28 days later

29...30! Most people in the Irish blogosphere will be aware of Damien's cry for help/tirade against Fine Gael last month. Well, here is what they don't know, it wasn't true. I chose not to engage directly at the time in order not to leave myself open to accusations of seeking to deflect attention from the Irish Blog Awards which are primarily Damien's creation and for which he deserves considerable credit and which I can well imagine generates a good degree of stress in the organising.

Put as simply as possible his bald assertion that he was being harassed and stalked on and off line is completely erroneous. Some few people may be aware that I had what could be charitably described as a set-do with Damien back at the turn of the year over his use of a particular piece of terminology and his less than elegant reaction to my making my opinion about it known to him. The back and forth on the whole thing lasted a few days, and since then I've had no direct contact with him. Well after I got to make one comment which he proceeded to modify I reckoned there wasn't much point in bothering.

As regards his even more peculiar reference to being harassed and stalked off line all I can say is that to the best of my knowledge the last time I was even in the same city as Damien Mulley was for the blog awards last year. In fact in the week prior to his post about all this Damien travelled to Limerick twice and on one of those occasions was or so I heard inquiring as to my whereabouts. As it happens I was in Dublin on both occasions. Frankly, if that is stalking it sounds much more like Damien is the one doing it. Or if I really am supposed to be doing it I should think about buying a manual. I would very interested in seeing Damien produce the merest sliver of evidence to back up this ludicrous claim.

As regard his involvement of Fine Gael in all this, I'm further perplexed. In his communications with a number of people and organisations regarding his claims he has mentioned my name and that of Fine Gael. Why? The truth is that it would appear Damien is prone to the odd bout of histrionics going from cheerleading for Eamon Ryan to being his self appointment nemesis in the blink of a political eye. Since this was a disagreement between two individuals over the use of language one would wonder why Damien took issue with my membership of Fine Gael at all, rather than say my being an engineer or a Kerryman. Honestly, I would suggest that his repeated harping on about Fine Gael says more about his own indulgence of his biases when approaching any topic than anything else.

I comment on lots of blogs and I suppose one might say we end up playing in the same sand pits from time to time. Let's face it the Irish blogging township isn't quite that large and I wasn't aware that I was supposed to be banished from interacting with people simply because I had fallen foul of Damien Mulley. So I'm sure there have been a couple of occasions when I've commented on the same post as Damien but what reasonable person could characterise that as harassment or even stalking?

Further to this we had his quite excitable jumping up and down about people making threats of legal action. People who were paying close attention from his first post would have noticed that it was Damien Mulley who first spoke of contacting An Garda Síochána and of seeking recourse to legal advice. To date I've heard nothing, nada, faic from anyone to do with his claims and frankly I strongly expect to never hear anything. Any more than I expect to be contacted about the whereabouts of Shergar or the Irish Crown Jewels. Since there was no harassment or stalking there aren't going to be any legal actions forthcoming from Damien. Simply saying something again and again doesn't make it true.

The one quite serious implication from his remarks in his post was that I, acting with others, was in some way seeking to deliberately impact on his health. This is, just like the rest of his post, completely rubbish. As the state of his health wasn't known to me, how was I supposed to be doing this? Voodoo? Incantations? If he is suffering from some form of paranoia and it is somehow impacting his health then I would really suggest that he seek help for it. Strange to think that a simple thing like a relative nobody in blogging not being cowed by Damien's vitriol three months ago would be an scab he would chose to return to on the eve of the blog awards. Retaining a positive mental outlook is vitally important when a person is dealing with a disease like MS.

As for making threats to radio shows and contacting blog nominees about their eligibility for nomination that did not happen either. Who was contacted and exactly what kind of threats would I be in a position to make to radio shows? Withhold my license? Write to Arthur Murphy on Mailbag?

If people like Damien want to say something about people they should be prepared to be upfront about it. Damien made big play of taking his twitter account private though I suspect the real reason behind that was so he could continue to make snide, sly, underhand comments which are his real modus operandi. It's the web 2.0 version of whispering in class with your hand over your mouth. I'm sure those who do have access to his twitter will know if this is the case. Did he name names? Drop hints? Is he still going on about it?

