In a very comprehensive and very moving article titled The Cult of Nic Jones, music journalist Colin Irwin recalls the event that broke the hearts of so many fans of the English singer and guitarist: "And then it happened — one desperate February night in 1982. He'd been playing at Glossop Folk Club in Derbyshire and was almost back home in Cambridgeshire when his car was involved in a headlong collision with an articulated lorry. The theory is that Nic fell asleep at the wheel but nobody knows for sure, least of all Nic, who remembers nothing about the accident or any of the horrors that followed. His injuries were massive and his career was in tatters..."

"The 'never give offence' brigade imagines that a more plural society requires a greater imposition of censorship. In fact it is precisely because we do live in a plural society that we need the fullest extension possible of free speech. In a homogenous society in which everyone thought in exactly the same way then the giving of offence would be nothing more than gratuitous. But in the real world where societies are plural, then it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And we should deal with those clashes rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. The right to 'subject each others' fundamental beliefs to criticism' is the bedrock of an open, diverse society. Or, as Rushdie put it in his essay In Good Faith, human beings 'understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.'

Rainy Day does not set out to offend, but it insists upon the right to offend. We wish to say the unsayable.

"By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.

We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate."

Rewiring society? That's a pretty big claim to make about social networking. And there's more. According to Zuckerberg, a more open and connected world will "help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services", and Facebook will be right in the middle, of course. But it gets better because all this social networking will "bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government".

"By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few."

The person who wrote this is the CEO of a company with a projected market value of $100 billion that affects nearly a billion people. And he now wants to play a central role in how societies develop and are governed. This is an audacious move. Mark Zuckerberg is 28.

Today, 1 February is the St Brigid's Day Raftery commemorated in Anois teacht an Earraigh, but there's certainly no evidence of the coming of spring where your writer is typing this. The temperature is firmly under zero and while it's not as cold in Ireland, the weather there is anything but springy. To be sure, there's "a stretch in the evening", as the people say, but conditions are chilling. An unscientific analysis of Raftery's poem then might lead one to conclude that our winters are getting colder, not warmer, as some alarmists would have us believe. The poet certainly suggests that it was quite mild in early February around the end of the 18th- and the beginning of the 19th century.

Why would the wandering poet Raftery have been so aware of St Brigid's Day? Well, back in his time, when Ireland was an agrarian society, the first of February was considered the start of the growth season. The date had long been held sacred as Imbolg, the Celtic festival of Spring, but after Christianity arrived, Saint Brigid was honoured instead of the pagan gods. She was a fifth-century mystic who became the patron saint of blacksmiths and healers. By the way, my mother will attend the "blessing of the scarves" in the local church today and, like many believers, she considers the wearing of such a scarf to be far better protection against a sore throat that any amount of antibiotics. Saint Brigid was also the patron saint of poets, a second reason, perhaps, for Raftery's mentioning of her feast day.

Being a saint, Brigid was able to perform miracle. Most of hers involved the multiplication of food such as providing butter for the poor. It is said that she once caused cows to give milk three times the same day to enable visiting bishops to have enough to drink. As Irish monks wandered through Europe, they carried their belief in Brigid with them. In England, many churches were dedicated to her, most notably St. Bride's Church in London's Fleet Street. Designed by Wren, it was the spiritual home of the printing and media trades for 200 years. And now it's in cyberspace — where most hacks and ink-stained drudges (St. Matt?) hang out.

Apart from the blessed scarves, the last vestiges of the Brigid cult in Ireland today are plaited crosses fashioned from rushes. In 1961, when the Republic decided to launch a national television service, the St Brigid's Cross was chosen as its logo and it remained part of the station's corporate identity for many years before being reduced to such a stylized form as to be all but unrecognizable. Then it was disappeared.

Snippet: "The German solution will only cause a recession, or more recessions, in the periphery. This will cause money to flow into Germany, not out of Germany, because the risk of default in the periphery increases and in time much of Europe will begin to look like Greece, teetering on the edge. As money flows into Germany, German bond yields fall, Greece will default, and this will give the others permission to do likewise because a default in Greece sets off a domino effect all over Europe because Europeans will say, 'Well, if the Greeks can do it, why can't we?' Is it any wonder right now that the price of gold is firm, that the yield on German bonds is falling and that the euro is weakening against the dollar?" He's onto something.

