Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day: October 2002 Archives

Pina

Some years ago, the Austrian government decided to introduce compulsory health insurance for artists. With a baby to support, singer Pina Koller felt she couldn't afford the outlay so she upped sticks from Vienna and moved to the less bureaucratic spot of Ardgroom in West Cork. She had seen a TV programme about Ireland and thought that a somewhat unconventional person like herself stood a chance of being accepted there.

She was, and then came another stroke of good fortune. The Afro-Celt Sound System decided to record a Heather Nova song, on their Volume 3: Further in Time album and invited Pina to be their guest vocalist. This was not quite the coincidence that it appears to be, because shortly after her arrival in Ireland she'd met Alan McEvoy, business manager of the Cranberries, and he'd put her in touch with useful names in the Irish music scene.

Anyway, Peter Gabriel head her voice on the Afro-Celt Sound recording and was so impressed that he offered her a deal with his Real World Label. The result is Quick Look.

Pina's voice is strongly reminiscent of American singer Melanie (remember her?) but there's a screech of Alanis Morissette there as well, while the backing sound is a dramatic electro-acoustic mix, strong on percussive guitar effects. Her Austrian English makes the lyrics marginally comprehensible and this presents listeners with the challenge of deciphering meaning. Perplexed by the lyrics, one critic wrote: "Their absence from the liner notes is keenly felt." Nice way of putting it, that.

And what of the Austrian government that forced her and her five-month-old baby to flee her native land? The tax-hungry Alpine republic gets its comeuppance in The Tower, a traumatic shriek of betrayal.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 31 October 2002 at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Exit FC Bayern, pursued by hubris

The Champions League will proceed this year without FC Bayern Munich, last year's winners. In fact, the 2-1 loss last night against Deportivo La Coruña heralds Bayern's first ever exit from the Champions League's first round phase following five quarter-final appearances. But the competition will be better without Bayern as the team has veered between arrogance and apathy in its recent appearances and has long absented itself from original football.

Bayern arrived in La Coruña last night with just one point from four games. They had to win to have any chance of regaining the trophy they won last year, but without totemic keeper Oliver Kahn (injured thigh) it never looked as if the Munich side were going to take the three points. One would expect a team playing for its Champions League life to fight for every ball, but there were stages of the game where Bayern appeared incapable of summoning anything resembling passion. Such is the state of a team that's come to believe fawning press reports of its invincibility.

On the downside, there'll be no more Champions League evenings in the local bar with free rounds of drink for every Bayern goal. Progress has its price.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 30 October 2002 at 8:50 AM | Permalink

Anticipating the Via Appia Antica

Around the corner is November, and with it winter. The eleventh month is the time of year when central European skies turns leaden and the temperature here in Munich drops too far, too fast. For exploring Rome, though, November is a splendid month — not too wet or windy, not too cold or dark. This is important because it's one of those cities that demands to be walked and that's what I'll be doing there at the weekend.

There'll be a stroll to the Parco della Musica near the Flaminio sports stadium to see the new multimillion-euro Auditorium designed by Renzo Piano, as well as a ramble through the Borghese Park just above Piazza del Popolo to see the remaining colour on the city's trees. And then there's going to be a serious walk along the Via Appia Antica, starting at the entrance of Parco dell 'Appia Antica. This combination of ancient Roman street and pastoral landscape with its ruins from centuries past may move me to declaim those lines from Thomas Babington Macaulay's, Lays of Ancient Rome:

"Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 29 October 2002 at 6:57 AM | Permalink

My mother, the blogger

Ever since I left Ireland in November 1984, my mother has written at least one letter to me every week. Expressed in a stream-of-consciousness style that relies mostly on the present tense and usually accompanied by cuttings from local papers such as the Limerick Leader and the Avondhu, they depict rural life the foot of the Galtee Mountains where the borders of Limerick, Cork and Tipperary intersect. Because we're talking about a farming community here, the most important issue is the weather and up to half of each letter can be taken up with comments about temperature and levels of precipitation. A typical account, which was written over three days, includes the following weather remarks:

"Monday. It wasn't too bad today. It cleared up a good evening. I started again on the windows. I was at them last year and never finished on the day I broke the bones in my hand."
"Tuesday. Misty and cold in the morning but cleared up after dinner. I was at the windows again. Nearly finished now."

"Wednesday. Not too bad. Damp but clearing up. Heavy showers predicted. I am in a rush now to tidy up & get the dinner ready."

Along with the minutiae of the weather, the letters are populated with animals and people treading a fine line between health and decline:

"JJ is not great, very short of breath & blue and purple looking. He invested money in shares & now they are gone down. He says he's going to lose a lot. Must go to bed now. It's 11.30. The severe cold is gone. I am sure it will be back."

Funerals are the most important social gatherings but this is not to be interpreted as a sign of morbidity; in tightly-knit communities the tolling of the bell is much more significant than in anonymous urban environments:

"Three are three funerals on. An aunt of Paddy Glavin's over near Galbally, a Mrs Downey. An uncle of Willie' Lee's (Lane) was found dead in bed. A Paddy Quirk near church in Knocklong is also dead. He'd be a first cousin of Denny McGrath's."

Gardening, grandchildren, ailments, baking and card playing take their place in the news hierarchy after tales of the elements and mortality.

Long before blogging was a technology-enabled concept, my mother was "posting" regularly. Her letters are "permlinks" with the world I grew up in and my replies are "comments". From next week, my mother will be contributing a weekly update to Rainy Day.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 28 October 2002 at 7:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A sporting life, 1930-2002

Richard Harris, who died on Friday, was born in Limerick City, one of the few places in Ireland where the game of rugby, normally associated with the country's elite schools, transcends class barriers. He was a noted second-row forward for Garryowen, and was tipped to line out for Ireland, before tuberculosis landed him in bed for two years, and put an end to his playing career. Rugby accounted for some of Harris's nine broken noses, but it also helped him hit the big time in 1963 when he starred as Frank Machin in This Sporting Life.

Archer Winsten, writing in The New York Post, called it "a great, indelibly memorable performance". In the film, Harris is an athletic coal miner determined to play professional rugby. He establishes himself as one of the most brutal players in the business and quickly amasses a fortune. But at what price? Director Lindsay Anderson's thesis is that an individual must look within himself in order to change his lot in life; by the end of the film, Frank looks within himself at long last.

Nominated for an Oscar, Harris rapidly became a major Hollywood name, playing opposite the likes of Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston and Julie Andrews. Box office hits such as Hawaii, Camelot, A Man Called Horse, and The Molly Maguires followed, but the actor who loved the stage remained cynical about the big screen: "I hate movies," he once said. "They're a waste of time. I could be in a pub having more fun talking to idiots rather than sitting down and watching idiots perform." Always astringent about his fellow actors, he once said of Michael Caine, "He makes films you wouldn't rent on video."

