Posts from — October 2008

Green Party TD Ciaran Cuffe was in Dun Laoghaire on Monday morning, I saw him walking to his Fiat

Cinquecento (one of the flashy, new ones) having made a deposit at the recycling centre in Glasthule. Always an amiable character, he stopped to chat with a local before getting in his car and pootling off, assumedly to his constituency office over the pet shop on Patrick St. I couldn’t hear the conversation (sitting guiltily behind 3.2 litres of grumbling Mitsubishi Pajero engine at the time), but despite the time that is in it for his party, Ciaran ended the chat with a smile on his face.

I voted for Ciaran last time I was able, and was happy to see the Greens get in, feeling that they were better inside the tent pissing out than the alternative. But as the party slowly swallows and chokes on its high-fibre morals, I find myself torn. If the general election was tomorrow, could I go Green again?

I voted Green last time I could (I can’t even remember if I posted second choice) because they were the only party that matched my outlook, and were the only dogma-free, human politicians I had dealt with while writing for Metro. You would ring up Ciaran Cuffe or Eamonn Ryan (Damien’s fave) for a quote and hear kids screaming in the background and dinner being cooked. There were no minders or bullshit. The conversations never happened in the back of a moving Mercedes, and never involved shouted figures or pointed rants.

But now? The Greens seem like a wart on a hand you wouldn’t dare shake. At a time when voter activism is at an all-time high and apathy has been banished, their dilution as a principled entity means I can’t see a single palatable option in the Irish political spectrum. Back in ’07, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein were never getting my vote, despite some frank and interesting exchanges with local FF nominee Barry Andrews. Fiona O’Malley, the PD candidate, needn’t have bothered asking, and flavourless Fine Gael the same, particularly with that hapless goon Enda Kenny at the helm. Eamon Gilmore’s canvassers successfully put me off ever voting for Labour again. And aside from the eternally hopeful, personally impressive but fatally misguided Richard Boyd-Barrett (Socialist), it was Greens or bust. Since then, Labour and Fine Gael have had umpteen chances to stick the knife into Fianna Fail, and dropped the blade every time. Kenny can take a lot of the blame for that, an orator in love with his own voice, who places more emphasis on showmanship than substance, and constantly misses the point because he’s concentrating on fancy alliteration.

The Greens were always going to have to temper their socialist tendencies and grow up economically, and it seemed like they had done that, to some extent, when they joined hands with Bertie and skipped into the cabinet to make a deal. But it was always going to be tricky – ‘A Deal With the Devil‘, as Ciaran Cuffe famously said.

To use the words of another aptly-named band of eccentrics, They Might Be Giants, you can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding, which the Greens are learning now, potentially at huge cost. I could see them suffering a PD-style loss next time around.

Ciaran, who’s been remarkably quiet of late, presciently remarked at the time of his ‘deal with the devil’ slip: ‘We would be spat out after five years, and decimated as a Party. But, … would it be worth it? Power is a many faceted thing.’

He was right on the money there, going by recent events, but if you choose to believe Eamon Gilmore, only it only took a year.

Said Gilmore today: ‘The Green Party is dead; the Green Party is beaten, and this is a sad day for this country’.

Last week Ciaran Cuffe hinted we could see the Greens walk out of government within four weeks, which would make it a very short turn at the reins of power. Was it all worth it?

Where does Obama stand on the Star Wars defence system?

Via.

Great article from The New Republic on the punishing

Originally uploaded by juffrouwjo

four-yearly journalistic ritual that is an election campaign. Perhaps this is why journalists are called ‘hacks’, because this beat is a long hack, an unbearable slog that breaks men, ruins relationships, skews career trajectories and emotionally rapes journalists who are pegged to it for the duration.

It’s enough to make you down tools. From a height.

Last week, Lizza, who was banned from the Obama plane in July, found his way back on and thought he had stumbled on a lost colony. “It felt like the Lord of the Flies in there,” he says. “The people who have been there for a long time have all of their little decorations and knickknacks all over the back of the plane. Everyone’s a little grumpy and territorial, and there’s this sense of people thrown together who have been with each other way too long. I got the sense that I was dropping in on a hostage-captor situation.”

Reminds me of the plane scene from Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, where candidate George McGovern’s ‘Zoo Plane’ was a flying media circus (for Hunter at least), with an open bar and no shortage of stimulants. There’s no mention of wholesale consumption of drugs, of course, in the TNR bit. Just trinkets, greying hair and failing senses of humour.

Maybe Robert Shortt will be relieved that The Bird is replacing him, ‘though it’s probably too late to get some proper Charlie on the plane.

In a world of downward trends, this is nice to see:

It’s the average boat speed graph from the Volvo Ocean Race. Ericcson 4 (the orange line) has just smashed the world record for most miles in a 24-hour period – 585 nautical miles (673 regular ones). That’s an average of 28 mph in a sailboat. Dashing.

