blinkit

'Worse yet'

1. At breakfast I came across three of the German guests, all burly men, sitting at their table in the B&B dining lounge. I said good morning, and they replied in kind, but with such guilty faces that it was like I'd interrupted their secret planning for their next invasion. I'll give the Germans credit though: they're all on a cycling trip, and four of them today rode to Croagh Patrick, climbed it (about a two hour ascent), came down and then went swimming.

2. When I die, I want it to be on Achill Island in the arms of an Irish maid. Preferably two. And she/they will just as likely be Polish or French. "You're a lovely young woman, and I hope you have good luck in Ireland," I said to to the waitress, who told me she was Polish, at a Westport restaurant. "Well, I've been here six years so far, so we'll see," she said. Something like 10 per cent of the population now is non-Irish: mainly foreign workers, most Eastern European, coming in through the EU to fill jobs when the Irish economy vaulted into the stratosphere (it's since come back to Earth). One of my tour guides today at Achill Island was from Germany. She had come here as a tourist, got addicted and decided to stay. I've heard more than a few stories like that here.

3. Spent an hour at Matt Molloy's, reputed to be the best bar for traditional Irish music in Westport. They had music going in two rooms: one with traditional musicians (a flutist and a banjo player) and another with more modern stuff. I sat in the traditional room. "What are you? American?" asked an old man who directed me to my seat when I first made the mistake of sitting in the corner where the musicians play. "Canadian," I replied. "Worse yet," he said and laughed. On my left were a couple from Germany. On my right a trio from England. Before long, a guy from New Jersey on his college graduation trip with a friend sat at our table. "I'm the only one in this bar who's Irish," said the old man. But before that, I met a group of young guys from Kerry -- "from the kingdom" said one,-- and they'd come up to Westport for a stag because one of them was getting married. At first they thought I was very tall and wondered how I fit under the doorway. Then they thought I was American, and when I explained I was Canadian, they asked me: have I been to Niagra Falls, what do I think of New Yorkers, do we have our own government. Most of it was joking. Much of it I couldn't understand. They, and the people I met after, suggest one never need be lonely in a traditional Irish gathering spot.

4. Achill Island: after a six hour tour today, I can confidently say: this is a place to holiday or retire. Relaxed pace of life, friendly people, scenery to take your breath away, excellent broadband.

Into the west

1. The "road" from Galway to Westport is more like a path someone paved over and decided to use for cars. No one told them it would also be used for trucks, buses, two cars passing each other in opposite directions, tractors, pedestrians and sheep. The latter begin to show up right at the side of the road about midway along the journey. They are either the most fearless sheep in Ireland or the dumbest. "Hi there, are you an oncoming mass of metal and glass? Let me have a good look at you!"

2. The route is undeniably scenic: lush farm fields, stony farm fields, stone fences, stone bridges, stone farm houses, guys in yellow vests fixing stone fences, road construction crews, emerald mountains, quaint little villages and B&Bs and even quainter tourist traps.

3. Each village has its own weather system. You go from sunshine, to rain to sun again merely by rounding a corner.

4. Some Germans are watching soccer in the B&B. Germany is winning, barely.

5. Out my B&B window, I can see Croagh Patrick, where St. Patrick apparently spent 40 days and 40 nights (a not very original number) impressing the locals with this devoutness. It's now a pilgrimage site, attracting thousand of Catholics from around the world who scale it in the last week of July. Kind of like a Grouse Grind for the faithful. Archaelogical digs reveal the top of the mountain was a sacred pagan site dating back to the Bronze Age. Pat knew what he was doing.

6. The local Anglican minister (the vast majority of the locals are Catholic, so his congregation is tiny) plays gigs in one of the local pubs on Wednesday nights.

"Give way to the right"

1. Driving in Ireland is easier for North Americans than it seems. "Take 'er easy, give way to the right," advised my taxi driver (London born, returned to the country of his parents) on the way to the rental office. It was good advice. Driving UK-style is like a mirror world: the steering wheel is on the right, the rear view mirror on the left, turn signals on the right, faster traffic on the freeways takes the right lane. Signs are great on the freeways, eccentric everywhere else. Roundabouts are frequent (sometimes you'll get three or four in the space of a mile) and confusing at first but the advice about yielding to the right at roundabouts is invaluable. Less than five minutes after renting my car, I was on the road. It was easy (Dubliners complain about their traffic problem, but it's country driving compared to Vancouver's roadway combat zone), but I also had no idea where I was going, which was interesting. But I finally figured it out, using a map and after taking a long scenic tour south when I should have been going west. It also rained. A lot.

