A reminder that this year's Bog Snorkelling Championship takes place today in Wales. The very best of luck if she's taking part to Julia Galvin from Listowel, Co Kerry, the Irish Bog Snorkelling Champion.
For some bizarre reason the competition - now in its 19th year - is sponsored by... Ben and Jerrys Ice Cream!
So the Olympics are over. Loads of middle-distance stuff later, and marathons, and mad Irish ex-priests bollicking up other marathons, and that Russian woman Yelena Isinbayeva's fanstastic world record in the pole vault, but the men's K1 kayak slalom was the big event in the Olympics for our lot in Gazette HQ. This was for the following reasons...
This year we had a local hero in the event - Eoin Rheinisch from Leixlip. He stood a good chance too - with a world ranking of ninth, he was seeded sixth in the heats. But it was not to be. A disastrous first round and he was just one place outside the qualifying group. It's very unforgiving, so much preparation then the mistakes you make in just a minute or two of your life, but that's sport, and Rheinish is just 24. Still, maybe his time will come again.
The $26m course at the Hellinko Complex in Athens is truly, absolutely, incredibly, magnificently stonking. It's a great wonder of the modern sporting world. The course is in a figure of eight, almost like a gigantic watery version of a deluxe Scalectrix set, and with six massive turbines pumping the water from the base level up to the start line.
Yet it's "totally artificial". The toybox feel of it is echoed in the use of huge plastic bollards, in bright greens and blues, that they use to create the complex patterns of eddies and waves that the canoeists have to go through. Yes, it's artificial, man-made (can we say "man" any more?). Unlike a natural river, it creates just about the same conditions for each competitor each time as they go down the rapids. But it's still real water, in real currents and real turbulence, obeying real physical laws that the competitors have to deal with.
Water always looks good in sport on the box. It creates slo-mo splashes, slipstreams for overhead shots and underwater angles. This water on the Hellinko course looked particularly fantastic - very foamy, a churning froth, blue, clear and blue - and I was slightly surprised to find that they use seawater. Apparently it's more "vibrant" than fresh water. Must be a density thing.
The kayak slalom (or is it slalom canoeing? He reaches for his online dictionary but to no avail) has all these graceful twists and turns - it involves a particular way of working with/against the forces of water. This makes it very beautiful to watch, giving it much of the grace of diving or gymnastic events. But it's a totally objective sport in terms of judging winners and losers. Either you get through all the gates properly, in the fastest time, or you're too slow and/or you bang into one or two of them gates and get penalised. There's no room for it to be assessed from different subjective viewpoints. It's not like, say, high diving or gymnastics - or boxing even - where a panel of umpires adds a subjective layer to the whole affair. It's even more objective than a footie match, where the ref can make a daft decision and destroy a team's chances in seconds.
There's also a freelance colleague in Gazette HQ called Marleen, who's training for her first Liffey Descent, which takes place next Saturday. We get weekly - no, often it's daily or even hourly - updates on her progress as her trainer (he's called "Mad Dog", honest) puts her through her paces for the event next Saturday. It's not quite the same as slalom canoeing in the Olympics, but our Marleen has never done anything like it in her life, and fair play to her.
Just over a week ago a person on an email list I'm on asked for a peer review of a new website. It was going live that day, "but it is not too late to make changes".
So, as I do, I took the time to go through the site and made a few suggestions and additions for their snaglist. One of the worst bits was a map on their stockists page. It has to be one of the worst maps of Ireland I've ever seen online.
They've split the island into Northern Ireland, AND four provinces. Work that one out. "Ulster" is now shrunk down to just County Donegal, and Leinster has become terribly fat - presumably after eating up an extra county or two.
Exhibit A, your honour:
Seeing as they couldn't be arsed to change this one gif and its corresponding image-map, I might as well name them too: www.alvinconnor.com.
So the Irish Independent's tabloid or "compact" version has been a success. Or so it seems.
