10.20.05
Posted in Feminism at 4:20 pm by
For some years now the National Lottery’s Telly Bingo programme has been presented by Shirley Temple Bar, a drag queen previously best known for her/his acts in the gay bar The George. It was always slightly disconcerting to watch this freakish creature host a programme watched by elderly people.
However, it is even more disconcerting to watch the real person, Declan Buckley, present the programme dressed completely normally and as himself. I have no idea why there was a change. Were there complaints? Is Declan trying to put his drag queen past behind him? Could the makers not fire him and get a normal presenter to do it or have they decided to give him a straight shot at it? It’s very odd. Can’t find photo yet of Declan. He’s not very good looking.
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 12:59 pm by
I had cause to consult Garret’s autobiography today (All in a Life) and came across this passage. He had been describing his early childhood, how his brother Fergus taught him to type at the age of 7 and other such gems. He then talks about Nurse O’Neill having charge of him until age 5 when she was replaced by a governess Miss Cuddy until he was sent to an all-Irish boardiing school at the age of 9.
“It would be very wrong to think from this account of events that my mother was somehow lacking in affection or care for me. Nothing could be further from the truth. But she was the product of a middle-class Victorian environment that involved extensive supplementing of parental care by nurses of governesses. She had never been able to afford such luxuries in the past when my elder brothers were young, my father was frequently in jail and she was herself involved in revolutionary activities. It seemed natural to her to take advantage of a recent inheritance from her father by trying to give me the kind of childhood she had enjoyed”
Many things struck me about this. His casual reference to the jail and revolution are amusing and yet such was the insistence by FF that FG was a bunch of old west-Brits that most people have no idea how key both Garret’s parents were to 1916 (they were both in the GPO) and the War of Independence and of course the Civil War when his father helped form the pro-Treaty party of Cuman na Gael (I know I’ve spelt it wrong, but no time for checking now).
Secondly, when there is so much hysteria about childcare and mothers feeling guilty about not being constantly present with their children, one does start to wonder when the orthodoxy arose that women had to devote such an amount of time to child rearing. I’m not saying the victorians were right – we know what adults they produced – but, I must say, the idea of a Nurse O’Neill, seems very appealing.
And finally, isn’t it amazing that despite the fact that we hold our parents responsible for most of our miseries and defects, we still insist on rearing our children in the same fashion? I resented bitterly that my school mates lived in the town and could play with each other after school and we were so unfortunate to live down a lane where I hated the only other girl on the road and had to tag along with older brothers and their friends…hmm perhaps this explains my need for approval from slightly older men whom I have placed on pedestals…
Isn’t it great this blog is free and I can sort out all these issues without need of a therapist? Oh, and the point is that we could have lived in the town but I wanted my children to grow up with fields to run around in just like I did, even if they are bored out of their minds.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:35 am by
I was most fortunate to hear this live yesterday. Play this and fast forward to 22 minutes. Will go down in the annals as one of the best rows ever on radio between Joan Rivers and Darcus Howe.
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10.18.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:03 am by
PO’Neill makes the link between Pinter and Seinfeld…who would have thought it…now I can watch The Betrayal on Friday having seen its offspring on the small screen. Soooo post-modern.
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10.17.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:05 pm by
I will confess – last week I knew practically nothing about Harold Pinter. In fact, I knew less than nothing – I thought he was Scandinavian. But! I am researching and I am going to see his play Betrayal on Friday. Turns out we are on the same wavelength. He has been conducting a massive anti-war campaign. The Guardian published a series of “letters to Bush”. Here is Pinter’s.
Dear President Bush,
I’m sure you’ll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.
Harold Pinter
Playwright
I like it.
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Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 1:58 pm by
I continue to be defeated by household so-called technology.
In a state of high hassle, I was trying to get them organised for a walk because the baby wouldn’t sleep and a stroll in the pram was the only solution. I tried to pull up the release handle to make the back seat of the double buggy lie flat. I pulled and pulled and it just wouldn’t release. So I forced the back down anyway. I nearly cried with the effort. The next day, I tried to get it back up. The two support bars on the back just snapped clean off. I broke it. I tried to work out some scenario whereby M. must have broken the handle and therefore it was his fault. But even in my stressed out state I had to concede to myself that I was solely to blame.
But why are they so bloody hard to manage? I have another single pram and every now and then that handle goes to. We had another double buggy (inherited, as was the broken one – thank god) and we had scenes with 3 grown men and 2 women in a car park and everyone trying to figure out how to make it collapse so it would go in the car. No wonder my ulcer is making a re-appearance. This kind of stuff would break anyone.
Getting them in the car seats makes me nauseous*. Why don’t they teach you how to manage these things instead of rubbish about cervixes dilating?
