Draw Breath

The Indian courts shouldn’t stop here. They should ban mobile phones and boats too.

A minor furore today over whether or not Coldplay has copied Joe Satriani’s If I Could Fly with their song Viva La Vida. I have to say that close aural scrutiny does reveal a similar chord progression and melody line in parts. However, If I Could Fly is not the most memorable tune ever. Pleasant and all as it is, Viva la Vida is not one of Coldplay’s strongest numbers either. In fact, I would be inclined to believe Coldplay when they say any similarity is coincidental. No danger of similarities between tunes during Coldplay’s concert in Dublin on 14 September with Girls Aloud and Jay-Z as support. An eclectic mix which could make or break the evening!

What an interesting, nuanced corrective this piece by Mahmood Mamdani makes to the bizarre claptrap being spoken on this Slugger thread about African tribalism (never mind incredible shite about ‘the people of Africa’ and ‘African pastoral culture’).

On intervention in Zimbabwe, am I mad in thinking that there’s a difference between sitting in Belfast (or York) demanding military intervention and actually figuring out a way that you could intervene in a country somewhat larger than Germany and be positive that you won’t make matters even worse than they are?  After all, the lessons of the last decade are not uniformly positive.

If you can’t really take the leap from saying that something must be done to actually figuring out what it is that can be done, then – sadly – inaction as events play out might be the wisest course.

My mood about Ireland is not good today. I more or less have the same feeling about the place as I did, just before I high-tailed it to England, when Dublin Bus added 20% to the length of my route home and then charged me 20% more for the privilege of being cooped up for longer in their sodding fume wagons.

So, here’s my gripe:

1. We market tourism on ‘Ireland of the welcomes’ and then gouge tourists for every penny/cent they have in return for warm chips and cafetieres filled with instant coffee.
2. We take money from the EU but, once we become net contributors, we tell them to piss right off.
3. We re-elect a venal government that talked down to us about supply and demand when their mates were gouging us but has switched to lecturing us about our patriotic duties now that we’ve been high-tailing it to shop in foreign parts (you know, Newry).
4. And now, oh now, having marketed Irish farm produce as somehow more natural than that from your average swamp, we reveal that we’ve been adding industrial oil to the livestock’s swill. Which really undermines the brochure.

The Irish. Sometimes we lack a touch of class.

Another day, another template. I decided that I didn’t like Plurlalism as much as I had originally thought (it seemed oddly crowded) so I’ve opted for the Barlow theme. I think I might try to widen the main window a bit, but apart from that it seems nice and sedate. Like me!