According to the latest ABC figures issued yesterday, it had an "average net circulation" of 52,045 in the first six months of this year.
The broadsheet version had an almost inevitable drop - from 162,463 copies in the same period last year to 129,035. But that means the Indo's overall circulation went up:
129,035 + 52,045 = 181,080, a growth of 11%.
Enter stage right the Irish Times's managing director Maeve Donovan: "On first reading, it would appear that the market has grown," she told her own paper. "It is incorrect, however, to simply combine Independent's six-day broadsheet and five-day tabloid editions. An estimate of the combined result would give an average daily circulation of 163,000 copies approximately. This represents a very modest increase in sales. Independent would appear to have made a very significant investment for very little return."
Maths, eh?
And what return has the Irish Times itself made on its own investments during the period? Circulation actually fell slightly: from 117,565 copies in the first half of last year to 116,009 copies in the same period this year: a drop of about 1% during a boom time for property, recruitment and business generally.
It's the annual supply-and-demand scramble for Irish college places, aka The Points Race.
And from today's Irish Times front page it seems that journalism and multimedia courses in Ireland - at least in institutions such as DIT and DCU - are finally on the way down and not so hip any more. That particular bubble may have finally burst:
"There has also been a significant fall in points required for communications courses. At DIT, media arts is down from 465 to 445. A range of courses in journalism and multi-media in DCU and DIT are all down by up to 40 points."
afaik, there are only six colleges in the Republic with courses approved by the NUJ:
Yes, it's about time we had a bit of culture on the site. Yoghurt culture, that is. Not the sugary shite with E numbers that comes in ickle plastic tubs with colourings and artificial preservative trash, but real live yoghurt. Pure natural yoghurt that is cheap and reasonably easy to make.
Here's the scientific bit, so skip this long paragraph if you're not in training for "University Challenge" but it's important. Yoghurt is a living, breeding organism. I said organism, not orgasm. It's made with a culture containing highly beneficial bacteria that have somewhat sinister-sounding names: "Lactobacillus bulgaricus" and "Streptococcus thermophilus". These are allowed to multiply at an amazingly exponential rate within ordinary milk at a controlled temperature, until it achieves the right flavour and semi-solid consistency. And temperature is the key, because we're dealing with a living wee bacteria: it will be killed if its environment - the milk - is too hot (above 49C), and it stops growing if the temperature drops below 32C. So it has to be incubated within an optimum temperature range (starting at 40C and finishing at no lower than 18C) for the eight hours it takes to set.
You will need:
A thermometer - or a clean finger
A spotless saucepan
An equally clean glass bowl or earthenware dish (or a thermos flask)
A litre of milk (skimmed if you're weight-watching)
A tablespoon of "starter". Talking of which...
What's a starter? Natural yoghurt! Yes, that's the BRILLIANT thing about it: yoghurt makes yoghurt - it is its own "bacillus" or starter. All you need is a tablespoonful of natural yoghurt, i.e. the plain white stuff; strawberry flavoured Yoplait does not count. It's quite important to get just the right amount of starter though: too much or too little will cause the yoghurt to separate into curds and whey, just like that nursery rhyme.
And here are the steps to take:
First, make sure that your saucepan and all other utensils such as spoons are 100% clean and well-rinsed.
Bring the milk to the boil in the saucepan - this is to sterilise it - then turn off the heat when it gets to that "frothy" state.
Now you have to let the milk cool to just the right temperature range for the incubation process. So how do you figure that out? Either check it with a thermometer every so often until it has cooled to 40C. Or - what I do - simply dip your clean finger in and count to 15. If you can keep your finger in for that amount of time without screaming, you've reached the right temperature.
By this time a skin will have formed on the surface of the milk. You don't need this. So skim it off with a spoon and either discard it, or let it cool and add some honey or sugar and spread it on a chunk of bread. In the Middle East this "cream" is highly prized and called "kaymak" or "ser". People swap camels for it (OK, I made that very last bit up).