Off screen, Harris was famous for his drinking, fighting, womanising and drug taking. Along with fellow debauchers Richard Burton, Oliver Reed and Peter O'Toole, he made scandalous headlines in the '60s and '70s while doing enormous damage to his health. Remarkably, he still managed to make commercially successful films, invest astutely in property and record a million-selling song, MacArthur Park.

In 1991, Harris got his second Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in The Field, an adaptation of John B. Keane's landmark play about the endless Irish hunger for land. For many years Bull McCabe (Harris) has cultivated a small patch of rented ground, turning barren rock into a fertile field. Now, however, the widow who owns the land plans to sell it. The tyrannical Bull shows up at the auction, certain in his belief that no one will dare bid against him. But he has not reckoned with a wealthy Irish-American (Tom Berenger), who intends to build on the land and bring new industry to the area. The Bull sends his son (Sean Bean) to "persuade" the American to withdraw his bid but things go horribly wrong. The obsession with land begets tragedy and madness.

Two years ago, Harris played Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator. Some critics thought he might earn yet another Academy Award nomination, but he did not. Most recently, he starred in the Harry Potter films as Professor Albus Dumbledore.

Richard Harris, 1930-2002, player, actor and character: "I swim in a pool of my own neurosis," he told a Hollywood reporter. "I carry love, grief, wrath deeply, like an Irishman."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 27 October 2002 at 6:55 AM | Permalink

Let's not forget Africa

The Ivory Coast is at war and the country is now divided into government and rebel held areas. The immediate cause was the mutiny on 19 September by about 750 troops who tried to seize installations in Abidjan, Bouake and Korhogo. In an interview with the BBC's Network Africa, a rebel called Corporal Kwasi said they had been treated like "slaves" by the government and were rebelling against "dictatorship hiding under the guise of democracy". The soldiers who started the rebellion were recruited by General Robert Guei during his 10 month period in power as the country's military ruler. Guei, by the way, was killed in Abidjan during the uprising. In the meantime, the former colonial power France has deployed troops to evacuate European and North American nationals, and has now sent a headquarters and logistical unit to help the Ivorian army.

In political terms, the country is split into those who support president Laurent Gbagbo and are mainly Christian and from the south and west and those who support opposition leader Alassane Ouattara and tend to be Muslims from the north. As the rebels in Abidjan were crushed, the security forces and civilian supporters of the government attacked shantytowns housing immigrants, many of whom were blamed by southern Ivorians for backing the rebels. The government-run television station has openly accused the more than two million Burkinabes living in Ivory Coast of being responsible for the country's problems. As we know, West Africa has a recent history of conflicts in one state spilling over into neighbouring countries (the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone), so there is an added danger to the growing tension between Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso.

The savagery of these conflicts is stunning. Take, for instance, this Economist report of what happened recently near the Congo town of Bunia, which borders Uganda:

"Last month, militiamen from the Lendu tribe, with painted faces and leaf circlets in their hair, broke into a hospital, where many of the staff and patients were from the rival Hemas, a tribe allied to the Ugandans. The Lendu warriors went from bed to bed, cutting up the occupants. By the time they had dragged out the children hiding in the roof and torched a nearby village, they had killed 1,000 people."

More than 30 years ago, an angry and unsparing V.S. Naipaul, portrayed the failure of postcolonial Africa with In A Free State. Last year's Nobel Prize winner gives us the horror and the squalor, the dislocation and the dread that are the legacy of empire. The line that separates privileged outsiders from terrified locals has never been depicted with such precision. When one thinks about the current Ivory Coast situation, the first paragraph is uncannily accurate:

"In this country in Africa there was a president and there was also a king. They belonged to different tribes. The enmity of the tribes was old, and with independence their anxieties about one another became acute. The king and the president intrigued with the local representatives of white governments. The white men who were appealed to liked the king personally. But the president was stronger; the new army was wholly his, of his tribe; and the white men decided that the president was to be supported. So that at last, this weekend, the president was able to send his army against the king's people."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 26 October 2002 at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Blog of the week II

"Objects may be closer than they appear" is the cryptic slogan adorning Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign. It's the kind of formulation one can ponder at length as it might refer to programming or it could be a reminder about the need to take care on life's highway.

Bowman is much in the news these days. As Network Design Manager for Terra Lycos, he recently masterminded the CSS/XHTML redesign of Wired News, a site that attracts up to 25 million page views a month. The redesign makes content accessible to all browsers and devices but hides its layout from old browsers that don?t support the W3C standards. Bowman and his team have written an informative rationale explaining why they took these steps and relating the new design to browser history.

In a DevEdge interview with CSS guru Eric Meyer about this huge project, Bowman paid tribute to the advances made in pure standards compliance by the blogging community:

"Wired News isn't the first website to be written in XHTML and to utilize CSS; many weblogs and designers' sites have already converted to these standards."

Some sites, however, still rely on tables for their layout and, embarrassingly, Rainy Day is one of them. Bowman's poses the following question to us laggards:

"Is it important that your documents be backward-compatible with older or specialized browsing environments? And forward-compatible with browser applications of the future? Are you comfortable with the idea that your documents may not look exactly the same in every browser?"

And the answer is, YES. Rainy Day has decided to take up the challenge and we promise a fully standards compliant site in the New Year.

Not content with redesigning Wired News, Bowman has reworked his own site with CSS and XHTML. It looks lovely and renders beautifully. As well as incorporating a blog, Stopdesign presents Bowman's articles, experiments, and thinking surrounding his experience and view of the world as a designer and problem solver.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 25 October 2002 at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Erotic rocks

Ever looked at a landscape and seen sensuality? Heather Firth has. The Northern Californian, who now lives in New York, photographed her first two "sexy" earth images while trekking the Sinai Desert in 1981. Since then, her "Earth Erotica" project has brought her back to her native Sierra Nevada Mountains, into Arizona and onto Colorado and New Mexico. In Zion National Park, Utah, she discovered lots of "hot rocks" while exploring Anasazi ruins. Take a peek now at some of her naughty rock shapes.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 24 October 2002 at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Optimism and Endurance

"Optimism is true moral courage," the Irish-born explorer Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) once said, and this was the credo he lived by throughout his remarkable life. Of his four expeditions to Antarctica, none was more remarkable than that which began on 8 August 1914, when he and a crew of 27 set sail from England on the Endurance for what they expected to be a six-month expedition. The goal: to become the first men to traverse the frozen continent via the South Pole, an 1,800-mile journey.