2. Irish men are short.

3. In Ireland, taxi drivers speak English. Unlike in Vancouver.

4. Irish people are easily pleased: "Thanks a million!" said the woman at the highway toll booth. "Thanks a million!" said the cashier at the gas station when I paid for a drink and croissant. "That's grand!" said the woman at the ticket counter at the Guinness Storehouse. Things here are described as being either "fantastic!" or "brilliant!" The ultimate compliment: "That's brilliant! Thanks a million!"

5. Irish dancing is goofy. The dancers look like they're paralyzed by stage fright from the hips up. But it's also athletically and rhythmically impressive, especially when they stop the damn fiddle (one jig and reel sounds much like every other jig or reel) and go right to the tribal drums and feet. Makes you want to paint yourself blue and charge a Norman column.

6. Accents in the west sound like the speaker is comatose or really, really relaxed. And I understand people here even less than in Dublin. "Oh, yes, it's beautiful here mmm hhh mmmm hhhh my mates hhh mmm hhhh had a pint mmm hhhh mmm blue water hhhh mmmm hhhh trees mmm hhhh mmm zzzzzz."

7. Everyone in Ireland has a mobile phone. Everyone texts, constantly. Everyone also has their own website. Free wifi in the cities is easy to find. They're more wired than we are.

Catching up: Zunes to the barricades!

Pic at left: one of hundreds of signs, for and against a recent referendum on further integration with the EU, still up in Dublin. Irish voters said no, and apparently, that's not good for the EU.

WMD: It's taken me two days to learn that: a) my hotel is right across from the building where Oscar Wilde lived and barely two blocks from both the Irish parliament and the birthplace of the Duke of Wellington. For that, you have to walk around, and also swallow your pride and hop on one of the ubiquituous but worthwhile tourist buses that do a continuous circuit of notable points in the city.

WMD 2: Some months ago, Microsoft sent me an advance review copy of its Zune. I mostly liked it, but instead of doing a review, meditated on the revolutionary utility of little machines. That column is here. Text is as follows:

'Little machines' weaponry of brave new world's battlefields

All quiet on Canada's technological front

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Celebrate, comrades, the Zune is coming to Canada. It's a tiny part of a larger and necessary revolution we all need to join.

The Zune is Microsoft's answer to the iPod, the Apple-produced device that dominates the MP3 player market. I've used a review copy of the Zune for the past month. I like it. The 80-gig harddrive version has an attractive metal casing and a generous 3.5" colour screen. Its interface is clean and smooth, and it ably plays music, videos and pictures. It has a built-in FM radio and syncs wirelessly with your home computer network. The software required for your PC to work with the Zune can only be used with a Zune, but its design is bold and clean.

If I didn't already have a couple of MP3 players I like and use, I'd consider buying a Zune, which Microsoft tells me will be sold in Canada this spring. But its availability north of the 49th parallel comes nearly two years after the first version of the Zune was unveiled in the U.S., and that's a problem.

Canada is becoming a technological backwater. Once we were world leaders in telecommunications, and brave enough three decades ago to try failed experiments like Telidon--a very limited but forward-thinking early kind of Internet. Now we sell off our advanced satellites to the American arms industry and hobble our national space program with lack of funding and vision.

On the consumer level, we're no better. We still don't have iPhones, Apple's revolutionary cellphone and pocket computer, even though they're in widespread use just over the border. Our domestic cellphone companies wrap their fees within incomprehensible pricing plans and charge mobile users ridiculously high rates. Check American websites of consumer retailers and place them alongside the smaller inventories of Canadian retailers. Compared to Asia, Europe or the U.S., we're Sierra Leone when it comes to price and choice in consumer technology. Compared to Sierra Leone, we're Nigeria.

The lack of consumer technology matters. Yes, we're talking about little plastic and metal devices that people use for listening to stolen Aerosmith tunes. But the key social and political battle in the next two decades will not be Senate reform, gas taxes or daycare subsidies. It will be the use of information by governments and corporations to corral and monitor every aspect of our lives. In past years, people resisted such measures with stones and Molotov cocktails. Our weapons of resistance will be the Internet and devices like iPods and Zunes.