Using a clean fork or spoon, beat the starter spoonful of yoghurt in a cup for 10 seconds, and add two or three teaspoons of the warm milk to it, beating vigorously for another 10 seconds, then pour it into the rest of the milk, giving a few more stirs. We're basically trying to make sure that the bacillus is fairly well spread throughout the milk.
Now comes the incubation period - does this sound like a sci-fi horror story? There are two basic incubation methods:
Either pour the milk into a bowl, cover it with a large plate and wrap it in a towel or some tea-towels, and put it in a warm place such as a hot press or near a radiator for about eight to ten hours, leaving it undisturbed.
Or - what I do - pour the milk into a thermos flask instead, and leave it for about nine hours till it's set. Then immediately decant it into a bowl and chill it - if you don't do this, it will over-incubate in the flask and become too acidic.
For a milder flavour, chill the yoghurt as soon as it begins to thicken. For a stronger flavour, incubate it for a short while longer (half an hour, say) then chill.
And that's basically it. Have the right amount of starter, scrupulously clean equipment and the right temperatures and you'll have no problems. Store the yoghurt in the fridge for up to seven days (by which time it may start to separate and become very tangy).
To flavour yoghurt as a dessert, add some roughly liquidised fruit: thaw out some "Fruit of the Forest" from the freezer and blitz it in a liquidiser for a couple of seconds, or roughly chop up some raspberries or strawberries or black cherries or whatever takes your fancy. Taste to see how much the natural sugars in the fruit have sweetened it, then if it's still not sweet enough you can always drizzle in a bit of honey.
Natural yoghurt isn't just the base for your own DIY yoghurt smoothies either. It's also a key ingredient in the cuisines of the Middle East, the Balkans, some regions of Northern Africa, Caucasus, India and parts of Stoneybatter. Everything from soups to ice-creams. But that's another story..
Like a lot of bloggers I know, I seem to get a lot of blogspam in quick bursts. Shite about viagra and other chemicals, sex with all kinds of animals etc etc.
A lot of it seems to be coming from Taiwan, and I'm increasingly inclined to the view that Taiwan should be banned outright from even viewing this blog.
TEN things I've gleaned from Simon Loxley's new book "Type: The Secret History Of Letters" (published by IB Taurus)...
1 TYPE AND PLACE: Before World War II, if you were blindfolded and parachuted into Europe, you'd know where you'd landed (once you'd taken off the blindfold of course) by looking at the typefaces around you - from the roadsigns to the shopfronts. Nowadays it's far more difficult, as global capitalism homogenizes all in its path. Look at that restaurant's big arched yellow "M" on a red background. Where the fuck are you now? In Budapest or Belfast?
2 TYPOGRAPHER TYPES: From Gutenberg's day to the 1960s, top typeface designers seemed to be maverick rock 'n' roll individuals, often in conflict with the mass production world of their employers. John Baskerville "comes across as an 18th-century Brian Wilson to Caslon's Beatles", while Frederic Goudy is a bit of a Warhol or a Malcolm McLaren. These rebel designers often had other key passions in other media. Eric Gill, for example, was more famous in his lifetime for his sculpture and stone cutting than his typography.
3 ZAPF! KAPOWWW! Twenty minutes into the future, our written languages will be replaced by systems of symbols, ideograms... dingbats! Think of the rise of the "@" sign, already shared across all languages - in every email!