The really disappointing aspect for me was that so few people looked for any justification for the accusation. Most were simply prepared to take him at his word and instead of calling for habeas corpus, the call went out for a head, any head in fact. I acknowledge that Damien has done tremendous work promoting blogging in Ireland but to suggest that such efforts somehow gives him carte blanche to make accusations about people and then never front up is totally unjustified. I will continue to blog, but as for the Irish Blogging Community I have to wonder who would wish to be a member of a community that reaches so readily for pitch forks at the whim of its leader.

It is worth remembering that a benevolent dictator isn't benevolent to everyone all the time and at the end of the day they really are a just dictator, one more petty tyrant.

Rumours and innuendo

Last week the word was put out about the state of a major bank with the intention of impacting its share price. Yet one week on there has been no announcement of any investigation into improper conduct by those spreading the rumours.

The bank I'm referring to isn't HBOS or Anglo-Irish Bank, it is Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was telling everyone who would listen that it was fine, just dandy, nothing at all to see here and there was no reason for anyone to worry their silly little heads about when it came to its ability to continue to do business in the future. Yet in the matter of a few days, it has been subsumed in JP Morgan Chase. So I guess the lesson is when the institution itself tells fibs that's ok, if someone else does it that is wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke - RIP

One of the giants of science fiction has passed on. His writing was always somewhat dry in my view and to be honest he didn't really do characters but God some of the ideas. Harks back to when the bulk of science fiction came from the pens of actually science grounded people, like scientists and engineers, like Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke . I think his short stories are today somewhat under appreciated though that is where 2001 came from.

While his idea or promote of geo stationary satellites will doubtless get lots of attention over the coming days I think the his use of the idea of the space elevator may end up being the more significant in terms of the exploration of space by humans.

Unemployed black man or employed white graduate - who is to blame for the credit crunch?

The two Johns have tackled the issue of the sub prime market already (see the clip below) but I believe the real problem isn't the unemployed black man in a vest sitting outside a house he can no longer afford, it's the college educated white 20 and 30 somethings who is up to their eyes in credit card and college loan debt.



At the heart of the credit problem is a significant percentage of people mostly white college educated folks who had large sums of money made available to them which they gladly borrowed and spent it on pure frippery, and of course spring break! Average credit debt in the US for those graduates in the 20s is nearly $6,000. And that is just credit card debt, most US graduates have college loans into the 10s of thousands. Now the solution being offered by the Fed is yet more cheap credit which will lead to more spending on frippery (most of it coming from Asian economies rather than the US).

Is there some hope that those being lent to would act to re-finance their credit card debt into loans and take the time to pay down their debts? The problem is that the servicing of the credit card debt is much more profitable to the banks and they are disinclined to alter the terms to medium term loans. This is the time to turn into the tidal wave of financial mismanagement but I suspect most will take the short term option and just spend again.

The Jack Russell - champion sheep worrier

So the topic of worrying sheep came up recently and the theory was put forward that Jack Russell's being a more intelligent breed of beast have their own style of worrying the wooliers. Apparently, they sidle up to the fuzzy ones under cover of dark and start telling them that inflation is up again, that the stock market is screwed and that the building industry is laying folks off left right and centre. That has them worried in no time at all.

New Blood Alcohol - another fig leaf effort

I believe the new blood alcohol limitations are a waste of time and a fig leaf to really dealing with the abuse of alcohol and driving.

The report below (which is from 2003, I've been unable to find more recent figures) shows those with blood alcohol between 50 and 80 to be just 5% of fatal accidents. And those with no alcohol at all in their systems were 30%, another 20% were not tested.

http://www.healthintelligence.ie/publications/updated%20report%20fatal%20crashes%202003.pdf

while those over 160 mg/ml are involved in nearly 30% of fatal accidents.

The numbers involved in accidents who are between 50mg and 80mg would not indicate that this is the area that needs most attention. A more sensible approach would be punish more severely based on the degree to which you are over the limit. We should do the same with speeding and link fines to a % of income.

What are we doing about the bigger problem of those who are completely ignoring the existing limits and effectively driving while hammered? The answer is - nothing.

