The world's scariest football club

The timing wasn't very good. The New York Times had declared the Arsenal Football Club the worthy successors to the Fashion-Football synergy that had been surrendered by Manchester United with the departure of David Beckham. Sunday's Mens' Fashions of the Times featured a glowing article about the club's Swedish wizard Freddie Ljungberg, who has a new sideline as the underwear model for Calvin Klein.

But on the very same day, Arsenal were putting on a most unfashionable display of screaming, yelling, and taunting in a very ill-tempered conclusion to their match with MU. While Freddie had an excellent match, the dominant story after the game was the team's taunting of MU striker Ruud van Nistlerooy when he missed a penalty; this had followed upon Ruud's role in getting Arsenal midfielder Patrick Vieira sent off.

We had this sense looking at one of the pictures, of Arsenal defender Martin Keown screaming in Ruud's face, that we'd seen that look somewhere before...and eventually we remembered where: in Lord of the Rings. Compare Martin's scream and that of an orc. Not the kind of look that makes it to the fashion pages.

But you Nyah Nyahed over the best part

In our incessant web surfing, we couldn't help but notice the seemingly sudden overuse of the expression "Nyah Nyah," or some variation thereof (usually involving repetition). Apparently the expression indicates a printed version of the basic schoolyard taunting but at its current rate of excess deployment, the effect will soon be similar to be using the old line from Heathers about something being "so '87" without bothering to update the year.*

Sadly, we don't have new episodes of Seinfeld available to mock its ever more dorky usage but we think that some kind of threshold of uncoolness has been crossed when it winds up in the Washington Post's cut-and-paste survey of web commentary assembled by Howard Kurtz. After noting that Senator John Kerry's campaign was disengenuously welcoming Wesley Clark to their position on the Iraq war, Howard helpfully translates for those of us who need plain English translated into bite-size sitcom (Don't Go There, Tell It To The Hand) nuggets:

Translation: Nyah nyah nyah.

We think that the old dictum about brevity being the soul of wit is having unintended consequences.

*Another analogy that later occurs to us is that having to go to the effort to develop a written version of a nonsense taunt misses the point in the same way that AOL did when they introduced a function to print smiley faces.

Parody, Rest in Peace

Lead sentence from one of today's Wall Street Journal editorials:

Here's one more reason for Howard Dean and the French to deplore the liberation of Iraq: The new Iraqi Finance Minister, Kamel al-Gailani, has just announced that the country's highest marginal tax rates will be 15% -- on both individual and corporate income.

Read Headlines With Care

GILLIGAN ACKNOWLEDGES 'SLIP OF THE TONGUE'*

*i.e. that he misquoted Dr. Kelly, not that he's a fan of that brilliant Whitesnake album.

Send this guy to Eckvelt

There is a new blog on The New Republic's website by Gregg Easterbrook. It's quite a piece of work. Roger Ailes has been doing Trojan work keeping track of the outrages so far; check out this post which discusses Gregg's reliance on Rush Limbaugh's favourite British newspaper, WorldNet Daily, as his source for a disparaging story about the police chief who led the hunt for the Washington snipers last year. But something else on the Easterbrook blog intersected with something we posted about a few months ago.

The jumping off (the cliff?) point for Gregg is the observation that Ben and Jerry's has a pro-Howard Dean flavour of ice cream. This leads to hilarious speculation about what flavours for other Presidential candidates would be:

John Kerry: Very Kerry Irish-Jewish-Czech Melting Pot. Flavors from all over the world, blended together until indistinguishable.

Joe Lieberman: Joe's Kosher Swirl. Corned beef flavored ice cream with real chunks of rye bread and ribbons of mustard.

How idiotic is this? The contempt for Kerry (and by extension the contempt for assimilation) springs from the Boston Globe's misconception that Kerry said he was Irish-American, when in fact his ancestry is Central European Jewish. As we pointed out before, no-one with a proper knowledge of Ireland would assume that someone named Kerry is Irish, because that's an Irish county, not an Irish surname. It's like assuming that Gregg Easterbrook is Christian because he has the word "Easter" in his name. Come on Gregg, tell us, was your greatgrandfather a Mr Pesachbrook from Vilnius and you've been hiding it all these years?

At least if that were true, it might provide us with a good Psych 101 explanation for his swipe at Joe Lieberman, and the distinctly non-kosher meat-dairy concoction he suggests for him.

Towards the end of the post, he drops the ethnic mockery and goes for the straight partisan slams:

Al Gore's Dade County Surprise. Bittersweet chocolate with a sour grape swirl.

And looking ahead to 2008:
Hillary's Endless Fudge.

First of all, the big Florida problems were in Broward and Palm Beach, not Dade. And of course, according to Gregg, Gore and sour grapes are synonymous. All that stuff about a Supreme Court decision so dubious that even its architects had to give themselves the pass of not setting a precedent -- it's all just in Gore's mind. And then he goes after Hillary, who we are supposed to think never takes a position on anything. Kind of makes us wonder then why so many people, including Gregg, hate her. Perhaps Gregg would benefit from Hillary's long-standing position in favour of expanded mental health benefits.

