Every Day is Election Day

Know that application on the Bepo (what Mam insists on calling it!) and Facebook, where you can clarify how you know your friends? Here are some of the more amusing things my friends have to say about me, and how we all became friends:

1. Ciaran (Tayto) - the best friend
Fate brought us together
The cunning, devious, the downright manipulative of them all. They tell me to check one box, the “through a friend” doesn’t do justice, so fuck it. Fate it’ll be. The credit to my debit. The Freddy Mac to my Fannie Mae.

Tayto and Brennan: the caucasian Kenan and Kel

2. Bartley Rock - the only man whose name is also an order
Fate brought us together, Lived together, Sports Team, Childhood friends
Squash. We played squash. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

3. Raymond - the Law
Through Bebo, Fate, Through a Friend
“Can we say we met through bebo? No, truly we met when you tried to beat me up at a pro-life rally with, typically, a hurley.”

4. Denis (The-Best-Friend-Of-The-Brother and now a Brennan basically!)
Family
We must be related we’re both incedibly good looking while the OTHER (supposedly) brother is….. well I don’t want to say it he might be listening…

5. Lynam (the Lámh… *shudder* ;))
We hooked up
Ah no. But not for want of trying Congress ‘06.

6. Shane (the Politicio)
Fate brought us together, School or College
The winds of fate gushed through the meadow, and there they blew the Mighty Brennan and the Fearless Holden across the forests and glens to meet at the Crossroads of Time….the rest, was history.

…

This could be a good meme, how do your friends know you?

I think I just vommed a little. In my inbox:

Ciara –

Barack likes to tell a story about the two of us standing backstage before his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

The way he tells it, he was too busy in the days before the convention to feel any pressure — but about an hour before the speech, I could tell he was getting a little nervous.

To break the tension, right before he went out on stage I leaned in close and said, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy.”

We laughed. And then Barack brought the house down.

This year, the house is going to be a lot bigger. More than 75,000 people will be in Denver to be part of this important moment, and I want to tell you about an opportunity to join Barack backstage before his acceptance speech.

Ten supporters who make a donation in any amount by midnight this Thursday, July 31st, will be selected to fly to Denver, spend a couple of nights in a hotel, participate in the convention, and go Backstage with Barack. Each supporter who is selected will also get to bring a guest along to share the experience.

Make a contribution of $5 or more today and you could have your own Backstage with Barack story to tell.

Barack’s speech at the convention will be a culmination of the unlikely journey that has brought all of us so far over the past 17 months.

He will call on us to come together and work for change — not just to win this election, but to make things better for all Americans.

Seeing it in person will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’m excited about being there, and if you make a donation of $5 or more before the deadline, you could join Barack backstage.

Thanks for everything you’ve done to get us here.

Michelle

My delayed (sorry Darragh, thanks for the tag!) contribution to the irritable cause…

1. List two things that irritate you for a reason, and list the reason, and two things that irritate you for no apparent reason whatsoever
2. Give credit to the person who tagged you
3. Link your answers to the original blog, Skillett.com
4. Tag four new people to participate

Well, the first thing that annoys me are rules… so I guess I’ll break the said above rules here and do more than two things? Rebel Rebel! What can I say, I’m a crank and I adore a good grumble (meaning it’s Monday and Cork won yesterday)!

I’ve decided not to restrict myself just to two things that I know irritate me - if it irritates me, it irritates me, and I’m taking the chance to purge!

So get yore rant protection helmets on, folks, I’m away!

1. Sinusitis
I suffer from what is known as a ‘Brennan nose’. This involves a cold at least 5 times a year which includes, but isn’t limited to, the following symptoms: Pressure and pain over the forehead, constant headaches, continual clearing of the throat, a burning runny snoz that is always blocked with a thick mucus, and earaches bordering on downright deafness. You spend your time blowing a nose that is as blocked as my writing ability in explaining the horrors of these sinus attacks.

