I feel as if I have been denied. Why did Pogues fans never play this for me? Gives Fairytale of New York a run for its money, and features one of the greatest YouTube comments ever - "How is Brad Pitt the sexiest man alive when Shane is still here?".

James Brown RIP.

Something I’ve put up here seems to occasionally disagree with IE6. I’ll try and fix it over the weekend. Using a standards-compliant browser works, shockingly.

Draft until 2007, or maybe 2008. Suggestions welcome.

‘De Ireland

1. Irish electorate renounce stupidity, vote out FF / PD coalition, vote in Dustin the Turkey / Twink / Eddie Hobbs coalition. Finally, the full potential of the Celtic Tiger is realised. Oh, wait. 

2. Irish property remains a sound investment. Sure doesn’t everyone know property prices never go down? Oh wait now, where did I put that dead cat? Really? It bounced right over that election you say?

2a. European Central Bank apologises for placing the interests (ho ho) of a majority of European citizens over those of some Irish people with highly irresponsible and previously illegal mortgages. Interest rates cut to 0% 4eva.

2b. The Irish Times admits sheepishly that all those pots of advertising revenue it received from estate agents and auctioneers may have influenced its breathless coverage of the property market, and its baffling €50m purchase of a database with a fancy front-end (a snip at twenty times earnings!).

3. Dell announces trebling of activities in Ireland due to massive increase in demand for non-flammable laptops. That big ol’ manufacturing plant being built in Poland is just for "parties, fun and ponies", say management.

4. Intel, Vodafone and Xerox say they were "only messing" when they mentioned they were conducting reviews of their Irish operations. All three claim to be unaware of  increasing costs, inflation. However, all three are agreed that "it’s a great little country, isn’t it?", so that’s all right then. Oh, wait.

5. Eircom takes full credit for efficiently converting one of the best telecom networks in Europe into one of the worst [PDF]. Claims this efficient approach is a crucial component in attracting increasing levels of FDI into Ireland.

6. The Dublin Port Tunnel is a stunning success. Moves unsightly traffic problem from the city centre out to the M50. This, of course, is a good thing, because there was previously no traffic problem on the M50. And a problem shared is a problem gained or something … oh, wait.

7. Ireland win Rugby World Cup under new coach Steve Staunton. Charlie Haughey rises from the dead to claim credit.

8. Public interest in performance art becomes widespread across Northern Ireland. Ian Paisley admits to being a huge fan of the Blue Man Group. Suspicion that the Reverend Paisley is colourblind is confirmed.

Rest of ‘de world

1. Yo, Blair! Tony Blair goes quietly into the good night of the Carlyle Group, after treating Gordon Brown to another dinner at Granita. Admits mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Quotes Kipling.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

 Oh, wait.

2.  George Bush, the great decider, resigns, citing own incompetence, fear of horses and desire to spend more time with his money.  Admits mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Quotes Mr. Kipling.

    exceedingly good cakes 

But at least the voodoo economics worked out, eh? Oh, wait.

3. World discovers that there really is room for umpteen hundreds more social networking websites. All social networking sites are worth $8bn by default. Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have infinite amounts of cash. Hang on now, remember this never happened before. Speaking of which, the new boo.com had better hurry up and launch in 2006 as promised. I need something to point and laugh at for the new year.

4. MS Vista hailed as "most bug-free OS ever" by Steve Jobs at its launch whilst Larry Ellison performs a tap-dance routine. Oh, wait, I don’t think Larry can dance.

5. David Icke is proven right in his theory that the world is run by lizards in a marvellous bit of mystic synchronicity when the Loch Ness Monster is revealed to be George Bush Sr.

6. For 3 months in the summer Second Life turns out to be actually better than real life leading to record business and financial growth, until a rampant strain of Second AIDS kills everyone and virtually all virtual business with it. Like, totally virtually.

7.  Time magazine acknowledges its debt to The Big Lebowski and promises to be more Dude next year.

8. Reality television becomes even more real and every TV show is about you in your house being bored watching yourself in your house being bored.