When they were in sight of the frozen continent, however, the Endurance became caught in floating pack ice and was ground to pieces. After watching the ship sink, Shackleton and his crew dragged three lifeboats in the direction of open water in hopes of sailing north to safety. Six days later, they were forced to abandon the march, and they made camp on an ice floe that then began drifting across the Antarctic Circle. Abandoning the floe, Shackleton guided his crew to Elephant Island, a barren rock and it was there that he had his boldest idea. He and five men would attempt to sail one of the life-boats 800 miles to South Georgia Island, where there was a year-round whaling camp. Miraculously, after 17 days at sea, they reached South Georgia. Unfortunately, they landed on the wrong coast. Exhausted, they began a 36-hour trek over the island's glaciers and into safety. After two attempts, Shackleton rescued his abandoned crew — two years after the Endurance set sail from England. It's one of the greatest survival stories and Shackleton's stature as a compassionate and courageous leader was established for all time.

From tomorrow until Sunday, the second Ernest Shackleton Autumn School will take place in Athy, County Kildare. There's a splendid programme of events, featuring talks ("Antarctic Exploration Ancient and Modern", by Dr. Robert Headland, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge), exhibitions and field trips to sites in south Kildare connected with Shackleton. The School will be officially opened on Friday evening by the Honourable Alexandra Shackleton, the explorer's grand-daughter, and then comes one of the highlights: the great Uilleann piper, Liam O' Flynn, who lives in Athy, will perform the world premiere of Endurance, a piece he has composed in honour of Shackleton. Lucky are those who can be present.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 23 October 2002 at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Booker fever

Tonight's the night. If you love books, you'll surely know that the winner of this year's Booker Prize will be announced at a ceremony in the British Museum, which will be broadcast live on BBC Two and BBC Four. To the winner goes prospects of vast sales, lucrative paperback rights, loads of publicity and £50,000 — a handsome £30,000 increase on the amount given to Peter Carey, who won last year. The generosity is directly related to the fact that the prize has a new sponsor, the Man financial group. Actually, the prize is now officially known as the Man Booker Prize.

And who's going to win the most prestigious award given to British, Irish and Commonwealth fiction writers? Well, it won't be Zadie Smith, Will Self or Howard Jacobson as neither of these celebrity authors made it from the "long list" to the "short list" issued on 24 September. By the way, William Boyd, Anita Brookner, Michael Frayn and Colin Thubron didn't even make the long list. Tonight's candidates are: Yann Martel for Life of Pi, Rohinton Mistry for Family Matters, Carol Shields for Unless, William Trevor for The Story of Lucy Gault, Sarah Waters for Fingersmith and Tim Winton for Dirt Music.

As soon as the short list was made public, bookmakers William Hill made Trevor 9-4 favourite to win, followed by Winton at 3-1 and Martel at 9-2. And then came a classic moment that showed how subversive our new technologies can be. The bookies reported a huge increase in bets on Martel's book — with some people betting up to £100. Why? Simple. The Booker site published a page declaring it had won the prize. The red-faced organisers said that the page had "accidentally" made its way online while being prepared. According to a spokeswoman, the web team had prepared six different pages saying each shortlisted author had won, to be ready for each possibility tonight. Happens, I suppose. Sounds, though, as if they need a little help with their content management system and editing workflow.

Anyway, William Hill immediately suspended betting, which was rather a pity as I was getting ready to have a flutter. My heart was saying William Trevor, partly because he was born in Mitchelstown, a County Cork market town located seven miles from where I was raised, and partly because he's been shortlisted three times already for writing that has a poetic beauty about it. That's the heart; the head says Sarah Waters. She's on a roll these days. Her first novel, the lesbian historical romance Tipping the Velvet, is being dramatised for television in an adaptation described gleefully as "filthy". Fingersmith is an intricate thriller set in the underworld of the "fingersmiths", or pickpockets, of 1860s London and the Daily Telegraph's Helen Brown has called it "unabashedly sensational".

Sounds exactly like the kind of "new era" writing that Booker jury chair Lisa Jardine favours.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 22 October 2002 at 7:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's Ryan, not Bryan

Back on 21 August, Rainy Day featured an item titled "Ryan and Bryan", which referred to separate November concerts in Munich by Ryan Adams and Bryan Adams. The advice for the fans was: "Don't mix up those dates, venues, names, tickets, now."

Seems there's someone in Nashville, who didn't get the message because during a Ryan Adams concert at the Ryman Auditorium last week, a confused fan yelled out a request for "Summer of '69," a Bryan Adams hit. Ryan was not amused and reacted with stream of bad language. He then ordered the house lights turned on and said he wouldn't play another note until the miscreant was found and removed. Once he was located, Ryan stepped forward and handed him $30 as a refund for the show. The venue manager stopped the fan on his way out, "apologized profusely", according to The Tennessean newspaper, and allowed him back into the concert. The fan kept Ryan's $30.

Will this start a wave of copycat requests for Bryan Adams songs at Ryan Adams concerts? Or, come to think of it, requests for Ryan Adams songs at Bryan Adams concerts? And if so, will there be personal refunds by the stars? I'm really looking forward now to the gig in the Circus Krone on 7 November. It's an evening with Ryan, not Bryan, by the way.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 21 October 2002 at 7:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Peace on Earth" and Bali

Maybe you've seen it, the "Peace on Earth" chain e-mail that's been going round for some weeks now. Recipients are asked to copy, rather than forward it, add their name to the list and send it to all the people they know. It begins: "Mourn the Victims. Stand for Peace. Islam is not the Enemy. War is NOT the Answer."

From now on, I will return the mail with a link to this
Sydney Morning Herald story:

"At 2pm yesterday, Craig Salvatori put his two young daughters on a plane at Bali airport, telling them he had to stay 'to look for mummy'. Three hours later he found her body in a morgue. Kathy, who would have turned 38 yesterday, was barely recognisable, except for some jewellery, her body so badly charred, her blonde hair blackened... The president of the Maroubra Lions rugby league club, John Costa, said seven families had immediate members missing. 'We look like we've lost five mothers, a father and two children ... missing this long after the event, it's not looking good.'"

I'm also thinking of sending this photo of the parents whose 19 year-old daughter was murdered by the Islamofascists.

And this isn't war?

