06.29.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:54 pm by Sarah
Alright you guys, you totally need something nice and wholesome to cheer you up.
Gavin’s back at Gavin’s Blog and posted about Paul Potts. I am right out of the whole popular culture scene so missed this on the telly. So here’s a new qualifying test for commenters:
Does this
a) warm you up a bit (excepting the Amanda one, even I found her irritating) or
b) do you feel the irresistible urge to thrash out sarky comments?
If it’s a) you may stay
If it’s b) get some help 
Let’s turn over a new leaf. I promise to say nothing bad about anyone for a week.
Ant&Dec are total pros, aren’t they?
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06.28.07
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 8:40 am by Sarah
Who would’ve thought..
we are getting an actual opposition
“Fine Gael is to reduce its co-operation with the Government in the Dáil in protest over Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s treatment of the party since the general election, particularly his handling of the election of the Leas-Cheann Comhairle.
Under changes imposed this week, Fine Gael has refused to offer Dáil “pairs” that allow Government Ministers to be absent for votes, unless they are away on business vital to the State’s interests.”
About bloody time and all. Why should they get pairs so they can go off opening things?
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Feminism at 8:22 am by Sarah
After the usual melodramatic start to the day, some good news! From the IT…
“Ireland’s first black mayor set to be elected in Portlaoise
A Nigerian man who arrived here seven years ago seeking asylum is likely to create history by becoming Ireland’s first black mayor today, Ronan McGreevy .
Cllr Rotimi Adebari (43) was elected to Portlaoise Town Council in 2004 and should take the chain of office when the members meet to elect a new mayor this afternoon.
He is likely to be elected under a mayoral pact which sees the position rotate among the Fine Gael/Sinn Féin/Independent members of the council.
Mr Adebari has scheduled a party for the new parish centre in Portlaoise tomorrow evening to celebrate his imminent mayoralty.
He said: “It will be a great honour to become the number one citizen of the town. The kudos, though, goes to the people of Portlaoise who elected me in 2004. They gave me this opportunity,” he said.
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06.27.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:02 pm by Sarah
I love this series, and was just reading up on the wikipedia entry ( I missed one or two crucial episodes and their guide is fantastic). Anyway, they included this..a pathetic law suit if ever…
“Emerson lawsuit
On October 2, 2006, Emerson Electric Company, an appliance market competitor of NBC’s owner General Electric, filed suit in federal court against NBC. The suit was in regards to a scene that appeared in “Genesis”, the pilot episode, where a character reaches into an active garbage disposal unit—labeled “In-Sink-Erator”—to retrieve a ring, and severely injures her hand in the process. Emerson claims the scene “casts the disposer in an unsavory light, irreparably tarnishing the product” by suggesting serious injuries will result “in the event consumers were to accidentally insert their hand into one.”
Emerson had asked for a ruling barring future broadcasts of the pilot, which was previously available on NBC’s Web site and has already aired on NBC Universal-owned cable networks USA Network and The Sci Fi Channel. It also sought to block NBC from using any Emerson trademarks in the future.[32]
On February 23, 2007, the case against NBC was dropped. NBC Universal and Emerson Electric reached an agreement to settle the lawsuit outside of court. [33]
The episode in question was briefly unavailable in the iTunes Store, but an edited version was shortly made available for download.”
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Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 12:57 pm by Sarah
The hoover (vaccum whatever) is broken. Just won’t switch on. Could be anything. Could be the plug, but its one of those stupid stuck on ones that you can’t check.
So now I have to get a new one.
Do I get to bring the old one back to Power City or whatever hell hole from whence it came?
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06.26.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:43 pm by Sarah
Lots of great comments but this letter in the IT amused me most
“Madam, – Dublin Zoo is seeking a name for its baby giraffe. In view of its extensive neck may I suggest “Beverley”? – Yours, etc,
PETER COOGAN, Temple Manor, Celbridge, Co Kildare.£
Honestly, Crewser….I won’t even list all the sins of Beverly “I have nothing to apologise for” Flynn…HOW can you find anything remotely redeeming in this episode?
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06.25.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:24 pm by Sarah
Funny. I was just thinking today how class effects so many issues and would you believe, it appears to show up in social networking too.
From the Guardian today, quoting Danah Boyd, it seems that Facebook is the SN site of preference for the white middle classes and Myspace for immigrants and working classes.
Even more interesting is the fact that the class divide has appeared in the army..
“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.”
According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.
“The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can’t help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.”
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 12:25 pm by Sarah
Got the ballot paper. Most exciting.
Also noted the ST story yesterday – lots of people on both the TCD and NUI panels are dead….
And John Waters does and doesn’t plug The Examiner’s Ronan Mullen for the NUI panel today
” received a communication last week from Ronan Mullen who, aside from being a fine columnist with another newspaper, is a candidate on the NUI panel in the Seanad elections, writes, John Waters
He was asking for my support. I wept copious tears, partly for being reminded once again, as I am on each occasion of a Seanad election, of my inferior status, and partly from the emotions generated by Ronan’s obvious misapprehension – gathered, I assumed, from the quality of my spelling and punctuation – that I had in fact been to “college”. When Ronan followed up his e-mail with a phone call, it emerged that he was fully aware of my democratic deficit (I did not go to university and therefore am a non-person when it comes to elections to the Seanad), but thought perhaps I might give him a mention in this column.
