Good News, Bad News. What's The Difference?

Let's talk about the standard and tone of newsreaders, we have touched on it before. A few days ago I listened to a bulletin on a national radio station. The two lead items; the deaths of three members of a Co. Down family in a farming accident and the discovery of the body of an eleven year old girl in a house in Tullamore were delivered in the chirpy manner you would expect for coverage of the birth of a baby panda at Dublin Zoo. No attempt was made to make the delivery appropriate to the subject matter. Shocking stuff.

Management Theory

An extract from Dion Fanning in last week's Sunday Independent on Scottish football managers:

"Scotland and Ireland have many similarities. We are wedded together by a complex relationship with drink and England but Ireland has never managed to produce the great managers that were rolled out in Scotland.

Some say the Scottish accent provides its own authority whereas the Irish accent, to English ears, is associated with the arrival of a fun activity like all-night drinking or even all-day drinking.

The response, "I just love your accent", is all very well and can often be turned to our advantage, but it slightly undermines the point if you've just told the listener they're a worthless piece of shit who will never play for the club again.

Perhaps this is why Michael O' Leary irritates English people so much. As soon as they hear his voice, some involuntary neural reflex has them thinking, "I just love your accent", before they register that he, or one of his proxies, is telling them that they owe him £745 for a packet of Skittles."

Give Her The Holly

I read with interest today of someone who was fined €400.00 for flashing his lights to warn oncoming drivers of a speed camera.

So despite all the protestations by Gardaí and local authorities that the sole purpose of these cameras is road safety does this not amount to a straight admission that it is in fact revenue generation?

If the motivation is a genuine desire to reduce speed was this citizen not providing invaluable help in this regard, should he not have been commended rather than fined? Seemingly not.

King Chicken

There was a woman on the radio today who has just written a book entitled “Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That”. She is an advocate of the gallery system as an effective means of bringing worthwhile pieces of art to the attention of the public.

She made the point that it is people in the know, the artistic community, people who have studied art, curators etc. who decide what makes it into galleries in the first place. So a filter has already been applied before what we would call “the public” get to see it. Which of course begs the eternal question; what is art and more pertinently who decides?

The same scenario applies when it comes to fashion. You’ve often heard it said of someone that they have style or taste or a great sense of fashion based on the clothes that they wear. Clothes that were inevitably purchased in a shop. Clothes that were chosen for that shop by a buyer in an office in London or New York or Paris. At least one filter has already been applied. It's the same story with furniture.

We think we like certain art, clothes or furniture but the decision has been made for us behind closed doors. 

I wrote a poem yesterday on the back of my bus ticket about a chicken that survives the nuclear holocaust. By my reckoning that’s art. But you will never see it so by our friend's logic it is not art any more, it ceases to be art when it doesn't attract an audience.

According to her any One Direction song you care to choose has more artistic merit than post apocalyptic poultry poetry.

That can't be right. 

Pat's High Hat

The Energy Regulator was on Pat Kenny this morning. In response to a case put to him by Pat wherein a person uses €3.00 of electricity per month but is obliged to pay a bill of €40.00 per month The Regulator treated us to a delightful yarn about hidden costs and some heretofore unheard of arrangement whereby the ESB are still paying for wires that were installed decades ago, the costs for which are being “paid back on average over time”.

This is the standard, this is where we’re at. The position of Energy Regulator, a big job, and a job that would definitely fall into the big swinging mickey category has attracted the caliber of person who will go on national radio and utter a sentence containing the words “paid back on average over time”.

Fr. Spud Murphy, my third year Maths teacher, had a well calibrated bullshit radar and when faced with an obfuscating student would simply nod and say “Yes, indeed and what’s the difference between a duck?”

It would be nice to see the eminent current affairs presenter of the national broadcaster deploy similar techniques when faced with something of the order of “paid back on average over time”.

Instead of some verbose comment designed solely to illustrate that he knows more about the subject at hand than the guest how about  “What’s the difference between a duck?”

I, for one, won’t live to see it; they have each other’s backs, these guys.

Just The One

Overheard on Portlaoise to Dublin bus Saturday afternoon;
"Did you have a drink last night Becky?"
"I'd a bottle of wine that's all"

Pat & Rory

Pat Kenny became very agitated the other day on the subject of Rory McIlroy and an interview he gave to the Daily Mail newspaper. Rory said that he has always felt more British than Irish. Pat thought this was a stupid thing to say. Seemingly and surprisingly, Pat knows Rory better then Rory knows Rory.

