How Certain Millionaires Can Help Make Poverty History - They Can Give a Few Bars of a Song

Millionaire television producer Bob Geldof has announced plans for an international series of popular music concerts to coincide with the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, on July 2nd. The concerts are taking place at five venues - London, Paris, Rome, Berlin and Philadelphia, all cities of G8 countries simultaneously with the G8 summit.

The free concert in London's Hyde Park will feature millionaire Madonna, millionaires Coldplay, millionaire Dido and millionaires REM. Millionaires Bon Jovi and millionaire Stevie Wonder will perform in Philadelphia, while millionaires Duran Duran will perform in Rome.

The millionaires are assembling in support of the Make Poverty History organisation, who were recently in the news concerning allegations that the trendy white wristbands that show the wearer's conscience is in the right place towards his less-developed brethren are made in the same sort of sweatshop as the wearer's Nike sneakers. The assembled millionaires' position on the sweatshop issue is unclear at time of going to press.

Ag Fánaíocht an Ghréasáin as Gaeilge!

D'insíonn seanchara don Spailpín agus sáreolaí teicneolaíochta go minic gurb é Firefox an brabhsálaí is fearr agus An Spailpín ag siortaigh ar an tEadarlíon, ach níor bhac leis an Spailpín leo. Cosúil le cach nach h-oibríonn i gcroí na ríomhaireachta, is cuma leis an Spailpín faoi cach seachas cad atá taitíoch dó.

Ach nuair thug mé cuairt ar an suíomh Firefox cúpla nóiméad ó shin, agus mé ag éirí beagán breán den obair agus ag cuardaigh tonnta móra an Ghréasáin Domhanda, fuair mé amach go bhfuil an brabhsálaí Firefox le tarraignt anuas agus leagan Gaeilge air.

Thogas anuas é comh tapaidh mar is féidir liom, agus tá sé le húsaid agamsa anois. Is ait an rud é, bheith ag obair i dtimpeallacht Ghaeilge - cuirtear bród orm, sárbhród, go bhfuil áit ag ár tseantheanga ins an domhan mór nua teicneolaíochta, an seantheanga chéanna atá ar leathchós san uaigh leis na mblianta fhada. Tabhair é daoibh féin anseo, agus cuardaigh ar an líosta.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

My God, it's awful. Really, really bad. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a bad, bad movie. Fans will have to go and see it, just as fans of County Mayo will march off to support the Green and Red against whatever football power is going to give them a scutching on that particular Sunday, but the feeling of abject depression at the end of the "entertainment" is just the same. It's such a waste.

The holes in the plot are endearments, compared to the rest of the horror. Consider this: not only are the Jedi smart bucks generally, but they are also in commune with the Force, thus giving them an extra layer of insight. Now, one of their number, and Jedi are not supposed to have any truck with the ladies, is not only living with a lady, but said lady is eight months up the duff and large as a barge in consequence. And the boys twig: absolutely nothing. D'oh!, Obi-Wan Kenobi doesn't remark when the penny finally drops.

Poor Ewan McGregor. He does his best, he really does, while those other British thesps, Christopher Lee and Ian McDiarmid, simply think of England and the cheque, and ham it up for all their worth. McDiarmid, particularly, is sheer bacon, especially when he goes from the cultured vowels of Chancellor Palpatine to the rasp of the Emperor. But the rest of the cast just sink beneath the waves of dialogue that's just too awful in a script that, in word, sucks.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has to be one of the worst written movies in history. It stinks. It's rotten. And, as Anthony Lane remarked in the that brilliantly vicious review in the New Yorker last week, any time Lucas gets himself into a position to knock the audience's socks off - socks that have resolutely stayed on since this this whole sorry sequence of spurious prequels began - he invariably makes a complete balls of it.

Since Qui-Gon Jinn first pitched up to Tatooine and discovered Anakin Skywalker we've been waiting for Skywalker to turn into a badass. Six or seven long and boring hours of pitifully dull cinema later, he finally gets his freak on and, in a scene reminiscent of Riefenstahl at her jackbooted best, makes his way to the Jedi Temple with intent do harm. And what does Lucas do? An Spailpín cannot say as he's been begged not to spoil the movie for anyone that still wants to go, but anyone that has seen it and remembers what happens next - well, it's pass the sick bag, isn't it? Gawd bless us, every one, says Tiny Fucking Tim.

The characters have no depth whatsoever. If anything Anakin Skywalker sounds even more petulant that he did last time out, in Attack of the Drones. This is a man who sells his soul, and the reason why is because he reasons and feels like a baby. The man is meant to be on his way to Jedi master, a supreme mystic and intellect in the galaxy, and he sounds like a spoilt little brat. If the Jedi had light slippers instead of sabres and Anakin spent a little more across Obi-Wan's knee (or Mace Windu's, if he's such a playa) getting six of the best it could have saved the Republic you know.

