Back in the days of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, if you wanted to offload something, you headed for Portobello Road. (Portobello road, Portobello road – street where the riches of ages are stowed. Anything and everything a chap can unload Is sold off the barrow in Portobello road.)

Today, when you’re trying to ditch your junk, you join an internet email group for scavengers. I joined Freecycle about six months ago, purely to get rid of a few old filing cabinets that, I thought, you couldn’t give away. Turns out I was wrong. You can give ANYTHING away.

I still get the emails, and every now and then, one will make me laugh out loud. Today’s collection of insansely random giveaways is a doozy, and it’s from Paula:

Clearing out and have the following to offer:

• cat food – 9 small tins of gourmet gold (3 x beef, 2 x chicken and liver, 2 x salmon and sole, 2 x turkey and duck) and one foil tray of Marks and Spencers organic luxury chicken dinner with vegetables
• fish bowl and some ornaments – standard starter size – home to our late goldfish for nearly 7 years
• a thing for making crisps in the microwave – it’s a plastic ring with lots of little slits to put your finely sliced potatoes in – the theory is that
  it’s no-fat crisps – but they’re not quite tayto!
• a free-standing magnetic triangle for holding knives, but could also be used on a desk for notes, etc
• a thing you can put into the neck of an empty bottle to turn it into a candlestick [i.e - a fucking CANDLE?]
• 2 Halloween cookie cutters – from Crate and Barrel, I think – one cuts out BOO, the other a frightened cat
• an electronic suduko game
• a child’s electronic password journal – needs batteries
• All can be collected in [and I didn't make this up - you couldn't] Portbello.

When men landed on the moon in 1969, my Mum was in Irish college in Connemara. The only TV near them belonged to a woman who owned a local shop, and she wouldn’t let them watch the moon landing because she thought it was the world’s greatest act of codology. No man could go to the moon, said she, and being a respected authority on deep space travel, the last word would rest with Bean an tSiopa. The goggle box remained switched off, and so, Mum missed the moon landing.

Dad never mentioned it, so I can only assume it had little impact on him at the time. He would have been 16 years old, probably up to no good, and so otherwise engaged.

I mention my parents and the moon landing because all the furore about the 40th anniversary passed me by, largely because they aren’t around any more to share their stories. Both of them are now up there somewhere among the heavenly bodies themselves.

I also mention them because going to see Moon, (a.k.a. that film by David Bowie’s son who sensibly changed his name) was unexpectedly emotional. Sometimes a film stirs unusually deep-rooted emotions, and Moon, bizarrely is only the second film in ten years to affect me in that way.

Sam Rockwell’s character, a solitary lunar miner, has the rug pulled out from under him, experiencing a deep, deep sense of sudden loss far away from home. Twice, I’ve had the same. I was on a different continent when my parents passed away in 2004 and 2008 respectively, and the combination of that loss and dislocation from home of that magnitude is indescribably unsettling. Granted, I wasn’t on the moon, but the journeys home from Australia and the Caribbean felt long enough.

So there you are, a film about a man mining Helium3 on the moon in a fictitious future that made me think about my parents’ deaths. Funny who you find yourself identifying with.

Moon, incidentally, is a stunning piece of work. It’s a very human sci-fi, none of your glossy phasers-and-lycra Star Trek crap, propped up with wallet-flaming special effects. A more intelligent investment was made in the script and the time spent thinking it up. The grime, context and emotion all seem very plausible and the production is beautiful. Sam Rockwell is a real find, providing a two-for-the-price-of-one performance that I can’t say more about without spoiling things. Matt Berry of IT Crowd fame is in there in a cameo, and Kevin Spacey provides the voice for Gerty, a robot that does a good job of not becoming HAL from 2001. However, the film has a Kubrickian cleanliness, and the lone caretaker going slowly mad (think: Jack Nicholson in The Shining), combined with the retro-futuristic stylings that owe plenty to 2001: A Space Odyssey have opened Jones up to criticism for being more than a tad derivative.