4 TYPE FASCISTS! Blackletter, or "fraktur" (those jagged typeface forms based on monastic script), isn't quite extinct yet. It's still loitering above Ye Olde Coffee Shops and on provincial newspaper mastheads, and in theng titles of war movies. Nowadays blackletter is as obsolete as, well, an IBM golfball, but it managed to survive in Germany for over four centuries after Gutenberg. It was still the dominant form when the Nazis took power, and despite calls to replace it with roman fonts, the Fascists initially said roman faces were alien, foreign, decadent. Blackletter was traditional, Germanic. Sometimes this "blackletter v roman" debate became a matter of life or death: designers were sent to prison camps for taking the "wrong" side. (Yet the Nazis did a U-turn and abandoned blackletter in 1941. Why? Due to the needs of an expanding empire? Or because their pilots found it hard to read aircraft markings at a distance? Answers pls on a postcard)
5 GOING UNDERGROUND! The London Underground's custom typefaces are literally a landmark corporate commission - "London's handwriting". As for typefaces for, say, road signs, designers should do a lot of user testing in the field on different fonts, colours, upper v lower case, serif v sans etc.
6 TIMES AND PROPERTY: You're bound to have heard of the Times typeface. And maybe that it was created for the London newspaper The Times, making its first appearance on 3 October 1932. Or that it was designed by Stanley Morison. But who owns it?
"The Times had sole usage rights to their typeface only for a year, after which it went on general release. It's hard to imagine this today, when eerything is nailed down as regards usage and copyright. Would The Times's management have been amazed if they had known that sixty years later Times New Roman, or a digitized version of it, would be a feature of every personal computer throughout the world?"
That's a bit like a nerdy kid buying a computer OS off another company, tweaking it and flogging it on to IBM - but not giving them the rights.
7 LET'S GET PHYSICAL: Letterpress is very physical. It's about the colossus machines from a bygone age, and the tactile magic of tiny metal letters neatly arranged in their wooden cases. You can still see them in places such as the National Print Museum in Beggars Bush in Dublin. It's also about the physical feel of letterpress output - the ever so slight indentation of letters on paper, the tangible warmth that that evokes, and the sounds and smells of a publication house. Manual typewriters clacking away in the newsroom. The chug, rattle and clatter of a typecaster at full pelt. The heavy aroma of machine oil, the perfume of fresh ink next to a tin of Swarfega.
8 GOING DIGITAL: In less than a lifetime, printers and designers have moved from hot metal to photosetting, via various detours such as Letraset (no, ye never had enough e's), finally making the great leap into digital type in the past two decades. Perhaps the biggest milestone in that migration was Postscript - storing fonts not as bitmaps but as mathematical formulae, freeing the letter from its metal past and its dependence on resolution (x pixels per inch), turning it into a fluid entity.
9 THE AUTEUR TYPE: Typography isn't "just" design. Loxley writes: "If designers solve other people's problems while artists solve their own, then a typeface can place its creator solidly in the realm of the latter."
10 THE INVISIBLE TYPE? An "old school" notion: type is invisible, a servant to the message, always doing its job in the background, only noticed when it fails to do it properly. The "new school" notion: b%l£&@ks to all that.
* * *
OK, the bottom line is that Loxley's book is a good read. It doesn't presume too much knowledge of type (though it does assume you know what descenders and ascenders and x- and y-heights are).
I was a bit pissed off that there were only so many illustrations, but that probably just means the book whetted me appetite.
And the area of study is very much within the Anglo-American chunk of the English-speaking world. After Gutenberg is sorted, the book concentrates mainly on the Brits, the Americans, the rise of a German threat (this is just like "The Riddle of the Sands"), the post-war rise of sans serifs with a few Swiss and French blokes mentioned. It's a minor quibble, but
The front blurb is a bit OTT ("Loxley, with the skill of a novelist, tells of the people and events behind our letters. How did Johann Gutenberg, in late 1438, come to think of printing? Does Baskerville have anything to do with Sherlock Holmes"). But it's a great yarn and he manages to draw together a huge number of strands of the story of type, with historical "infobursts" every so often to explain what this all had to do with wider society and the winds of war or whatever was happening at the time.
Loxley also adds various autobiographical touches here and there, with strolls down London streets or visits to surviving hot metal printers and so on.
Dunno how much the hardback costs in this country - I got it as a pressie - but well worth getting your local library to order.