Shall we sample some dialogue? If we must, I suppose:

Obi-Wan: "But Chancellor Palpatine is evil!"
Anakin: "I believe the Jedi are evil!"

It's like listening to five year olds, it really is.

There's more to these space opera than effects you know. Anything that happens in Star Wars has to be true to its own reality, the Star Wars reality, but it has to serve a greater cause as well, and that's to keep the story bombing along. In the Western World we've been wondering what makes drama work since Aristotle wrote the Poetics. But this is passed by in Revenge of the Sith in order to satisfy some bizarre need for misplaced authenticity in a story that's MADE UP in the first place.

Example: In Revenge of the Sith, always true to the Yodic way of speech Yoda is. And that was one of the delights of The Empire Strikes Back, still the best Star Wars movie by a street, this object initial way of speaking that Yoda has. But here's the thing: in Empire, when Yoda has something pertinant to say, he drops the act: "No! Do, or do not - there is no try." "That is why you have failed." In Revenge of the Sith, he oy, veys! to the end. On his way into exile, his religion over, his priesthood destroyed, Yoda says "failed have I." Schtick must always remain paramount over the story in Sith, and that's why it's a rotten, rotten picture.

My advice? Wait for the sequel. You'd never know - Kenobi lying low in the desert watching how Skywalker's young buck gets on, Darth Vader finally finding an outfit that suits him, maybe we can throw in some sort of space cowboy to liven things up a bit - there might be a trace of movie there amongst the rubble. Oh, hold on....

"Rip-Off Ireland" - Éirinn na nGadaithe

Mar is eol daoibh go leor, is tírghráthóir é bhur Spailpín Fánach - is breá leis an rud ceart a dhéanamh ar son na hÉireann. Mar sin, nuair a léigh sé go raibh Micheál Ó Mairtín, an tAire Fiontar, Trádála agus Fostaíochta, tar éis gadhar faire tomhaltóra a chur ar siúl, bhí súil an Spailpín níos oscailte roimh gadaíocht na siopadóirí.

Seo scéal daoibh. Bhíos i lár BÁC Dé Sathairn agus, tar éis lá fada siopadóireachta agus sula bhfuaireas mo bhus abhaile, bhuaileas isteach i siopa chun píosa beag seacláide a cheannach, le h-ithe ar an mbus fad atá luifearnaigh na cathrach ag caitheamh a gcuid drugaí. Tá an siopa seo ar chúil Sráid na Tríonóide agus Sráid Aidriú, ach tá sé néamhghnáth mar tá an praigheas ar gach chuile milseáin atá le díol acu. Ochtó cent an ceann, más maith leat.

D'fhágas an siopa, agus chuaigh mé trasna na boithre chuig siopa Centra ar Sráid an Dáma, atá bunaithe in aice leis an bhialann Little Caesar's. Bhuaileas isteach, agus thogas Cadbury's Snack suas chuig an freastálaí. "Naoi cent ochtó," ar seisean. "Tá sé sin ró-dhaor domsa," arsa mise as Béarla dó, mar a duirt an tAire agus an Tánaiste ba cheart duinn a rá. "J¤ß·PÁÂ¥þ²yªºµØ¤H¤õ½b¶¤²y°g­Ì¡C«Ü," ar seisean liomsa. Síneach ab ea é, agus ba chuma leis má fhuaireas seacáid don bealach abhaile nó mura bhfuaireas. Bhí sé buíoch go leor bheith in Éirinn álainn ná bheidh abhaile san Sín, agus ní n-iompódh sé aon bhád murab fhéidir leis.

Cheannaigh mé mo sheacláid tráthnóna inné, i nDunnes Stores. Ocht cent is caoga. Bhí sí go deas, muise, agus tríocha cent níos suaraigh ná mo bhuachaillí ar Shráid Trinóide nó Sráid an Dáma. Nach iontach é an taisteal, i ndeireadh na dála?

John Waters on the Roles of Ideology and Values in Modern Irish Politics

None whatsoever, of course. Sigh. You can read it here.

An Speaking of Gurriers...

Two sightings yesterday: the first was on a city imp bus, on a side road that turns onto O'Connell Street. A track-suited young man had been refreshing himself with a bottle of Lucozade on the journey into town. His beverage consumed, he leaned towards one of the windows of the bus and threw the empty bottle out onto the road. Whoosh. Pop.

