08.30.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 10:51 pm by Sarah
I have hives. Just a few. But they are really annoying. I do tend to get a few every summer I think for a week or so. I tend to blame new potatoes and so try to avoid them but I thought at this stage they’d be alright to eat. But then I never knew if my body settled down or the new potatoes settled down. Maybe I just have to dig in early in the season and wait to adjust rather than hoping that the later new potatoes don’t have whatever it is that my body doesn’t like.
Or maybe its not the new potaotes at all. Other dietary changes this week were:
- my dad’s blackcurrants – had some every day (picked earlier and frozen)
- my dad’s lettuce – had it twice.
I maybe allergic to my father’s food. It is a perfect hysteria related symptom.
hmmmm.
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08.28.06
Posted in Feminism at 4:49 pm by Sarah
Personally I was disappointed. I’ve never really forgiven Mayo for complaining so hard and so long that Meath beat them years ago. Also, I think its good if Dublin are good at something. They are the capital after all. Sadly my views are not shared here in Meath where the anti-Dublin meeja edge takes hold. I thought there might be some exaggeration but a quick perusal of the weekend papers did confirm a broadsheet consensus that Dublin would win.
However, since this is not just a Meath household but also a Fine Gael one, my father not only delighted in the Mayo win (expressing relief that the Mayo guys had something to show after years of slog) but it was also noted, in deadly serious tones, that politically it was much better since now Enda Kenny, and Pat Rabbitte, who is from Mayo, could hold their heads high in Croker and not let Bertie have the run of the place. A good omen for the opposition. Still, I remember Pat Rabbitte complaining about Meath.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 4:03 pm by Sarah
Leon has introduced me to a crazy new entertainment culture. He’s been at it for years apparently. But I’m hooked now. We go to bad movies. It’s great. You expect nothing. The worst bits are the funniest. And there are so many more options. When I wanted to see good movies I hardly ever went to the cinema. There was never anything good on. But there’s loads of bad stuff on. Snakes on a Plane was hilarious (and scary). Miami Vice was appalling for the most part. Colin Farrell was terrible. The Omen was great crack. (although again scary). I can thoroughly recommend the practice.
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08.27.06
Posted in Feminism at 12:31 pm by Sarah
I’m all in favour of one-off houses in the country. Of course I live in one, so this may colour my opinion.
The conventional wisdom is that building one-off houses in the country is a bad thing. Land is scarce. Local authority services such as water supply and refuse collection are too expensive to extend along ribbon development. Bungalow blight ruins the appearance of the countryside. Septic tanks attached to one-off houses pollute the ground water. And people living in the middle of nowhere have to drive everywhere, and that causes pollution and traffic jams.
But when I needed a home, one thing became clear pretty quickly. I couldn’t afford to buy a house in keeping with my delusions of grandeur, so I was going to have to build one.
Fortunately I was able to pass the crucial “local need” test in Enfield, Co Meath. My family was firmly embedded in the local community and I was able to tell Meath county council I could work from home and there would be no commuting.
This “local need” test is a hurdle that those seeking refuge from astronomical house prices in Dublin generally fail to clear. The tests were put in place because the environmental impact of a one-off house is thought to be so detrimental that only those with an absolute need and a moral right should be allowed to possess these dastardly dwellings.
Knowing I wouldn’t have a problem with such a test, I must admit I didn’t question it too closely. I accepted the logic land was in short supply and the demand for it was enormous, so a pecking order had to be established. It seemed more fair that those with a local need should be satisfied ahead of blow-ins. So I sympathised with my over-mortgaged peers in Dublin and built the dream home.
Then, like everything else in life when you experience something instead of just pontificating about it, your perspective changes.
One by one the reasons trotted out as to why my one-off house was officially designated an environmental hazard were dismantled. For example, there really isn’t any such thing as a septic tank. We have “waste-water treatment systems” that don’t cause water pollution and require us to be environmentally friendly. My one-off house has a well and we treat the water with a filter system. We also pay a company to collect our rubbish. We did pay the council a princely sum as a contribution to maintain our road — but it hasn’t been touched. We have no public lighting and don’t expect any. The land was ours and when I last looked there seemed to be plenty of it. The local authority provides us with nothing.
