Art, media, opinion and ideas
I have often suspected that if Michael McDowell was to be locked in a room on his own for anything longer than 2 hours, he would start a fight with himself. Today, that suspicion is confirmed. Under the headline "McDowell Rejects Mobile Phone Claims", RTE reports that "he [the minister] said that the allegation that the prison service had been colluding with prisoners over phone use was a serious one.
Have you ever scrolled through the user reviews on Amazon and noticed that no matter how overwhelmingly positive the general trend is, there’s always one jerk who gives a vitriolic one-star review? Even where the book in question is a classic, an acknowledged masterpiece, you can usually find one of these guys, denouncing an adornment of human accomplishment with poorly-spelled scorn, expressing ..
It is rare that a newspaper headline cannot be bettered, but the title of a front page story in this weekend’s Sunday Independent summed up the article so perfectly that no other words seem appropriate. First, the back story:The previous week, the Independent ran with a story about Bertie Ahern and a suitcase full of money. You may have heard about it.
A short time ago Cian Ginty of Blurred Keys very kindly sent me, amongst other bloggers, an invitation to go along to one of the Cleraun Media Forum sessions. These are monthly get-togethers where media professionals and anyone else "working / teaching / studying / interested in media" can meet to discuss some aspect of the profession.
Some day an enterprising tech journalist may write a history of spam, from it’s earliest days to the present. Though primarily identified with e-mail, spam is an imperialist substance, and has also colonised message boards, chat rooms, blogs and, more recently, Skype. In the public imagination though, the classic form remains the e-mail.
Reporting on legal cases is a specialist skill. It requires the journalist to be at least familiar with the procedures of how a case is heard and what the steps are along the way. Sometimes, a journalist will be sent out to report on a court case without sufficient experience or training to interpret what they see or hear for their readers.
Copernicus of the Midnight Court recently described Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City as “stomach-churningly unsurprising". I concur with the stomach-churning descrition, but, perhaps due to naivety on my part, I managed to be surprised now and then by just how badly organised the American (or "coalition", if you will) occupation of Iraq turned out to be.
Though I didn’t mention it in my 2006 music of the year post (I hadn’t yet heard it), an album from last year that I currently can’t get enough of is Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine. A concept album of sorts, it tells the story of the eponymous neighbourhood, a thriving latino community in 1940’s and 1950’s Los Angeles.
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That headline nearly killed me to write. I'll never make a sub-editor. Of more interest than my struggles for brevity is the fact that the Irish Times writer has responded to Kevin's feelings of deja vu, experienced when successively reading the New York Times obit of French Thinkifyer Jean Baudrillard (tips on pronunciation would be welcomed) and Boyd's obit of same for the Irish Times.
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