Posts from — November 2007

Damien picked up on this national embarrassment the other day, which I’ll leave for now, begrudgingly, but come back to later with venom. But when we produce crap like Mister P the dancing potato as a national icon, it’s no surprise that the Aussies use our horrible parody of ourselves as an excuse to fling a stereotype back in our faces.

Cue an ad, now running on Australian television, complete with a tin whistle theme tune, dodgy accents, diddly-aye dancing, and leprechauns leaping out of Mitsubishi Lancers. The Lancers aren’t Irish, they’re Japanese. The ad will be part of a hugely publicised short film festival that is broadcast nationwide every year. Yay.

Click here and open the ‘roomier’ video, adjust your cloth cap and add water to your whiskey. It’s bad, but still way better than Mister P.

Welcome to the grand aul world of Diddly-aye-down-under.

PS: While we’re at it – Social networking for Irish dancers at Diddlyi.com. These guys are great.

….in environmental technology.

On the right is the Wind Dam, a new energy-generating project which funnels breeze into a turbine located in its own crotch. Looking like a gigantic g-string slung across a valley, the pant-like creation will, if built, hang in a valley in Russia.

It’s from zany architects Chetwoods, apparently, who aren’t fans of the stoic designs of the country bungalow. They like their buildings straight out of Ridley Scott’s brain.

More gigantic underwear, we say. Soon we’ll all be powering blenders using nothing but our girlfriends’ bras and a jury-rigged dynamo from a rusty bike.

Via: Litoralis

Via via: Scuttlebutt

Christmas is all about presents, right?

No? It’s about Jesus? I don’t believe it.

Well, believe it baby, because apparently it’s true. Historically, Christmas was about the birth of Christ (hint: the clue is in the name – Christmas). If you were to go back in time, Christmas day involved a trip to Church to celebrate Jesus Christ’s birthday before you opened your own presents.  Harsh, but he did save mankind by dying for OUR sins.  No, seriously.

Remind your kids/punish them for forgetting about the true meaning of Christmas by wrapping up one of these puppies: the Tales of Glory Talking Jesus doll.

Hear him speak the word of his dad (Click) and don’t forget, there’s a handy accompanying booklet which the kids will HATE. Imagine, unwrapping a box at the foot of the tree to find something religious. GOD, why don’t you just by them schoolbooks, for Christ’s sake.

More: www.one2believe.com

(Disclaimer: This post is heinously blasphemous, contravening Commandment 4 of 10. If you’ve read this far, post a comment and I’ll keep you a seat in hell. Unless you decide to repent. WUSS.)

We’re great ambassadors for our nation when we go overseas, exporting our love of the banter and a bit o’ the aul craic, wha? Spawning cultural icons like House of Pain and Seamus O’Shaughnessy.
Don’t believe me? Guide your mouse to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph to see CCTV footage of a brawl/alleged drink spiking that forced a 24-hour Irish bar in Sydney to close its doors to incoming punters from 3am. But no-one gets kicked out. It merely keeps the drunk folks from other pubs out, while keeping the merry folks inside Scruffy Murphy’s in.

The Sydney police call it a lock-out, but I can’t help but realise that it bears a striking resemblance to a LOCK-IN, in colloquial terms. Mandated by the police. How draconian.

Somebody call Brian Lenihan. He needs to see this in action. Fly him over here right now. Lock-ins all round (for a change). Hurrah!

The original story on our front page:

Time for some trumpet-blowing. The Sydney Irish Film Festival, held last weekend, was a rip-roaring success, and the opening night saw a packed house sit down to watch Kings, a bleak but honest rendering of the Irish in London, back in the day when we were diggers and labourers rather than IT consultants and property portfolio managers.

Not to get bogged down in it, a bunch of six Irish lads leave the Gaeltacht in 1977 to find their fortunes. One does, the rest don’t, but all keep their admirable pact of only speaking Irish to each other when they’re together, making it the first Irish-language feature film I’d ever seen.

The festival seems to have gone extremely well, helped along by a simple festival website created through WordPress on the smell of an oily rag. With the festival approaching, the absence of a website became worrying and with our own clunker being re-done, we asked our very competent IT consultants to tag on a Film Festival site to the job.

We were quoted $3,000 to create a professional one, but with the festival being essentially an inaugural community event only running over four days, it wasn’t deemed a sensible expense when all we needed was brief synopses of the films and a link to the Chauvel cinema site, which took care of ticketing.

I suggested the idea of using a free blog to do up the site, did a mock-up within 15 minutes, and the boss was sold on the idea. Our graphics guy did the banner, I coached the boss in how to manipulate the blog software (which we’ll be using on our newspaper’s blogs soon anyway) and off we went.

The result is admittedly crude, without the flash trappings of a professionally-written site, but for a small not-for-profit event it helped us keep costs down and did the job admirably. Some trickery with page parents, etc, allowed us list the films in the sidebar, and you’d be amazed what trailers, etc, can be found to flesh the site out.

