11.17.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 7:12 pm by Sarah
Ok, time to get off the Denis post. Herr Flick had some questions to answer today. From rte
“McDowell denies deal done in McArthur case
The Tánaiste and Minister for Justice has said that the reason Malcolm McArthur was never tried for the murder in 1982 of Offaly farmer Donal Dunne was directly related to the evidence that was available to the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time.
Michael McDowell strongly denied that a deal had been done by Mr McArthur’s legal representative with the DPP to avoid the case going to trial. The Justice Minister had acted as a junior counsel for Mr McArthur.
An additional twist is surely the fact that Mcarthur is the longest serving prisoner in the state and the person he depends upon to given parole is the minister for Justice?
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11.15.06
Posted in Feminism at 1:39 pm by Sarah
I see the High Court agrees with me on this issue.
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Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 1:32 pm by Sarah
Sigh. I should report on this.
The last update was that I had bought the Free View card for €45 on Ebay.
So it worked, although I had to manually tune in RTE1, 2, TV3 etc. However, not only was there no Nick Jr, which was my aim, but there was no Paramount either, i.e. no Seinfeld. Or the channel that has all the Rick Stein programmes. HE LOVES Seinfeld and Rick Stein. I suggested that we buy Seinfeld DVDs. Course we’d have to buy a DVD player too. HE pointed out that by the time we bought all this stuff we’d have paid the Sky subscription several times over. And I’d already bought Peppa Pig and Little Bear DVDs.
SO, we are keeping Sky at €30 per month HOWEVER exercise was not total failure as I learned how to tune in CeeBeebies and BBC Four and ITV and Film Four. So the net result is that I have extra channels and no extra cost. I just wasted €45 on the card. Not toooooooooo bad I suppose.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 12:49 pm by Sarah
“Giampaolo Mazza’s side have won just one game in 16 years of international football (a friendly against Liechtenstein), and managed two points from competitive games in all that time. They have started the current campaign with two defeats – 13-0 to Germany and 7-0 to the Czech Republic – but the goalless run extends back six games during which they’ve conceded 40 times”
Why do they bother?
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Posted in Uncategorized at 11:03 am by Sarah
Denis O’Brien enters US market.
Denis has given an interview to Time magazine outlining his plans for the US. I smiled at this quote:
“”We are going to completely change how Americans view cell phones,” he said. Mr O’Brien declined to elaborate on his means of achieving that, saying it was “the kind of thing that if I told you, I’d have to kill you“.”
When I worked for him in the mid-90′s there were some standard quotes throughout the business. Starting with ” I could tell you that but then I’d have to kill you”. A huge part of Denis’ strategy involves secrecy. If people don’t know what you are doing then they can’t compete until its too late. At one point, the location of the office where the bid was being written was a secret. So if someone asked me where I was going, the reply would be ” I could tell you that……”. Sometimes my own boss would shake his head because I’d be pulled off onto some secret mission and not be able to tell him what I was doing. Which is funny. And it worked.
Anyway, other catchphrases were:
1. “No queens”. This didn’t mean no gays, but no WAGS at company parties. Presence of WAGS interfered with employee bonding. In fact, relationships within the company were frequent and practically encouraged. It tied you more into the company. Your destinies were tied too close together to consider screwing up.
2. “This is not the Department of Agriculture”, i.e. we do things NOW not in 12 months
3. “Since when did we come from the land of a thousand No’s” – standard reply given when your jaw just dropped because you’d been asked to do some seemingly impossible task.
4. “You’re FIRED!” – usually revoked when problem solved. One guy who was fired 3 times within 24 hours kept saying “But Denis, if you fire me I can’t fix it”.
5. “Everyone is in sales” – usual scenario – New employee meets Denis. He says “what did you sell today?” They would say “Oh, I’m not in sales”. Veteran employees within earshot smirk and bow heads. Half hour later new employee presents list to Denis of 10 people they know in companies who have not signed up to Esat. Those people got phone calls within 24 hours. EVERYONE was in sales.
