Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern announced his intention to resign today. I wonder, though, if it wasn’t the unusual payments and the Mahon Tribunal’s investigation, but the future set out by this bizarre trademark case reported by IPKat this week, that really prompted it?
2008 baseball season; given that Lex Ferenda marked such with a picture of a hat last year, I thought I’d repeat the exercise! New hat, though. (Though, apparently the game that interests me is delayed due to rain. “Rain stopped play” in the cricket tradition).
From the Chicago Sun-Times, a booklist.
From Eric Turkewitz, fantasy baseball, the law, and the Supreme Court.
Regular readers and casual visitors alike might be interested in this - I’ll be hosting the wonderful Blawg Review next Monday (17th March - you can guess why!). The Blawg Review covers blogs about law, and all submissions are welcome, but blogs/posts with a specific connection with Ireland or topics that one would associate with this fair island (try not to have them all about alcohol, mmmkay?), would be particularly useful. My Blawg Review #128 of last October was great fun to put together, and I’m hoping for loads of interesting submission for the second attempt.
To submit a post of your own, or an interesting post that you’ve seen, please follow the submission guidelines here. Follow the link and use the online submission or email the specified address and I’ll receive it immediately.
I haven’t quite got used to this yet, but as of today the EU and North America (US/Canada - but not Mexico) are in the odd out-of-sync period of the year. Ireland is typically five hours ahead of the “Eastern” zone in North America (that is, the east coast of the US and most of Ontario and Quebec in Canada), and historically this has been reliable all year round except for a week in March due to different ’start dates’ for summer time (we started last weekend in March, they started first weekend in April) - with a (usually) common change-back date at the end of October.
However, changes to US law (in the Energy Policy Act 2005) and changes in Canada to keep things in line with the big sibling to the south (to my amusement, time zones are a matter of provincial - not federal - jurisdiction in Canada!) came into force last year; under the new system (designed to reduce energy costs, apparently) summer time (what they call daylight saving time) now begins on the second weekend in March and runs all the way to the first weekend in November.
So from today until Sunday 30th March, the difference between Ireland and the eastern zone is four hours, not five. For all you politics-watchers and sports-watchers, in particular, this means that you will miss whatever debates, programmes or fixtures you want to see if you don’t remember this and intend on watching live via the intertubes.
There’s something quite sad about talking about summer time on the day that Dublin has a major storm warning issued and some city roads will be closed off tonight and tomorrow due to the fear of serious flooding from the Irish Sea…
Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)
Link, with thanks to Language Log.
I can’t believe they actually made a mistake like this. I laughed out loud (or LOLed; I don’t think I ROFLed because it’s covered with books). It must have been a very clever joke on the part of a creative sub-editor. Perhaps it was an odd tribute to Louis Menard, who infamously put the boot in in a New Yorker article. The article opened with these classic words:
The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”, by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there.
You can guess where it went from there.
While we’re talking about the New York Times, though, I just have to mention this. As you’ve probably heard or read or seen or divined, the New York Times ran a story about John McCain and a lobbyist and the connection between them. I was much more interested, though, in the response from The New Republic (TNR), which is a detailed slab of meta-media, an analysis of how and why the Times ran the article…published less than 24 hours after the article it is commenting on was uploaded to the Times’ website! Clearly, the magazine (TNR) has been following this for some time - but it’s still an illustration of something, I just haven’t figured out what. For what it’s worth, I found the piece in TNR (or ‘the TNR’ - shades of The The?) more interesting than the Times article itself. The TNR article also has a cameo from Bob Bennett, who has a life-as-a-lawyer book called In The Ring coming out. Must keep an eye out for that.
Peter Ryan has tagged me with one of these tagging things, and I’m only doing it because he’s from Toronto and I need him to bring me for good coffee and donuts the next time I’m in town.
So, what I have to do is this :
We have been instructed to open the nearest book to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Or else. The note also demands that we forward this stupidity onto five others.
Following the addition by the good people at Slaw, though, I’ll give two answers - one for a legal book and one for a non-legal book.
First, the law one, then. It’s International Economic Law and the Digital Divide by Rohan Kariyawasam (because I’m trying to get the time to read it - it’s very good but quite detailed - for thesis reasons so it’s still on my desk)
WTO members have held five dedicated discussions on cross-cutting issues relevant to electronic commerce, under the auspices of the General Council. One of the cross-cutting issues of concern is the classification of electronic intangibles. The issue before the WTO is whether the supply of digitised produces which can be delivered either in a physical medium or by way of the internet should be classified under the GATS or GATT, or even the TRIPS. The type of products generally described as electronic intangibles consist of sound recordings, video games, audiovisual works, computer software and literary works, generally any form of content, protected by copyright or other forms of intellectual property rights that can be delivered in a physical form (CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, videos, books, newspapers and magazines), or as a form of an electronic transmission over the Internet.
