The trouble with Israel and its incursion into Palestine is the lines become increasingly muddied. If ‘Heat’ magazine were to do an article on the conflict I could imagine a ‘Face-off’ type table set out which compared the various aspects of the two sides, in the same way they might compare two celebrities and ultimately come to a conclusion. With both sides in this conflict, its a case of who is worse, than who is in the wrong. Under Israels column you could have ‘Tactics: Large Scale air and land assault on Palestinian Settlements killing up to 500′, while Hamas’ would read ‘Tactics: Operating from busy civilian areas and fighting with no strategic intent’. It’s a mess and no one seems to want peace.

There are no statesmen at play here, there are coniving politicians and actions of terror to be acounted for on all sides. Israel for me will always be in the wrong, it legitimises terror under the auspices of its existence of an elected government and ignores almost universal condemnation of its disproportionate actions and veres away from efforts to encourage a cease fire and dialogue. Israelis are as deserving as Palestinian people to go about their lives undeterred - so the actions of Hamas in its combat and intensifying its rocket attacks cannot be excused. The rockets continue while Israel makes claims of progress. Where is there an end to this? When they obliterate Hamas’ ability to fire rockets? When a stalemate is reached when the Israeli forces prove ineffective? Neither of these is likely and worryingly events could escalate in Israel contending it should take more permanent roots in Gaza to ensure Hamas is dismantled. Hamas put a quick end to the cease fire that was in place, launching a rocket the day before the cease-fire was to formally end, while Israel is refusing to seek a diplomatic solution.

Dick Cheney has remarked that this is not two UN members in conflict, but instead a UN member under attack from a terrorist organisation. In these semantics the fact a society of people is being continually victimised is lost. As ever different values are being put to different lives. War begets war, I’m over these intellectual debates about war being necessary and discussing the Biblical conflicts. Our TV screens have us so desensitised to war, that we discuss abstract notions while people die.

What’s important about these nominations is that 12 of the previous 19 winners of best feature as selected by the PGA has gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars, including ‘No Country for Old Men’ last year. The appearance of ‘The Dark Knight’ here will raise hopes for many that it could feature in the Best Picture race. Obviously Heath Ledger has been receiving nominations, but the film itself is not making many awards short lists, other than of course the Dossing Times Movie of the Year 2008! The PGA nominees are:

• Dark Knight;
• Slumdog Millionaire;
• Frost/Nixon;
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and
• Milk

I know most people probably have heard of this but http://www.irisheconomy.ie/ is a new blog from a team of economic heavy weights. Looking through their respective background seems to be a whos who of economic Academics in Ireland.

2009 will see the rise of race in politics in Ireland. Most people have marveled at the way Ireland integrated our “New Irish”. People said that as we are an emigrating nation we understand their plight. The fact of the matter is they came here and did the jobs that we did not want to do. But now times are changing with rising unemployment they will now be seen as doing the jobs that should be Irish peoples jobs. They will take a lot of the blame for the housing crash on the belief that their numbers swelled the boom in housing. The fact that these arguments can be successfully argued against and the fact that many of the Eastern Europeans are leaving our shores as the jobs dry up is neither here nor there. They will take the blame for a lot. Take Dell in Limerick. It employed loads of Poles and now the plant is moving to Poland. This will not go unnoticed and the decisions of American multinationals will not focus anger on the Americans but on the Eastern Europeans. Most towns in this country have a Eastern European Deli or shop of some sort. Don’t be surprised if one gets burnt down in the next year. Also expect a party to move against this. Either Libertas or Sinn Fein are the most likely however Labour is the only one to go near the issue in the last few years. This is going to get nasty in 2009.

Hi everybody,

The comic will return next Tuesday after its Christmas hiatus.

Thanks for your patience

Tuathal

Every Day this week I will make a prediction a day 

Number 1 A massive web company is going to wall. Most web companies exist on the back of projected Advertising revenue. The trend is for TV viewerships to go down and internet usage going up. Ergo the thinking being that with its ability to target audiences web based advertising is the wave of the future. However most people ignore adds on websites with very little click throughs many people are also increasingly using ad blockers. Also many are also realising that to get to the top of google, a well design web page and blog will get you to the the top alot quicker and cheaper then advertising on google. That Fact that Google have mentioned adding add blockers to Google Chrome seems to show that Google also thinks this is the wave of the future. Wait to see some newspapers returning to the subscription type service that were to the forefront of the web in the beginning.  But a more imaginative way of getting people to pay for these services needs to be made.