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 20 October 2002 at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Derek Bell, RIP

Derek Bell was Ireland's best known harper. His membership of the Chieftains ensured such fame, but there were other reasons for his eminence, not least of which was that fact that he was a native of Belfast.
That city's connection with the brass-strung Irish harp was established in history when a group of its enlightened citizens arranged a Harper's Festival in 1792 and engaged the young Edward Bunting to note down the music. Arthur O'Neill of Tyrone and Denis Hempson of Derry were among those who played and all involved must have known that this was going to be the final gathering of its kind. The old Gaelic order, with its harper patrons, faced extinction and the race was on to save some of its glory for posterity. The young Wolfe Tone, who would lead the United Irishmen against the British in 1798, dropped by and sensed doom in the air. "Strum, strum and be hanged," was his comment. Six years later he was dead; his vision of an independent Ireland shared by Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter in ruins. The Act of Union with Great Britain in 1800 was the final scene in the tragedy.

The Belfast that Derek Bell was born into in 1935 shared few of the values of its 18th century elite, but its love of music remained and the child prodigy, who wrote his first concerto at 12, was rewardeded with scholarships and education, and later, employment with the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra. The attraction of the ancient music grew, however, and in 1972 he joined The Chieftains, a group that had come together in Dublin in the late 50s while playing with Ceoltori Cualann, a folk orchestra led by Sean O Riada.

International recognition came following the group's contribution to Mike Oldfield's Ommadawn album and the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's movie, Barry Lyndon. Then came collaborations with the likes of Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder, Rickie Lee Jones and Bonnie Raitt. Particularly satisfying for Bell was the success of the 1988 Irish Heartbeat recording with fellow Belfast artist Van Morrison. Two years ago he was made an MBE for his contribution to traditional Irish and classical music. He had nine solo albums to his credit — as well as more than 30 recordings with the Chieftains.

On and off stage, Derek Bell dressed in conservative suits and looked more like a mild-mannered banker than a celebrity musician. It was his loud argyle socks that revealed the boyish sense of humour behind the staid visage. His death in the year that the group is celebrating its 40th anniversary is particularly sad.

"His passing will leave a silence that will never be filled. Anyone who has had the honour of meeting Derek will know that the world will be a much less interesting place without him. We will all miss him terribly," said the statement issued by the group members Paddy Moloney, Sean Keane, Martin Fay, Matt Molloy, Kevin Conneff and former members Michael Tubridy and Sean Potts.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 19 October 2002 at 9:13 AM | Permalink

Blog of the week I

Each week Rainy Day proposes to take a look at a site that deserves to be singled out for its contribution to the information ecosystem. Kicking off our series is Robot Wisdom, the blog Jorn Barger started in 1998. It was Barger who coined the term "weblog" and that should be reason enough to earn him a place in the pantheon of bloggers, but there are other convincing grounds for including him in our list. Take, for instance, his James Joyce marginalia, especially his "online shorter Finnegans Wake". Of this, Barger modestly says: "All I've done is trim phrases and sections, smoothing the larger gaps with short summaries. In general, this restores the sentence structures of David Hayman's First Draft Versionof FW [FDV]. But I've also tried to include all the most beautiful sounding phrases, so when the sense is obscure, just listen to the sounds.]"

Along with hewing a leftist political line that is often critical of Israeli actions, a stance that has earned him the wrath of warbloggers such as Matt Welch, Barger can be relied upon for a steady stream of info-babble, cam-girls and eclectic interests. Typical of the latter is his "Marta Sebestyen resources on the Web". The Hungarian folk singer came to fame on the soundtracks of such films as Robert Altman's Pret-a-Porter and Anthony Minghella's English Patient, and Barger, typically, is exhaustive in his listing of her recordings.

At first glance, Robot Wisdom's homepage design is forbidding in its austerity but closer inspection reveals an interface crafted to delight the infovore. There's a lot going on here and nothing is quite as simple as it appears. That link to Salon, for example, leads to a reformatted view of the zine's homepage without the ads.

Barger's homepage links are gems of compressed comment:

"Brilliant Jensen analysis of the crisis in US democracy"
"Short, difficult household-alchemy poem"
"Hashish-club for writers in 1840s Paris"
"Ghastly Stella-McCartney fashions"

Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom is an homage to information that places function above form and while this isn't everyone's dish today, if your aim is to construct a blog that has integrity and influence you will gain from studying Barger's approach.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 18 October 2002 at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Moore's Law in Munich

So there I was yesterday, attending Systems 2002, which, after the spring CEBIT bash in Hanover, is Germany's most prestigious IT trade fair. And how was the mood at this autumnal gathering of the computer industry's elite in Munich? Astonishingly different to that of last year, I can tell you. Back then, people were still upbeat and insisting that good times would be rolling in a year or so. That guarded optimism has been replaced by downright pessimism because the bottom of the decline is still not in sight. Droves of exhibitors have stayed away from Systems 2002 and attendance is way down. The debate among many of those I spoke to was whether the IT industry had become a mature one or a slow-growth one.

To counteract the doom and gloom, the fair's organizers have talked up mobile phone technology. The abbreviation of the moment is MMS, which stands for multimedia messaging services, and the equipment makers and network operators present at the fair are betting heavily on its swift acceptance. MMS, by the way, is an extension of SMS (short message service), with the idea being that users with specially equipped phones will be able to send digital photos, audio and video to other handsets.

However, given the complex deals that need to be ironed out between international providers, the inevitable high costs of the services to users, the large subsidies needed for the handsets and the reality that MMS can't be expected to make any significant market until the end of 2003, this is not exactly the solution to current problems. And anyway, why should we pay attention to the telecoms operators and their predictions after their elementary failure to grasp the meaning of Moore's Law? You many remember that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore established some 35 years ago that computing capacity doubles every 18 months. This is the unrelenting rule driving the rapid pace of technology development. And what did the telecoms operators do during their massive 1990's expansion? They took on enormous long-term debt and spent a great part of the money on computer equipment that was experiencing almost immediate depreciation and obsolescence. So, having helped create the industry's financial crisis they now expect us to pay their way out of it by sending snapshots and songs to each other. Hello?

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 17 October 2002 at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quick t(r)ips: Rome and Wexford

Life's far too short and much too busy to go everywhere so thank God for the Internet, I say. Take my surfing last night. I began in Rome, where I stopped at the Palazzo Ruspoli on the Via della Fontanella Borghese. Until 23 February it's hosting "The Borghias: The Art of Power", a truly must-see exhibition.

As we all know, the Borghias were the most decadent of Italy's great Renaissance families and in the period 1400 to 1500, when the world was on the threshold of the modern era, they intrigued, fornicated, poisoned and governed with an exuberance that has not been matched since. The exhibition presents masterpieces by Botticelli, Pinturicchio and Benozzo Gozzoli, as well as rare manuscripts and precious furniture. Filippino Lippi's Santa Maria Maddalena (1498-1500) is sensational and you shouldn't leave the site without gazing at length upon its harrowingly beautiful depiction of human frailty.