How the Irish saved civilisation

More on the hideous Celebrity Farm, via Fintan O'Toole in today's Irish Times.

[all names refer to the "celebrities"]
George, you see, had been given the job of choreographing a line dance in the Games Field and then he and Gavin and Tamara and Mary K had to make scarecrows out of straw and include them in the dance. And while the girls made a straw woman that looked like a normal female, George and Gavin, with a display of wit that has not been seen since Wilde and Whistler faced each other across the dinner tables of London high society, put a bra and panties on theirs and then filled the bra to bursting-point with more straw.

And then they were all tired so they had a few beers and a Chinese takeaway, and then Mary K got voted out but, showing all the dignity of Marie Antoinette at the guillotine and all the rapier-like repartee of Madame de Stael, she delighted the nation with her dazzling catch-phrase "Joke!"

How soon before this brilliant series is available on a Region 1 DVD so that America can share in the laughter?

We're not celebrities, get us out of here

Last week we posted about the truly awful RTE reality show, Celebrity Farm. This is Irish television at its mock-worthy worst. But somehow, the show got big ratings. Which makes us wonder how they are calculating the ratings. Maybe people just wallowed in its awfulness. Or maybe they knew how to make the best of a bad thing and find a laugh somewhere. Take for instance the show's nod to the new diverse modern Ireland -- one of the contestants, Kevin Sharkey, was black. Kevin got turfed off the show and hasn't stopped slamming it since: the voting was rigged, the farm is shoddily managed [the owner of the farm is suing]. Kevin vented on one of the Friday night talk shows, which was going up against the other Friday night talk show on which the winner was announced. The "winner" of a RTE reality show turned out to be a star on a RTE soap, so maybe Kevin has a point.

But whatever excuses one can make for the public, or even the contestants, we don't know what to do with this John Waters column from today's Irish Times. For our thousands of readers who don't know who John Waters is, he is the fomer Mr Sinead O'Connor, and perennial contender for the title of World's Worst Columnist. Try to believe (as Daily Howler would say) that he penned this drivel:

In the near future, the concept of Celebrity Farm will reveal itself as crude and rudimentary, because it will have opened a door on to something else, from where the true possibilities of television will become clearer. And soon thereafter, a half-hour of seeming banality may tell us more about what we are really like than 30 years of Late Lates [RTE's Friday talk show].

It's pointless tearing our hair out. It is as ridiculous to attack Celebrity Farm for lacking substance and depth as to attack the Pope for being insufficiently Jewish. This may not just be the future of television, but the future of drama, life and everything.

Manchester United Watch

1. Utterly gratuitous Beckham mention in the New York Times Sunday travel section article on Madrid. The headline: Beckham days in Madrid*. The opening sentence

A new star shines in Madrid's firmament this fall: the world's most famous - and most fashionable - soccer player, David Beckham, has just moved to the Spanish capital etc etc

We ask: was there nothing in Madrid before Beckham got there?
*Mysteriously, this headline from the print edition is not reproduced on the website version.

2. From the BBC:

Man Utd dismiss takeover talk

Manchester United have played down newspaper reports that they are the subject of a possible £600m takeover.

"newspaper reports" means a single completely unsourced article in the Observer that did not name any of the three supposed billionaires who supposedly want to buy the club.

The more relevant information is that the share price has surged on the takeover speculation, a nice little capital gain for the club's largest shareholders, Oirish crony capitalists John Magnier and JP McManus. Hmmm.

You'll never please the Irish

The Irish are often called (by ourselves) a nation of begrudgers, but apparently we've been up to even more of it than we knew. Confronted by the accusation that Dubya has dissipated all of the post 9/11 global sympathy for the US on his Arabian adventurism, the sadly predictable response from his boosters has been to claim that There Was No 9/11 Global Sympathy for the US. It's especially surprising for bloggers to make this claim, because surely they understand than in addition to our memories of the global outpouring of solidarity, they must know that the same technology that allows them to blog allows us to go back all of two years ago and check that our memories were correct.

In his quest for evidence of global gloating, Andrew Sullivan links to a blog-irish selection of quotes from the opinion pages of the Irish Times. [Link via a fine riposte on Sullywatch ]. How dubious is this exercise? Let's start with one little thing. Robert Fisk is used as an example. Given the widespread reprinting of his columns, just how many countries could be shown to be gloaters with quotes from locally published Fisk articles?

But then there's the whole MO of this exercise: trawl through the op-ed pieces of one's favourite whipping boys, and pull out the quote expressing, God forbid, the odd bit of skepticism or cynicism about the likely aftermath of 9-11. Let's look at number 1 target, Fintan O'Toole. Exactly 14 days after the atrocity, Fintan is worried:

On the other hand, the kind of serial killing that is being actively canvassed by some within the Bush administration would make the world an even more dangerous place. There is serious talk of an open-ended war, not just on Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, but on Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and, in a neat stroke of opportunism, Cuba.

Is he an anti-American gloater because 14 days afterwards, he fears that 9/11 might be used an excuse to invade Iraq?