Election games

And we have another great instance of a time sucker. Back in 1996 when the net had stopped yelping and it was being to attract attention for other reasons, a number of media outlets tried a number of things out to get people interested in the Presidential contest between Clinton, Dole and Perot (yes cranky old Ross ran again, well it was either that or buy a state for himself).

One sub site put up was called Dark Horse, in which you played as a virtual candidate, picked your platform, spent some money on ads and campaigned like crazy. Dear God, it killed some amount of time while waiting for my machine to churn through stuff. I'm sure we'll get even more of these as time goes on, I've got my own on the drawing board but...well can't really say too much. One thing that strikes me is that each of these 'games' says as much about how people understand or would like politics to be as it is about how politics might be made more interesting.

And naturally I have this old stager in the electoral politics stakes too! With the dollar the way it is, it is excellent value.

The coming blog deluge

Was chatting to someone over lunch a while back about a side project on blogging and conversation and I mentioned my aside over on Kathy Foley "What happens if the Beboers decide to move on?" At least a few may decide that they have more to write than Bebo allows for. If even 1% of the purported 1 million Beboers in Ireland were to start blogging over the next year it would truly represent exponential growth in blogging in Ireland in a very, very short period of time. We were thinking about what that might mean to blogging in particular in the Irish context with all the talk of a 'community' and also the nature of comment, discussion and conversation around and within blogs. I suspect it may well feed in our thinking and planning on the side project, which is sadly lacking a code name at present.

A project without a codename isn't worthy of a back of beermat business plan.

Not planning on killing a man

It is odd how a simple enough post can end up bringing you to the attention of all sorts of peculiar folks from near and far. A short while back I created a post based on a pub conversation about the attempted murder of a man in Dublin while he was sitting in a car outside a gym. We were surprised at the hash the assailant had made of the job and it recounted our views on how we might have gone about the job with the view of prosecuting it more successfully. However, I would just like to clarify that I'm not offering services or specific advice on how to kill someone, male or female. I don't generally favour killing people as a solution to a problem.

World Book Day

I'm a library brat, my dad was the caretaker for the local library so the library was sort an extension of my living room. I never paid much in library fines in large part because I would have returned any books borrowed long before the deadline. Sitting on a comfy chair surrounded by bookshelves is quite a blissful way to pass a dull rainy afternoon. And there were many of those in Kerry. The playground was round the back of the library so we could run about kicking a ball and then when it got too wet, we wheeled into the library en masse.

A survey of British librarians gives us this list of 30 books to read before you...well, find yourself in a place where you can't read them anymore.

The Top 30

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible (by God!) - True, I've not read all of it.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

Blog talking at UL

So the auld blog talk to the baby journos at UL went well enough, along with myself present to speak were Alan English- Editor of the Limerick Leader representing the print media and Mike Knightson - from Newstalk 106 on behave of broadcasting I guess. Dr, Eoin Devereux- bailed at the last minute apparently. I'm guessing he is still reeling from my response all those years ago at his introduction to Anthropology lecture of "what is wrong with that?" to his comment that all Kerry people answer a question with a question.

I won't rehash but I said but one question that did come up was in reference to libel and yep you can get sued for what you write or what someone else writes...just cos it's on the internet doesn't let you off. I am available by appointment to help cure insomnia.

McCain is the nominee but will he have the right to himself?

With all the focus we seemed to have glossed over the fact that McCain barely got over 51% in Texas as I suspected he might. Of course people may just be blowing off steam secure in the knowledge that McCain was to all intents home and hosed. Aren't there still signs of problems there for McCain there?

It won't be Huckabee, it may not even be a Republican but I suspect we will see a 3rd party family values, social conservative emerge in the next few months. Someone will do the rounds of the talk shows, write a book, pick a fight with Hollywood and generally seek to defend their view of the family.

Paisley to stand down - in May

While there has been a lot of talk about this in the last few weeks, it is quite hard to take in as being real. I know that he do make the final jump into power sharing but I can't help thinking that his role for so many years kept the mess in the north going for much longer than was necessary. I would have much the same view of SF for that matter.

Blog talk

I have to give a talk to the journalism society in UL about Blogging. Also on the panel is someone from the dead tree press, someone from telly, and someone from a college department. Naturally, it would be remiss of me not to refer to recent events and I'm going to be using all my own words as is my wont. Well, technically the actual words themselves belong to the English language but the particular order they are placed in will be entirely my decision. Should make for an interesting evening.