These little machines let us fight back. Governments install security cameras on public streets. People use cameras on cellphones to record and place on YouTube the tasering deaths of innocent people by over-zealous police. Governments introduce "enhanced" driver's licences and passports with data chips. People use Facebook--itself the biggest corporate threat to personal privacy in years--to organize anti-war rallies and consumer boycotts.

Millions of people are setting up their own entertainment, news, and information networks and systems through tools such as Bit torrents, blogs and podcasting, the latter of which is a big use for MP3 players like the Zune. It's most obvious in the field of consumer technology itself, where thousands of blogs and audio and video podcasts produced by amateurs and individuals aggressively influence debate and markets. In consumer tech, companies that attempt to cheat consumers pay in bucket loads of bad publicity.

An iPod nano, Sansa player or Nokia smartphone is a funny thing to lift up on the battlements as an instrument of liberation. But we're in a post-AK-47 world. It's now a cliche that personal digital devices have allowed information to filter out of closed societies. Practically the sole source of uncensored images of violence in Tibet this month, and last year in Burma, came from individuals using cellphones and digital cameras.

Zunes and the vast flood of toys in our daily life are problematic, because they are meant to be tossed into landfills once they break, which is frequently. And consumer tech doesn't guarantee democratic resistance. Asia is awash in small computing devices, and yet is an underfed model of democracy.

These tools also come from corporations with little interest in individual liberty. As a recent Wired article pointed out, Apple is notorious for a corporate culture of secrecy and control. But as profit-driven entities, Apple and Microsoft must offer what the market wants. And what the market wants--whether it's privacy protection and continued personal freedom or videos of cats playing piano--is up to us.

Beginner's Dublin, Day Two

1. Irish women tend to have small noses and cute, almost lipless mouths.
2. Irish men, at least the ones who drive the tourist buses and work the numberous constructon crews around the city core are not to be trifled with. Heard in passing from a crew hanging out on the side of the road: "...he was a criking little English f---." OK.
3. bicycles share the major roads here more easily than in Vancouver
4. there are more scooters and motorbikes here. The cars are small. Hardly any SUVs.
5. people who work the tourist concessions are fairly easygoing, and about a third encountered so far are not Irish.
6. Irish tourism likes visitors to drink, so it's good that they also want to shuttle visitors around in what seems like several hundred tour buses jamming the city core: you get a "free" pint of Guinness after touring the Guinness Storehouse and you get a "free" glass of Jameson's after touring the Old Jameson Distillery. Neither is free because you pay admission for the tours. As far as tours go, the latter is the better deal, although the former is apparently Dublin's most popular tourist destination.And it does have a magnificent view of the city.
7. The James Joyce Centre is small and modest (see pic above), and like Joyce in his lifetime, considered important but not popular outside of the university crowd. I was one of six visitors the 45 minutes I was there. But worth the effort finding off the beaten tourism path.

Irish TV: stunningly the same as American TV, especially the news shows, with the same template of young female anchor paired with one or more avunculur or veteran male anchors. Morning show has sunny saxophone tune. Weatherman runs pictures from viewers, especially kids. Top stories: continued fallout over Irish voters' rejection of an EU treaty; scandal involving a former PM; contract killer for hire trial; Irish school children are happy, smart and active; hundreds turn out in Cork to pose nude for art photography. The last story on two different newscasts created an opportunity for male anchor to turn to female counterpart and say  something like, "Too bad you missed that one." Sex roles seem more conservative here, with news segments on fashion and weddings openly targeted at women. Also, dairy commercials are frequent.

Note: Guinness is spelled with two n's. I knew that.

Beginner's Dublin

WMD: first hours
1. It has lots of pedestrians.
2. it has little cars
3. dark striped suits worn without ties are in
4. everyone has a mobile phone and must be on it always
5. more people smoke here than in Vancouver -- and they're still allowed to smoke on outdoor public patios
6. Book of Kells at Trinity College is over interpreted: by the time you get to the actual manuscripts, which are cool, you're exhausted (if not bored) by all the interpretive stuff
7. The Long Room at Trinity College, a long library hall of wood and mouldering books, is simply amazing
8. foreign cities are the best places to drink
9. Dubliners walk very fast

Twitter change

I changed my Twitter address: it's now trueblinkit. Some other dude got blinkit ...

All a-Twitter

WMD: Yes, I've given in and joined Twitter, a "microblogging" site which is either a complete waste of time or a cool way to keep in touch without any of the baggage associated with crap sites like Facebook.

