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From: "Hugh mT" <imho@eircom.net>
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Subject: IMHO 1.10 - Chomsky, Fashion, and Segways
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                                                            27.11.02

                        Insignificant Matters Heavily Overemphasised
                                                   <www.imho.8m.com>
                                                          by Hugh mT
====================================================================

It's time again for IMHO, brought to you as always by the letters I,
M, H and O, in partnership with the goofy electronic hubris of the
Irish Internet.  IMHO will be in orbit again sometime in early
December.

   * * *   Back issues online at http://www.imho.8m.com   * * *

Formatted for easy reading in Courier New, so you might like to
print it out in that font.  IMHO also contains hyperlinks to sites
of interest or relevance: read it while online, too, and check 'em
out.

In case you're wondering, we Bowdlerise colourful language (e.g.
'bas7ard') so that IMHO can sneak past corporate obscenity filters,
like a Dublin solicitor's staff car zooming slyly down the taxi lane
with a cheap post-regulation taxi plate on top: http://xsls.com?81

====================================================================

Heartfelt thanks this ish to AnnieT, Sean, Ray and the indefatigable
Mr Brennan for leads and content.  And a big Brava! of
congratulations to Jacqueline on her outstanding occupational
odyssey, plus a Bravo! of felicitations to Badger for his famous
fourwheeled feat.

====================================================================

Please FORWARD this to anyone you think might be interested: if
that's how you received this, then please SUBSCRIBE by sending mail
to imho@eircom.net with the word 'subscribe' in the subject line.

You didn't see the previous IMHOs?  They're either in your Junk Mail
folder with the rest of the s9am, or you weren't sent them.  Read
them online at http://www.imho.8m.com.  But make sure to SUBSCRIBE!

====================================================================


AN INTERNET EIREANNACH............................Ping An Irish Song

Yet another Irish internet company, Octagon Technologies, closed for
good this week.  And after reading the phrase for what seemed like
the umpteen-thousandth time, we were idly wondering how many Irish
tech companies blamed their misfortunes "on the global downturn":
http://makeashorterlink.com/?S35A63392

Oh, so it's about 450 then.  Thanks, Google.

*

The death occurred recently of that great Irish washtub musician
Lonnie Donegan.  RIP.  This seems like an apt time therefore to
reflect on his many accomplishments: his virtuoso playing of
utensil-based instruments, his worldwide commercial success, his
place in history as King of Skiffle, and how he wiped billions of
yen off the value of the Tokyo stock market:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=373A9C4F.61B@time.life
("panic and subsequent 10+% decline of Tokyo Stock Exchange when Reuters
advised 'Lonnie Donnegan' was dead")
and also at
http://xsls.com?80
("to Japanese ears it sounded like Ronald Reagan").

*

UCD's Literary and Historical Society this week awarded an honorary
fellowship to the tediously brilliant American multidisciplarian Dr
Noam Chomsky.  Now the idea of some trifling college society
awarding a mere honorary fellowship actually sounds rather like an
insult to us, considering that Niall Quinn and Marian Finucane were
given *degrees* by DIT the very next day, but then Chomsky
apparently inspired some of Radiohead's most caterwaulingly blunted
songs, so we suppose it serves him right.  Anyway, if you're an
admirer of the great man's hermeutic genius, linguistic philosophy
or contentious views on US foreign policy, perhaps you might also
appreciate his amazing interview of Tom Hanks:
http://www.sadiethepilot.com/aaweb/tapes.htm#tomnnoam

Very special thanks to IMHO's London correspondent Ray Butler for
this one.

*

Key IMHO contributor Sean Lynch quite realistically predicts a post-
Budget dole queue for all of us, and wonders if we'll miss those
cash-and-job cow multinationals when they're gone?   Not if their
Irish presence was as permanent and impressive as "the world's
leading risk and insurance services firm", he concludes:
http://www.marsh.ie
(compare and contrast with, say, http://www.marsh.co.uk/)

*

Also: we've been remiss in the past in not featuring
EircomTribunal.com's stalwart and righteous campaigning against
Eircom's crippling rates and crippled infrastructure in this
country.  Well, we aim to redress that right now, by pointing out
(1) Their 'Banana Republic' international price comparison page at
http://www.eircomtribunal.com/dossier_banana_rep.html, which will
surely make you mad enough to
(2) Download and print out their marvellously bitter "No More
Favours For You, Mr Eircom Employee" flyer from
http://www.eircomtribunal.com/counterstrike_a2_nomore.html, designed
to be stuck under the windshields of the ubiquitous and bilious
blue/orange Eircom vans.
Now if only EircomTribunal.com could somehow could retrieve that
money we all lost on bloody Eircom shares...


                          * * * * * * * * *


IMHO'S PICK: JOB....................IMHO HO HO (AND A BOTTLE OF RUM)

"FATHER CHRISTMAS on a bike - Student - Giving out FREEBIES - Four
weeks".  No, not us telegraphing our worst nightmare to our shrink,
but a job description for a position that apparently pays "enough".
Email tmckeagney@msn.com or hell, cycle into his perfume shop at 128
The Stephens Green Centre and show him what you can do.