* I never know how to spell that word and checked with dictionary.com. Here is a most interesting usage note attached to the definition
“Traditional critics have insisted that nauseous is properly used only to mean ?causing nausea? and that it is incorrect to use it to mean ?affected with nausea,? as in Roller coasters make me nauseous. In this example, nauseated is preferred by 72 percent of the Usage Panel. Curiously, though, 88 percent of the Panelists prefer using nauseating in the sentence The children looked a little green from too many candy apples and nauseating (not nauseous) rides. Since there is a lot of evidence to show that nauseous is widely used to mean ?feeling sick,? it appears that people use nauseous mainly in the sense in which it is considered incorrect. In its ?correct? sense it is being supplanted by nauseating”
Update: I rang the guy who made our gates. He told me to drop the buggy over to him and reckons he can repair it. Hurrah! Feel virtuous as am repairing something instead of throwing it out.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 12:55 pm by
Heroines today are pathetic, with one kicking exception
Bridget Jones is back. An Irish newspaper is running a weekly column about the eternally thirtysomething ditz who still can’t get her love life sorted out. Now I don’t mind the author, Helen Fielding, milking her Jones character for every available penny, but I do mind that the most popular female heroine of the past 10 years is both self-obsessed and stupid.
Bridget Jones is as thick as a plank. Instead of newspapers or proper books, she reads ludicrously titled self-help manuals on love. She succeeds in her broadcasting career because her capacity for farce is appealing to her moronic boss and, ergo, the viewing masses.
From her column and book and from the big screen, the message screams down at girls: stupid is funny and endearing, stupid will get you a man. Women of education are cold and cruel. Career women are ambitious schemers. Hate the woman who reads books. Despise she who knows one politician from another. Your knowledge of celebrity gossip will make the boys laugh and, God knows, the last thing they want when they come home from the office is a know-it-all.
Compare the heroine of chick-lit to the heroes of “lad-lit”. In Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch or Tony Parsons’s Man and Boy, the men start out as selfish, immature and self-obsessed, and the events of the narrative have a redemptive effect. Through the good offices of a sensible woman the lads are completely reformed. The happy ending is their transformation into fully formed mature adults.
Meanwhile, the happy ending in Bridget Jones is that the bitch with the fancy job got her comeuppance and the men love silly Bridget just the way she is.
What’s wrong with that, I hear you scream? Surely it’s okay not to read a book or the news section of the paper? While it’s true that applying maths to anything other than counting calories is not compulsory, improving your mind is the path to self-fulfilment. Conducting a war with your body is not. If women are constantly portrayed as searching for meaning in their lives, why is that meaning only to be found in losing weight, getting a man or figuring out whether to pluck your eyebrows?
Every year when the Leaving Cert results appear, concern is expressed at girls getting far better results than boys. But the lads needn’t worry. Through the systematic thrashing of female self-confidence, the girls will baulk at promotional opportunities, salary negotiations and office power struggles. By the time they reach 30, men are earning more than women and their careers are peaking. Women are being reminded that they need to upgrade their grooming before their ovaries shrivel up.
So why consistently glorify stupidity in our female heroines? Must they all be twittering victims happy to be patronised by men?
The sinister aspect to the ubiquity of the silly woman is the demonisation of the clever woman. At a time when women have more legal and economic independence than ever before, why is it impossible to find a happy woman of any intelligence in popular culture?
Casting around for a more appealing role model, who do we find? The Sex and the City girls started out as confident, career-orientated women who would deal with men as men deal with women. By the end of the series, each had made humiliating sacrifices and u-turns in order to get a man – any man.
The clash between man and job is considered inevitable. Miranda, the lawyer, is considered redeemed when she moves to the suburbs and minds her sick mother-in-law. Samantha, the promiscuous one, is given breast cancer – that will cool her heels for a while. Charlotte, the Wasp-ish art curator, abandons her job so she can concentrate on getting pregnant and converts to Judaism so the man she wants will marry her. Carrie resigns from her job and moves to France in the hope of making a selfish pig love her. She only leaves when he hits her.
Surely there is one woman on television who isn’t pathetic, neurotic and possesses an IQ in double digits? Grace of Will & Grace is a flake. Ally McBeal is an airhead. The Desperate Housewives haven’t a job between them. Every top-notch female doctor in ER is eventually given a baby to drag her out of the hospital.
All is not lost, however. You might come across reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Apart from her stupid name, Buffy is quite the feminist. She kicks vampire ass and shoulders the burden of saving the world. Various men come and go, serving as mentors or lovers. Usually they cannot cope with her being the stronger one, and they leave. Unlike other television heroines, this does not result in her falling apart. Instead, the boys are portrayed as losers, and she gets on with the job.