Finally, lurking here is the recurring inconsistency at the heart of much right-wing media criticism. Are these pampered Dublin 2 liberal media elites a cloistered enclave of anti-Americanism within a mass of "real" people who know the truth, or are they an evil 5th column using the vast power of the Irish Times opinion page to manipulate the public around to their pinko freedom-hating ways? If it's the former, then why does it matter what they say, and if it's the latter, why does this 5th column often seem so singularly ineffective?

To take the last question at face value, could it be that people read other parts of the paper besides the opinion pages? On the days from which the Irish 9-11 gloatfest was culled, the following articles also ran:

Irish Times Article - NY an Irish city from firefighting to finance

Irish Times Article - Homage paid by North's business

Irish Times Article - Global community backs US in 'act of war' aftermath

Irish Times Article - Irish-born missing or unaccounted for estimated at 20 to 30

Irish Times Article - State is silenced by 'awful acts of hatred'

And this before we get into things like Ireland's nod-and-wink neutrality in favour of America, for example, the Shannon stopover for military flights. But let's say one positive thing about Sullivan and his Irish contributor: with the surprisingly big egos we Irish have about our place in the world, all of us can take pleasure at being taken as representative of world public opinion.

That's my horse you rode in on

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article in its Sunday business section discussing whether buying shares in Manchester United (a company with publicly traded stock) was a good investment. ($$ req'd)The article was a sensible analysis of things one might want to look at buying shares in a normal company: revenues, expenditures, profits. But for us, any rational analysis is moot in the face of the question of why in God's name would anyone would want to put money into the relentless domestic trophy winning machine that they are. More seriously though, there is one thing that makes a sports team like MU a dubious investment for outside shareholders: the huge size of the egos involved relative to the size of the company. So one little spat within the company, which most likely goes public on the sports or social pages rather than the financial pages, can have big implications for the shares. It's a bit like the roller-coaster experience of shareholders in Martha Stewart's company.

It's already fairly well accepted that the supposed ingenious sale of an over-the-hill fashion-seeking David Beckham to some minor club in Madrid was in fact Becks fleeing the deranged megalomania of manager Alex Ferguson and landing in Europe's most famous football club. How is an outside shareholder supposed to evaluate what is going on? Especially when the inside shareholders are also getting involved in the spats. A few days ago, the club's chief executive, Peter Kenyon, quit for the same job at Chelsea. It first looked like another side-effect of Chelsea being awash in roubles these days, but now comes the news that Kenyon fled because he was sick of a row between Fergie and Irish shareholder John Magnier about a horse.

As we noted a while back, Ireland has spawned a particularly obnoxious breed of wealthy businessmen, who trade on their Irishness while dodging Irish taxes and being cronies of corrupt Irish Prime Ministers. Two of this group, Magnier and JP MacManus, own 10 percent of MU. Magnier owns and breeds horses, and he offered Fergie a 50 percent share in the horse Rock of Gibraltar at a knock-down price. The horse turns out to be extremely good and has netted millions in prize money. But Fergie now claims that his share in the horse extends to its breeding rights, which would be worth even more. This is not standard practice in the horse industry, where ownership rights to winnings and breeding are sold separately. The row has been running since the start of the year and Britain's Daily Mirror gets the leak:

[Daily Mirror source]: "Peter simply decided the grass was greener at [Chelsea], and that he could easily live without the tantrums of Sir Alex.
I think he became tired of the endless quarrels and disagreements.
Sir Alex getting involved in a scrap with a United shareholder was aggravation he certainly didn't need. Peter was always playing the peacemaker and I think he grew tired of all the hassle.

More dirt is sure to come out, including a rumour that Fergie was given his share in the horse for free. Remove the sports context, and these deals look very odd. Fergie and his Irish yuppie cronies are well-matched for each other. But it would be unwise to get caught in the cross-fire. We give this company a sell rating.

Heard the one about the Irish reality TV show?

No, not the one with the contestants on a boat and the boat sinks. The one with celebrities (or at least the Irish sub-genus thereof) brought together to work on a farm. You can imagine the ridicule being heaped on the show. The show's website is actually pretty funny (almost certainly not intentionally). Note the dreadful wordplay (ejected contestants are turfed off), the profiles of the contestants (and thus an idea of what it takes to be celebrity in Ireland), and the fairly prominent role of pigs in the low-tech graphics -- perhaps showing how much Animal Farm has entered the popular culture as an image of the farm animal hierarchy. But we can't think of much else to say about this show. If you think the BBC TV licence is bad value for money....

Irish Targets of Opportunity

We've spent a relatively high number of posts recently commenting on dubious material in the Daily Telegraph. But they just keep on delivering. Today, editor Charles Moore uses a signed editorial to launch a feature called Beebwatch, in which the paper will have a team of analysts, supplemented by reader input, monitoring BBC content for signs of bias. It's all motivated by the BBC's skeptical coverage of the Iraq war, and so will sound great to pro-Bush ears here, but the Telegraph being the Telegraph, they have to get in a few digs at Irish nationalism and a few winks to Unionists along the way. So in the midst of the rant is the following:

[the BBC believes that] Gerry Adams is better than Ian Paisley, that government should spend more on social programmes, that the Pope is out of touch except when he criticises the West, that gun control is the answer to gun crime, that... well, you can add hundreds more articles to the creed without my help.