Sure, I’ve tried all the homeopathic “cures”, and I’ve nasal sprayed with the best of them, but sure as hell every odd month I end up spluttering like a faulty auto unit willing that damn air cavity in my nose to pop for some serious relief. To boot I tend to be struck down with a lurgy of this kind at the most inappropriate times… piano exams, orals, Leaving Cert, finals… you name it. At these times I am obviously at my attractive best and my primary concern is batting away admirers one snotty minute at a time. [Oi! That should be your priority all the time! - Gav]

For this, and so many other wonderful genes, thanks Pops.

2. Token Environmentalists
Self-righteous and arrogant greens truly grind my gears. You know the muesli eating, Guardian-reading types who only eat free range… but happen to conveniently guzzle gallons of gas and take several long-haul flights a year? Such types can often be seen in Avoca Handweavers, with other middle class ‘conscience’ types - one of the more disgusting phenomena of the Celtic Tiger years. I will declare war on their Cat Kitson aprons and home-made 20yo-a-pot hummus (totally not a real food, incidentally). Ooooone day…

3. Irish Transport in general…
…but mostly a bitter shout out to the cowboys that are behind the Student Travel Card, the atrocious attendants at Irish Rail and the badly trained and cantankerous drivers at Dublin Bus. Note: You can be mugged on a train in Ireland, seek help and be told to “Get over it” when you’ve been hit over the head. Horse’s mouth.

4. Notes from roommates (just an issue from my past thankfully! I heart my new roomies!)
Dearest X,

Please stop communicating with me through notes. You know where I live (unfortunately) and if I know you (and I don’t want to) you have probably stalked me on social networking sites for months and know that I am never at home to be the one creating the mess in the kitchen, eating your cheerios or drinking your beer.

Sincerely,
Ciara

5. People who take everything and give nothing
I prefer to call them verbal spongers. You end up stuck beside them at a wedding or in the next booth in the office, and you’re expected to be a bloody conversation jukebox. They give you nothing to work with.

“See that movie last night?”
“Meh.”

“How do you know Mary?”
“Work.”

Painfully you pull conversation from them. One. Grunt. At. A. Time.

6. Unremoved labels on shoes and clothes

Well done! You got new shoes! Think you could take the label off the bottom and not just hope it’ll disintegrate off the soul of your foot? Those white labels burn my eyes as I’m walking behind you. Hate hate hate it.

7. Women’s attitude to women
A previous post of mine will suffice here. ‘Nuff said

8. Unblended foundation
Just. Look. At. The. Difference. In. Colour. Between. Your. Neck. And. Face.

Wonkaface.

9. Top Gear
I hate things I don’t understand. And they drank behind the wheel. I don’t care if it was in the Antarctic…

10. Structured memes
Obviously.

You’ve no idea how much restraint it took not to put Cork in there. I guess we owe Mulley.

Rant over and out!

Credit the person who tagged you: The first thing that strikes me about Darragh is the understanding that he has for the world. He views issues and events with a complex sensitivity and humanises stories to wonderful effect. I truly love reading his blog; it was one of the first I started to religiously follow when I came across the blogosphere. He champions new bloggers around him and challenges establishing ones. I’m proud to say he takes some time out of his day to read our rants. Thank you Darragh.

I second Gav’s tags: doooooo it!

Work is dead so I’ll be back later…

I think this is the first time either of us have actually been tagged in a meme - chalk it down, the momentous date!

Anyway, we’ve been tagged by Darragh to participate in the Getting Your Goat meme, which has the following rules:

1. List two things that irritate you for a reason, and list the reason, and two things that irritate you for no apparent reason whatsoever
2. Give credit to the person who tagged you
3. Link your answers to the original blog, Skillett.com
4. Tag four new people to participate

I guess we’ll both be doing our different entries and that Ciara will be getting hers up soon enough, but for now, it’s Getting Gav’s Goat.

So - Things that irritate me for a reason:

Misplaced Arrogance
Something that Ciara’s last post brought forefront to my mind was how much in the last year, slugging away for the Students’ Union, we were exposed to a certain few people who, despite any inner fear about their failings or adequacy at particular tasks, went out of their way to find some way of inflating themselves, mostly by actively deflating the other people around them.