Costs were limited to the $10 paid to WordPress for domain name registration, plus the A$50 to resigter irishfilmfestival.org.au

Sixty bucks.

It meant we could spend more putting ads into the mainstream media to boost its profile. We had a freelancer work on sending out press releases, and hit our email database with a newsletter directing them to the site.

It worked.

We registered more than 1,300 hits on Saturday alone, and an average of 775 hits per day during the festival. Several movies sold out, and it seems our not-for-profit event, thankfully, was a not-for-loss event also.

While using a blog for something like this is constricting, if you’re willing to spend a bit of time figuring out how to maximise the available widgets and options, it can be put to best use. Use your own resources wisely (i.e. email database, contacts lists, etc.) and you can maximise the efficiency. We could have done a whole lot more if we had more time to play with, and we will do next year – probably in a more professional manner.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on www.irishecho.com.au for a big change in the pipeline.

“Words make pic good,” Rocko was heard to say, before slamming his club into Pat Kenny’s fruit danish. It is thought he received media training from the guy who has been writing the polls on the main RTÉ page for the past while. An RTÉ spokesperson said: “Maybe we should have started him off on something less demanding of sensitivity and, er, grammar, than the discovery of two bodies in a river. But our HR policy is sound. Without it we would never have unearthed Ryan Tubridy.”

More: Two bodies recovered from the Shannon – RTÉ News

Always has, always will.

Back before Australia’s chief exports were coal/uranium, it was Jason/Kylie.

Here’s the straight man on Gay’s show. Being straight.

[youtube="http://youtube.com/watch?v=U9uh5nhZhvE"]

Still doing fine: ‘Kylie snubs Jase over tell-all memoir’

What kind of utter BASTARD lies in an interview, huh?

Jonathan Rhys-Maeiyeiweers, apparently. Just what did the self-styled actOR-slash-poet-slash-perfume caddy JRM do to earn the wrath of über-serious mediablogger Roy Greenslade ? He lied. To a newspaper. And not just to any newspaper – to Metro. Having told them he was a healthy little Tudor, he went out on a bender, assumedly overcome with grief at his mother’s death.

The CAD. How could he?

We don’t know how he gets work these days. With respect, of course, but seriously, how does he?

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

STOP THE PRESS:

True-or-False excerpts from the interview:

METRO: Do you worry about becoming more famous?
JRL: No. I don’t care about it. I couldn’t give a toss. Fame is just part of it but it’s not something I dwell on. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and try to get more famous.  FALSE!!

METRO: You’ve never been romantically linked with any of your co-stars. How come?
JRL: There’s only room for one in my life, and I’m it.  TRUE!!

Money quote: “I’d never want to be mediocre at something.”

Erm, who wants to tell him?

The whole shebang here.

The Libs from Australia show Labour/Fine Gael a thing or two about screen presence. If you want breakfast roll man to vote for you, ditch the subtle pitch at the geriatrics and the clever insinuations. And don’t, for the love of God, call him Bernard. Bernard wears a brown jumper and smells of wee.

Let there be cursing! Let there be charging the streets! Let effigies hang from lamposts! Tell the other guys, nice and loudly on national TV to Go Fuck Themselves! That’s what you should have done! I predict a riot – and the other feckers started it!

Pah, you’re not even listening. And that’s why Rabbitte got stewed.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

The Libs fire-and-brimstone bitchslap of an ad: [youtube="http://youtube.com/watch?v=uC_PDy3kINU"]

Labour’s gripping This is Bernard party political. Yawn:

[youtube="http://youtube.com/watch?v=W1s9umFo9WU"]

It’s T minus 24 hours until election time and nasty old John Howard (evil emperor – boooooooo) looks like he’s on the way out while Tintin-faced newcomer Kevin Rudd (Luke Skywalker – yaaaaaaaaay) is ready to usher in a new era of hope and prosperity. It’s your basic showdown of cartoonish good-versus-evil.

Howard to Rudd: “Your over-confidence is your weakness”

Rudd’s retort: “Your faith in your friends is yours…”

The drama!

As with any potential Labor/red flag Government, they are flush with liberal optimism, unworried by the cloud of potential financial disaster that follows them.

Who will win? The steady old domineering hand that is the Coalition/Dark Empire or Labor, the rag-tag rebels fighting the good fight on the smell of an oily rag?

Who knows!

Who has the attention span to pay attention to the debates?

No-one!

Thankfully those Labor wags have played a hulllllllarious prank to keep us distracted from it all. The 2.0 jokesters!

Selling Kirribilli House on a well-respected property website? Open for inspection, sorry, ELECTION?

Somebody stitch up my sides! (Full pic below the fold – beware, like, total MIRTH ALERT!)

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