Now, none of the above beliefs is indefensible. The problem is that all of them are open to challenge and that that challenge never comes from the BBC...If the BBC puts on a play about GM foods, you just know that it will be against them (the recent offering in question was by Ronan Bennett, a supporter of Sinn Fein/IRA, and Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian).

So in the midst of what's supposed to be their response to BBC bias on the Iraq war, they find time to tar Ronan Bennett with the terrorism brush. And to occasional Telegraph readers, the most likely reaction is "Who?" But there's a long running agenda here. Ronan Bennett is an Irish novelist now living in England. He briefly served jail time in the 1970s, when it was a relatively easy matter for disenchanted Catholic youths to come to the attention of the police. As Bennett recounts in this article from the Guardian, he's had to handle these slurs and smears for years.

Then there is the other supposed example of egregious BBC bias, that Gerry Adams is better than Ian Paisley. We're not sure where to go that one, although we suspect that merely being mentioned in the same sentence as Adams would be enough to unfuriate Paisley. And there would have been less scope for the likes of Gerry Adams to emerge if Paisley and his supporters hadn't been so busy beating up civil rights protestors in the 1960s.

Finally, let us speculate on how the poor old BBC could placate the irate Telegraph without having to change its politics one bit. As satirical magazine Private Eye points out, the paper has perhaps just one true obsession: Liz Hurley. A few more stories about her on the BBC and beebwatch would be dead in no time.

Bishop Ahern of Drumcondra

Since we're pretty stuck for material today, it's best just to briefly link to a couple of interesting posts by Warblogger Andrew Sullivan, usefully diverted from some very weird justifications for the Iraq war by the renewed focus on the dark side of the extensive quasi-state role of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Sullivan links to a review of, and discusses the disturbing tale recounted in, the movie The Magdalene Sisters. The movie deals with a Dickensian form of purdah inflicted on "wayward" Irish women. In a follow-up post, Sullivan approvingly quotes a letter to the Irish Times (proving once again the wide influence of that fine letters page) which points out the commercial gain to the Church from its workhouses, and then he adds:

Perhaps some of it [the profit] will now be used to compensate the hundreds and thousands of children abused and destroyed by the church hierarchy for so long.

A fair and reasonable sentiment, but with the current Irish government, not very likely. For reasons difficult to fathom, the government has put more effort to protecting the Church from liability than providing any kind of redress for the victims -- and given the wide role of the Church in schools, orphanages, group homes, and social activities, we could be talking about a wide range of abusive behavior against many different people.

The latest installment, which is close to precipitating a full-blown political crisis in the Republic, is the apparent collapse of an investigative commission looking into child abuse cases in church-run institutions. Here is the still-active website of the possibly defunct commission, which makes for pretty pathetic reading -- notice how its terms of references were expanded to include vaccine trials on residents of group homes.

As we speculated yesterday, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern might well be looking for a lordship from Her Majesty if she visits next year. But with his brilliant defensive display on behalf of the Catholic Church, could he looking for a bishop position as well?

Lord Ahern of Drumcondra

Saturday's London Times reports that Queen Elizabeth II (i.e. the current one) wants to visit the Republic of Ireland. The visit would most likely take place early in 2004. The media will doubtless pitch this one as a test of how the Republic has matured in its attitude to our former rulers. We are more interested in the spectacle that the visit will present in terms of our current rulers, the self-styled custodians of Irish nationalism, Fianna Fail. Even 10 years ago, the idea that an Irish Prime Minister would go through all the formalities of a royal visit in full view of the electorate would have seemed far fetched. But Fianna Fail now seem to think we can handle the sight of our VIP culture meeting its counterpart from Britain.

George V (i.e. two Georges after the mad one) was the last British monarch to visit the Republic, but the best known visit was by Queen Victoria in 1900. If our protocol people decide to look at her visit to see how things should be handled, some pretty rusty roles are going to have to be revived, as this meticulous (but totally sycophantic) contemporary account illustrates. For one thing, where in God's name are we going to find an Athlone Pursuivant-at-arms?

Anyway, Victoria's visit was deemed such a great success that she handed out a bunch of titles to local dignitaries when she got home. Could it be that PM Bertie Ahern is jealous of Sir Bob Geldof and Sir Tony O'Reilly and wants to one-up them with a lordship?

Maybe Saddam is just getting started

The August vacation did nothing for the logical abilities at Opinionjournal.com. Today's gem:

London's Daily Telegraph notes another benefit of Iraq's liberation:

A spokesman for [Italy's Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

For such a short item it captures everything that's bogus about OpinionJournal: the sourcing to fellow Vast Right Wing Conspiracy member, the Daily Telegraph, whose own standard of sourcing (like all British papers) is very low -- as in this case, sourced to an undated quote from a "spokesman" to persons unknown supposedly on behalf of a Prime Minister who's never had much problem directly speaking his mind. And then there's the return to the Libya rationale for invading Iraq -- that it'll scare Gaddafi. But as we pointed out before, under Ronald Reagan, the US already acted as directly as it could in scaring Gaddafi -- by attacking his home and killing his daughter. It was after this attack that Libya organised the Lockerbie bombing.

