speculations about the next pope, read this. It’s a cracker.
Better late than never – Via euro-correspondent, I’ve only just come across Veronica Kokhlova’s wonderful blog Neeka’s Backlog. I only wish I’d had the wit to have found it back in November, if not long before that. Kokhlova’s blog from Ukraine is (to my mind) well informed, sharp, warm and passionate.
Illustrating the superficiality of most westerners’ knowledge of politics in Ukraine, Kokhlova draws attention to a piece in the NYT earlier this week, noting;
“the paragraph, in which Yushchenko’s name was spelled as “Yushenchenko,” is now gone completely, together with any mention of Ukraine.
The way that paragraph described our election saga was awesome, too: “Mr. Putin also actively opposed the pro-Western candidacy of the Ukrainian presidential candidate, Viktor A. Yushenchenko [sic], who was ultimately sworn into office.”
It reminded me of Putin’s famous answer to Larry King’s question about what happened to the Kursk submarine: “It sank,” he said.”
A related site has hundreds of beautiful and informative photographs taken by Kokhlova in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere.
Via Statewatch, a story of four Air Horizon passengers being prosecuted by the French government for objecting to a forced deportation on their flight. Probably the most chilling aspect is the insistence by cabin crew, policy, the airline and the state that it’s perfectly normal to share a plane with a hysterical man crying “I am not a slave” as he is assaulted and gagged by a glove shoved into his mouth.
This is the reality of European immigration policy, whether we like it or not. And as bizaare and Kafka-esque as it is to prosecute people who object to being made a part of the machinery of expulsion, the fact is that the young Congolese man was safer on a commercial flight than using another means.
Perversely, I’m glad that four articulate and well-connected Europeans are being prosecuted for doing their moral duty. It seems to me that every time we accept a narrowing of human rights as a trade-off for better security, we do so on the unspoken assumption that the person suffering will never be ‘one of us’.
There’s a wonderful passage in Colm Toibin’s ‘The Master’, a fictional biography of Henry James, where the hero is on his way to see the house in Rye where he’ll spend the rest of his life. It came to mind when I sat down to list my favourite cookery books.
It’s all happening in Dublin these days. In January, Michael Ignatieff gave the first annual Amnesty lecture in Trinity College – since published by The Dubliner magazine. Ignatieff tried to explain and in some sense justify American exceptionalism in matters multilateral, particularly the ‘judicial narcissism’ that prevents US judges from incorporating foreign jurisprudence and international legal norms.
Meanwhile, no less a personage than Antonin Scalia put the idea of judicial isolationism to the test only last Friday night, which he passed in the company of a horde of boisterous Dublin barristers.
Following my thoughtful and inventive co-bloggers, here’s a list of 2004 recommended reading with links to the Amazon Associates programme and my promise to match and forward any fees to the Red Cross for tsunami disaster relief. It may take a day or so for my Associates registration to work out, so please be patient. But now that I’ve finally set an account up, I promise to match and forward any Associates fees I receive in 2005 to the ICRC.
And now for something completely different. As I was going over the Cork and Kerry mountains, only this morning in fact, The Langer Song came on the radio. So I finally got a chance to hear it, just 6 months after it was Number 1.
What is a langer? See here for essential information and the alarming news that the word langer is now in the Collins dictionary (surely the beginning of the end). Better still CT’s resident Cork sociologist, Kieran, has been there and done all that last June.
Smoking gun or no smoking gun, the line going around in Ireland about David Blunkett’s resignation is; ‘Jesus, a Minister who didn’t sort out a visa application for someone he knew should have to resign.’
Plus, is anyone else irritated that the same Jacques Chirac who lazed by the pool while thousands of elderly Parisians baked to death last year ditched his Moroccan holiday for a photo opp with the released hostages Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot?
This may simply be a sign that I’m past 30 and culturally marooned, but most of my favourite bands haven’t done anything good since 1994.
Which is not to say popular music in general has been rubbish since then – it hasn’t – just that if I was completely honest about it, I’d rather some acts stopped putting out records that I feel compelled to buy out nostalgia, consistency, and a slight feeling of guilt that I’ve moved on and they clearly haven’t.
I’m tired of going into record shops and coming out with mediocre albums of artists who were once truly or almost great. So, reluctantly, I’ve recently compiled my list of bands/artists whose work I will now stop buying just because they were good ten years ago.
Pop quiz: name a wily old political operator who relies on the French Right to keep him out of jail and in power indefinitely while he out-manoeuvres the opposition and bamboozles the tax-payer.
No, not Jacques Chirac. His buddy Gaston Flosse, aka Papa Flosse, the president-in-waiting of French Polynesia. Chirac’s unbending desire to keep Flosse in power has thrown French Polynesia into a political and institutional crisis, sparking the biggest protests ever seen in Tahiti, and accusations by the French Left of a legal coup d’etat.
Why are all required statistics courses essentially the same? They start off with bland assurances from the instructor that no knowledge of maths is required and that the concepts involved are pretty easy to grasp – all you need to do is turn up in class and do lots of practice questions. Oh, and have a positive attitude. Yeah, right.
I’m about to take the third stats exam of my life. As with the two before, failure is a barrier to continuing my ‘real’ studies. And, though this is my third tour of duty through histograms to simple regression, failure is a distinct possibility. The null hypothesis, that Maria has sufficient knowledge, nerve and luck to once again pass stats by the skin of her teeth, looks like being rejected. Of course I don’t blame myself, not entirely. I’d rather blame the teachers, or perhaps the subject itself.
What’s the Irish for boondoggle?
It’s not every day that Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats and Sinn Fein agree on something. But they all say Irish should be an official language of the EU, and complain that the government (which the PDs are part of) hasn’t done enough to make this happen during the Irish presidency. Our presidency of the EU is at best a partial success because we haven’t managed to force the EU to spend an extra 50 million euro a year to translate speeches and documents into a language that no one actually needs them in. It’s the principle, you see.
Ahead of next week’s federal election in Canada, Michael Geist has a revealing piece in today’s Toronto Star that compares the positions on Internet/technology issues of the main Canadian parties. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa and Digital Copyright Canada surveyed the Liberals, NDP, Conservatives and Greens on their views on IP protection, file-sharing, open source, identity cards and use of Internet materials in education. The results are not what a classic right-left divide might predict.