This is Super Tuesday!

So who is it to be? On the traditional date for Super Tuesday, we've got 4 races for the Dems with the two smaller ones Rhode Island and Vermont expected to split one a piece for Clinton and Obama. The big delegate counts are in Ohio and Texas. And I think that Clinton will win both but she won't make that much of a gain delegate wise. If Obama wins both then I think it will be curtains for Clinton, though she may hang in there with one last throw of the dice until Penn.

The complicated nature of the polling in Texas (it's both a caucus and a primary!) will mean that irrespective of who wins the margin of victory would need to be huge or it won't change much. Ohio represents the much better chance for Clinton to make some proper gains but even there it is a mess. A 60%/40% in a 4 seat district gets you 2 seats a piece. It is almost as if the Dem never thought they might end up having a tight two horse race because their systems teams neither candidate can really break away. For more detail check out the guru.

The Republicans are still going through the motions of a primary race. I do have to wonder what the Ron Paul supporters will do if he breaks 10% in Texas! Probably declare victory.

Update 5.39pm local time: I have a feeling that McCain might not break 50% in Texas.

Things are different in Russia

Anyone who saw Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev in jeans and black leather jackets walking across Red Square after it was announced that Medvedev had won would have realised that democracy is a different beast in Russia. I think a strong, confident Russia is good for the world. For sure it has to be better than a paranoid insecure Russia. Yet there is no denying that it would be even more preferable if they could see it as a mark of confidence to allow their critics have their few moments. After all if your argument is better you still win. Only the truly inadequate would deny their opposition any type of a voice.

Incredibly landing attempt by A320

See what happens if you avoid TV for the day, you miss stuff like this.



Amazing work by the pilot. And on RTe's 6.1 News Bryan Dobson got his Superman on by telling us that air travel was still the safest way to fly.

Predictions - Blog Awards

If I've enough presumptuousness to be picking Presidents why not winners of the Blog Awards? Where I'm torn I've left in 2/3, where I don't know enough I've left the category out completely.

Best Blog

• Bock The Robber

Best Blog Post

Fustar - To Whom it Concerns… It’s The Manky Toy Show (Live)!

Most Humourous Post

Twenty Major - Tonight’s Debate

Best Arts and Culture Blog Sponsored by Poetry Ireland

• The Sigla Blog
• Tuppenceworth.ie

Best Political Blog Sponsored by Digital Revolutionaries

• Slugger O’Toole

Best Group Blog Sponsored by Salesjobs.ie

• The Dublin Community Blog

Best Personal Blog Sponsored by Microsoft Ireland’s Developer and Platform Group

• Hangar Queen
• Head Rambles
• Avoiding Life

Best Technology Blog Sponsored by Bitbuzz

Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Best Sports and Recreation Blog Sponsored by Boards.ie

• Arseblog

Best News/Current Affairs Blog Sponsored by Irish Broadband

• The Limerick Blogger
• Gavin’s Blog

Best Newcomer Sponsored by Edelman Dublin

• Irish Taxi
• 73man

Best Music Blog Sponsored by DownloadMusic.ie

Cheebah

Best Popculture Blog Sponsored by Weeno Media

• UnaRocks
• Why, That’s Delightful!
  

Best Blog from a Journalist Sponsored by RedFly Marketing

Present Tense

Blog Awards - break a link, everyone!

Just a quick "Best Wishes" to the good ship Irish Blog Awards and all who sail in her. A lot of work goes into such events and that effort can't be denied, that hair doesn't fix itself. Not able to attend myself for reasons that may emerge over the next while, but have a good one, one and all.

Here's to speeches profound and profane.

To dancing odd and elastic.

To glasses clinked not smashed

And hearts lifted not broken.

Now where did I leave my comet controller?

New Iron Man Trailer

I always found Iron Man and Tony Stark to be a bit on the dull side, but Robert Downey makes it look like this could be a real hoot. Com'on the Merchant of Death!

Iron Man Exclusive Trailer

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And I agree it's not the worst thing any of us have been caught doing....