Lots of people are justifiably fretting about the shambles in Iraq. But as Tom Cruise said to Ving Rhames in Mission Impossible: Relax. It's much worse than you think.

The Irish ghost of Robert Moses

To the extent that Americans, and especially New Yorkers, take an interest in urban planning, Robert Moses would be characterised by many people as the man who destroyed the Bronx (by building an ugly elevated expressway through its heart) and paved over Long Island. His reputation as architect of the suburban lifestyle has taken a battering, but perhaps his descendants can take heart from the fact that his philosophy is alive and well in Ireland. With all the enthusiasm of another organisation with the same initials, Ireland's National Roads Authority is busy paving over green fields and running highways next to older residential areas so that people can live further away from the city and drive their cars there every weekday.

What has driven us over the edge, so to speak, is that the NRA is particularly busy developing plans to pave over our beloved County Meath. The proximate cause is Meath's position directly the west of Dublin. But one might have expected that in a rational weighing of costs and benefits of roads, Meath's incredibly fertile land and (not coincidentally) its thousands of years of settled habitation might have counted for something. There is no evidence that this is the case. The most egregious example is the NRA's plan to run two separate motorways through the center of the county, one a route to the north and the other to the northwest. Ireland is not that big a place, so the distance between a northern and northwestern route near where they begin is about 12 miles. But that means twice the fun for the road building maniacs, and not simply the opportunity to consolidate two roads into one.

Opponents of the roads have crystallised their objections around that the fact that the northwestern motorway is going to go perilously close to the Hill of Tara, which has multiple significant roles in Irish history, let alone its inspiration for the name of the home in Gone with the Wind. The most spectacular remnant of this region's history is the well-known 5000 year old tombs at Newgrange, but archeologists are constantly making new discoveries. We are supposed to be reassured that anything in the path of the bulldozers will be documented and hauled off to a warehouse somewhere, which leaves us about as reassured as Indiana Jones was when seeing the Ark of the Covenant disappear in the bowels of the US government.

One would have thought that with the Irish public finances tanking nearly as fast as Dubya's fiscal policy, financial constraints alone would slow things down. But roads have essentially been exempted from the normal budgetary process by having them run as Public-Private Partnerships, which basically hides the true cost to society of the roads, by making the upfront contribution of the taxpayer look much smaller (it comes later, in the form of tolls, and undisclosed subsidies to the toll operator). Just one fact to highlight the lunacy: Meath's largest stand-alone town, Navan, will be within striking distance of three separate motorways to Dublin when the building is finished. But it will have no rail link.

A protest will take place at Tara this weekend. We wish them luck. As for the NRA's attitude to dissenters, it's straight out of the Moses playbook:

When asked by historian Robert Caro about how he dealt with the resistance to the [Cross-Bronx] expressway, Moses replied, "They stirred up the animals there [the to-be demolished areas], so I just held fast, and that was all we had to do."

Today's Hutton Inquiry Revelations

1. If nothing else, those Brits have a nice turn of phrase. The weapons report wasn't so much "sexed-up" as "over-egged."

2. New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who was definitely sexing-up and over-egging claims of Iraq's WMDs, was in e-mail contact with Dr. Kelly, including one sent 3 hours before he died:

The inquiry was shown further e-mails including one to Judith Miller saying: "Judy I will wait until the end of the week before judging - many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time."

Which prompts the mystery of why his relative skepticism about WMDs didn't feed into her reports.

We prefer the other Collins

What do you do if you're an editorial writer at the Daily Telegraph and have spent the summer watching three years of rants about the glorious consequences of George W. Bush and the evil naysaying of the BBC come crashing down around your ears? Simple, you editorialise about something else entirely. Like the oppressed army officers of Northern Ireland. And so it is that this group finds itself elevated to a cause celebre in one of Tuesday's editorials (link requires registration).

The editorial concerns the news that a British Army officer, Tim Collins, who was accused of war crimes in Iraq, has been cleared. Collins became well known in the US because of his widely cited speech on the eve of war. A second investigation into the conduct of his command is ongoing. But for the Telegraph, it's all an opportunity for gloating about whiny Americans (an American having prompted the war crimes complaint) while wallowing in the paper's shameless Unionist tradition. And thus we read:

[Collins] soon found himself the victim of a meretricious accusation by a reserve American officer whose peacetime occupation...was that of a social worker. This kind of reporting on superiors is dignified by the name of 'whistle-blowing''. A more appropriate term is surely "sneaking''. It was one of the few incidents which marred the otherwise felicitous Anglo-American co-operation on the battlefield.

We sincerely hope that future Army promotion boards will have the courage not to be put off from recognising Col Collins's remarkable qualities, not merely for his own sake but also for the sake of the Royal Irish Regiment (RIR), which is headquartered in Ballymena, Co Antrim.

For the Royal Irish are one of the great unifying forces on the island of Ireland. Some 20 per cent of the men in the general service battalion come from south of the border and work without the slightest hint of sectarian rancour with their largely (but by no means exclusively) Protestant brothers-in-arms from Northern Ireland. It has always been a regiment that has cared for its soldiers and it is good to see that Col Collins's superiors have in turn looked after him.