[numbers 5-8 inclusive courtesy of artlick] 

Slightly Christmas-flavoured …

Emmylou Harris - ‘Where will I be?’ | Toots & the Maytals - ‘Pressure Drop’ | Reverend Horton Heat - ‘We three kings’ | Benny Benassi - ‘I love my sex’ |  Blonde Redhead - ‘Misery is a butterfly’ | Cansei de Ser Sexy - ’Meeting Paris Hilton’  | Dean Martin vs. Dan the Automator - ’Jingle Bells’  | Jackie Mittoo - ‘Soul Bird’ | Jens Lekman - ’Black Cab’ | Johan - ‘Oceans’ | We Landed On The Moon - ‘Everything is fine’ | Aimee Mann - ‘Long Shot (live)’ |  Tralala - ’All fired up’ | The Buzzcocks - ‘I don’t mind’ | New York Dolls - ‘Dance like a monkey’ | The Cramps - ‘Naked girl falling down the stairs’ |  New Order - ’Blue Monday’  | Lou Reed - ‘Vicious’ | Curtis Mayfield - ‘Pusherman’ | This Mortal Coil - ‘Dreams are like water’

The colour photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.

Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. In the early 1900s, he developed an ingenious technique of taking colour photographs. The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.

Some early Kodachrome images of the US during the depression are here.

So a memo was leaked. Unsurprising point number one. The memo reveals that Donald Rumsfeld, handshaker-in-chief, existential poet and onetime US Secretary of Defence, was recommending a ’major adjustment’ be made in Iraq just prior to, ahem, resigning. There are a few things about this that interest me, besides the implication that circulating this memo may have hastened Rumsfeld’s departure (I doubt it).

Firstly, the primary importance of the US public’s perception of what is happening, rather than the actual reality in Iraq. After all, there’s always an election on the horizon.

Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist

Indeed. It’s how the goals are ‘cast’ and talked about that counts. No doubt they do not have to bear any relation to reality. For a dose of reality, try the daily news reports and read Riverbend.

Secondly, the bloody patronising tone of the language used. "Start taking our hand off the bicycle seat" struck me as a particularly offensive metaphor considering as many as 655,000 people have died in Iraq since the US-led invasion.

Finally, the inclusion of this wonderful catch-all caveat -

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

Isn’t it ironic that ‘we can’t lose’ was one of the subtexts touted by the cheerleaders for this war. As for the phrase "as Saddam Hussein did", I am at a loss.

Here are a few of my own Rumsfeld favourites. Known knowns [MP3], Known knowns [Video], East, West, South and North [MP3]

A few months back I added a widget to my Google (not evil) homepage which tracks the price of barrels of crude oil. I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention to it and only glanced at it occasionally, but I did notice that whilst it had been down in the 50s for quite some time, it recently went up above 60. Amazingly it turns out that the price started to go back up again immediately after the US midterm elections, as some people had been predicting. So many coincidences, so little time …

From Salon

If you were a little suspicious of the way in which gasoline prices just happened to dive just before this month’s midterm elections, this bit of news won’t exactly put your mind at ease: After dropping 84 cents between Aug. 11 and Nov. 3, gas prices are up five cents in the first Lundberg Survey released after the Nov. 7 election.

Trilby Lundberg tells CNN that the reversal in the 12-week pre-election slide shows that the market has "soaked up" a "mini-glut" of crude oil from August, causing a "normalization" of supply and demand.

Closer to home, the Irish electoral register is royally screwed up. Up to a third of the populations of some of the cities are not on the register. Conveniently, this has been balanced out by the large number of additional people on the register in the border counties. So that’s all OK then. 

What did surprise me recently was that 1) a woman won the Turner Prize (the art world not being exactly noted for it’s gender equality) and 2) I quite like her work (the Turner Prize not being exactly noted for its quality or accessibility). This makes me feel as if I need to lie down in a dark room for a while. Perhaps with a shark in a tank of formaldehyde.

PS, I’ve added videos (from VodPod, currently shows the five most recently watched) and the Downtown Soulville podcast (via Odeo, this fella should update weekly). They’re on the right.

Now with Snap-powered mini previews of links. It’s a shame it isn’t smart enough to recognise file extensions that are unlikely to need thumbnail previews, such as .mp3s or .movs, but it’s still quite a cool application. You can search from within the pop-up as well, and from the little bit of testing I’ve done the search engine itself is handy enough.

Ma.gnolia.com bookmarks should be appearing on the right sometime soon as well, once I can get it to cooperate. In the meantime, go here if you’re interested in my bookmarks over there.

Edit: can’t get ma.gnolia’s linkroll to work without access to the Wordpress plugins directory, so that won’t be happening.