waider

Talking Points Memo presents a glorious compendium of moronic questions asked of Joe Biden by a Florida newsanchor. Biden's response are, I think, pretty restrained given the stupidity of the questions.

As the poster describes it, "Only the best Guinness advert ever". The dancing man in the advert subsequently went to some length to alter his appearance due to constantly being referred to as "yer man from the Guinness ad". The advert itself was also the subject of an ultimately failed copyright lawsuit, which may account for the absence of this advert from Guinness' archive of their TV spots from the 1990's. Anyway, it's still a classic.

Don't click on this link lightly; it's a TV spot in support of a recently-launched road safety campaign targetted at excessive speed, using the tagline the faster the speed, the bigger the mess. It's been rated as 15/15A for cinema viewing and cannot be broadcast on national TV before 9pm; I saw it on TV during the week and to be honest found it difficult viewing. My only concern is that too many people in this country seem to think, "ah, but that wouldn't happen to me".

Judging by TV adverts at the moment, if you can't get a date for Valentine's, your next option is to overdose on chocolate, and failing that, drink.

Last week, some guy gate-crashed The Late Late Show. This week, some guy drove a car into "the reception area of the television building".

Just saw an advert on TV for www.cdwow.ie which mentioned free delivery, so I figured I'd check them out. The site is displaying Perl debug traces (Data::Dumper output) all over the place and no DVD images, prices or other details. That's that advertising budget wasted...

So it was stereotypical to the point of humour[1] for a while (before we all got jaded, dontcha know) that any advert featuring a woman doing something outdoorsy and/or flexible was selling tampons or sanitary towels. Now there are a lot of adverts featuring various diverse outdoorsy things which are for... the British Army. There's a punchline here, I'm sure.

[1] I don't recall if any advertising agency ever took this up; I have a vague recollection of seeing something where a woman is on a street in a wetsuit, walking fifteen dogs, and dancing to uptempo music as she walks, and someone says, "must be her time of the month" or equivalent euphemism.

Apocryphally, someone (not necessarily RSF) organised the rioting in Dublin. Interesting second-hand stories about well-dressed guys with bluetooth headsets directing the ebb and flow of the rioters from somewhere behind the line. Jeffery Donaldson on the radio, responding to a caller who said it was "a bunch of northsiders who came out of the pubs to join the riots", responding that if northsiders generally went drinking carrying tricolours and fireworks, he'd not be drinking on the northside any time soon (Good comeback, Jeffery, and wholly without malice I'd suggest you'd not get an entirely pleasant reception on the northside or the southside anyway.) My own suggestion, that the rioters had raided Carroll's (a purveyor of many, many Oirish tourist gimmicks who were offended when I asked if they sold "cheap-ass sunglasses") prior to or during the rioting in order to stock up on "Irish" paraphenalia (made in $cheapest_location_available, of course). Some idiots headed to Lansdowne Road on Wednesday for the Ireland/Sweden friendly chanting pro-IRA slogans on the platform. No, seriously, you are assholes, if only for equating the Irish soccer team with a bunch of (actual, as opposed to Bushian) terrorists. I missed said match due to it not being free-to-air, i.e. the Irish soccer association having sold the rights exclusively to a pay-for channel based in the UK. How is it the alleged nationalists aren't up in arms over that? I caught the highlights of the match; Ireland's first goal was a typically Irish fluke: a lone striker keeps the ball to himself, takes a shot, and it bounces off the opposition into the opposition's goal. This is how we fumble our way to victory, except that the third goal was an absolute stunner. Which makes it all the more inexplicable why one of the freesheet tabloids the following day had a big headline crediting Duff (goal 1) and Keane (goal 2) but making no mention of Miller (goal 3, and the only decent goal scored). German coworker asked in jest if this meant we take Sweden's place in the World Cup.

No link from there to here: no sooner do I post about running when the weather takes a turn for the colder (apparently including the coldest night in ten years; temperatures somewhere down to -15°C) which meant I wasn't even inclined to leave the warmth of the front room, much less the house.

I think that about covers everything. Time for bed.

There's a programme on right now covering two ex-inmates of mountjoy prison six months and onwards after their release. Raymond, unemployed, imprisoned for breaking and entering, and Jeremy, consultant gynaecologist, imprisoned for "dangerous driving causing grievious bodily harm", i.e. hit someone with his car while driving under the influence. The behaviour of the latter is so crass as to look staged - for example, giving grief to the camera crew on account of the fact that two of them are women and one isn't even Irish. His wife isn't much better, saying that he was "only just over the limit" when he had his accident. Poor Jeremykins would no doubt feel that the victim hit his car, not the other way around, and the loss of his no-claims bonus is the real crime.

What, frankly, a tosser.

update: HAHAHA, the joke's on me. It's a spoof. The fact that I didn't even suspect this until a good fifteen minutes in (with Gerry Ryan attempting to scam backstage passes to a U2 gig) gives testament to the fact that people like Jeremykins and his oh-so-precious lifestyle do in fact exist.

From today's TV listings:

Harry Potter agus An Seomra Diamhair (2002): TG4, 19:00 - 22:00
Premiere. [description elided] Dubbed in Irish.

Wow. Not only a premiere, but as gaelige, too. Of course, these days "premiere" seems to mean "our first time showing it" as opposed to any sort of exclusivity, but hey.