Folly. He’s simply one of a tiny minority in the last 15 years who has managed to do sci-fi well without blowing the bank on CGI and big names. $5million for a first-class ticket to the Moon and back? That, my friends, is money well spent.

African Pygmy Hedgehog

Originally uploaded by meantux

If you’ve ever been the only black / white / hispanic / asian person in a room full of opposites, you’ll know what its like to be stared at. It’s happened to me several times: at a carnival in Antigua, at a nightclub in Tanzania, and in a market up on Mt Kilimanjaro. People can’t help staring

But imagine growing up in rural Africa and looking like a photo-negative of every one around you – your parents, brothers and sisters. That’s the life of an African albino.

I meant to blawg this a while back, but there’s a great post about an albino sanctuary here. Sanctuary may seem a zoo-like term to use, but it is used in its original sense, somewhere safe from harm rather than a handy corral for people with binoculars. To be an albino in rural Africa is to risk being hacked to death by people who believe your body parts are useful only as lucky charms, or as a commodity to sell as such. Thousands are killed every year, for the same reason people hunt rhinos for their horn, or sharks for their fins.

We met an albino girl walking to market that day on Kili, back in 2001. While everyone else pointed, laughed, giggled and scowled at the strange sight of three western whities walking to a rural market (me carrying a stone weight of bananas on my head), the albino girl ran up to Blanche, one of our trio, and hugged her, just for being white. For many of the people in that particularly remote area, white people were an oddity of the nearby towns, something that  passed by at speed in a Land Cruiser.  I had kids run shrieking on remote forest paths because they thought I was a ghost, quite different from the ‘mzungu!’ cries of street kids in the cities and towns where white-skinned tourists are the norm.

The albino girl stared at Blanche with a broad smile and caressed her face before walking on. Just to see someone like her seemed to have made her day. Blanche was weirded out by the whole scene, unsurprisingly. She was from Belgium, and her sense of humour had been removed at birth, as is Flemish custom.

I’ve written my first short story in years (and am working on a second) , and have absolutely no idea what to do with it. So, I thought I’d create a Wordle of it, which doesn’t seem to give anything away at all in terms of plot. Only two people have read it to date. Both reviews are positive, from people who I think would be critical if it warranted it.

Any suggestions on what to do with a short story would be greatly appreciated. Right now it’s stashed doing nothing, like a wad of leftover currency after a holiday.

For any of the hit-hunters out there, this should end any queries in your mind about currency being related to your hits. I posted yesterday morning about Thursday night’s Pecha Kucha night, and the result is expressed in the image to the right – nearly all search hits were Pecha Kucha-related, contributing to a one-day trebling of traffic.

Apart from the tiger sex search, that is. Jeez, you post one item about Tiger Sex and for the next two years……

I spent last weekend working in the press office for the Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta, with a few hours each day of frantic news-gathering for the daily report, in-Design work producing the newsletter, and interviewing the sailors.

Story of the weekend actually happened before the racing got underway – when Antix Dubh narrowly avoided being struck by lightning on its journey up from Cork. The blast hit the water 15 metres from the boat and fried the electronics for a time. Here, delivery skipper Rob O’Leary describes the incident.

All the omens were good for Dublin’s inaugural Pecha Kucha night. €5 on the door – reasonable. Nine speakers, 20 slides each, 20 seconds per slide – sensible. The Sugar Club – fashionable.

The attendance was a capacity crowd, but on stage, the hit rate was slightly less impressive.

The international phenomenon that is Pecha Kucha (pronounced peCHAkCHA, meaning ‘chatter’ in Japanese) is designed to stimulate creative debate by bringing together a few speakers to offer their interpretation of a single theme through the 20-slide medium. The theme for last night’s edition, of which there will be five more in the next 12 months, was ‘Small ideas, Big Impact’. Plenty of scope there, easy to interpret. You might think.

