I don’t know if she’s doing a good job at home but by sacking the bank executives in the bank that the French government bailed out, I think I can safely say I’d prefer to have Christine Lagarde as our Minister for Finance rather than our own Brian Lenihan. As you can see above, she can hold her own with Jon Stewart, something I’d like to see any Irish politician do!
The Annie Mac Presents tour rolls into Dublin on Thursday with a really good line-up of acts. The gig takes place in the Twisted Pepper, and joining Annie on the night are Sinden, Kormac (Live), Arveene, and Shortie. The Facebook event page for the gig is currently showing 321 people planning on attending, so it’s going to be a sell out night for sure. You can buy tickets in advance from Bodytonic tickets section of Tickets.ie.
A quick heads up on Arveene’s current production action with Misk. I got his new tracks Hells Bells and Blow Your Whistle a little while ago, and they’re both really working well on the dancefloor. Here’s a video clip of Hells Bells:
This is episode 3 of Charlie Brooker’s new Newswipe show, the spin-off from Screenwipe. It’s like a cross between the history of Television news and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Entertaining and informative? Who’da thunk it?
I’ll post the first two episode here also once I put them into playlists. Special thanks to xthemusic on YouTube for capturing and posting the videos.
I did a quick Twitter post last night when I noticed a story on RTÉ News online about two anonymous paintings of a naked Brian Cowen that had appeared in two Dublin galleries yesterday. Underneath a picture of one of the paintings a sub editor had made a pun about one of the paintings being “well hung”. I was surprised but pleased that RTÉ could make fun of the situation.
I was more than a little surprised tonight then to hear that RTÉ issued an apology to Cowen and his family over their reporting of the story. Watching the report above, I really don’t know why they would have had to do so. I know our libel laws are amazingly out of date, but surely they couldn’t cover anything said in the report? The story on RTÉ online has also since been edited and the pictures of the paintings have been removed.
I look forward to hearing more about it tomorrow anyway. In the meantime, you can read the latest reactions by searching for #picturegate on Twitter.
“On last night’s programme we carried a report on the illicit hanging of caricatures of the Taoiseach in two Dublin galleries. RTÉ News would like to apologise for any personal offence caused to Mr Cowen or his family and for any disrespect shown to the office of the Taoiseach by our broadcast.”
To make matters worse, they’re also reporting that “Fianna Fáil TD Michael Kennedy last night called on RTÉ director general Cathal Goan to consider his position”. Seriously, I know things are bad right now, but Cowen and the FF party need to figure out when to laugh and roll with it. They’ve now achieved something I thought was impossible: to look even more pathetic than they already did.
[Update 25/03/09] Here’s the video of the apology.
It seems people are less perplexed about this than I am, but more angry. Damien Mulley, who posted the first video here, just wrote his own blog post about RTÉ’s apology, and other artists are now starting to publish more naked pictures of Cowen.
[Update 25/03/09] Nearly 24 hours have passed since I first posted here about what’s now just called Picturegate. It’s funny how fast things move sometimes. We now know that the artist in question is called Conor Casby. Apparently the pictures were hung in the galleries weeks ago, but it was RTÉ’s report two nights ago that made the shit hit the fan.
Today, Gardai visited Today FM trying to strongarm the contact details of Mr Casby out of them. He had been in touch with the Ray D’Arcy show for a couple of months. They didn’t give the Gardai his details, but, in a strange turn of events, Mr Casby contacted the Gardai himself and gave a voluntary statement. It just goes to show how out of hand the whole thing had gotten that there was talk of charging him with criminal damage for putting some glue on a wall and incitement to hatred (???).
The story has been all over the radio all day, and all over the world thanks to the BBC, The Times and the New York Times. I’m still pissed off that RTÉ were made to apologise, when no other media group in the world has even been asked to (to the best of my knowledge), and they’re all still publishing images of the paintings which caused such offence to the office of the Taoiseach.
I guess we can take some comfort in the fact that the creative types didn’t let us down. Check out some of their sterling photoshops of Brian Cowen over on the Creative Ireland website. This one is my favourite:
I was trying to describe the big reveal in this video to a friend in the pub the other day, and failed miserably. It happens between 5.00 and 5.30 but it’s worth watching the whole thing.
Much and all as I like thought provoking low budget movies in foreign languages, I always have room for a big blockbuster in my schedule now and again. This summer has a lot of “big” movies coming up. Here are a few of the trailers to whet your appetite. (There is no trailer for Avatar from James Cameron yet…)
After reading a bit about it I understand what tilt-shift photography is, but I still don’t understand how it fools my brain into thinking what I’m seeing isn’t real when clearly it is. I was sure when I watched the video above for the first time that is was a composite of real world backgrounds with little models superimposed, or something along those lines, but it is all “100% real” according to the creator, Keith Loutit.
Not surprisingly this video has been picked up by a lot of blogs already, but it is amazing, so if you haven’t seen it, take a look. Check out the rest of his videos on Vimeo here.
Seeing is believing! This is the $194,000 Terrafugia Transition. We’re obviously a long way off from this being normal in any sense, but I’d love to see this catching on. See more images and the video of the car transforming into the plane on Jalopnik.
Having not gotten into Peep Show properly yet I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Robert Webb. In fact he’s one of those people that I have a mild dislike of for no apparent reason. Here though he channels his inner Dr. Frank-N-Furter for Comic Relief’s dance program and it’s hard not to laugh. Good work from Comic Relief for hijacking the celebs dancing format to great effect.
[Thanks to 