BBC 2:

RTE 2:

RESULT:

Originally uploaded by melisdramatic

This post is dedicated to Wayne Rooney, who, in an act of taste and appreciation of quality, was much maligned this past weekend. Rooney was at Goodison Park, Everton’s home ground, and caused hand-wringing by the home crowd when he kissed his Manchester United Badge after being booked for a foul.

The action sparked over 600 online articles and countless unheard rants. All a little misunderstanding.

Rooney, faced with the uncertainty of playing the rest of the match under a yellow card, turned to one thing he knew he could rely on. Quality embroidery. As an embroiderer, I can tell you that a well-embroidered badge deserves a kiss every now and then. It keeps your brand in the spotlight in full colour, long after screen prints and heat press printing have faded in the wash. Rooney was hoping to score his 100th goal at the weekend, and could confidently do so wearing the same, unfaded, well-embroidered badge if he so wished. Not so with printing.

To celebrate this rare act of high-profile embroidery appreciation, A Stitch In Time Embroiderers is offering badge-kissing blog-readers 20% off their embroidery for orders placed by November 1. Call our factory or walk in, ask for Markham and mention this blog post to receive your discount. Conditions below the fold. [Read more →]

Originally uploaded by sevensixfive

It’s often hard to explain to someone who doesn’t blog, or read blogs, or use RSS feeds, why blogging is useful, or why it is so addictive. One of the first blogs I was introduced to was that of Andrew Sullivan, senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s a proliferate blogger, a master of the art, and in the latest Atlantic, he writes a post on why he does it.

What struck me was his link between the modern-day blogs and the old ship’s logs of yore, which links nicely to my last post on the extreme bloggers on the Volvo Ocean Race.

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction.

Sullivan goes WAY back with his blogging history, to Montaigne, Pascal and the likes. Worth a read.

If your laptop was in a noisy, vibrating sauna – would you blog? Probably not. And if it took you 45 minutes to upload a minute of video, would you bother? No, probably not. And what if, while blogging, all you could eat was flavourless, grainy rehydrated slop – would you keep writing? No, me either. But I know some guys who do.

Currently making their way down Africa’s west coast are the eight crews in the Volvo Ocean Race, all blogging furiously from inside the carbon fibre hulls of their boats. At times, these boats hit speeds of around 70kmh, and each boat has one dedicated crew member whose sole responsibility is to send back pics and video, all fully edited from on an on-board suite of laptops, to race HQ.

But that doesn’t stop the others getting in on the action. The navigators (like Mr Nilson, pictured) are sat down below, right down the cramped stern of the boat, trying to pick their way through weather patterns on their computers. They are chained to their desks at the moment as the boats navigate the doldrums. One such navvy is Matt Gregory, navigator on the Irish/Dutch entry Delta Lloyd, writing on his aptly-named blog, Volvo Hotseat.

From yesterday:

The hotseat is HOT today and don’t mean metaphorically. I am sitting in a sauna. It is well over 100 degrees down below. My only option for cooling myself is pointing the small fan at my nav desk directly at my head while drinking water with sports drink powder added. The water is desalinated from the sea, which is hot as well. Neither seems to be of very much help.

That’s some dedicated blogging, there Mr Gregory.

Also worth checking out – the site of the Irish/Chinese Green Dragon (currently in the lead), with team blog and lots of other goodies. And, of course, my piece on the Green Dragon for the Sunday Business Post.

The Economic winter, that is.

An interesting and unmentioned slant from my piece in the Sunday Business Post yesterday about the growing Irish population in Australia was that I was one of said emigrants.  I could have written the article about myself, if I hadn’t had to come home. I came home from Australia in February, under duress, and were I still in Australia today, coming home would be a very tough call.

Sun, surf – Australia has a lot going for it in terms of lifestyle.  Ask most Irish over there what is the worst thing about it, and they’re likely to say the distance from home. If only we could up Ireland’s anchor and tow it through the Suez, down into the Indian Ocean.

If you can stand the removal from friends or family, or if you can convince enough of them to join you,  conditions for life down under are remarkably good. Work is plentiful, relatively speaking. Your money goes further and your options are broader. The lifestyle is healthier. The media down there (newspapers/TV) is utter shite, but generally there are better things to be doing outdoors (which is probably why Aussie blogging is minimal).

The piece is here. Make up your own minds.

…Should probably be protected with sailing gloves when sailing.

Below the fold is a pic of my shredded hands – the result of one day’s racing on Lough Ree. I should have known better. Since this, life has been pretty busy, and I haven’t really had time for sailing. I’ve been buried in work, taking on the family business, and writing too.

A summer without sailing and pure work meant my hands were soft as silk, and not ready for ropework. The result – typically nasty burns, much screaming in the shower after sailing when the shampoo hit them, and two days now with curled, painful, cracking openings on my fingers.

A friend’s dad came into the factory looking for embroidery last week, and we got chatting about the recent SB3 World Championships, for which I was writing the press releases and providing commentary and podcasts on Afloat magazine’s website.

He mentioned the Lough Ree event, and left with his embroidery but also two crew for the trip to Lough Ree. Thanks, Roger. Great weekend. And the highlight? MORE ASLAAANNNNN.

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