Of the nine speakers in the Sugar Club, just one fulfilled the brief: the sharp, intelligent, witty and visually clear presentation of Conor + David (Conor’s no relation, by the way). They spoke about the simple concept of being 100% sure, and how one’s approach to it affects projects as big as the moon landing. It was clever, challenging and fun, no doubt as much for them, putting it together, as it was for us watching it delivered.

Notable mentions for doing something interesting, but way off brief, go to TAKA for their presentation on doors, and Will St Leger who gave a synopsis of his influences as an artivist (arty activist). Both were interesting but wholly unrelated to the theme.

Kudos for giggles go to journalist Cian Hallinan for his Ulysses v PS I Love You stand-up routine, and Giselle Scanlon, who got a few laughs as well for her rambling but snappily-delivered sermon on the wit of human miscommunication.

A big ‘aboooo’, however, to Thinkhouse PR, who seemed to give a six minute and 40 second pitch on why no-one should hire them. If your sole function as an entity is to communicate effectively and creatively according to a client’s brief, one would think that you could come up with some sort of clever interpretation of a simple theme that provided plenty of scope for creativity. Their immature and self-indulgent display – ‘Stuff we Like’ – failed massively. Slides were entitled ‘Tits’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Food’, ‘Holidays’, ‘New Shit’ and, an assortment of other random words. Thinkhouse, clearly trading off a rep as industry luvvies, came across like a company where professionalism is a value best kept at bay with big pink blowtorches and snarky howls from the canteen.

Not that I’m a rules nazi, but next time around, I’d like to see people offer differ interpretations on the theme, doing something thoughtful and creative, rather than merely putting themselves up there for self-promotion or self-indulgence, lest it becomes a platform for the same. The Pecha Kucha concept is good, and when the presenters were good, they were very, very good. But when they were bad, they were horrid.

The press release issued last week by the owning triumvirate of the forthcoming Metro Herald newspaper offered little by way of information on what is now a confirmed merger. It was amazingly hollow, in fact. (The text of it is below the fold). Hiding behind the merger’s ratification by the Competition Authority, the release merely confirmed what had been already suggested, the release ‘announced’ that Metro Newspaper, co-owned by DGMT and the Irish Times and its rival freesheet Herald AM, owned by Independent New and Media, will both disappear as previously indicated, leaving a single freesheet, Metro Herald. This was padded out with a few gushing quotes from notable names, or the pens of their comm-hawks.

Metro currently has its offices in Embassy House, Ballsbridge, where it shares a floor with the Irish Daily Mail, however it is understood that the Metro/Herald hybrid will be located in the city centre, most likely in the Irish Times building on Tara St, closer to the hub of Dublin’s activity.

But none of the nuts and bolts were mentioned in the fluffy release which only alluded to the synergies, the benefits to advertisers and readers, etc. Benefits will only accrue to readers as long as the content is of a certain quality, so it would be hoped that writing staff would be retained, rather than merely having a team of subs patching a paper together from press releases and wire copy. But like the location, nothing is mentioned of staffing – who goes where and who, (apart from a grand swathe of distributors) goes home with an empty brown envelope.

The Metro staff has undergone a gradual but comprehensive whittling down of its editorial staff in the last few months and it’s a nervy crew who remain. And on the street, the distribution crews employed by the two papers will, assumedly, be downsized considerably too.

I wrote about this before (my thoughts here) and apparently, the Metro MD Paul Crosbie (disclosure: a good friend of my father’s) quoted a good portion of that post in the subsequent meeting with the editorial staff (made up of some good friends of mine, too), citing it as ‘on the pessimistic side‘. Which is probably how you’d feel if your company was preparing for a move -  potentially a cull – and wasn’t telling you much about it.

As you read the text below, note the tone of the two soundbites: one from the IT/Metro side, versus that from the Indo side, each claiming the merger will build on the momentum their paper has created.

So, which one do you reach for at the train/bus/Luas stop in the morning?