So how can anyone tell me that one-off houses in the country place too much pressure on the infrastructure? What infrastructure? I pay the same taxes as the infrastructurally maintained urbanites, but get precious little in return. Their urban local authorities collect huge rates from businesses that fund libraries and playgrounds, services of which we can only dream.
Yet the “local need” condition is now being extended to villages. In Wicklow and in Meath’s draft development plan, developers building houses in villages are being forced to set some aside for buyers who satisfy a “local need” policy. What this says to me is that locals-only policies are not about the environment but social engineering.
Councils realise that when you build houses, you are building communities. They believe that if they can control who gets the houses they can control how the community will evolve and function. Planners reckon that if they put enough locals into local housing, then those houses will be occupied during the day by citizens who will involve themselves in the community. Keep out the blow-ins, they believe, and we will prevent the development of dormitory towns to which people come just to sleep.
This policy, however noble its aims, is wrong. In a free-market economy it is ludicrous to tell people where they can buy a house. If councils decided housing policy on the basis of race or religion, there would be uproar. So why should they be allowed to decide it on the basis of origin? Imagine if they operated that policy in Dublin and only a certain portion of houses on the south side could be bought by north siders?
It’s unfair to think that origin will govern behaviour. Blow-in Dubliners do settle in rural towns, and who says locals won’t get jobs in the city and drive in every day? If the goal of the councils is to get people to do things other than sleep in their local village, there is only one way to keep them there: work. They should concentrate their energies on pulling employment into rural towns instead of pushing the people out. Businesses won’t come unless there is infrastructure, and councils can’t pay for infrastructure without businesses to pay rates.
The solution therefore is obvious, if a bit more expensive than making life miserable for house buyers in Meath and Wicklow.
Council funding will have to be reorganised so they can invest in infrastructure that will encourage the establishment of businesses in rural areas. That means adequate water and sewerage facilities, roads and reliable telecommunications. You may not believe it, but outside Dublin none of these are reliably available.
If they build it, the employers will come. Then the people can build and buy as many houses as they want.
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08.21.06
Posted in Feminism, Sunday Times Columns at 8:52 pm by Sarah
The priest just called to see us. He’s very nice. I felt bad cos we don’t go to Mass. I’ll have to do the usual and buy my way out of the guilt. I’m not doing Mass.
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08.20.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 10:09 pm by Sarah
Interesting autobiographical stuff in the ST here. It starts out as cliched 60’s Free Love tripe but the end is interesting. The writer SEEMS to be a nice guy, but the conclusion of his story exposed him as a bit of shit if you ask me….
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08.19.06
Posted in Irish Politics at 10:37 pm by Sarah
You might have all seen this, but if not, well worth watching. When you go to the page where its at there are some other great links exposing Bill O’Reilly…
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08.17.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns, Uncategorized at 8:14 pm by Sarah
God. I JUST got back from the beauticians and what do I read???
“For women who overpluck, this season will be about growing your eyebrows back so that they have a natural arch that extends out and ends in a beautiful point,” said Pat McGrath, a makeup artist for Max Factor and CoverGirl and the creative director for Procter & Gamble Beauty.
Ms. McGrath is one of the trend-setting stylists responsible for unleashing the feral eyebrow as this season’s beauty signature…..
Her exaggerated runway look is already having an impact on personal grooming. Some women who once plucked zealously are now hoping that the thin brown lines on their foreheads bloom into thickets.
“On both coasts, everybody wants a thicker brow that reminds you of Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner,” said Robyn Cosio, an eyebrow stylist who works at the Salon by Maxime in Beverly Hills and Eiji salon in Manhattan. ….
Ladies, lay down your tweezers. Facial hair hasn’t been this much in demand since the advent in 1978 of Brooke Shields. Indeed, this month French Vogue devotes an entire page to the tinted, brushed and glossed eyebrow, recommending a “dense and proud” brow as the best way to structure a face.
…
“With a stronger, more graphic quality to the clothes like the fall collection from Balenciaga, you want strong eyebrows that make you look intelligent and empowered, and you want to keep the rest of the face clean,”
How to achieve the salon look at home!!