And then, with a click of the mouse, I was in Wexford, that lovely Irish coastal town, which devotes itself for two weeks each autumn to operas most people have never heard of. This year there's Mercadante's Il Giuramento, Martinu's Mirandola and, best of all, Manon Lescaut — not the well known settings by Massenet or Puccini but that of Auber. So, if you're fed up with Le Figaro and you're bored with La Boheme, the Wexford Opera Festival is were you'll recover your appetite for music and life. Speaking of which, the site mentions a "Late Nights" series introduced by a woman wearing a shortened Shakespearean costume being admired by three fluffy rams. The old Borghias would have approved.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 16 October 2002 at 8:02 AM | Permalink

The (new) Lady of D'Olier Street

The weekend appointment of Geraldine Kennedy as editor of Ireland's most influential newspaper, The Irish Times, is a milestone in the Republic's media history, as she has become the first woman to hold such a senior post in the annals of Irish newspapers. Kennedy, the paper's political editor, replaces Conor Brady who saw daily circulation expand from 80,000 copies to almost 120,000 during his 16 years at the top. But Brady's reign ended under darkening clouds — "The Old Lady of D'Olier Street" was forced to endure unprecedented public criticism of its management strategy and 250 staff were let go earlier this year in a dramatic attempt to cut costs. And then there was the embarrassing and expensive scandal involving managing director Nick "The English Impatient" Chapman during which the paper's reputation for prudence was severely damaged.

So, Kennedy is taking over at a difficult time and things won't be any easier for her given reports that Maeve Donovan, the paper's managing director, wanted The Irish Times to begin "with a clean slate" and had favoured an outsider for the job. And, of course, Kennedy will have to work with the unsuccessful internal candidates for the job: columnist Fintan O'Toole and associate editor, Cliff Taylor.

Back in August, Taylor was regarded as favourite for the editor's chair but ultimately he lacked the public profile of his rivals. O'Toole, on the other hand, is a brilliant and popular columnist, but his leftist tendencies frighten the business community. His antipathy towards Fianna Fᩬ, the majority party in the ruling coalition government, goes down well in the paper, but Kennedy has more impressive credentials in that area. She became a household name in the 1980s after clashing with the then Fianna Fail government, which tapped her phone to establish the source of leaks. In 1987, she successfully sued the state for invasion of privacy and in the same year she was elected to the Dail as a Progressive Democrat deputy and became the party spokesperson on foreign affairs and Northern Ireland.

Geraldine Kennedy is a formidable persona with many friends, but the list of her enemies inside and outside The Irish Times is impressive.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 15 October 2002 at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Houellebecq's eerie prescience

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically," begins Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform. Having written last Friday about the trials in France of Houellebecq and Oriana Fallaci, I didn't think that I'd be returning the case for a while, but the mass murder in Bali on Saturday night should serve to remind us how eerily prescient Houellebecq's pre-11 September novel really was.

The main character in Platform, Michel, is a civil servant who works for the Ministry of Culture in Paris. Bored, amoral and approaching middle age he has given up on life. But when his hated father dies, leaving him money, Michel travels to Thailand, where he experiments with prostitutes and meets Valerie, who works in the tourist industry. Michel comes to believe that Asian sex tourism is the antidote to Western apathy so, with Valerie's support, he establishes a sex-tour company, Eldorador Aphrodite. Valerie's bosses are delighted to turn their ailing Club Med-style resorts into brothels as the flesh trade means "no more salaries to be paid to registered pediatric nurses or windsurfing instructors; nor to specialists in ikebana, ceramics or painting on silk".

The vision is destroyed, however, by the intervention of militants acting in the name of Islam, that "inhuman murderous absurdity", as one character calls it, who launch a devastating terrorist attack on Eldorador Aphrodite. As mutilated foreigners lie in the wreckage of the bombed club, Michel hears "the genuine screams of the damned".

That Saturday night's victims were mostly young men and women enjoying themselves in a Bali disco adds to the monstrousness of the crime committed by those acting in pursuit of their perverse ideology. Houellebecq, a disillusioned former communist, believes that all plans to remake the world for the better are doomed to failure. So what does life mean? In Platform he answers: to live in this world is to suffer.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 14 October 2002 at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Europe, Ireland and correct plurals

This was the week in which the European Commission announced that it expects 10 countries — Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Cyprus and Malta — to be able to conclude membership negotiations at an EU summit in December and to join in 2004. But.

If Ireland's voters next Saturday reject (for a second time) the Nice Treaty, which governs enlargement, the project faces an uncertain future. Another Irish "No" might mean the junking of the treaty and the delaying of enlargement by two to four years. The ten candidate countries wouldn't like that. They might even give up on the idea.

And if the Irish remain stubbornly rejectionist? In Brussels, "radical integrationist" voices are growing. These want to speed up the enlargement process dramatically with a new treaty containing the essential elements of Nice required for the operation of an expanded EU. Naturally, the Irish and other small member states would see this as a ploy for getting around a democratic vote. Opponents of the radicals argue that another Irish rejection would have to be treated as an appeal for slower integration.

Meanwhile in Ireland, the government has set up a referendum web site for those of us who aren't yet fully informed yet about the "Twenty-sixth amendment of the Constitution Bill, 2002", to give Saturday's vote its proper title. The FAQ page contains this vital information:

Q. Is the word "referendums" the correct plural of "referendum"?
The following is an extract from the CD version of the Oxford English Dictionary in relation to this question -

referendum (rEf@"rEnd@m). Pl. referendums, -enda.
[L., gerund or neut. gerundive of referre to refer.]
1. The practice or principle (in early use chiefly associated with the Swiss constitution) of submitting a question at issue to the whole body of voters.
In terms of its Latin origin, referendums is logically preferable as a modern plural form meaning ballots on one issue (as a Latin gerund referendum has no plural); the Latin plural gerundive referenda, meaning 'things to be referred', necessarily connotes a plurality of issues. Those who prefer the form referenda are presumably using words like agenda and memoranda as models. Usage varies at the present time (1981), but The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1981) recommends referendums, and this form seems likely to prevail."

An educated electorate can be trusted to make the right decision. Right?

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 13 October 2002 at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MT 2.5 + ECOS

It has been a week of welcome developments. First came the release of version 2.5 of Movable Type (MT), the content management system that drives Rainy Day and hundreds, nay, thousands of other blogs. What began as a hobby for Ben and Mena Trott, that talented and handsome San Francisco couple, has become a business of the nicest kind — one that allows people from all over the world to fashion and exchange ideas while drawing upon the immense power of the global network.