And the non-law one, which is That Neutral Island by Clair Wills (cause I just bought it in paperback this week):
Brennan’s ditty lambasted the Americans for their cavalier attitude to Irish lives, and argued for Ireland’s right to remain neutral. But it also expressed another concern of the Irish government, through one less often acknowledged in the sober language of diplomacy: the belief that if the British were offered the ports, they would never give them back (’For says John, “I find those bases / Are really quite attractive places…”). Where the British were inclined to think of the ports simply as military bases, divorced from the counties and communities in which they stood, Brennan, and behind him the Irish government, focused on the ports as Irish territory - as integral to the country as the Six Counties.
Now, spreading the love, here’s asking for the reading habits of Ruth (because she reads better books than I do), Content and Carrier (because they love their Shakespeare and their law), Nic (to distract him from his thesis, and to bounce the meme to Australia), Tarleton as his fantastic new syllabus must mean he has a desk covered in books, and finally Lilian so that she can use the results in her next presentation on meme culture!
So, the new Science Gallery (based on the Trinity College campus where I live and work) is now open. Its first festival/series of events is Lightwave, and the campus is all aglow with various tie-in lights (including the projected signage pictured, right; this one is the wall of the Koralek-designed 1960s Berkeley Library where the law library is located). We’ll pass over the impact of all the generators during Campus Green Week and hope that they run on recycled chip fat or something…
The Gallery itself is small in size, but big in ambition and scope. For example, this week’s festival includes a whole range of talks, walks, events and demos; most are related to light (you’ve just missed some stuff on rock concert visuals, would love to have seen that) but there’s more to come, and other things too in the general science-and-society vibe that is in my view one of the most important areas that the Gallery must work in. In that regard, I’m looking forward to this talk (tickets necessary, €5) on Thursday night, if I can make it :
What are the factors and conditions that contribute to innovation? How are important problems found and solved? How can insights from the arts, science and creative industries be leveraged by business to develop an innovation environment? The Science Gallery presents a unique opportunity to discuss the next generation of idea-environments with David Edwards, founder of Paris’s Le Laboratoire and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University, Colm Long, Director of EMEA Online Sales & Operations at Google and leading Irish American venture capitalist Terry Maguire and facilitated by Irish Times technology columnist, Karlin Lillington. The talk coincides with the launch of David Edwards’ new book ‘ArtScience: Creativity and the post-Google Generation’ (Harvard University Press 2008). The talk will be followed by a book signing. (taken from a bit of the website that I can’t deeplink to, and link to book added by me)
Another outpost of Lightwave is further down the river at Grand Canal Dock (home to the Martha Schwartz-designed square at the original dock*, soon to be home to a theatre designed by Daniel Liebeskind and much more besides). The Schwartz square itself has a strong light theme (including bright red poles sticking up into the sky) and added to the mix for the week is The Hive (KMA), a sound and light installation (using a lot of Philip Glass or something that sounds like him!) that is pictured (cameraphone, with tweaking), left. It involved projection of beams on the ground and a lot of hyperactive children and a sensor…
Anyway, check it all out at sciencegallery.com and around Dublin 2 all this week.
PS First attempt at this post vanished. Anyone else having trouble with Safari of late? Keeps crashing for no particular reason.
PPS Then I couldn’t get into the blog to post the second version. Conspiracy, I tell you.
* which itself was the location for the legendary video for Gloria by U2, one of the first U2 singles videos, when the area looked very different to how it does today. Definitely scope for some sort of music-on-a-barge project to mark it…
Last year I had the honour of being a judge for the Irish language category in the Irish Blog Awards. The eventual winner was the lovely Hilary NY (no, not that Hil(l)ary). Anyway, I’ve happened to come across the longlist for this year’s award in this category, Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog (like Colm Keena, I have no intention of telling you where I got it). A fine bunch of blogs. Watch out for the official longlists coming soon at http://awards.ie/blogawards/.
You know what it’s like. “How do I get a gift that will be unique and special this Christmas?”. Well, I spotted these two items on blogs I read recently, and I hope they help you in making that important decision this December:
Bizarre exchange in the House of Commons (Monday):
31. John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab): How many people have been killed by falling gravestones in church graveyards in the last 20 years. [160985]
Mr. Gerry Sutcliffe (Bradford, South): The number is not recorded centrally but I understand from the Ecclesiastical Insurance Group, which insures almost all Church of England churches, that it has received no claims relating to such fatalities in the last 10 years—the period for which figures are available.
John Mann: Why is it, then, that hundreds of thousands of gravestones across the country are being staked, as if they were a health and safety risk? Across the country, only two deaths have been caused by gravestones in the past 28 years. Should we not investigate precisely why local authorities and churches are taking such an absurd decision?
Mr. Sutcliffe: My hon. Friend raises a fair point, which I will take up with my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough.
(Transcript here