6. Oh and other psychological/bonding thing was the bestowing of nicknames. Increase camraderie etc.
7. Final interesting aspect from an organisational point of view was the genuinely flat structure. Everyone had ONE goal – which was to keep Denis in a good mood. It cut out a LOT of the usual politicking and maneouvering. That can only work in an organisaiton of a certain size, but I think up to 100 employees, it certainly effective.
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11.14.06
Posted in Feminism at 2:45 pm by Sarah
Here’s some good advice via the Guardian
“Mr Bradshaw said it was important for shoppers to be aware that recycling was not necessarily the best option. “It is better than throwing stuff away, but reduction is better still,” he said.
He illustrated his comments with examples of wasteful packaging – such as four apples, wrapped in polythene and presented on a polystyrene tray – which cannot be recycled. He acknowledged that all the supermarkets had come up with plans to cut packaging, but said: “We need to see the delivery of those plans. We need to see quantifiable reductions.”
While saying he would like to see targets for waste reduction spelled out in and included in annual reports, Mr Bradshaw also urged shoppers to force the grocers to move faster by taking direct action. After paying for their goods, shoppers should remove “excessive and unnecessary” wrappers and leave them behind.”
Good idea. I think I’ll do this. M&S are the worst offenders I think.
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11.13.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 6:46 pm by Sarah
Baxter’s Cream of Tomato Tinned Soup. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
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Posted in Feminism, Uncategorized at 2:30 pm by Sarah
I featured on this programme yesterday. (Programme 5) It’s about ethics and journalism and blogging etc. It’s a 45 minute discussion edited down, so a little bit choppy in places, but I think interesting.
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Posted in Feminism at 2:26 pm by Sarah
From rte.ie
“The Supreme Court has ruled that a two-year-old girl must be returned to the custody of her birth parents.
Baby ‘Ann’ was offered up for adoption by her parents who were at the time unmarried. They later married and during the adoption process withdrew their consent to adoption. The High Court had earlier ruled that the baby must remain in the custody of her would-be adoptive parents.
However, she will now be returned to her birth parents after the Supreme Court decides on a transfer process.
The interests of the child dictate that the matter must be dealt with as soon as possible, according to Chief Justice Murray’s judgment. The Supreme Court is likely to consider the custodial transfer next week at the latest.”
I think this is dreadful. I feel very sorry for the birth parents but my god, a 2 year old girl is going to be taken from the only parents she has known and wake up the next morning as someone else’s child? What a trauma. The birth parents made a mistake, but is rectifying that mistake worth traumatising their daughter? It’s back to adoption=child stealing again. How can they inflict this on their daughter? Or are their feelings more important than hers? Obviously.
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11.12.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 9:17 pm by Sarah
I went shopping last week for a doll for my son. I bought him one before and he really liked it. Rather sadistically, I had also enjoyed the barely concealed anxiety of my mother-in-law, who was afraid I was trying to turn her grandson gay.
He’s also expressed an interest in ironing, so I put an ironing board on the shopping list too. I’m determined that, from toddlerhood, my sons will learn that domestic tasks are not just for women.
After the shopping trip, I sat in the car and I had to put the seat back. “This,” I thought to myself, “is how it must feel to have a stroke.” A spear had pierced my right eye forcing the eyelid to squint with the pain. I was sweating and my husband was afraid I was going to vomit. Forty minutes later I staggered into the house, eye still twitching, and collapsed on the couch.
Who could have dreamt toy shopping would be this stressful? It seemed like such a good idea. We’d head into town and cheerfully over-indulge the children while anticipating their delight on Christmas morning. We’d go for a drink afterwards and congratulate ourselves on getting everything organised weeks before all the other parents started panicking.
I really had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Most of the boys’ current play-things are inherited from older cousins. My brother arrives with box-loads of plastic cast-offs every six months, thereby de-cluttering his house and sparing us visits to retail parks. But our eldest lad is now three and has come to understand that products featured on television ads can be his. All he has to do is perfect a mix of whines and winning smiles. Too late, I tuned in to CBeebies — ad-free television — and switched off Nick Jr.