And hey, if you're a crazy maniac, that's great too.  It's about
time we had an Irish SANTACON - after all, no force on earth can
stop one hundred Santas, especially if they're drunk:
http://www.santarchy.com/
(from the San Francisco Police Report, "the naughty Santas ... had
reeked (sic) havoc in the emporium ... in an un-Christmas like
fashion.")

*

Heh.  Disproving the stereotype that all accountants are boring:
some Dublin 2 company is looking for a "Parti-time bookkeeper" at
http://xsls.com?83

*

Our attention-deficient gaze also fell briefly this week onto a box
ad in a Sunday paper which is seeking private investors for an
ADVENTURE SPORTS RETAILING business in Dublin.  Now this probably
just means selling snowboards or something equally tame, but in our
imagination we see IMHO readers hunting elephants, dogfighting in
biplanes over the Wicklow Hills and abseiling down moon craters.
Just in case we're right, any "smart, experienced partner/investor"
looking for an "equity stake/board position" should "express"
"interest" to neptune@atomic.ie.

You know, it might look like we're giving these people free
advertising, but by putting their email addresses on the public web,
we're actually GUARANTEEING them spam...


                          * * * * * * * * *


IMHO'S PICK: EVENT...........................Allow Us To Demonstrate

Friday is BUY NOTHING DAY.  For the sake of your own mental health
and the socio-economic future, we urge you to give it a try.  It's
not that hard to get through 24 hours without a purchase, and those
corporate balance sheets sure look funny with a big pre-Christmas
hole in them.

The official home of BND is of course Adbusters
(http://adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd/) and they have a run-down of
Irish activities at http://xsls.com?84... rather a disappointing line-up
at this late stage, although the Zombie-Shopping in Galway sounds
like fun - shame they're moving the day to Saturday, hopefully it's
not for purpose-defeating reasons ("Friday?  Damn, I'm working the
late shift at McDonald's... how about Saturday?").  In addition and
elsewhere you can expect bring-and-trade markets, flypostering, free
stuff, public speaking and all the other happy faces of democratic
consumer agitation.  Punk's not dead!  Party for your right to
fight!  No Logo!  Hare Hare!  And so on.

*

We're now going to risk life and limb by mentioning an event which
is so diametrically opposed to the above that we might just bring
about the heat-death of the Internet by combining them in the one
newsletter.

We speak of course of the benighted and spiritually-denuded sickness
of the TRILOGY FASHION SHOW in the RDS on December 4th, tickets
starting at "just E50" (but rising to E395 + VAT, natch).  The
advertising for this bleak celebration focuses entirely on "the most
beautiful women in the world" who will grace the Simmonscourt
Pavilion with their airbrushed emptiness: Tyra Banks, Sophie Dahl
and Anna Kournikova (not the virus) are the only names we recognise.
You have to pore pretty closely over the small print of the press
ads to divine that it's the "new Escada Collection" (the who now?)
they're modelling.  And in an utterly appropriate and inevitable
partnership, tickets are available from the cultural sewage
treatment system that is Ticketmaster.
http://www.cslassociates.ie/events/trilogy_fashion.htm


                          * * * * * * * * *


IMHO'S PICK: DOWNLOAD..................Transparent and Unaccountable

Given our internet focus and the subversive nature of our scurrilous
publishing agenda, there is only one possible download
recommendation this week.  It's the brilliant GHOSTZILLA browser, a
creation of architectural genius which brings office escapism to
heady new heights.

Designed to facilitate inconspicuous worktime browsing, Ghostzilla
sits quietly and invisibly in the background until you summon it
with a special mouse movement.  It then adapts itself to your
currently-uppermost application, for example Micro$oft Word, leaving
Word's toolbars intact while showing web pages in a subtle grayed-
out wash in the main window.  Images appear in a subdued two-tone
unless you summon them, and the overall effect is to make it look
like you're working exactly as you should be.  A casual glance from
your Office Space boss as he paces past your cubicle shouldn't
detect anything that looks like browsing.  To think that someone
devoted their life to creating something so wonderfully juvenile!
It's a beautiful thing.  Go ghosting at
http://www.ghostzilla.com.


                          * * * * * * * * *


IMHO'S PICK: INTERNET^HWS................................ON YER BIKE

Roll up, roll up roll up!  Segue right this way!  Amazon is now
selling the celebrated SEGWAY (aka Ginger, aka IT) online, the hype
of the millennium finally made available to lowly consumers.  You're
only four months and five thousands bucks away from participating in
the future of transport, the most fundamental and significant
breakthrough in human evolution since the invention of the leg, the
"spirit that can change the world", etc. etc.

Get out your chequebook and get your Segway at
http://makeashorterlink.com/?N49A51392.

