Love this.

Ah, here!

Frasier’s Dr. Pepper Ad.

An interesting documentary about New Zealand political ads. I’m not joking! Check out the dancing cossacks at 3:30.

Great books you should read: Hellraisers by Robert Sellers.

Hellraisers is one of those books you read in a single holiday because it is a) quite short, and b) just so chock full of laugh out loud stories that you fly through them looking to get to the next one.

The subject is Burton, O’Toole, Reed and Harris, back when men were men who went roarin’ shoutin’ and fightin’ and then delivered their lines perfectly on set.

Whether it was Harris demanding tea and toast in a police station or Reed announcing to crowded pubs that one of his friends had a bigger cock than he did (When he wasn’t shooting at helicopters with his shotgun.) an absolute joy to read.

An Occasional Guide to Irish Life: The lonely famous girl.

She's beautiful. Her life has to be perfect, right?

To look at her, you’d think she has it all. She is very beautiful, and there is not a single day that goes by that her image doesn’t appear in VIP or The Star or in an ad campaign. So why is she sitting at home alone on a Friday night with an M&S meal for one and a Downton Abbey marathon on the SkyPlus? She has no shortage of friends, and certainly no shortage of male admirers, indeed all she has to do is walk into any pub or nightclub in Ireland and they’re flocking. But that’s it. They do come flocking, and she can see it in their eyes. The look that recognises her as that girl from that poster/magazine/thing on TV3 and how I’d love to bang her and tell my mates about it. They see a commodity, a mobile bragging right, and she sees they see it too. Last time she gave into a moment of weakness, and woke up in bed with a guy who was pretty fit and seemed pretty grounded, until he tried to take a picture of her whilst she slept. What was even more disturbing was that he couldn’t even see what the problem was, and turned nasty. She’s had boyfriends as famous as her too, and with that came her lovelife as public property and discovering their casual attitude to infidelity on the front of a tabloid as she went shopping with her mother. Her older sister, who didn’t quite inherit the same beautiful gene, loves when she visits, and wants to talk about her glamorous life whilst she, the sister, only has this, pointing at her two kids thrashing the house in front of the telly whilst her boring but loving husband snores loudly in front of the fire after his steak and kidney pie. Her younger niece, approaching ten, is fascinated by her cool auntie and her beautiful photos in ALL the magazines which  she cuts out and keeps in a scrapbook. The niece wants to be just like her when she grows up, which is funny, because she increasingly envies her sister and family and yes, even her boring but loving husband.

Great Books you should read: The Man Who Ran The Moon.

I would like to think of myself as a relatively mild mannered man. Having said that, there is almost nothing that makes me want to sail over a table, fists flying, as when I hear someone casually announce that ” Of course they didn’t go to the moon. It was all a film set!”

Piers Bizony (What a great name!) sets out in his book The Man Who Ran The Moon the story of James Webb, an old style Democratic hack who was appointed to head NASA, and pretty much singlehandedly turned US policy towards landing a man on the moon. With a mix of noble belief (Webb believed that all problems, including poverty, could be solved by NASA style mission controls) and good ole fashioned political wheel greasing (Wonder why mission control is in Houston? Because the congressman in charge of NASA’s budget represented the district!) Webb took 5% of the national budget and employed 500,000 people on the moonshot.

Which, incidentally, is why I believe they did go to the moon. Because they had spent so much money and involved so many people it would have been impossible not to.

X Files spin off predicts 9/11 in March 2001.

From the X Files spin off  “The Lone Gunmen”.

An Irish solution to an American problem.

Ooooh! A nice Republican!

See this guy to the left? There are lesser spotted lesbian pottery making owls who are less rare than him. His name is Lincoln Chafee, and from 1999 to 2007 he was a Republican United States Senator from the great if teensy-weensy state of Rhode Island. Nothing special there, you say. Except he was against the death penalty. And the Iraq war. And in favour of gay rights. In fact, on many issues he was to the left of President Obama. In the 2004 general election he wrote George Bush senior’s name on the ballot as a write-in candidate. He endorsed Obama in 2008. Surely, you say, he’s really a Democrat. That’s certainly what the hard right in the Republican party say, calling him, and other moderate Republicans “RINOs” (Republicans in name only.) Yet Lincoln Chafee only quit the Republican party relatively recently, and is now the independent Governor of the state. Why? Because he believes in free enterprise, a small government, low taxes and the freedom of the individual. In other words, traditional Republican values, not the hate filled bible bashing whackjobbery that has seized control of what was once a pretty good party. It seems that there is no room in the modern Republican party  for moderates like Lincoln Chafee. Why is that? Here’s why:

Supposing Sinn Fein were able to draw up the boundaries of their own Dail constituencies, to ensure that all the Sinn Fein voters in a given area were in, and non-Sinn Fein voters were moved into another constituency. In other words, it was 100% assured that that constituency would  elect a Sinn Fein TD. What that would mean is that the real fight would not be the general election but for the Sinn Fein nomination. And supposing only Sinn Fein voters were allowed vote in the primary election. Imagine the sort of “I hate the Brits more than you!” grandstanding that would go on to appeal to that narrow electoral base, leading inevitably to candidates more concerned about appealing to the extreme voters in their primaries than the broad electorate because they are guaranteed to win in the general election. Sure, it’s not the same in Ireland, where our politicians are so broad based as to be meaningless, but in the US it is causing a poison at the heart of American politics. Both parties have gerrymandered districts so that most are either solid Democratic or Republican, and as a result the real fight is in the primaries, where candidates have to appeal to either ultra liberal or ultra conservative primary voters, and as a result you get a Congress with almost no middle ground.

That’s where we can help. Our electoral system, the single transferable vote, would transform US politics for the better, and here’s how:

First, it would allow parties to scrap the expensive primary process, instead permitting every candidate to contest the general election. In other words, there would be a number of Democrats and Republicans on the ballot paper. But rather than splitting the vote, STV would allow Republican voters to vote for their favoured candidate, but know that if he/she could not get elected, their votes would transfer to their second choice, and so on, until some candidate would win of 50% of all the votes in the district.

But that doesn’t matter in a rigged district, surely? That’s right, but that is where the second part of the Irish system helps. Multi-member districts, as we have in Ireland, make it much harder to gerrymander in favour of one party or another. A four or five seat district means that voters have a better choice, and a better representation for minorities (Such as white voters in parts of Los Angeles. Pay attention conservatives!). But it also allows American voters to vote for how they really feel. A Lincoln Chafee Republican may feel more comfortable giving a second preference to a Clinton Democrat than to a Rush Limbaugh Republican. Likewise, a Rush Limbaugh Republican may prefer to transfer to a Joe Lieberman Democrat than to a Lincoln Chaffee Republican. This system improves choice whilst rewarding moderation, and that’s surely what America needs now.

I love the menacing tone of this ad.