Why all the moaning about January I ask you? Oscar season is upon us so that movie releases are going stellar, you get to forget that you failed miserably at keeping last years resolutions and most importantly the new series of ‘Lost’ is mere weeks away (January 21st Stateside and hopefully not too much longer after here). I’m in TV nirvana at the moment with Season 2 of ‘The Wire’ making an appearance in my christmas presents and despite the ‘Lost’ tacograph mapping an inconsistent route I can’t but feel a wave of anticipation as to how events will unfold. Only 2 truncated seasons remain to answer the maze of questions relayed by the events of the series. Sitting in the alleyway of Mutton Lane pub before Christmas it was remarked that the final reveal will ultimately be a disappointment, if this is to be the case I really hope getting there is as intriguing as it’s been to date.

Importantly, the merits of ‘Lost’ has passed Tuathal by and this has been to the detrminent of his quality of life. Tuathal has agreed to watch the season opener so that he can see the error of his ways. We also lost Simon along the way, he at one time a fan, is no longer committed. Hopefully he will find his way back. I’m thinking some episode reviews might be in order. Here are some previews of the episode.

The last issue of Newscientist had an article that tells us about the future. Online shopping and the Harry Potter effect the basic premise of the article can be summed up the the following graph 

Back a few years  Chris Anderson wrote a famous piece for wierd magazine about how the world of retail was going to be changed by the internet. Traditionally shops were restricted with what they could stock in their shops as their was only so much room on their shelves. So we had the yellow graph. Where the total sales hovered over a few key items like Harry Potter books. Anderson’s idea was that as the likes of Amazon had very little restrictions on shelf space that a long tail would emerge as people could buy what they wished.  

But this is not happening.

It is an attractive hypothesis that rapidly acquired an evangelical following. But then dissenting voices emerged. The first shot across the bows came in July this year, when Anita Elberse of Harvard Business School published an analysis of music downloads and DVD-by-mail rentals in the Harvard Business Review. Her findings suggest that the long tail is far from the revolution Anderson claimed. The tail is indeed getting longer, but isn’t, as Anderson thought, growing fat with choice. Instead it is getting both flatter and thinner, filled with ever more products that sell few or no copies.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Her ideas have recently been backed up by another study. Will Page and Gary Eggleton at the MCPS-PRS Alliance - a UK body that collects royalties for musicians when their songs are played on air or downloaded - and Andrew Bud from the cellphone software company mBlox have analysed a year’s worth of downloads from a well-known internet music store. They found that of the 13 million tracks available, 52,000 - just 0.4 per cent - accounted for 80 per cent of downloads.

What this shows is that humans have a herd mentality. We follow trends. The internet has not changed this indeed as the internet has made the world smaller so too has it made our range of decissions smaller.

One of the ideas behind the securitization that kicked off the whole credit crunch was that you  unlocalised risk. Say a town in Texas bank went bust. The loses of that bank would be diluted all around the world so that on the grand scale of things the losses were nothing even for the town in Texas. But as we have seen in the recent crunch this also resulted in the problems shooting right across the world as all banks were intertwined. But not only that.

Much of the building boom in Ireland was caused by the herd mentality. House prices were going one way and you would be a fool to miss out on them. As we all know this thinking was basically bonkers. But it was the word of mouth that spread this to a large extent. With the growth of the internet the word of mouth like the risk is globalised. Everyone can read anything from everywere. From now on booms and busts are going to be more and more globalised. Because lets not forget one of the main causes of a recession. Is fear and if everyone in our sphere is afraid we also tend to be. Social networking and the web makes spheres and therefore fear global.  The coming depression is going to be worse then it should be because of fear.

Monday on RTE 2, at an unacceptable hour of 11.55 it might be worth checking out the Irish short movie ‘Frankie’, which narrates a 15-year old father-to-be struggle with anxiety over his impending responsibilities. Irish director Darren Thornton won the European Film Academy short film prize during the European Film Awards ceremony in Copenhagen in December for the movie.

10. Get Smart

Steve Carrell giving comedy a hope, perfectly cast in what is a derivative piece but nevertheless well done, with great tongue in cheek and excellent action.