You can follow my excellent thoughts (a maximum of 160 or so characters is allowed per post) here. Or alternately, follow the pasts under "Passing observations" on the top right corner of the blog. One day, I'll have something interesting to say.

Government goes insane on MP3s; raving about The Wire

Today's bLINKit: The federal government wants to give border guards (and police, too) the power to search, without a warrant, your laptop or iPod for copyrighted material. At their discretion, the guards can determine if your copy of "YMCA" on your MP3 player is illegal and have the power to confiscate and/or destroy it and fine you. As if they don't already have enough to do at the border in keeping out terrorists and diseased fruit. The kicker: The government is negotiating these kinds of insane powers in secret.

WMD: In my continuing campaign catch up, I go back to the middle of March, when I penned this ode to The Wire (aka best show ever):

This past Sunday, one of the few reasons to watch TV finished an extraordinary run. The Wire--perhaps the best American television storytelling ever--finished its fifth season, and I am sad. Its absence is enough to make me go back to reading. Or staring at the wall.

I recently upgraded my basic cable television to the full "classic" channel lineup from Shaw. I felt lonely with basic cable, flipping up the channel lineup to hit a ceiling at channel 28 (the handful of French-language and public service channels past 100 don't count, since no one ever watches them). Thanks to my expanded lineup, I can now surf up to channel 57. And what do I get with the extra channels? Every CSI episode ever made. An endless parade of Second World War shows. Guys blowing stuff up. Women trying on dresses. Every Law and Order episode ever made. Chefs swearing. Faded celebrities pretending to be in "reality" shows. Cheesy, made-up documentaries about porn. Every Star Trek episode ever made. I like Star Trek, but that's my own special problem.

Thank God for The Wire. More novel than television, it was one of the few popular forms of art, outside of the films of John Sayles, that tried to tell the story of American society as it really is. With a huge cast and slowly moving and intricately overlapping storyline, its main character was a dysfunctional, socially shattered city. Its lessons: America's institutions--including schools, the police, civic governments and corner drug gangs--stomp on individuals, reward the craven, punish the daring, mock the honest, and make victims of the innocent. All with a large dose of chance and circumstance happening to all. Its other lesson: cops drink a lot.

No one creating TV has loved a city more than the creators of The Wire loved Baltimore. Their fondness was obvious in the use of the city's rich dialect, which when watching DVDs of past seasons, had me using subtitles on occasion to figure out what some of the characters were saying. But now I be with my people. You feel me?

No one doing TV has also done more to lament and chronicle a city's decline. The first season covered the futility of the war on drugs. The second season examined the decline of traditional industry, and the powerlessness of American unions in the face of globalization. The third season imagined a failed experiment in harm reduction, and the fourth instalment took us into the inner city schools, where inflating statistics to increase government funding trumped teaching.

The final season wobbled with its underwritten storyline about the death of American newspapers. But it hit home, powerfully so, with its season long theme of truth and deceit, and how while everyone who holds power knows the truth, deceit is often the more expedient route as large, self-serving insitutions rumble and jockey for position and grind up people between them. For many, lying is the enriching choice.

Few shows have dealt directly with the constant institutional lying that marks modern urban life, and perhaps make it possible.

The dialogue in Sunday's finale tells it best.

"I always wondered if they'd get their shit together," says one character after he expresses surprise at how long it took authorities to uncover his corruption. "But that's Baltimore, isn't it."

And this from a lawyer when her career is on the line, and her superiors have the upper hand: "You know the weight will not fall on them. It never does."

Or this from a drug dealer, pointing a gun to a rival's head: "There ain't no nostalgia to this. There's just the street, and the game, and what happened here today."

And finally, from the city editor of the ficticiously rendered Baltimore Sun newspaper, which features prominently in the final season: "I remember clean." The silent smile on a colleague's face said it all.

The Wire was created by a former journalist and a former cop-turned-teacher, all professions which have both a public service component and systemic pressures that compete with the ability to perform public service. The one legacy of the brilliant, and often very funny show they created can be boiled down to this: Do you tell the truth about the system, or do you go along, telling yourself you'll do the best you can in the circumstances. In the two-hour finale, one constant refrain was heard from various characters as they did a careful dance with truth and power: "Keep my name out of it."

If you live or work in Vancouver, or just about any city anywhere, you've heard that line before.