PS did I ever tell you the story of the Irish Times editor who believed not enough stories were getting into the paper, so he decreed that body type should be reduced from 8pt down to 7pt Times Roman? I kid you not. The daft experiment didn't last long.
Bob Bemer (84) - the man who helped bring ASCII into the world, and a lot more besides - died a few weeks back at his home in Texas.
"He was a coder until he couldn't code any more. He lived it and breathed it," his stepson told the Associated Press. Which is probably why his website hasn't been updated since then.
Tucked away in the metatags on the site are some keywords and key phrases of what Bob was all about, such as:
"Cause and Origins of ASCII from 1957 on, according to Bob Bemer ('Father of ASCII'), and what ASCII made possible (e.g., the Internet)"
ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange), pronounced “As-kee”, is an encoding system used in almost every computer. It lets computers, which can only interpret numbers, "see" text as a series of numbers.
ASCII is a truly massive breakthrough when you realise what came before it: zilch. Different computers had no way of communicating with one another. Each manufacturer had their own way of representing letters in the alphabet, numbers and control codes.
"We had over 60 different ways to represent characters in computers. It was a real Tower of Babel," Bemer once said.
And he realised that this primary ASCII content would be just a tiny subset of the alphabets and symbols which would have to be accommodated in a worldwide communication system. So in 1960 he came up with something else: the universal switching concept in use today, via the ESCape character/sequence.
He was also responsible for publishing some of the earliest Y2K warnings in the 1970s, and helped create COBOL (with Grace Hopper), and the 8-bit per byte standard.
A good introduction to his work is Lucille Redmond's interview of him for the "Computimes" section of the Irish Times. Don't worry, you don't need an Irish Times subscription: Bob archived it.
You'd think it was a new urban myth. But it ain't. The UK Passport Service has issued new guidelines about passport photos - you're not allowed to grimace, grin or gurn. No silly faces or raised eyebrows. Just a neutral expression, looking straight at the camera, with eyes wideand your gob shut.
The reason? Photographs showing people with parted lips could confuse the new biometric security scanners being introduced to measure facial parameters.
It's all "to meet recently-agreed international standards", apparently. Or as a headline says in today's Daily Telegraph, "Look miserable to help the war on terrorism".
Since Java uses the idea of a "virtual machine" rather than a true executable, this makes your source code less secure from prying eyes, because the process can be reversed or "decompiled". Godfrey's book explains how decompilation works in order to protect your code properly. He answers questions such as "How secure is your code after you run an obfuscator?"
OK, that might not be the most pressing issue in the Cunningham household at the moment, but I bet there's a good load of Java heads out there who need this book.
I've never met Godfrey in the flesh, but he has a fine writing style and was a real help to myself and Fiachra when we ran the computer page in a certain Irish newspaper many moons ago (jaysus, it's over SIX years ago now!). In fact if memory serves me right Godfrey was far and away our best "Deep Throat", and that's all I'll say on the subject.
Was having a quick pint after work with The Lucanian, an old codger who writes a weekly column in our newspaper.
He's an inveterate chainsmoker, so we found ourselves in the beer garden of a local hostelry, and it was overcast, very muggy, dark - your typical Irish August evening nowadays. And then it started to piss down and get very cold. "That's it, I'm going inside," says The Lucanian, adding a throwaway remark on the lines of "God help the smokers when it gets really cold in November or February, when the temperatures really start dropping down..."
It was at that moment that my lightbulb went "Ping!" Get some nice chunky robust thermometers, put your company's name/logo etc on them - tastefully of course - and stick them up on the walls in the beer gardens across our green and pleasant (and chilly) land.
Then come the winter, the smokers will be puffing away outside, and one will say to the other: "Jaysus it's feckin' freezin' out here..." And the other will reply: "Aye, for feck sake the thermometer says it's minus four. Oh look, there's some company branding on it. Must buy their stuff."