…To achieve the furry but tamed [Marguax] Hemingway eyebrow, Ms. McGrath suggested an appointment with a professional eyebrow groomer.
“Giving yourself a beautiful eyebrow is not one of the easiest things to do,” Ms. McGrath said.
For those who want to create fuller brows at home, she suggested a way to ensure that they look evenly shaped. Start by drawing over the straggly hairs you want to remove with a white eyeliner pencil to guarantee that the placement is right before tweezing them.
Next, to create fullness, use a brow pencil or brow powder that is two shades lighter than your natural eyebrow color to fill in between the hairs. The brow should look blended rather than drawn on, she said. Finally, use clear mascara or eyebrow gel to fluff hairs — push them up so they are almost vertical — and then brush them back down, fixing them into shape, she said.
But – artificial enhancement available for the less well endowed!
For those with very sparse brows, some salons offer eyebrow extensions. At LuxLash on Newbury Street in Boston, for example, Suzanne Cats, the owner, thickens brows by gluing a tiny fiber onto each existing hair. The process, which costs $75 to $250, can take 45 minutes to two hours and the false eyebrow effect lasts two weeks, she said. She also offers brow prosthetics — hairpieces for the eyebrows — in 20 different shapes and shades.
“It’s for women who previously had their brows made too thin,” Ms. Cats said.
But Ms. Cosio, an author of a book on the history of brows called “The Eyebrow,” said that a furry fringe does not fit everyone.
But! Warning! It’s not for everyone!
“If you have wild, thick, dense hair, a thicker brow can make you look heavy, harsh and mad,” Ms. Cosio said.
For those who do wish to emphasize the brows, Mr. Kaliardos recommended playing down other facial features by going easy on foundation and wearing sheerer lipsticks in natural-looking pink-brown hues.
“The slightest amount that you do to your eyebrows makes a big statement,” Mr. Kaliardos said. “If you are not careful, you will end up looking like Groucho Marx.”
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08.14.06
Posted in Feminism at 9:21 pm by Sarah
Notes: – Apologies to regulars – I turned some of the recent irish language blog stuff into a column – hope you’re not bored – This is the text as I submitted it to the ST not what was published. They cut out minor bits here and there but I missed them. However this also means there maybe some typos or errors!
I don’t have much in the way of hobbies, but I have enormous admiration for those who do. I have friends who, when the day job is done, are musicians, photographers, sportsmen, readers, art collectors and historians. Their cultural activity enriches their lives : and mine, since I pick up plenty of interesting knowledge from them. But wouldn’t it be nonsensical if any of them decided that their cultural interest, say, playing the piano, was so fundamentally important that everyone in the State should be forced to take on their hobby too?
I’m not saying playing the piano isn’t a good thing: of course it is. But forcing it on an entire population would be silly. If the population still couldn’t play despite these Herculean efforts, it would be pointless. If everyone hated the piano as a result : then it would be counterproductive. So why on earth do we persist with the compulsion to learn Irish? Why do the Gaelgoiris get alternately defensive and aggressive when anyone points out how utterly futile is the State insistence that Irish be maintained as an official language? It’s not working. We all know its not working.
People who have a love of the language will seek it out and nurture it. Where Irish is thriving it is in a voluntary capacity in the Gaelscoilleanna, Irish language programming and in Irish clubs dotted around the country. I take my hat off to them, one day I’d like to brush up on the coupla focail myself. But that doesn’t mean that the State is required to force the language on the entire population at an enormous cost. The expense is in pure cash terms when official documents like County Development Plans have to be translated even if no one wants them. It consumes enormous time and money in our education system and at the end of it people still can’t speak the language. Someone, sometime, is going to have to call a halt.
The problem is that any time a proposal is made to eliminate the compulsion to learn Irish, the cries of cultural treason can be heard from Connemara to Dublin 4. The entirely reasonable act of questioning the continued maintenance of the Irish language on its State sponsored life-support machine gets smothered in accusations of cultural cleansing. For some people, official acceptance that the Irish language is a marginal pursuit instead of a core practice is akin to identity theft. Take my language : you take away my nationhood : my sense of Irishness.