He’s on a winner though, because I’m carrying Christmas baggage. I can still see an allegedly poorer neighbour whizzing up and down the road one December 25 on a new BMX bike. I re-examined my Connect Four game and jigsaw, which hours earlier had seemed like a reasonable haul. Why, I asked my mother, did Santy distribute his largesse in unequal measure? She explained that poorer children got very little throughout the year so Santy made it up to them at Christmas. “You,” she said, “eat meat every day.” I wasn’t impressed.
Attempting to alleviate this childhood envy by spoiling my toddlers isn’t healthy but my consumerist guilt takes a break at Christmas. I was aiming for some kind of equilibrium by giving the children exactly what they want (tractors) and what I wanted to give them (educational tools). They’d be happy, I’d be proud.
The first 10 minutes were fun. We ran around marvelling at the produce of China. Although How-to-Rear-Your-Children books advise against transferring one’s ambitions onto offspring, the temptation is simply too great. As I had already committed the sin of over-identification (assuming my feelings were comparable to theirs), I allowed myself a little projection. They could have the tractors, now I wanted more.
I had to go looking in the girls’ section for the dolls, of course, and that’s where my mood started to crash. The boys’ section is a multi-coloured fiesta but the girls’ aisles are a startling variety of ghastly shades of pink. The boys have construction gear, farm sets, Lego, transport, aliens and animals. The girls have pink.
They may call this a post-feminist world, but gender apartheid still rules when it comes to toy marketing. Pink dolls, pink fairy outfits, pink fashion accessories, pink pretend make-up.
That’s when I started squinting — distinguishing one toy from another is hard in an avalanche of pink. All the baby dolls were wearing pink — and there weren’t even any boy dolls.
After getting over the fright of the price of them, I selected one. Then I found the ironing set; it had a picture of a girl wearing a pink dress on the front. With my liberal sensibilities assuaged, I headed back to the tractor section.
In the meantime my husband had spotted little musical instruments. He wants his sons to play guitars at parties to impress women the way he never did. There was an intense debate on the most appropriate type, and finally a little guitar went under the arm. Now, definitely, back to the tractors. On the way we found a section devoted to easels, blackboards and white boards. Another debate, and we settled for one that was a blackboard on one side and a magnetic board on the other — chalk and magnetic letters and numbers all included. Brilliant. I could start him on his letters. The possibility of my son being able to read before he went to school thrilled me. Some 104 letters would have to be picked up, but I figured this was a small sacrifice for his advancement. It was heavy, but I dragged that along as we headed for the tractors, picking up a set of toy golf clubs on the way. Sport is another talent to be nurtured.
Finally, the tractors. But there we were defeated; there were so many. At first I was enthusiastic about a ride-on but He pointed out that it would be winter and maybe getting outside toys wasn’t a great idea. There were motorised remote-control versions — amazing but too advanced. There were hand-sized little ones, but the pieces were so complex that you just knew they’d be smashed inside five seconds.
I started to panic. Surrounded by thousands of tractors, and no idea which one to get. Finally we found a model with a simple design that seemed relatively unsmashable and was only a tenner. We ran for the checkout stuffing batteries in our pockets as we left.
As we loaded everything into the boot, I listed the contents. One doll and one ironing board bought so I could make him less of a boy. One guitar and one set of golf clubs so his father could dream of his unfulfilled youth. One magnetic board and letters so I could teach him to read and be proud. One tractor, which he wanted.
Then I remembered we had two children. We had managed to forget to buy anything for the almost two-year-old. He doesn’t know how to ask for anything so we’d overlooked him. We were going to have to go back. That’s when I had the “stroke”.
Next day, the oldest boy’s birthday, we gave him the doll. He was delighted, even though his four-year-old cousin was there for the opening of the package and kept shouting “but that’s for girls!” My son calls the doll “he” even though it’s wearing pink. The mother-in-law isn’t one bit impressed.
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