My upgrade to MT 2.5 was not without its perplexing moments, but the MT Support Forum is staffed by kind and brilliant people who can whip up an answer quicker than you can say "Movable Type" when confronted with this kind of scary error message:

"Unsupported driver MT::ObjectDriver::DBI::mysql: Can't locate MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm"

Everything is running smoothly now and I look forward to exploring such exciting MT 2.5 additions as "TrackBack auto-discovery", which can automatically find TrackBack ping URLs based on permalinks in entry bodies, and the whole localization side of things: the MT interface is now available in multiple languages, including Spanish, thanks to Eduardo Arcos Barredo.

Speaking of Spanish, in this week of good news ECOS, that excellent Munich-based magazine for learners and lovers of the language of Cervantes and Lorca, Ra?d Morientes, is now online. At a time when many people will be celebrating Columbus' discovery of the New World, Juan Ram󮠇arc��Ober and his colleagues have put together a site that reflects the wealth of the Iberian heritage while making admirable use of the technologies which are opening up new worlds for so many of us. To all at ECOS: ?Mucha suerte!

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 12 October 2002 at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Le politiquement correct

Yet another writer faces criminal charges in France for speaking out against extreme Islam. The latest case involves The Rage and The Pride, the best-selling novel by Italian writer Oriana Fallaci. One plaintiff wants the book banned in France altogether. Two others are demanding disclaimers that its statements about Islam don't accurately reflect the Muslim religion. Fallaci, 72, who has cancer, was not present during the opening hearing. But her lawyer, the exquisitely named Christophe Bigot, denounced the trial as a campaign for political correctness.

The Fallaci trial echoes another that opened last month against French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Like Fallaci, Houllebecq faces charges of "provoking discrimination, hatred or violence" toward a group because of their religion. But this time, the charges relate to Houellebecq's statements during an interview, rather than the controversial passages about Islam in his book Platform. A verdict is expected on 22 October.

Ah, the Thought Police and writers. It's an old story. As Orwell wrote in 1984: "How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 11 October 2002 at 6:36 AM | Permalink

Cardenal Mendoza

"Claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy". Samuel Johnson

Late last night, at the end of a full day, I poured a snifter of Cardenal Mendoza for Mrs Fitzgerald and another for myself. Cardenal Mendoza is the darkest of all the Jerez brandies and it is distilled by vintners Sanchez Romate. This has to rank amongst the greatest spirits of Spain. The nose is spectacular with hints of dates, plums and roasted nuts; the texture is rich and creamy with a commanding, lingering finish, and the flavours include apricot, fig, peach, smoke, toffee and honey. Here is a brandy that makes one eager to be heroic in the Johnsonian sense.

The pleasures of the brandied evening were further enhanced by the music of Alboka, whose latest CD, Lorius, I listened to courtesy of my charming colleague Enrique Recabarren. With Juan Arriola (violin), Alan Griffin (alboka) and Joxan Goikoetxea (accordion), Alboka play a distinctive form of Basque music that's full of an Iberian passion tinged with Celtic melancholy. On this recording, they're joined by some first-class guest musicians, including Marta Sebestyen from Hungary, one of finest singers of contemporary folk music.

Cardenal Mendoza, Alboka and then, to bed.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 10 October 2002 at 7:13 AM | Permalink

Logical positivism

Who has time these days to read the philosophers? Busy bloggers would benefit from a little Hume, Nietzsche and Sartre, of course, but with so many sites to visit and so little time...,well, you know how it is. We should, therefore, be grateful to Glyn Hughes and his "Squashed Philosophers" project where the great works are: ?Meticulously condensed to retain the style, substance, format, arguments and ideas of the originals, while ditching the bulk of the verbiage?.

A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth + Logic is particulary good. It was Ayer who said: ?The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else.? Last year, Grove Press published A.J. Ayer: A Life by Ben Rogers, which contains this marvellous anecdote from 1987, two years before Ayer died:

"At yet another party he had befriended Sanchez [Fernando Sanchez, a fashionable designer famous for women's underclothes]. Ayer was now standing near the entrance to the great white living-room of Sanchez's West 57th Street apartment, chatting to a group of young models and designers, when a woman rushed in saying that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer went to investigate and found Mike Tyson forcing himself on a young south London model called Naomi Campbell, then just beginning her career. Ayer warned Tyson to desist. Tyson: 'Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.' Ayer stood his ground. 'And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.' Ayer and Tyson began to talk. Naomi Campbell slipped out."

Ayer was 77 when he went up against Tyson. Logical positivism won the round.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 9 October 2002 at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My wordrobe

I was blogrolling (surfing blogs) at the weekend and came across "wordrobe". What I thought was misspelling is, in fact, a noun that refers to a person's vocabulary. It's a mix of "word" and "wardrobe". Example: "He blogs every day so he needs an extensive wordrobe." Silly? Maybe. But it also shows that English is in motion, as football players (American) would say.

Talking of new words, back in the boom, Douglas Coupland wrote the book that captured the Zeitgeist, Generation X, and created a noun that brilliantly summed up so much of the '90s by putting the prefix "Mc-" and "job" together to give us "McJob". It means work in a service related field with no prestige, low pay and little opportunity for advancement: "...a message that I suppose irked Dag, who was bored and cranky after eight hours of working his McJob (p.5)." Inspired, no doubt, by Coupland, an anonymous genius then combined "Macintosh" (overpriced computer) and "trash" to create "Macintrash". Example: "I hate working on these feckin' Macintrashes!" The great thing about this word is that it is so accurate, as anyone who's had to deal with those machines will know.

What do you call a member of a street gang? Careful, unless you're carrying a piece. One word is "loc", which comes from the Spanish word "loco" meaning "crazy." So we get: "Yo! Don't mess with him. He's a loc." The plural might be locs, but in gangland that word also means dark sunglasses: "?Donde estᠭis locs? ("Where are my sun glasses?")

As we can see, English is a moving vehicle. All aboard?

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 8 October 2002 at 7:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Of algorithms and editors

At the bottom of the new Google news service homepage there's the proud announcement: "This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors." The future of journalism? The recent past, with its idiosyncratic editors, is more colourful. Take Max Hastings, for instance.

In a surprise move in 1985, the owners of that British institution, the Daily Telegraph, offered Hastings the editorship of the paper. It was an honour to be placed at the helm, but it was more of a challenge than he was prepared for because the Telegraph was an ailing business time-warped in the 1950s.

"Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers," is Hastings' account of the decade he spent remaking the Telegraph and it will be published Friday. It promises to make enjoyable reading. Here's Hastings on what confronted him during his early days in the editor's chair:

"I recognised the visual transformation of the paper as a very big job. The old Telegraph was not so much a badly designed newspaper as a paper that prided itself on having no design at all. Departments suited themselves about typefaces and headings. Pictures were grudgingly accorded whatever space news allowed."

"The main story on the front page seldom occupied more than two columns, around which 18 or 19 stories and a mean little picture were crammed in. Showbusiness, which by the millennium would increasingly preoccupy even the allegedly serious British press, scarcely got a look in. The Academy Awards rated just 300 words in the Telegraph of March 24, 1986."

Once he had fired the old guard and established a working relationship with Conrad Black, the paper's owner, Hastings set about remaking the Telegraph. Soon, he was revelling in the power that the editorship of one of the world's greatest newspapers conveys:

"There is an intoxication about access, about being told from the very top what is going on (even if the proffered version of events is wilfully or involuntarily deceitful) that makes almost all men and women who experience its charms reluctant resign them. It was the addictive lure of 'knowing' that did more that anything else to persuade me to continue editing newspapers for at least a decade longer than I first intended."

Mention of Max Hastings reminds of Derek Davies, the former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, who died recently. Under his leadership, the Review was transformed from a small specialist publication into a profitable, glossy news weekly read throughout the world. Davies hired western and Asian talent and guided them masterfully in making a magazine that not only expatriates came to rely on but also Asians whose media were either parochial or corrupt.

In his own way, Davies was a blogger. Each week he wrote his own column, "Travellers Tales", which was part diary, part commentary, and famous for the "fractured English" that is the reality of Asia. One of his favourites: "Sign in a Bangkok hotel lobby: 'Please leave your values at the front desk',".

It will be a while before algorithms replace editors of the calibre of Hastings and Davies.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 7 October 2002 at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Current listening

It was the almost-perfect album So that converted Peter Gabriel from star to superstar in 1986. He released Us in 1992 and that was it, then, for ten years. Well, sort of. There was OVO, his music for the Millennium Dome show, plus the soundtrack for the film Rabbit Proof Fence and there were lots of things in between with Real World and Womad, including remarriage and fatherhood. Not much time there for recording a new album. The interlude is now over, however, and Peter Gabriel is back with Up.

A decade in distillation. Was it worth the wait? On first listening, I didn't think so. The album cover, with its dominant grey and Man Ray-like tears on an out-of-focus face, hints that there's music within which is not for summer parties. Death and Birth are subjects that demand serious treatment and both set the tone for the album. So we get music that's dense and intense with lots of soaring vocals and big piano chords. There's dance stuff as well but even that's heavy. "The Barry Williams Show" is a swipe at the Jerry Springer plague of confessional TV: "watching people bleeding and turning it into cash." We live in an age when television executives feel it proper and profitable to turn dysfunctional lives into mass entertainment. Peter Gabriel isn't willing to buy it.

Through the recordings of Real World, Gabriel has expanded our appreciation of the diversity of the human voice, be it that of Yungchen Lhamo from Tibet or Iarla ӠLionᩲd from Ireland, and he calls on his catalogue to add depth to Up. "Sky Blue" is a sonic battle and then the Blind Boys of Alabama arrive to lift the chorus onto a new plane. In "Signal to Noise" it's the posthumous voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn that gives redemptive power to the song.

Somewhat inaccessible at first, Up repays close re-listening.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 6 October 2002 at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Job of the week

Spokesperson/Head of Information Section United Nations Office of the Humanitarian Co-ordinator, Iraq (UNOHCI) Minimum salary: $83,255.00.

Based in Baghdad, and working under the direct authority of the United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq, the successful applicant will direct all activities of the UNOHCI Information Section. Note: "The incumbent is often required to deal with situations not covered completely by this instruction."

Tasks will include: drafting the UNOHCI master plan for public information activities and establishing the office; co-ordinating all internal and external UNOHCI information activities; providing information and giving interviews/briefings for the Iraqi and international media related to the implementation of Security Council Resolution 986; overseeing production of daily information products for UN staff in Iraq; producing press and information packs for journalists and the general public; preparing updates for the diplomatic community and NGOs in Baghdad; maintaining regular liaison with the Iraqi Ministry of Information; working closely with UN Information Officers; supervising the work of international and national information staff in Baghdad; providing guidance for information activities in the northern governorates.

You'll need an advanced degree in a relevant field, prior experience as spokesperson or similar function, good knowledge of the United Nations and fluency in English and French.

Send your CV, referring to vacancy number HCI-02-001, to: Human Resources Planning and Development Section, PMSS/DPKO Room # DC1-980, 1 United Nations Plaza New York, NY 10017, USA, or e-mail it to: dpko-missions-internalva@un.org

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 5 October 2002 at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Mot du jour: "joueb"

Take the words "web" and "log" and you get a global phenomenon called "blog". It's not the prettiest of terms but it does the job. English continues to be the No. 1 blogging language but other tongues are getting in on the act. In Spanish, "bitacora" has established itself as the accepted substitute for "blog", but the question is not fully settled in French.

The leading contender, and a word that's very much in the spirit of "blog", is "joueb", a contraction of "journal web". A search for "joueb" on Google produces more than 5,000 results. Challenging "joueb" for the title is "carnet", a word from journalism, where a "carnet mondain" is a society column. Xtof originally was "Un blogue, un weblog, un joueb" but now calls itself a "Carnet Web," meaning a "Web notebook/Web journal".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 4 October 2002 at 7:21 AM | Permalink

Loadsa dosh for cheeky chappie

Does the music industry see the glass as half full or half empty? Surely, it has to be the former based on yesterday's reports that Robbie Williams will trouser £80 million from EMI Records. Robbie's a bit of lad, plays football, sings (his fourth solo album, the Sinatra tribute Swing When You're Winning, sold more than 5.5 million copies) and now he signs what is believed to be the UK's biggest record deal with £10 million up front, £15 million on completion of the first record and £55 million for the remaining three records.

One thing Williams hasn't done is convinced the American market that he's more than just a cheeky chappie. On the US side of the Atlantic people reacted more in perplexity than in amazement when they heard his version of My Way. And EMI? In a year in which it paid Mariah Carey $50 million to sever her contract after the failure of the Glitter album, it has cut 1,800 jobs and endured a string of flops.

Ultimately, EMI's problem is not so much the marketing of Robbie Williams and the recovery of its investment, but the rise of Kazaa. Over five million copies of its upgraded file sharing software, Kazaa V2, were downloaded last week and with more than 120 million downloads so far, it has become one of the most popular pieces of software ever created.

