Your Majesty is Like a Stream of Bat's Piss

The Irish Times has a breaking news RSS feed that, I must confess, is quite annoying; sports results count as breaking news these days. In terms of Irish news it's far from the worst; that accolade belongs to breakingnews.ie and its insistence on including drivel about celebrity diets in its top stories. But the sports thing annoys me, inasmuch as I have practically no interest in sport.

I say 'practically' as I periodically watch Formula 1 Grands Prix. Every once in a while I'll watch the entire season, and possibly keep it up for three years or so. I almost did this year, but as soon as the first race was over the result made it into the headline. The fucking headline. The thing I see which makes me decide whether I'll read the story.

I don't care

So LOL has made it into the dictionary. BFD.

I have a lot of problems with LOL as an acronym (or, for the minority, an initialism), but as for making it into the dictionary, it was inevitable. The BBC tells us that language purists are up in arms, but what does that tell us? That language purists are dicks? We all knew that already.

What's Wrong with Dog Day Afternoon?

Sidney Lumet died yesterday (as I write this). He's made some great films over the years, including Serpico, Network, The Anderson Tapes and many others that I really enjoyed.

Yet when IMDB reported his death, at the time of this typing 3,000 people had clicked the facebook 'like' button.

Bastards.

A Game the Whole Family Can Play

I've recently discovered an interesting game, and one that I've been playing for a while now without realising it. It's best played with an RSS feed, but there's a simpler version, too, suitable for younger readers.

The source of this game is the rather entertaining Out of Context Science, which offers a highly selective quote from various papers or articles. The game? Just guess what the quote refers to.

Soon... Soon...

A couple of news stories that seem entirely unrelated caught my eye in the last day or so. In one of its increasingly-frequent moments of press-release-publishing vacuity, breakingnews.ie reports that... well, just read the headline.

It's nonsense, of course. The very words 'online survey' are enough to confirm that. The only distressing part of the story is that it seems that 67% of respondents took it seriously. But why is it nonsense? Why shouldn't we treat it seriously? The country has a long history of believing such things. In fact, in the introduction to his Book of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry published a little over a hundred years ago, WB Yeats recounts his asking a Sligo man if he believed in fairies. "Sure, amn't I annoyed with them", was the answer.

Even today, such beliefs still exist, but for most people the belief is in a magic man who lived two thousand years ago rather than wee folk sitting on pots of gold. There is some hope, though.

The BBC is reporting that Ireland is one of nine countries in which religion will in time become extinct. One's first thought is, of course, that in time it should become extinct everywhere; we can only assume that they mean the relatively near future. Reading the paper they cited (pdf) was to a certain extent futile for one as lacking in erudition as I, but I was able to glean a certain amount from it; enough that I think they were being optimistic, but not overly so. Furthermore, in the specific case of Ireland, there are also other reasons for thinking that it might be a distinct possibility.

There's no doubt that the church has always been in a powerful position in Ireland, but it was really only with the advent of the Free State that they were directly able to affect policy (one thinks immediately of Dev and his relationship with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid). And although their behind-the-scenes power gradually decreased, it's really only since the turn of the millennium that they've seen their temporal -- not to mention moral -- authority diminish significantly.

And now we find ourselves in a position where Fianna Fáil, a party that's corrupt to its core, yet one that has ruled more or less continuously since the days of De Valera, has been eviscerated. Curiously, this was only peripherally related to their pernicious greed, and more to do with their staggering incompetence.

Could the church suffer a similar fate? It certainly deserves to. As more and more details of their atrocities come out, it becomes more and more obvious that any hand-wringing or mealy-mouthed apologies are intended only to save the church's position (or 'special position', as the constitution had it until 1972). If the details hadn't become so public via the church's many victims, would it have volunteered them? The can hardly be a single individual in the state who thinks it would.

And so, coupled with the appetite for change (genuine change, and not the vacuous change espoused by the former opposition), there's the distinct possibility that the rate of abandonment will accelerate. The generation currently in school could well be the last to grow up in a state where the church controls most primary and secondary education, where the church is seen as an arbiter of morality rather than a malevolent organisation dedicated to the protection of rapists, where the prevailing thought is "suffer little children to come unto me" rather than simply "suffer, little children".

All this is cold comfort, of course, to the church's thousands of victims. Enlightenment was always going to come at a price, but it's unlikely that even the most pessimistic expected it to be this high.

Why do you ask, Three Cops Spanking?

Headlines are wonderful things; subheads, sometimes more so. My favourite crash blossom of all time appeared in Dublin's Evening Herald many, many years ago, but it's one that stayed with me to this day. The story revolved around rabbits' famed proclivity for reproduction, and alluded to a report that suggested that we humans were just as prolific in that department. The headline? Man Beats Rabbits in Sexual Activity. I really, really wish I'd kept a copy of that paper.

These days, though, we still have many to choose from. The tabloids aim to have the best headlines, but given that they try to have a good one every day, they inevitably fail a lot more than they succeed. The Mirror's recent front page is a case in point.

Hahaha... they said 'snow' instead of 'no'. That's brilliant. Except it isn't, and it gives the sentence a meaning that's diametrically opposite that of the intended one. Yeah, I know, no one's going to be confused, but really: is this the best they could come up with? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a better one, but shitty puns based on 'snow', 'flake', 'drift', etc, abound.

Fortunately, we have the Register to fill the void. The Reg adopts a certain tabloidy tone, but is always usually an entertaining and informative read. Their language, though, contains quite a bit of jargon; stuff that'll be familiar to long-time readers, but utterly bemusing for the rest of the populace. The occasional reference to Bulgarian Airbags, for example, could well have hapless readers runnng in vain to the dictionary, and one must take pity on the poor soul who looks for reviews of the UK's broadband providers only to come across the headline Three cops spanking in mobile user ranking. Makes perfect sense if you know how to read it.

For sheer class, though, the Reg is unparallelled in the world of the Subhead. I tip my hat to the great mind that came up with this or this.

Of Course We Should Call It a Bailout

Looking back on the past few weeks, it's strange to see how naïve we were as a country. The fear was palpable as the spectre of the IMF loomed over us. Repeated assurances from the government that no digout would be necessary were ignored by everyone; we knew we were fucked. Fianna Fáil were in a position that may well have been unique; we've spent decades assuming that they were all crooks, but now we're not so sure. Can it be that Biffo and his minions were merely being incompetent? That rather than being the mendacious fuckers that tradition and experience would paint them, they were simply incapable of doing anything even remotely effective?