Regretfully, I had to decline. Though impressed by Ronan’s passion and commitment to promoting the dignity of the human person, his strong views on the importance of family and community, his call for global solidarity and opposition to human trafficking, I explained that I was opposed to oligarchy and could not make an exception. My position, I outlined, is that I am a believer in universal suffrage and looked forward to the introduction of full democracy into Ireland in my lifetime. It would therefore be inconsistent to recommend one elitist candidate over another. Ronan told me he shares my views and believes that both the system of election and the broader operation of the Seanad are in urgent need of reform. For the Seanad to be meaningful as a second house of parliament, he said, it would have to be “more democratically elected and more seriously capable of forcing a second look at legislation”.
The last time I heard such views expressed was five years ago, following the last Seanad election. The speaker was Mary O’Rourke, who had just been appointed leader of Fianna Fáil in the Seanad. We were debating on radio in the light, or heat, of an article I’d written arguing that, because Seanad elections trample on the most basic principles of democracy, the sheer uselessness of the Seanad might be deemed its sole redeeming quality. “Watch this space,” said O’Rourke, by which I understood her to mean that Ireland would be a full democracy by the time the next Seanad elections came around.”
Poor John.
A recent correspondent accused me of self-serving views on another topic, so I suppose these ones are too. I know the Senate is one way a load of codswallop, but in relation to the university Senators I do think it is a way of getting people into politics who might otherwise be sidelined. David Norris is a great example of someone who would have had no platform without the TCD Senate panel. And let’s face it, the original motive of making sure the Prods got a few seats by giving TCD representation still holds. Since Ivan Yates left, how many elected representatives are CofI?
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06.22.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:43 pm by Sarah
Woah! My MOTHER who is past 70 and way more with the zeitgeist than me just told me to check this out. F*cking great stuff from Damo who totally has Sky Handling Partners by the short and curlies. SOMEONE is in BIG trouble there! hee hee
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06.21.07
Posted in Feminism at 11:54 am by Sarah
Excellent column here from the IT today.
“We are outraged by child pornography, but the sexualisation of children is all around us, from bra tops to Bratz dolls, and we say nothing, writes Debbie Ging .
This week’s news about the break-up of an international paedophile ring revealed some facts which are literally too horrific to contemplate: men videoing themselves raping their own children, some as young as five. Naturally enough, most people want to see these individuals put behind bars for life; others advocate more severe punishments, from chemical castration to public hanging.
The sense of anger and outrage people feel is justified, and there is no doubt that tracking down and imprisoning the perpetrators will save many children from a fate arguably worse than death. It is not, however, going to solve the problem – because sexualised images of children are not just the stuff of covert internet porn rings. They are all around us, and we have failed to be shocked by them.
High-heeled shoes and boots are available in Irish shoe shops for children aged five and upwards. T-shirts with “porn star” written across the chest are widely available for the same age group. Major chain-stores sell g-string and bra sets for girls ranging from five to 10 years of age. Bratz dolls, now far exceeding sales of Barbie, combine pre-pubescent, wide-eyed innocence with the clothing and make-up of the prostitute or dominatrix. Bratz Babies, which wear make-up and earrings but carry babies’ milk bottles, represent an even more perturbing mix of adult sexuality and infancy.
Irish parents seem to have put up little resistance against the tide of gender-stereotyped and sexualised products and images which have recently flooded the children’s media, toy and clothing industries.
The spectre of little girls wearing bra tops, shaking their bootie and singing suggestive lyrics does not appal us, at least not sufficiently to make us call for a ban on advertising during children’s programming or to reject the alleged inevitability of these developments.
Increasingly we hear reports of eight-year-old girls about to make their Holy Communion availing of highlights, tanning and leg-waxing. Parents roll their eyes and say “girls will be girls”.
It is time to get real. Girls, if they continue to be treated like this, will be sexual objects: in their own eyes and those of others. For all its rhetoric about a society of free choice that engenders liberal, open debate, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland has not yet had an honest public discussion on this topic.
The Irish media has routinely constructed paedophiles as anti-social “outsiders” or strangers, (homo)sexually-repressed priests or disturbed celebrities, while playing down or ignoring the fact that most child abuse takes place within the family. Statistics from the Rape Crisis Centre in Dublin show that, in 2005, 19.6 per cent of reported child sexual abuse cases were perpetrated by fathers, 16.2 per cent by brothers, 26.8 per cent by another male relative and 30.2 per cent by another known person. Only 3.4 per cent of cases were perpetrated by strangers.
It is time to face up to the realities of child abuse – to acknowledge that raunch culture for the under-12s has become acceptable in the current mediascape; to face the fact that paedophilia is not restricted to small circles of anti-social sex monsters but is more commonplace than most people would like to think; and to take responsibility for the messages we are sending out to children by condoning and conspiring, albeit inadvertently, in their sexualisation.
Many of these realities are hard to stomach, but there is a real need, now more than ever, to think about them and to talk about them honestly and openly if the problem is ever to be successfully tackled.”
Dr Debbie Ging is a lecturer and researcher on gender in the media at the School of Communications, Dublin City University.
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