Seseña, in Toledo province, is home to a property development that encapsulates the madness which has led to Spain's dramatic fall from prosperity to poverty. Of the 13,000 apartments in Residencial Francisco Hernando, barely ten percent are occupied, and anyone who dares venture into this spectral space cannot wait to find the exit sign. But this is not the only development of its kind. In 2006 alone, 800,000 apartments were built in Spain — more than in France, Italy and Germany combined that year. Like Ireland, which was similarly gripped by an irrational property speculation fever, Spain is facing ruin. At the end of September last year, El Pais reported that Spanish banks had some €210 billion worth of mortgages on their balance sheets and 40 percent of that amount was said to be "doubtful". That should give those meeting in Brussels today something extra to think about as they ponder what to do about the crisis engulfing the world's "lifestyle superpower".

And this segues nicely into the recently issued Y Combinator RFS, where "RFS" stands for "Requests For Startups". It was the title wot done it: "RFS 9: Kill Hollywood". Typical of the tenor of the piece: "How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?"

This is pretty incendiary stuff and, sure enough, is has generated some heated responses. The entrepreneur and blogger Jason Calacanis has just kicked back with, "We Need to Empower Hollywood--Not Kill Hollywood". As always, Calacanis is entertaining: "What if YC's screed winds up on the desk of some angry or delusional CEO or studio head's desk with a list of stolen files in Dropbox folders and says, 'These guys are trying to kill us, let's unleash a trillion dollar lawsuit on them and harass them to death!' That's what Hollywood does — it harasses startups to death and YC's post is EXACTLY what those lawyers are looking for: the smoking gun that internet people want to kill them."

Y Combinator is right in demanding a creative response to the increasingly legalistic, stultifying, predictable, biased Hollywood output, but Calacanis is on the money when he points out that no amount of Angry Birds can match the magic of Hollywood when the result is something like Drive.

Note: "Half of global GDP in 2007 came from 380 cities in developed-regions, with more than 20 percent of global GDP coming from 190 North American cities alone. The 220 largest cities in developing-regions contributed another 10 percent. But by 2025, one-third of these developed-market cities will no longer make the top 600; and one out of every 20 cities in emerging-markets is likely to see its rank drop out of the top 600. By 2025, 136 new cities are expected to enter the top 600, all of them from the developing world and overwhelmingly — 100 new cities —from China."

For the gullible, the key statement that got them adding it to their Timelines was this: "Who Increased the Debt? President Reagan 189%. President GHW Bush 55%. President Clinton 37%. President GW Bush 115%. President Obama 16%." That was enough to get the credulous adding the propaganda to their Timelines.

In its admirable takedown of this Goebbelsian Big Lie, the Washington Post declares: "If MoveOn.org or Pelosi's office had any sense of shame, they would have quietly removed the links to this chart from their websites when PolitiFact gave it a 'pants on fire' rating four months ago. The fact that an outdated version is still floating around — and that people are still deluded into thinking it to be correct — is doubly shameful."

Here now, for your amusement, is the bogus chart that has proved so popular with so many credulous people on Facebook.

The book accompanies the Museum's current exhibition on the writer's life. One remarkable image, a Fox Talbot picture from 1841, is thought to be the earliest existing photograph of the Thames. It provides a view of Westminster, with no Houses of Parliament and no Big Ben. When we do see the river, it appears with not a single duck, cormorant or coot in sight because the water was simply too filthy. Dickens's Victorian London was an industrious, dynamic place, but it was also a dirty, dangerous city, where children were as likely to die as survive. It was the city of Oliver Twist. But it was not all grim as the late, great Christopher Hitchens explained in his final essay, "Charles Dickens's Inner Child". Snippet: "It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: WHATEVER YOU DO — HANG ON TO YOUR CHILDHOOD! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched."

Now, it seems a more radical shift is in the works. According to a report that appeared in Le Monde on 14 January, "Michelin dans la tourmente" (Michelin in turmoil), the days of the Guide Michelin are numbered... in paper form, at least. The company is contemplating making it available digitally only. Why? The venerable Guide sold 107,000 copies in France in 2010, which is a drop of of 22 percent compared to a decade ago when sales topped 400,000.