Draw Breath

And now this:

I had a mentor who said to me once that the fact that straw men exist is no reason to waste time on them. Wise words indeed when it comes to academic writing. With blogging on the other hand, it can be fun. So it goes with this profoundly daft letter to today's Irish Times. One Michael O'Driscoll of Cork manages to be wrong on all the facts and illogical by his own mistaken premises. What an achievement. At the risk of being accused of liberal intolerance (still, to the best of my knowledge, liberals only need to be happy to suffer fools, not to indulge them) I think this merits some sort of response.

We're just back from seeing The Orphanage in the QFT. Jesus. I don't know why we do that sort of thing.

How bizarre is it that a good Saturday night would include getting totally spooked by this sort of thing. This did not exactly feel like fun. My pants were not just scaredy by the end of it.

Still, I always come out wondering at the way that film has spoiled our capacity for fantasy. Maybe its just me, but I find it relatively easy even in films like this to distance myself from the story by thinking about the whole confection as a manufacturing process. If you get to engrossed just have reassuring thoughts about the cameraman, the bloke with the boom, the people in makeup, the director. Works a charm for the likes of me.

What we miss is I suppose no longer even available from literature. The veracity of the spoken word is probably the only place where someone can become truly immersed. The folklorists may have been doing us a huge favour in allowing us at least to be tourists in story-telling (I personally recommend David Thompson's Creatures of the Sea - don't let the whimsical title put you off). But reading the stories is not the same as actually being told by the very people you relied on for information about the world - neighbours, family and passers-by. We belong to only the third generation in Ireland who were likely to travel more than a few miles from home. Where, for all those who came before, can the boundaries of this world have ended, if anywhere?

The firmer lines between the recognisable world and fantasy are undoubtedly a modern development. By this, modernity is a function as much of medium as anything else. No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, it always distances us from the voices of those we trust. In truth, if you really want to cast doubt on the way things are just whisper in somebody's ear.

Companies may be legal fictions but who's to say that they're not capable of love?

Well. Not quite. But sometimes they just don't want to be made look bad in front of the laydees.

Flirty Something has an account of a safari to Avoca, the shop that likes to put the ker-ching into 'you paid what for that piece of tat?'

If you're from stateside, Avoca is an overpriced, smug (two common characteristics in the Celtic Tiger) cultural lovechild of Anthropologie and Laura Ashley all housed under one Edward Gibbonsesque roof. It's an SUV in Kensington. It's advanced capitalism in flower-patterned wellies.

As you can tell, I love the place (and what it says about Irish society) with a great passion.

Anyway, I have one question about Flirty's post. How. The. Fuck. Do you 'hand cook' crisps? Are the Chinese political prisoners now forced to hold the crisps into the deep fat fryer during breaks from welly stitching?

...is here.

I was going to make a few jokes about the 'lambing season' but then I realised that the picture is of an ear. I really thought someone was suffering from a highly disfiguring bout of karma.

So, my fellow blogger writes a great, fascinating post and the best I can come up with is the question: is this true? Did young Robert Knievel, in his pre-Evil days, really make an "earth mover pop a motorcycle-type wheelie?" Is that possible? Never mind that he then allegedly drove the earth mover "into Butte's main power line, leaving the city without electricity for several hours."

Why are these startling facts obscured on EK's official site? I demand answers.

How strange. I set up a Google Alert thingy last week for any news on Irish Credit Unions. So, I get an alert this morning telling me about Hyndman et al's Accountability: A Study of Credit Unions.

Now, this book is available directly from Oak Tree Press for €45, including shipping. It's available for £31 from Amazon (including their £1.99 sourcing fee), which is about €46, or for £18.99/€27 incl postage from one of their marketplace sellers.

But the page Google directed me to belongs to some group in the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin called Research and Markets. They sell the book for the same price as Oak Tree Press: €40. What I find intriguing, though, is the €50 'handling and shipping fee.'

I dare not ask what sort of handling the book would receive but I assume it involves tongues.

Three fine, if inconsequential in the greater scheme of things, discoveries in the last 24 hours:

1) There's a cycle messengers' world championship and this year it's in Dublin.

2) Comments captchas can be put to good use. ReCaptcha creates Captchas for your site by sending words that the Internet Archive book digitisation project can't decipher so you can read them and send your answer back. It's a sort of SETI for books. Who'd have thunk it?

3) The bloke that wrote The Red Flag came from the same village as my Grandmother.

I almost guarantee that you and your life was were less fragrant before you read this.