9. Kung Fu Panda

Great vocals, visuals and humour, the placement of this film is an appreciative nod to unchallenging yet pleasing, entertaining film making done well. Its just good fun - what more do you want?

8. There Will Be Blood

This film is unique, not tailor rmade for a Saturday nights viewing, or for people who go on holidays to sit by a pool, it is an exposure of character over a severely bleak canvas for 3 hours. What remains is an unfathomably complex piece, P.T. Anderson, Day Lewis and deserving mention also, Paul Dano, each have strong proprietal rights to this film so there is a strange mix of opposing forces trying to sculpt how you engage with this movie. Powerhouse stuff.

7. Burn After Reading

The most under rated movie of the year and the best ensemble of the year. A-listers, character actors, a plot that knowingly is absurd. This is atypical film making targeted at a mainstream audience, an approach to telling a story that intrigues, its novelty making you smirk. The story is assisted by excellent performances, everyone doing justice to their credibility. More of the same please.

6. Man on Wire

King Kong was the RTE Christmas movie on RTE 1 this year, I only saw the end of it and no matter how many times I see it I still get an uneasy feeling in my gut, and a nervousness on seeing the primate and Naomi Watts scale the Empire State Building. I had that experience again this year, through a documentary re-enactment in ‘Man on Wire’. Its re-enactment of a tight-rope walk between the twin towers in New York, the lead up to this, portrayed through black and white stills, some re-enactment and the people involved relaying their story was just brilliantly done. I honestly relived some of my worst ‘height’ experiences watching this. For a movie to evoke emotion, any sort is a testament to its achievement. This aside, the soundtrack, mix of styles and the questions remaining afterwards surrounding this riveting, odd event make this a full cinematic experience.

5. 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days

This movie made me cry, it literally effected me like few movies I have ever seen. Its not a comfortable topic and there is never a break in the tension that will grip you. No one walked out of this movie, no one spoke for a few minutes after the screen went black. It was a shared experience in unease and human frailty.

4. In Bruges

Next comes a polar opposite, a joy of Irish writing talent transferring to a bigger audience and Irish acting talent at its best. Brilliantly made, with tragi-comic themes throughout and an inherent rawness to the humour that is devilishly black, then juxtaposed within an instant with poignant moments. Stand out moments include the introduction of ‘the love interest’ (Clémence Poésy), her hair flailing beautifully, Farrell in a bathroom, revealing his heavy conscience, an exchange in a bell tower between Gleeson and Farrel and the final shoot out which will forever be one of my great moments in film.

3. Lars and the Real Girl

This is a difficult film to summarise, it makes the list for being so heart-felt but also for being brave enough to ask of the audience a leap of faith and then being so rewarding. I dont doubt there are those for whom this movie was a step too far - but again as with ‘Burn After Reading’ above this doesnt offer a ‘For Idiots’ storytelling technique or aim for overt realism, it bellies the film with quirkiness, sincerity and an almost fairytale like quality. I couldn’t but be swayed by its charm. And Ryan Gosling, all is forgiven for ‘The Notebook’.

2. No Country for Old Men

Guns, violence, dry wit, a sprawling story with poetic moments, tense moments, surreal moments - this is the Coens at their best. They want to play with you - Javier Bardem hides behind a door, you presume Tommy Lee Jones is just about to open. The door creaks open. Jones’s profile with stetson casts a stark shadow across the room, he enters, we fear the outcome, knowing the brutal way Bardems character has dispatched with various lives thus far. The room is empty. We are not told whether these events occured at different times, whether Bardem made an escape or whether he is still concealed in the room. The thought that goes into this type of execution of a movie sequence makes such great movies, and adds to the viewing experience. This movie is full of such moments.

1. The Dark Knight

There came a point while watching ‘The Dark Knight’ for the 1st time where the story was bombarded by events and I knew this was like no other superhero movie ever made, no simple progression, no driven villian, no easy finale. There came a point when Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon makes the closing soliloquy that I realised this movie had such huge dynamics; 3 men at its core and in their story ground was broken on how full of ideas this type of movie could be. There came points the second and third times I saw this movie that any smattering of plot hole or other failing you might like to find were negated by this tapestry of a film. I will neither be the first nor last person to say ‘The Dark Knight’ was the movie of 2008, I will be one of the most passionate in stating it though. No question.