I know that in an arena as vicious, vacuous - and often so spiteful - as student politics that there’s an innate need to cover up any failings but when those failings are obviously well known to those around - and when those in question known that those surrounding them would only be willing to help, then puncturing the people in their stead is just a stupid, stupid thing.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, while I don’t regret doing the year with the SU, I’m leaving with far more sour memories than fond ones. You know who you are.

The Sunday Independent
And what’s worse, I can’t help but continue to buy the fucking thing. Curse you, Aonghus Fanning, curse you and your nepostic, pretentious shambles of a publication.

Example a prime, as they’d say themselves, from last week’s issue:

Life on the Celtic Costa goes on despite the gloom at home, writes Barry Egan in Marbella”.

Oh, God love them, isn’t it lucky for them that they can get on with their lives despite all the hassle they have? Poor Barry Egan too, having to head all that way, just to file 973 measly words about how you can see Africa on a fine day. God love him, making a 5,814km round trip just to do it. One word for every 6km travelled? The craythur.

Well, you know what? Fuck off, Sindo. Of the 973 words you published in that piece, a grand total of 0 were necessary for the stable continuation of the world’s self-propulsion. And what’s more, you’ll be the first ones complaining about how the Government isn’t really committing to climate change, while you send your ginger prat journalists off on 3,600-mile tours to file sub-1,000 word pieces on fuck all.

[exhales slowly]

Now then - things that irritate me for no good reason.

The Hills on MTV
I know there’s absolutely no difference between it, and the soap operas that I won’t admit to liking, but will admit to watching anyway (on the grounds that it’s of significant social importance). But. Arrrrrrrgh. I don’t care if Lo is being a bitch to Audrina, and neither should anyone else.

The fact that although I know many things irritate me on a daily basis, that I can’t remember these causes on command
I rest my case. I swear, I spent twenty minutes trying to come up with stuff and The Hills was as good as I could do. Epic fail.

Credit to the person who tagged us:
Darragh’s blog is one of those rare nuggets of sheer honestly, without any sense of inflation or pretense, that come along far too rarely. His writing is open, honest, and bare, and his blog is well worth a subscription.

Tag four people to take part:
Alexia - Purely out of curiosity in what annoys her for no reason!
Dani - come on, Dan, get out of your blogging shell and express yourself more!
Masquerade - one of the more eloquent ranters I know!
Sinead K - I know Darragh tagged you already, but he did thirteen people, so I figure I’m allowed some overlap…

Inspired by Darragh’s recent masterclass on how to leave comments on other peoples’ blogs, and guiding Scally through the following process yesterday, I thought I’d post a guide on a similar theme to Darragh’s - how to get your own webspace and install Wordpress on your website.

Though there are a couple of other downable blogging software packages, Wordpress is by far the market leader, powering pretty much all self-hosted blogs at the time of writing. From an Irish point of view, almost all the prominent Irish blogs - Damien, Alexia, Tom, Elly, Twenty Major, Beaut.ie, Sarah, The Chancer, Jazz Biscuit, and so on [I wouldn't dare list myself here!] - are built on Wordpress’s reliable, stable, and very adaptable blogging software. What’s more, even more sites - like Rick O’Shea or Casa Casey Courtney - are hosted on the pre-provided Wordpress.com service, which has a lot of identical features but is not made to be quite as adaptable.

Wordpress is also fantastic for importing blogs you’ve written elsewhere - so if you have an old Blogger account, or maybe a LiveJournal, you can import these posts and they’ll appear as normal entries within your Wordpress. You can even export posts from Wordpress.com and import them into Wordpress on your own webspace if you like, which is very useful if you’re a current Wordpress.com user and want to graduate to hosting your blog yourself. What’s more, if you’ve got your own webspace, you don’t have to worry about exceeding Wordpress.com’s size limits for attachments to your blog, as you’ll have all the space you need to upload files for your posts.

(more…)

With my epic preparation of a thesis on how to save hurling - I honestly do think it’ll be released in drips over next week at this stage - it’s probably time that I did one of those “ooh, nice links” posts.