Although EMI, Warner Music and the others managed to shut down Napster, their celebrations can't have been that euphoric because Kazaa V2 is Napster on steroids. Its new "playlist" search function effectively provides a simple way to download entire albums at once rather than track by track, and by allowing users to rate files for quality, V2 helps them spot dummy or corrupted versions of files planted by the record companies to frustrate would-be downloaders.

File-swappers should note, however, that "free" often comes at a price today and that means "parasite-ware", sometimes called "stealware", which piggybacks on the installation. In the case of Kazaa, the parasite is SaveNow. Still, it's easy to remove from the Windows operating system. Just click on Start. Click on Settings. Click on Control Panel. Double-click on Add/Remove Programs. Click on SaveNow. Click on Add/Remove.

John Schwartz and Bob Tedeschi wrote an excellent article for the New York Times (registration required) called "New Software Quietly Diverts Sales Commissions". They point out the perils of "parasite-ware", identify the main culprits and show how they can be removed from one's computer.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 3 October 2002 at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Roy's rage

"Luckily, power doesn't last forever. One day, this powerful empire, like all others before it, will overstretch itself and implode. The first cracks are visible. The war against terror casts its net ever wider, and the hearts of American corporations bleed. A world ruled by a handful of greedy bankers and company bosses, that no one elected, cannot endure."

Phew! Strong stuff, that. Who's the writer? Why it's that bane of globalization, Arundhati Roy, celebrity author of the award-winning novel "The God of Small Things".

The quote above is taken from a piece by Roy titled "How one sells a war", which appears in today?s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The caption on the accompanying photo of the Indian writer is "Anti-Americanism — an American ideology?" and this allows her to ask:

"What does anti-Americanism mean? That one does not like listening to jazz? That one is against freedom of opinion? That one does not adore Toni Morrison or John Updike? Does it mean that one does not admire the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have protested against nuclear arms?"

She continues: "To accuse one of anti-Americanism is an expression of limited imagination, the inability to see the world in any way other than that proscribed by the establishment: Who isn't good, is evil. Who isn't for us, is for the terrorists.?

And then, this: "Following 11 September and the war against terror, hidden hand and fist are revealed. Clear to be seen is how the free market, like America's other weapons, descends upon the developing world with a bitter smile. 'The Task That Never Ends', is America's perfect war, the vehicle of unending, expanding American imperialism. In Urdu, profit is called 'faida', and 'Al-qaida' means 'word: God's word'. Many Indians regard the war against terror as a battle between Al Qaida and Al Faida. Word versus profit. At the moment, it looks as if Al Faida will win the upper hand."

She ends by saying that Soviet communism didn't fail because it was intrinsically evil, but because it contained the flaw that allowed too few to gain too much power. American capitalism will share the same fate, she predicts. In Roy's case, "predicts" means "wishes".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 2 October 2002 at 7:55 AM | Permalink

Beating back the spam bots

OK, you could say that I was naive by including my e-mail address there in the left-hand box for you contact me with your Rainy Day feedback. I mean, we all know that the spam bots are out day and night harvesting the Net for e-mail addresses that are sold on and then suffocated with junk mail. But then again, I wanted to believe that this modest blog would somehow escape the attention of the evil bots. No way.

Yesterday's 67 unwanted mails forced me to face facts. There was a "Want a BIG PENIS?" and a "We list foreign companies on U.S. stock exchanges" plus a "Job Alert" as well as a mysterious "**You are approved!**", not forgetting the strange "you really turn me on amfwtepntoqggsh". But it was the "Strictly Confidential" mail from Dr. Clarke Mbu (PhD) of Victoria Island, Lagos that convinced me to act. The good (?) doctor began:

"First I must solicit your utmost confidentiality in this transaction. I am
making this contact with you based on reliable information available to us, courtesy of the internet business index and confirmed locally by our chamber of commerce and industry, thus we are convinced that you would be capable of providing us with a solution to a money transfer transaction of US$36,400,000.00 (thirty-Six Million, Four Hundred Thousand United States Dollars)."

And on it went like that, getting more fantastic and outrageous with each line. Now one way of avoiding such by-products of the spam bots is to disguise your e-mail address on your site like this: "blogger-at-hotmail-dot-com". The bots can't do anything with that, but many visitors either find it impossible to understand or a chore to change into the functioning e-mail address. There is another way, thanks to Dan P. Benjamin's Hivelogic Email Address Encoder.

As Dan says on his site: "While no solution can create an address impervious to harvesting, this web-based tool will encode your email address using Numerical Equivalents and wrap the result in JavaScript. The final product will be rendered correctly by your browser, but will be nearly-indecipherable by most email harvesting robots." If we take the above fictitious address and follow the simple instructions for feeding it into Dan's encoder, we get:

Paste that into your page and listen to those bots howl with rage. You can see how Dan's service works by checking the "contact him" mouseover in the Rainy Day contact box at the top of this page and then clicking on the link. Only together, can we fight the spammers.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nice and (un)easy in Ireland

The front-page headline in yesterday's Irish Examiner ran "Foreign worker numbers will be controlled after Nice says Ahern". How is one supposed to interpret this? Well, if we add the date October 19 to the picture things begin to swim into view.

On that day, the Irish electorate will be given a second opportunity to have its say about the future shape of Europe when the Treaty of Nice, which determines the timetable for European Union enlargement, is put to a referendum. Much to the horror of the country's elites and Brussels bureaucrats, Irish voters rejected the treaty last June and it looked for a while as if the grand European plan was heading off the rails. But the EU can be resolute when it comes to getting what it wants so the Irish are being bidden once more to brave the elements and do "the right thing".

Speaking Sunday at the launch of the governing Fianna Fᩬ party's campaign for a Yes vote, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Bertie Ahern, delivered one of those statements that makes even George W. Bush appear coherent: "Every walk of life has its pundits. But our country's future is not a game of chance."

He then focussed on immigration, a sure sign of how desperate he is to get the result he needs. Tough talk on (Eastern European) labour mobility is cheap but it just might convince scared voters to opt for a "Yes" instead of a "No". Then again, it might not, because the mood in Ireland these days is anything but happy. As Brian Lavery points out in The New York Times (registration required), a succession of scandals has tainted Ahern's government to the point where voters may use the referendum to vent their dissatisfaction.

Next week, Rainy Day will look at the Irish referendum and try to puzzle out how one of the main beneficiaries of European infrastructural aid could contemplate biting the hand that has fed it so well and often for 30 years.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 1 October 2002 at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)