But of course, they canned Buffy and brought back Bridget. You wouldn’t want the girls getting any ideas now, would you?
Special Blog Update**
1. I restrained myself from comparing Bridget to Elizabeth Bennett as I can’t become the P&P column EVERY week BUT I am of course aware that Fielding completely ripped of P&P except in terms of the intelligence of the heroine. Our Elizabeth is clever. Bridget is a dope.
2. In ER I also note that they even gave Carrie a baby. She was the top boss of the hospital. First they gave her a mystery crutch to make her unattractive. Then they made her a lesbian. Then they provided a baby through her lesbian partner (who ended up being killed – she was a Fireman/person).
3. I see a guy is making some money and notoriety on the Bridget phenomenon too…(or if you can’t reach that link, here’s another)
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10.13.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:35 pm by
How I would love to adopt this policy from Wendy McClure’s blog on comments. SHE got a book deal from her blog! So it appears I am not the only one whose blog actually helped them. Must explore Blogger’s help section to see if I can censor comments BEFORE they appear on the site. I have started deleting the very abusive ones and as you may have noticed I had to introduce word verification as the spammers got a hold of me. I had felt guilty about deleting the odd very abusive comment since one must never stifle debate. But fuckit, its my blog, and it is quite mentally healthy to simply delete negativity. I wish I could do this with other sources of negativity in my life.
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 1:18 pm by
Today’s IT reports :
“Councillors have been banned from claiming expenses for attending conferences organised by political parties, under new rules issued by Minister for the Environment Dick Roche. The measure follows controversy after Fine Gael councillors were last month forced to drop plans to claim State expenses for attending a party conference in Athlone…..Last month, Mr Roche said it was “outrageous” that Fine Gael councillors would have expected the taxpayer to pay for their attendance at the party’s Hodson Bay Hotel conference between September 22nd and 24th……
In addition, he has told local authorities to inspect more closely the types of conference that councillors attend, amid suspicions that many of those chosen have little or nothing to do with local authority business.”
As you all know my esteemed father is one such FG councillor so I am obliged to look for something positive to say about this beleagured species.
The conference merry-go-round is a complete joke at this stage but there is one thing which mystifies me. Each conference organiser sends details of their event to the County Managers or Secretaries of the Councils. These are paid profesionals. They approve the conferences for attendance by the councillors. Fine Gael did indeed send in a request to each council asking that their conference be put on the list. I think all bar 4 did so. Every other council had the option to say no and didn’t. FG did chance their arm and nearly got away with it. Why is no one asking the officials why they approved the conference in the first place? Actually, the Da wrote last week to a FF TD (Pat Carey – who chipped in with criticisms of the FG conference) and enclosed a full list of conferences coming up. He highlighted several ones and asked him to raise these at some committee as they were quite suspicious. They are organised by known FnFers. I presume the list will not be announced at the committee meeting.
Secondly, I entirely sympathise with FG’s attempt to get their conference funded. The government parties have the most enormous resources at their disposal and the opposition parties are expected to compete man for man with them. My particular beef is the Media Monitoring Unit (or some other ominous title) that is staffed by I think 35 people and paid for by the taxpayer. They listen to all the local radio stations and read all local newspapers and then ring up the editors and producers and harass them. When you are faced with this kind of publicly funded machine, maybe a few dirty tricks is what FG need.
Of course the real issue about councillors is that with the abolition of residential rates local government was deprived of autonomy with regard to funding and therefore of any autonomy. Without money, they can do precious little. It is easy to sneer at bogmen councillors (who don’t eat rice) but most of the ones I know neglect their businesses and jobs and spend a lot of time harassing council officials to repair roads, put up signs, give people planning permissions and hurry up infrastucture projects. Local government is in huge need of reform. But who is going to vote for the re-introduction of rates? Do we abolish councillors altogether and have decisions about housing and roads made entirely by unaccountable officials (and if there’s one thing we have learned it is that officials can make really really stupid decisions) While it is popular to bang on about corrupt councillors and rezoning let’s remember that George Redmond, the guy who systematically took money for planning permissions was an official not a councillor. And who is Dick Roche to talk about councillors? I think in the tally of good and bad councillors it is FF who come off considerably worse.
So sorry if councillors are in the main, decent ol’ fellas who eat their dinner at 1 o’clock in the day and who have a lust for travelling expenses – but someone elects them! And those someone’s will generally vote for whoever supports their interests and not the interests of the common good. Could you just imagine if FG produced a policy on the reformation of local government, beginning with more local taxes? How Roche would laugh then.
So let’s stop the sneering and think about what we actually want from councillors. I think
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10.12.05
Posted in Irish Politics at 2:14 pm by
So-Called American Aid.
Great article here from the NYT on the bogus nature of what counts as “aid”.
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