Not that there’s a whole lot, mind - I really must do a wholescale overhaul of what’s in my Google Reader. I did find one thing of huge interest, though.

Something else eye-catching and doing the rounds at the moment do is Let Our Congress Tweet. It seems that the moment that the Houses of Congress are reconsidering some relatively archaic rules stating that content from members can’t appear on websites alongside political or commerical information or content (which surely seems contradictory in itself).

The project was born when users began following John Culberson (R-TX) on Twitter, while he tweeted - often from the House floor - on votes and his reasoning for his actions. Not, of course, that John was the first member of the houses to Tweet - Chris Hughes from Facebook is “Online Organisational Guru” for the Barack Obama campaign and had him Tweeting first.

Still, though, Culberson’s simple actions are a natural progression in accountability - politicians have been blogging for a while now, so micro-blogging was the simple step forward. Except, of course, that the rules of the Houses don’t allow him to do so.

It’s difficult to see why anyone would oppose a campaign like LOCT. As Culberson tweeted himself about four hours ago:

I wont quit until the rules give me & all members the same unfettered access to new media that I have to TV/nwspaper interviews

Indeed, why should he? Why should the rules allow members to have their own websites, and to participate openly in TV and newspaper interviews - which end up online immediately anyway - but not get their direct channels out? LOTC can only be a good thing.

If the Twitter community was any bigger in Ireland, I’d probably be trying to get more of our own Parliamentarians here at home to Tweet their way too. Maybe in time.

On that, if you have the time at all, head to and do their very short survey on what you’d like to see from the site in future. Damien has already commented that he’d like RSS feeds for speeches from each member - certainly an idea that shouldn’t take a huge amount of work to put into practice. Having already set up the superb Politics in Ireland aggregator, his suggestion can only come tinted with the potential of adaptable uses. I suppose, though, when the Oireachtas currently offers RSS feeds for its Committee Schedule, which then only direct you to a Word Document download… perhaps we shouldn’t hold our breaths too much.

The whole notion of easier two-way communication between politicians and the public, in our era of Web 2.0 and New Media, is one that needs further exploration. Forgive me for suggesting it but Irish political culture needs to be far more like that of Britain in this regard - and Irish citizens are probably the ones that must lead the way. Britain has fantastic sites like They Work For You, where by merely entering your postcode you can see who your local MP is, how often they’ve been speaking, how often they break ranks with their party, how often they submit parliamentary questions… everything. What’s more, the site is entirely voluntary, non-profit, and run by people who just want greater transparency in the political world.

It’s just not the citizenry that create Britain’s political web culture, though - even the Downing Street website integrates an official YouTube channel, runs regular webchats with Government ministers, and keeps a Flickr and - appropriately, for this post - a Twitter. All of them are written in everyday language, are perfectly accessible, and capture the lighter side of life, like when a sickly kestrel was found in the No.10 garden last week.

If anyone can tell me why Ireland shouldn’t be the same, I’d love to hear it. Why should we need Sunday newspapers to discover that the leader of a Government party has only spoken in his House eight times since he took office, when we could just click his name on a decent website - PoliticsInIreland would be the ideal building block - and find out for ourselves?