Some hours later, a chipper on the north side. Five young men, awaiting chips and milkshakes. Two have a soccer ball, and are kicking it against the wall of the chipper. From the inside. Three more - a tracksuited shout chap, a whippet-wiry second chap, dressed from toes to chin in Nike gear, the one exception to the uniform being a burberry baseball cap, which looks even more foul in real life than it does on the television. I can't remember what they third guy looked like - he must have passed for a human being.

Burberry goes up to the counter and address one of the staff, a young man trying to make a few quid working in a chipper. This entire address takes a place at the top of the burberry capped one's voice: "Hey you!... Where's me milkshake?... I told ya... it's chocoleh!... Three Euro fifty!... where's me change?... Hurry up, wouldyeh!" The three friends then retired to the front of the chipper, where they watched some character doing wheelies up and down what's left of Fairview Park on what looked like a toy motorcycle.

When I saw the young man nonchalantly throwing his bottle out of the window of the bus, I suddenly remembered one of the chapters of a book written PJ O'Rourke called Holidays in Hell. The book is about visits O'Rourke made in the 1980s to some of the world's then hell-holes, such as El Salavador, Northern Ireland and Eastern Europe. In the chapter I associate with my bottle-disposer of the city imp bus, O'Rourke was in South Africa, as the houseguest of a white South African who was explaining to O'Rourke why it would take years and years for the apartheid system to be dismantled. While they were having their chat, O'Rourke and his host were in the garden, enjoying evening cocktails and a few smokes. O'Rourke noticed that once his South African host had finished his cigarette, he'd just throw away the butt onto his perfectly manicured lawn. O'Rourke couldn't understand it - why keep a lawn so perfectly cut if you're going to litter it with butts? And later the penny dropped for O'Rourke - the South African could chuck his cigarette butts anywhere he pleased because there would always be a kaffir who had to come along and pick them up. That was how the South African apartheid system worked - there was always an underclass to service the needs of luxury for the whites, just as my lucozade refreshed young man clearly believes there is an underclasses - "muppehs," I believe, is the term used in that society for people who are employed in everyday jobs - who will pick up his bottles for him.

Do you remember Leona Helmsley? Ms Helmsley, the so-called "Queen of Mean," was the hotelier who famously quipped that "only little people pay taxes," and who was famously cruel to her employees. If Ms Helmsley was ever to visit Dublin and was overcome with a desire to visit an Italian chipper and enjoy a one-on-one, could she have been any more boorish that the boy in the burberry cap?

The Dublin Gurrier's Song, from the Pirates of Phibsboro (A Work in Progress)

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert once quipped after a particularly poor performance of Hamlet that the question of who wrote the plays of Shakespeare could now finally be settled. It was simply a question of opening the graves of both William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, and seeing which of them had turned over.

Old WSG will be burrowing his own way out after this, the poor old hoor:

SONG: DUBLIN GURRIER

I am the very model of a dodgy Dublin gurrier,
I'm working on the quiet as a motorcycle courier.
Spinning round the city, I always have to hurry her
Collecting rats and cats for a leading Dublin furrier.
I'm sick to death of immigrants, both Nigerian and Romanian;
It's more detail than I need to keep track of in my cranium;
If I wanted to be smart I would have been librarian
To a wealthy private school of religion Presbytarian.

ALL

He's working on the quiet as a motorcycle courier,
'Cos he is the very model of a dodgy Dublin gurrier.

DUBLIN GURRIER

I like to deal in grass and hash in an alley down off Grafton Street
The rich kids up from Ranelagh are the favourite ones I like to meet
"It's only fifty Euro bud, my grass is straight from Marrakesh" -
That I cut it in the Phoenix Park is something that I don't confess.

ALL

That he cuts it in the Phoenix Park is something that he don't confess
That he cuts it in the Phoenix Park is something that he don't confess
That he cuts it in the Phoenix Park is something that he don't confess

DUBLIN GURRIER

I'm in a council flat with a mot whose name is Natalie,
I'm getting very worried that she's quickly going fat on me.
I might have to do a legger and move in with me Ma and Da,
Especially as my Natalie is now embracing kabbalah.
I'm hopelessly addicted to cider, skag and methadone;
I'm living in flat in the middle of a battlezone
When social workers call I pretend that I'm not at home
While I'm drinking bottle after bottle of disinfecting Parazone®.

ALL

He's drinking bottle after bottle of disinfecting Parazone®
He's drinking bottle after bottle of disinfecting Parazone®
He's drinking bottle after bottle of disinfecting Parazone®

He's working on the quiet as a motorcycle courier,
'Cos he is the very model of a dodgy Dublin gurrier.