There is some very sneaky spin going on here. First, it is indeed true that the RIR draws soldiers from the Irish Republic. But the numbers run into a few hundred at most. So to bill the RIR as a "great unifying force" is preposterous -- it's more to do with a few young lads who want a bit more opportunity and adventure than they'd get enlisting in the Irish army. If one wants to go down this road of home nation nostalgia, at least mention something that has the scale and trans-sectarian scope to be a plausible example, like the all-Ireland rugby team.

Second, the claim that the RIR always cares for its soldiers -- that's the subject of the 2nd investigation into Collins, and the parents of a soldier who committed suicide while under his command have a different impression.

And then there's the mention of the RIR's HQ in Ballymena. The many Unionist readers of the paper get a nice warm glow with that sentence. We try to think of Ballymena as being famous for an indirect link to another Collins -- the Michael Collins of Irish history, as played by Ballymena native Liam Neeson in that movie. But sadly, Ballymena is more notable as the stomping ground of anti-Catholic bigot, Ian Paisley. A nice little nod and wink from the paper to its core readership.

Fumble in the smoky, fatty till

What do you do if you're an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal and have spent the summer watching three years of rants about the glorious consequences of invading Iraq and the miracle of self-financing tax cuts come crashing down around your ears? Simple, you editorialise about something else entirely. Like the oppressed smokers and eaters of Ireland. And so it is that these groups find themselves elevated to a cause celebre in one of Tuesday's WSJ editorials (link requires subs). Let's just pick out a few er...highlights of the reasoning:

The Republic of Ireland is a Catholic country. But when it comes to health issues, the Irish Free State is apparently no longer feeling either very free or (small-c) catholic. Ireland's health minister has proposed a New York City-style smoking ban in all workplaces, including pubs, from January 1, 2004.
....It turns out that Irish Health Minister Micheal Martin has been weighing a tax on fatty foods as well....

But it says something about the spread of nanny-statism that a fat tax is being contemplated even in a nation as famous for food and drink as Ireland...The question of what makes us fat isn't so clear-cut. What if it turns out that the main culprit is carbohydrates in the likes of potatoes and Irish soda bread? And what about Guinness? If the minister thinks the uproar over smoking in pubs is something, wait'll he takes on them.

Note:
1. The dated usage of the term Irish Free State, presumably a desperate search for a bit of word play. The country hasn't been called that since 1937 or 1949 (depending on some constitutional technicalities).

2. The use of the term "nanny-statism" to describe taxes. DUDES! The whole point of market economies is to ensure that prices reflect the true cost of people's behaviour. Sometimes getting prices right will involve the imposition of taxes, no communism involved. Another small example of the divergence between intellectual economics and its bastard child in the world of politics.

3. Which means that we're really not sure what they mean by "taking on" Guinness. Alcohol is already taxed, quite heavily. So in the WSJ's terminology, the Republic has already long been a nanny state.

4. We're "famous for food and drink?" OK, they didn't say famous for good food. So we'll let that one pass.

We'd been wondering when the complaints would start

A few times recently we've sat in front of the TV, basically baffled by the ads for the new soda from 7up, called dnL (7up upside down, geddit?). Wondering whether it's still just 7up (apparently not), and whether we're supposed to be laughing at the antics of the leprechaun flogging the product. Now we read in Saturday's Irish Times that all is not well with the ad campaign; the crux of the complaint is this:

In each [ad], the short-tempered leprechaun is pulling a wagon through the streets of New York while trying to sell Dr Pepper/7Up's new drink, dnL....In the offending advert, a New York police officer asks the leprechaun if he has a permit for the wagon. The leprechaun replies: "I'm not real, you moron, I'm a myth" and starts dancing a jig and humming a tune.

The problem is, it sounds like he is saying "I'm a Mick." The commercial will be re-edited to clarify. As with other cases of tacky Oirish marketing, our problem is not much any actual or perceived offence from the langauge, but the more basic complaint that it's not funny.

No news please, we're American

95 people dead in a mosque bombing in Iraq, including a cleric who was a potential bridge between the occupying powers and the people. So what does ABC's "serious" news program Nightline cover? The 25th anniversary of that film chronicle of drunken college debauchery, Animal House. A sly commentary on Dubya's college years at Yale, perhaps? Or just a long holiday weekend? Perhaps the effort of spending 6 months straight covering the Lewinsky affair in 1999 is still taking its toll on tired hacks. No time for messy news about furriners.

1776, 1922...

Trolling the web for something to be outraged about on this sleepy August day (other than Europe cooking and the Middle East exploding while Dubya snoozes in Crawford), we came across this passage in a Slate article about the Booker prize:

Today, being a British, Irish, or Commonwealth citizen will allow a novelist to qualify for Britain's most coveted literary prize, the Man Booker Prize, now worth $80,000 (or 50,000 pounds). If, however, you write in English and come from the one English-speaking country that defeated the British, you are excluded from the competition.

The article had already been briefly yanked for an incorrect claim that citizens of the Republic of Ireland were not eligible for the award, but we're being slighted again in this description of the USA as the only English speaking country that defeated the British. DUDES! Did the Brits just decide to endow the 32 counties* with self-rule in 1922 out of the goodness of their hearts? Did no-one see that Michael Collins movie? And anyway, if American authors are feeling slighted about not being eligible for the Booker, they should consider the Irish IMPAC award instead. Any book, any language, any nationality. And more money than the Booker.

(*6 counties within the UK, and 26 becoming the Free State)

Innocent Landscapes

Innocent Landscapes is the perfectly chosen title of a set of photographs by David Farrell, which show postcard-worthy Irish scenes at which digs were undertaken in the late 1990s to find the remains of the Irish "disappeared" i.e. people kidnapped and presumed murdered by the IRA, but whose remains had never been found. The IRA provided some information to help locate the remains, but at that point memories had deteriorated over the intervening decades.

The search for the body in the most notorious case, the execution of mother of 10, Jean McConville, was unsuccessful, but the remains have now apparently been located near where the original search took place. It will take weeks to confirm the identity, but significant circumstantial evidence indicates that the McConvilles will finally be able to have a proper funeral. Mrs McConville was murdered for having tended to a British soldier dying outside her door.

Some of Farrell's photographs are reproduced on this German site [busted link -- try this]; the photos themselves are currently on exhibit at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art. They perfectly encapsulate the capacity for casual brutality amid pastoral beauty. The final picture on the website shows the beach near where the body was found.

All terrorism is local

Much of the reactionary blog community seems to have followed the example of the Dear Leader and taken August off. So in the absence of the daily barrage of lunacy on Opinionjournal.com, one has to go the Wall Street Journal editorials to see the underlying mentality at work. We've noted before two recurring themes of much of the reactionary commentary on terrorism: the Epiphany Theme and the SPECTRE theme.

The first compares a terrorist event to the first sighting of the Messiah, in its ability to open our eyes to things we just hadn't seen before. The second views terrorist events as being coordinated from a stylish Bauhaus style bunker, in which various aspiring Dr. Evils (Kim Jong Il, Osama, Saddam, Yassir Arafat, and Jacques Chirac) allocate terrorist resources in reaction to strategic moves by the US. The two themes collide in today's WSJ editorial on the Bombay atrocity:

...All of this [Bombay] once again shows how the fight against terrorism is global. That's a lesson that doesn't yet seem to have fully hit home in India, judging from New Delhi's recent rejection of a U.S. request to send 15,000 troops to help restore order and combat terrorism in Iraq...
...The U.S. has recognized that India has its own terror problem, and has pressured Pakistan to stop winking at terrorists in Kashmir...We think India could have helped build even closer U.S. ties had it decided to send troops to Iraq. The U.S. has driven a wedge into the center of Muslim terrorism with its occupation of Iraq, and it is looking to see who its friends really are.

As usual one gasps at the implicit and explicit "logic" here: India is not serious about fighting terrorism because it wouldn't send troops to Iraq, but thanks to the bombing, maybe it now will get serious; Iraq is the center of Muslim terrorism -- can they name a single Islamic terrorist event outside Iraq attributable to Iraqis? And since even the editorial seems to agree that the Indian terrorism problem is concentrated in Kashmir, how exactly does invading Iraq amelioriate that problem? Unless they mean the preposterous flypaper theory, within which global terrorist resources are allocated by SPECTRE into the Iraq trap laid for them by the US.

Ever get the feeling that US foreign policy is being run by people who think Bombay is a brand of gin and Kashmir is a Led Zeppelin song?

That sophistamacated Pentagon communications system

It's understandable that commentators would focus on the geopolitical implications of this story from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:

The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.

But our question is: they still use telegrams at the Pentagon?

Keep your Franglais up to date

Je google, tu googles, nous googlons...

Desktop detective work

One of the minor details lost in the coverage of the UK's Hutton inquiry into circumstances surrounding the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly is the role that a search engine, almost certainly Google, played in the affair. After the BBC ran their story that Downing Street had exaggerated the Iraqi weapons threat, the government figured out who the BBC's source was. They then decided to play a coy game with the media in which the government would not directly name the leaker, but did provide some background information on him and said that would confirm educated guesses offered to them. It didn't take Financial Times political editor James Blitz long to come up with the correct guess, as he explained to the Inquiry:

[the search keywords]
"Ministry", "defence", "consultant", "chemical" and "weapons".
Q. And who popped up on the search?
A. ...I looked at the name of the individual and I took the view that this was not somebody who matched the description that had been given out at the 3.45 briefing.
Q. Right.
A. [a colleague] continued his research and selected from the list the reference to www.Sussex.ac.uk which produced a document.
Q. Was Dr Kelly's name on that document?
A. It was on that document, yes.
Q. Had you ever heard of Dr Kelly before that?
A. No, I had not.

Doing the search now, Kelly's name comes up in the 3rd result.

It's not the cigarettes that will kill you...

It's the incense used in Catholic Church ceremonies. So says Irish junior minister Jim McDaid M.D. in today's Irish Independent. To be honest, we haven't ruled out that this story is a hoax because it seems so preposterous and suspiciously timed. The Irish government is planning a total ban on smoking in the workplace from January 1 2004, and the definition of the workplace is to include bars and restaurants. If implemented, this would be a radical change from the traditional Irish experience of returning home from the pub with one's clothes reeking of tobacco.

A well funded lobby has sprung up to oppose the change, and has trotted out histrionic "analyses" of the impact of the ban: losses in jobs and tax revenue, not to mention the traditional Irish way of life. The public seem to be tuning out the opposition, not least because they heard exactly the same analysis of what would happen when duty free purchases on travel between EU countries was eliminated, and nothing bad happened. So it would indeed be convenient to portray the ban as coming from a government gone mad...today, cigarettes, tomorrow..the Mass! And for proof, this newspaper article:

The junior minister, who is a medical doctor, said high levels of carcinogenic carbon molecules in the smoke of the burning incense were being inhaled by the children.

"It makes me cringe when I see that huge cloud of smoke rising right up into the child's face, particularly given the delicate nature of a child's lungs and the level of irritation it must cause," he said.

A pint of Ultra and a packet of protein please

Americans visiting Britain and Ireland this summer will likely notice that the countries are in the midst of a frenzy about the Atkins diet, with a time lag relative to the frenzy in the US confirming that lifestyle trends still travel east, not west. Journalists always need a pleasing hook for lifestyle stories, given they are not, like, news, and one can only go so far with pictures of stars allegedly on the diet as an excuse to run another Atkins story. So a nice hook was provided when the Atkins book knocked Harry Potter off the best seller lists in Britain.

But any popularisation of the Atkins diet in Britain and Ireland is going to have to confront the islands' considerable appetite for beer, and lots of it. Step forward Michelob Ultra, which in its two years on the shelves in the US is considered a huge success by its brewer, Anheuser-Busch, and has just been launched in the UK. Surprisingly, given the slick marketing of Bud, Bud Light was a flop in Britain, but Ultra, another low-carb beer, is well timed to catch the Atkins surge there. The Ultra name manages to avoid the handicap of containing the word Light -- we suspect there are quite a few people who think the Light suffix in a beer name refers to alcohol content and not carbs. As this website explains, there is essentially no difference in calories and carbs between Michelob Ultra and Miller Lite. But what self-respecting, but perhaps confused, Irish beer drinker is going to order Lite beer?

Glasgow Cheer

We are pleased to inform our thousands of readers that the BoBW team has resurfaced after three weeks spent amongst the fascinating indigenous peoples of Meath, Dublin, Kildare, Offaly, Wicklow, and Glasgow. And if you think the fifth location seems a bit out of place with the other four, it's not. In fact you don't even have to take the 40 minute flight from Dublin to Glasgow to see one major element of its day-day-day life around Ireland -- football. Our informal visual poll is that even in this age of the Manchester United marketing juggernaut, shirts of Glasgow Celtic football club easily outnumber those of their English counterparts on Irish streets. The wearing of the club's green and white hoops is very much in.

One unexpected and potentially tricky consequence of the vocal support for Celtic amongst their fans in the Republic for the national team is that European football's governing body, UEFA, is unhappy with the booing of a Georgian player during a recent Georgia-Ireland match -- he was booed because he plays his club football for Celtic's Glasgow rival, the traditionally Protestant Rangers. In fact there's a laughable element to some fans' continued devotion to the old sectarian team model, because both clubs now draw many players from outside Scotland, players who couldn't care less about Glasgow's traditional sectarian rivalries. But anyway, a section of the Irish fans at the international match found the Georgian player's club affiliation sufficient grounds for booing, and the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) is worried that UEFA now have the national team on a watchlist for future sanctions if the problems persist. As a result, the FAI is making clear its stern disapproval of any such behaviour in future matches, with an imminent friendly against Australia (with two Rangers players) the immediate source of concern.

We're not sure whether it reflects the sophistication of the booers themselved, or the ease of putting up a website these days, but indicted fans have struck back via a self explanatory domain name, www.ok2boo.com. They make two points. First they rightly call attention to the FAI's preposterous description of the booing as "racist." There is a tendency in Irish officialdom to reach into a lucky bag of buzzwords to describe any behaviour that they don't like, and all the better if the description makes you sound like a thoroughly modern and sensitive person. So racist it was. Of course, this is utter nonsense -- if the booing is anything, it's sectarian, but even that's a stretch. The Georgian player is most likely Orthodox Christian, so is he being booed because of that? Perhaps there's still ill-feeling in Lansdowne Road about the Great Schism.

The fans' basic case is that Celtic-Rangers is a classic club rivalry, that it's the job of fans to create an atmosphere that helps their team, which may involve finding reasons to boo the other team, and thus the club affiliations of the other team's players are just another item on the checklist of excuses to boo. No malicious intent. But somewhere in the seeming overreaction of the FAI, there is a valid point. Have the Irish fans of Celtic asked themselves precisely why they support Celtic and despise Rangers? One can always take the copout and answer, like in Fiddler on the Roof, Tradition! But any further exploration can't escape the fact that Rangers are considered worthy of contempt because they are associated with Protestantism. Maybe one responds that the association is with Unionism, not Protestantism. But UEFA, with tricky fixtures in the Balkans to think about, is going to be very leery about accepting political rivalries as a justification for fan behavior. We hope that website becomes ok2booequally.com.