This notion of language equalling nationality and therefore personal identity is foolish. Condemning a language is not equivalent to condemning identity. Language did not evolve in order to confer identity : its purpose is far more utilitarian. Language was the great evolutionary leap for humans. Apart from the massive changes required in our brains, our bodies had to develop voice boxes and changes in our chest and diaphragm to allow us to speak. We aren’t just clever, better looking chimps. The ability to speak a language with all its grammatical complexities is an innate part of our humanity. People everywhere on this planet, no matter how isolated, speak languages of relatively equal complexity.
The purpose of language is very straightforward : it is to communicate with one another. In pure Darwinian terms it allows us to learn skills and ideas and pass them on. This drives the progress of the human race on to further progress or extinction : depending on your outlook. Languages develop in isolation, but once people move around, the language spreads. The natural instinct is for people to speak the same language : since that way they can communicate better. Linguists can say with great accuracy how people moved around the ancient world by tracking common Indo-European developments in language. When languages are spoken by small groups of people, in evolutionary terms, they have outlived their usefulness and get subsumed by others and die. A marginal language has a certain inevitability : it becomes a cultural appendix.
Theoretically, having as many people as possible speak the same language should be welcomed. It’s a bit like the Euro. It’s so handy. You’d think we’d be relieved of the burden of having to learn and translate other languages into one we can understand. The problem is that in the nineteenth century when colonialism was getting into full swing, people started to become very conscious of their nationality. When the colonists arrived language was one of their first targets. Hating the invader’s language and clinging to your own became a weapon of resistance. The link between invasion and the annihilation of language was forged and this negative connotation is what prevents us from letting go. The fact that people and language can move in both a peaceful and highly productive manner has been lost.
Letting go of Irish doesn’t mean that we are letting go of being Irish. Language is a marker of nationality but not the most important one. People who come from different countries speak the same language. It’s always difficult to define what bonds together the people who live within geographical borders. Even on this island the fact that some can speak Irish fluently and some can’t put together more than a “Failte Romhat”, does not make one citizen more or less Irish than the other. But consider this: with mass emigration : invasion by sheer volume rather than force, people who’ve never stood on this island consider themselves Irish.
If geographical location never mind language fails to adequately define what “being Irish” is, then what does? The ties that bond a people are a common set of reference points that encompass literature, history, landscape, religion, geography and yes, language. Someone who has nurtured their family connection with Ireland will share these reference points and that is what gives us a sense of recognition in one another which is always so warming and familiar when you travel abroad. However, nurturing this sense of nationality maybe pleasant, but it is not entirely benign.
Take the French. France is an amazing country which has erected admirable cultural borders to protect both its language and its way of life. They deeply resent and fight off the introduction of English words and phrases into official language use. “Le weekend” is the classic example of what is seen as a rot at the heart of the French language. No one uses the more correct “fin de semaine”.
So sensitive is the issue of the increasing dominance of English, that Jacques Chirac led a French walkout from the opening session of the EU’s annual spring summit last night when a fellow Frenchman Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the French head of the European employers’ group Unice, abandoned his mother tongue on the ground that English is “the language of business.”
Chirac may have made his point, but everyone else thought he was just being silly. But being thought silly is only the start of France’s problems. So resistant are they to “cultural colonization” that they also refuse to adopt economically viable work practices. The result is that their economy gets deeper and deeper into trouble. French nationalism has its upside : but their “economic nationalism” is ruining their country.
Mel Gibson is in furious trouble because in a recent drunken outburst he accused Jews of being the cause of all the world’s wars. Usually this allegation is leveled at religion. Closer to the truth is the fact that nationalism is the cause of the world’s wars. When we attempted an economic war with England all we achieved was tearing the heart- and the people – out of our own country. Nationality might be nice when its St. Patrick’s Day Parades and reciting old Irish epic poems, but when it demands that resources be spent in the pointless translation of documents, adding unnecessary complexity to road signs and costing us enormous expense in time and money in the educations system, you have to ask yourself why we are continuing.
If English as a language has won the battle of natural selection, that doesn’t mean the English as a people have won. That’s the notion that we have to get out of our heads if we are to debate this issue with any rationality.
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08.13.06
Posted in Irish Politics at 7:17 pm by Sarah
Paddy found this and Paul said I HAD to put it on the blog
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