*

The perfect expression of our post-modern mania for meta-media
(whoah! Easy, Chomsky!) is the utterly compelling 'Hoax Photo Test'
at http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/tests/hoaxphototest.html

(If you've seen this already, that's prolly 'cos the mighty B3TA.com
featured it last Friday - credit where it's due)

*

"Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says
one of the prophets of doom behind MyLifeBits, an incredibly Dickian
personalised self-database being developed by - who else? -
Microsoft.  By cataloguing every single artifact of your life
history, storing everything in an online repository, you build a
searchable index of every conversation, document, movement, event
and action that you ever generate or perform.  It's a continuous
real-time alibi recorder.  It's a voluntary submission of every
second of existence to information overload.  It's a system that can
show you all the photos you were ever in, tell you exactly how many
phonecalls you've ever made, or retrieve an mpeg of you going to the
toilet in March, 1986:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993084

Also: we knew that modern innovation was roaring ahead at a
blistering pace, but can MyLifeBits really allow "time-shifting"?
http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.asp

For a fictional (OR IS IT???) look at where this sinister technology
might just lead, check out this wonderful piece of short science
fiction (OR IS IT???):
http://www.ftrain.com/robot_exclusion_protocol.html
("I'm a Googlebot!  I will not kill you.")

*

The newest in the intriguing development of really sick-minded God-
perspective Flash games (e.g. suicide bombers at
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/kaboom.html, giant human-burning
magnifying glass at http://xsls.com?82) has arrived... boasting a title as
bereft of imagination as the gameplay is of taste, it's 'Pedestrian
Killer':
http://www.flaboratorium.org/data/flabor/4/4.htm

But if you prefer God-games which let you manipulate the very atoms
of creation, check out the awe-inspiring microscopic version of
Tetris using computer-controlled microspheres these loons have
created:
http://www.nat.vu.nl/~joost/complex/index.html.

*

We Irish are sometimes so uncultured, compared to our continental
cousins - even in things you'd expect us to be good at, like
vandalism.  Here we get inarticulate clowns with cans of red paint
daubing "666" on the gates of Cardinal Connell's palatial Drumcondra
residence... whereas in Paris, to pick an example out of the blue,
egghead situationists sneakily attach absurdist plaques (e.g. "On
April 17, 1967, nothing happened here") onto public buildings:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2478161.stm

*

Microsoft have co-opted the AmIHotOrNot concept, as is their wont, mixed
it up with a bit of Miss World, and come up with the 'Microsoft Office v.
X Integrated Experience', or Ms. M.o.X.i.e. competition:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/officex/contests/votemain.asp
Was it for this Emily Wilding Davison died beneath King George V's horse?
Was it for this that all those bras were burned?  It's like Girl Power
never happened.

*

When good TiVos go bad: you tape one episode of Ellen, they assume
you're gay:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1038261936872356908,00.html


                          * * * * * * * * *


LEGACY MEDIA.................There Was Nothing In The Air That Night

IRISH TV: If you rush straight home from work after reading this on
Thursday, you might catch the second semi-final of corny but
challenging elimination quiz IT'S NOT THE ANSWER (RTE1, 17:30).
Come on the beardy guy!  The final's on at the same time tomorrow.
Calm down from all that excitement with the laughable one-hour FAIR
CITY murder trial special (RTE1, 20:00) - it's quite brilliant how
the risible scripts really bring out the absolute worst in truly
terrible actors.  Settle down with a few G&Ts to watch PRIME TIME on
the same channel at 21:30, where they're discussing Ireland's
alcoholic epidemic and its attendant social problems, or waste them
on either the bottom-scraping POLICE ACADEMY 3 (N2, 21:30) or the
geriatric 1978 blockbuster COMA (TG4, 22:05).

Friday night, and after a hard day of buying nothing you can flop in
front of creepy Hitler doco SIX MOST EVIL MEN (N2, 21:00).  Near as
we can tell, the other evil men are Macauley Culkin in UNCLE BUCK
(TV3, 20:00), gossip columnist WINCHELL in a solid eponymous biopic
(N2, 21:30), the big boss bad guy - is it Kang? Kane? Cowen? - in
MORTAL KOMBAT (TG4, 21:25), Mel Gibson in predictable 80s drug
thriller TEQUILA SUNRISE (RTE1, 23:50), and Quentin Tarantino
jumping on his own bandwagon in DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO (TV3,
0:50).  Hang on, Dave Fanning might be one of the evil men too: he's
presenting THE LAST BROADCAST on Network 2 at 23:35.


                          * * * * * * * * *


COLOPHON....................................................APOLOGIA

We'd like to focus mainly on the IRISH Internet, but, uh, we were
sick that day.  Please help us out by mailing in your topical Irish
net news, your high-profile .ie failures, your worthy Gaelic
successes, your hilarious local web misadventures, anything that
seems messed-up, inappropriate or insane... or just mail us your
feedback.  (That address is imho@eircom.net)

But whatever you do, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE send this on to as many
people as you can.  If you don't, hostile scripts embedded in this
character string will disable your 'Forward' button forever:
~:|``¦?

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