It was a rare and interesting outburst from Pat. It was interesting in that he chose a sporting issue on which to discard his usual staunchly impartial stance. Pat made the decision that a matter pertaining to professional golf was not worthy of his trademark cautiousness, that he could let the hair down a bit. In trifling matters such as sport it appears Pat is not hesitant to let himself go.

It would be great to see Pat being similarly candid, similarly fast and loose with his tuppence worth when it comes to, say, coverage of the teacher conferences, the labour relations commission or the Croke Park agreement but no, it seems he will keep it to the golf. And Trapattoni.

That Would Be Excrement of a Bovine Persuasion

Bullshit is everywhere. To be polite we call it spin but everyone knows it’s bullshit and it’s inescapable. And pointless.

This morning when I went to the end of the road to retrieve the emptied bin, there was a letter attached. The first paragraph is as follows, verbatim including inexplicable capitals.

“In Today’s society, public awareness of the problems of waste is increasing and as your Environmental partner, Oxigen welcomes this as an opportunity to help build a more sustainable society and in turn reduce our carbon footprint. To assist with this, both bins (waste and recycling) will be collected together on a fortnightly basis in dual chamber collection vehicles”

What this should say is as follows;

“An analysis of our accounts has revealed that we are not making as much money as we would like to on your route and need to slash as much cost as we possibly can regardless of the impact on our customers and employees. To assist with this, both bins (waste and recycling) will be collected together on a fortnightly basis in dual chamber collection vehicles”.

Any kind of spin is hard to take but bad spin, absolute shite of the level of that paragraph is baffling. Do they think the children of the house are going to be the only ones reading this? Did it not cross their minds that this masterpiece might find its way into the hands of the odd mentally competent adult?

A senior functionary in this organization signed off on this tripe. It probably went through a few drafts until it was deemed to be sufficiently repugnant and insulting to our intelligence before the approved stamp was produced.

I’ve said it before; there ain’t no troika gonna save us now.

The Late Late

The superfluousness of The Late Late Show has been pointed out by practically everybody recently. But it was novel to see Tubridy and the show’s very own producers underline its irrelevance on the series premiere last night.

Straight out of the blocks came our Olympic boxing team in full training regalia, medals around necks. And for the next toe curling twenty minutes Tubridy tried to re light that fire, tried to corral a horse that had bolted a month ago.

There are some out there who probably think he made a decent fist of it. It is for these that The Late Late Show is allowed to trundle on.

There are some who think it was pointless trying to rekindle the buzz in the first place, who were appalled to see the great Ross Noble go down like a lead balloon while a piss poor medley from a pride of Eurovisionites was greeted with demented hysteria. It is for these that The Late Late Show should be given a lethal injection.

It’s the humane thing to do.

X. Rated.

Anything of value is predicated on a good idea. We have talked before about the toxic culture of the X Factor. The X Factor is supposedly about discovering talent. But discovering talent and discovering someone who will do exactly what you tell them to do are very different things. It is the latter that our friends at the X Factor are interested in.

They have no interest in discovering talent as you or I might recognize it; in the sense of someone having the vision and ideas to deliver something interesting and worthwhile.This is an intrinsic part of what you or I would call talent. But what the X Factor is trying to unearth is the opposite of this, the opposite of talent. What they are trying to unearth is a meek (X Factor translation “ambitious”) personality with a voice who will never disagree with them on anything.

Nick Cave is one of the most talented people in human history, he wouldn’t get through the first audition. Him and his pesky songwriting genius, and his humour, and his deep artistic convictions and his big ideas. Sure where would he be going.

Polithicks

It used to be that an engagement with politics was the sign of an alert, active mind, of a certain type of intelligence. But now, after all that we’ve seen, if you’re still reading editorials, if you’re still reading your Marc Colemans or your Fionnan Sheehans or your John Drennans and if you’re still posting comments on thejournal.ie then I’m sorry to say that you are a bona fide eejit.

On the radio the other day Pat Leahy said that it will be interesting to see the opinion polls around the time of the upcoming local elections. Yes Pat it will be interesting. To four people; yourself, John Drennan, Marc Coleman and Fionnan Sheehan. The people whose livelihoods depend upon the propagation of this turgid shite.

The rest of us will be too busy with season three of The Walking Dead, season five of Breaking Bad, the Premier League, Champions League, Europa League, Magners League and Heineken Cup. Amongst other things.