Fair play to Let Our Congress Tweet, and here’s hoping that they can set a positive role model for the rest of us in civilised democracies.

~~~

Elsewhere, on the lighter side of life, Jazz Biscuit does the funnies with the Dublin Airport problems…

Fantastically, the New York Times suggests that John McCain isn’t actually eligible to run for President…

And via Alexia - Radiohead’s video for House of Cards, due for release today but now put back a bit, has been made without a camera, but rather in the same way that sportspeople wear light-catching bubbles to help developers make video games. Sounds interesting - and if it’s anyway as memorable as the Johnny Hardstaff video for Pulk-Pull Revolving Doors/Like Spinning Plates mashup, it’ll be another job very well done.

How are we coping with the recession? With a wii-cession! (IS THIS THING ON?!)

Every part of me is aching today, turns out I’m a bowler extraordinaire (as light on my twinkle toes as Fred Flintstone), who’d a thunk it? Here are some snaps of Gav and Scally boxing it out mid Wii-party.

Lighting was poor but I actually think the ‘dreaded shadows’ add a tension.

So the UEN are under pressure, eh? The efforts to curb euroscepticism know no bounds!
I’m no Jim Corr, but it’s clear where the intention lies here. I worked with the UEN in Brussels two years ago, and it’s obvious that the motivation with these new rules doesn’t so much lie with

the difficulty in dealing with small political groupings

…as it does with INDEM, whose gagging is certainly intended here. It’ll be interesting to see if Kathy Sinnott (a member of this group) will be in the media today, speaking on the procedural changes.

But where will the FF-ers go now? EPP/ED? Will the blueshirts let the homeless in? This whole debacle is bound to damage the Irish Presidential bid of Brian Crowley (which I’ve predicted consistently for the past 4 years…), who is currently co-President of the UEN. Hope this gets good coverage today!

Anyway, in matters more personal, we’re Kilkenny-bound on Friday after work, and Navan/Trim bound for Saturday, in true family diplomacy! I’ll be studying while we travel, as I seem to be consistently t the minute, all day, everyday. Boo-urns. At least I’ll get to see home, see the GAAfia and the madra, and go here, here and here for supplies/eats/funs. Mamma Mia is on the cards for Mama Reilly and I for Saturday night… should be twenty-pink-tents-at-Oxegen camp.

Sunday is Munster Final day… need I say anymore? I will hold my Leinster head in shame and think about what should be… while secretly hoping Tipp will shade it. (Shade it mind, not by much, don’t get too bloody excited.)

Today is payday for Reilly. We will celebrate by paying credit-card debit.

Work drinkies tonight, museum/finance get-together. Don’t sure how that will roll but you know, banter is to be recommended. The accountants need the funs. And alcohol.

Reilly has one absolutely heroic blog due on the reformatting of the hurling championship. It’s his new love, and something he’s been spending unhealthy amounts of time on recently, so comment him up when it does arrive. Ned Quinn beware!

See the MediaNow article in the Sindo at the weekend? Sent away for the promotional material for it… just to have a gooch at it. ‘Xpensive. But tempting. Throwing it under Reilly’s nose anyways; if any of you have an interest in this area, it could be worth checking out. The proposal is rather impressive…

Had a nice brekkie meeting with the Old Man this morning. Was brisk but nice to have some sense of familial normality, especially as I won’t see him at the weekend.

So what have I been reading all morning?…

A bitta nostalgia about Ray Cokes and the MTV glory days…

Just when you thought the Big Brother shenanigans couldn’t get worse…

Why designer sunglasses are bucking the downturn of other luxury goods…

Graham’s link from the Salon on Bush the Felon… unbelievable stuff.

And before you digest all that, have a look at this - she’s just brilliant, and lovely. Don’t you agree?

Reilly rewrote the Meath GAA wiki… dying to know who did all the Kilkenny GAA entries! They’re superbly put together. On that, my sister’s friend was correcting Junior Cert history papers last week and it turns out Nickey was a rebel in 1916? Young people these days.

Sunday was no good for anyone. Trying to feel confident about the game going forward, but failing miserably. This might remind the Wexford players why they should go to training tonight…

Willing time to go by for the next series of Ricky Gervais Show audiobooks. In the meanwhile this is my serving of Pilkingtonomania methadone:

This is bound to create a few rows, don’t make the same mistake I did and suggest a collective Office run-down…

Want.

Some of this would be nice too.

Don’t ask, don’t tell?

Foho taking is going well, here are two of my favourites:

I‘m well on my way to the apex of the work project, so to celebrate I’m spending more than a few shneaky minutes online these days. As you can probably tell. Don’t tell the boss; sure he’s probably off at some 1916 commemoration, he won’t give a hoot.

PS - Having a showdown on the ucdsu.ie boards. Will share all later.

Call me slow but…

Has this - http://www.pilkipedia.co.uk/ - been around for ages?!

Amazing.

This morning’s big search: