Victory for Facebook group worried about the Independent newspaper
I joined a Facebook group called 'If Rod Liddle becomes editor of Independent, I will not buy it again.' and now it seems it has had the desired impact: 'Negotiations to install Rod Liddle as the editor of the Independent after its purchase by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev are understood to have ended yesterday...after MediaGuardian.co.uk broke the story about Liddle being lined up to edit the paper in January, there were protests from staff, politicians and readers. "He then went through this extraordinary campaign of hostility," a source said.Yesterday's meeting appears to indicate that Lebedev had a change of heart...
The Moving Statue Of Ballinspittle Grotto (Ireland 1985)
(image by thaths, used under a creative commons licence) A short movie on the 1985 Ballinspittle moving statues incident.
Irish people to charge Tesco €500K for fridge space
€500,000: Every Little Helps, I suppose. According to the Irish Times, British retailer Tesco is intimidating Irish businesses into coughing up large sums of money for the honour of being allowed to put their goods on Tesco's shelves. Sound insane? Well, what makes it crazier is that if you enter the hallowed halls of an Irish Tesco supermarket, there's lots of cheery signs telling you that they stock Irish goods. Yet.... The country's biggest retailer has been telling individual suppliers they must pay sums of up to €500,000 in order to have a presence in its 119 stores around the...
Herzog: Dazzle him with chocolate
Brilliant. A young man named Laszlo Brauning breaks into Werner Herzog's film school. Although I had gotten in, I soon learned that this would not be the twelve-student atelier that I had envisioned, but rather a fifty-person lecture. The weekend seminar would cost a whopping $1,450 that I didn't have, and after raising money for my feature I had no stomach to roll out another campaign. At this point I asked myself: What would Werner Herzog do? Well, not only does the Rogue Film School's syllabus include forging shooting permits, but I also heard Herzog once say he stole a...
Friday Choon: ‘Give me Big Time’ Peter Gabriel vs. Timbaland
(image by Joi, used under a Creative Commons license) A nice Friday mashup from Ben Double M. In light of the fact that this coming week sees the release of Gabriel's new cover-version project Scratch My Back, we're sure he won't mind this minor copyright contravention... More from Ben Double M.
An ‘Avalanche of Crap!’ Senator Eoghan Harris on George Lee
(Senator Eoghan Harris, earlier today) This is a discussion from Eamon Keane's Newstalk radio show where he and Senator Eoghan Harris discuss the George Lee controversy. It's among the more hilarious things I've heard in some months with Senator Harris calling it like he sees it on women, Dublin south and men who don't fart. If the above player doesn't load for you, you can also listen here.
Ronald Reagan Jnr. takes Pamela Geller (Queen of the Birthers) to School
(image by Nathan Jongewaard, used under a Creative Commons license) Pamela Geller: ain't she a charmer? More on Pamela Geller
More GUILTY
Ah, the Binyam Mohamed case. We've reported before on his torture etc. and now I am happy to report that MI5 have been found GUILTY. GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY. 'MI5 faced an unprecedented and damaging crisis tonight after one of the country's most senior judges found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a "culture of suppression" that undermined government assurances about its conduct.The condemnation, by Lord Neuberger, the master of the rolls, was drafted shortly before the foreign secretary, David Miliband, lost his long legal battle to suppress a seven-paragraph court document...
Obama Hasn’t Given Up Plans for Global Nuclear Holocaust by 2015
'Russian officials reacted coolly on Friday to the news that Romania had agreed to host American missile interceptors starting in 2015...' To say the least. NATO missiles a few miles from Moscow, what a sensible idea that is! Details about that in the New York Times. Predictably, 'President Dmitry Medvedev approved Friday a new military doctrine identifying NATO expansion as a national threat and reaffirming Russia's right to use nuclear weapons if the country's existence is threatened.' See the Reuters story. And I say thank you, thank you thank you thank you Mister 'Nobel Peace Prize' Obama, for ending all...
Relaxing Pagan Site Actually a Totem Pole of Cthulhu
'Letters that lay undiscovered in national archives for more than 230 years suggest that Silbury Hill, the enigmatic man-made mound that stands between Marlborough and Beckhampton, may have originally be constructed around some sort of totem pole.' Read the Long lost theory and let's raise Great Cthulhu once and for all!