i think if everything's going to hell i might start telling people to fuck off on linkedin

🎵 you’ve been closed by / you’ve been shut by / the task manager

“10s of thousands have died or suffered abject ruination in the service of a few glossy pictures. The shambolic project that killed or ruined them was made possible not only by a seemingly bottomless supply of oil money, but by the borrowed prestige of some of the West’s leading architecture firms”

And in "spectacular car brain" news. "We should be able to give the motorists a break. You know we all talk about trying to bring business and activity back into the centre of Dublin..."

yeah, just out of interest, how many people choose the pen on the right for real work or art? See a lot of them in professional workplaces, do you?

Folks familiar with 80s girls' comics (I'm thinking Diana or Misty), am I right in thinking this artist looks v familiar?

please refer to your Davos phrasebook www.ft.com/content/ab4f...

"Without us you'd all be speaking German", Donald Trump tells an audience in Davos, in Switzerland. Where the most common language is German.

Mark Carney's speech is now only the second most acute analysis of where the world is at right now:

Autocorrect means that I just emailed someone to ask them about the EU bazongas

A problem with appeasement is the people doing it see it as a neutral act. "We'll just appease him until it doesn't work", as if things stand still in the meantime. But every little act of appeasement makes things worse. He's demanding Greenland cause he's been appeased into believing it's possible

Is it a particularly Irish thing to not install amenities or take amenities away Just In Case someone unsavoury uses them?

Reminded that I have actually been to a conference in Davos (not the WEF) and most of the conference centre looks like my 1980s secondary school. A lot of breeze blocks.

Went outside, lads, don't recommend it.

It’s a race now. Can he die before he’s lowered the bar of behaviour expected while in office so low that he can keep doing it while dead?

Going through old files, I just stumbled across these 2001: A Space Odyssey / 1970s kids' TV mashups. No recollection of doing them. They must have been stuff intended for #Scarfolk, but got forgotten.

EXTREMELY successful experiment with @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com egg and rice breakfast this morning (please excuse asymmetrical egg).

was briefly so excited reading this until I realised he meant Davos

At least we have clarity now about America. It’s like there’s a neighbour down the street and people say he’s a nice guy but you’ve always thought he was a bit odd, then one day everyone sees him naked and waving a sword around in a shopping centre car park, screaming about the hamster people.

It's also incredibly telling that the messaging is that this is over.... "in the wake of"... "after the Grok controversy"... Nothing's happened! How are we in the wake of it?

I'd say at least half of the news lines that I read when I wake up in the morning now read like text-based exposition you find lying around in Fallout games.

I swear to god bbc news, if you ever introduce a BREAKING item again with the kind of gravity I personally would reserve for if we're getting a 3 min warning, or as another example god has died, and then it turns it to be "brooklyn beckham is still sulking," I swear to fucking god

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

South King Street, height of summer, toddler throwing an almighty wobbler involving lying on the ground clinging to my legs and refusing to move. Passing woman handed me a fresh-from-the-fridge bottle of sparkling water and told me that This Too Would Pass.

Cool idea: what if we stopped making everything worse and worse

My feeling of smug virtue at having made a tax payment is somewhat tempered by my suspicion that the government is going to spend it on AI dongles or granting personhood to the M50.

Every time I listen to the music of Sergio Mendes, I can't help thinking of this photo of him and his band with Harrison Ford in 1970, just after Ford had finished building a recording studio in Sergio's back garden. I like to think Mendes later went to see Star Wars & shouted "That's my carpenter!"

the perils of disco

I contain mountainous volumes of unfathomable existential anxiety & also whimsy

The Mermaid Cafe and Gruel (side by side, same owners) on Dame St. Mermaid for fancier meals and incredible brunch, Gruel for roast in a roll, super good value evening meals, and wine in little tumblers. Closed due to (IIRC) high rents, sat empty for ages, now a Carroll's Poxy Irish Gift Shop.

Our senior politicians need a chaperone for their visits to San Fran, someone who can point at stuff and go "that's not AI it's a search engine", "that's not a hologram it's a projector", "that's not a robot it's just a guy with a remote control"

[Exasperated Dilys Price voice] Norman! You have become death! Destroyer of worlds!

'it's time for Ireland to lead' 'by doing whatever you were told by whichever American politician you most recently met?' 'by doing whatever i was told by whichever American politician I most recently met, yes'

this particular anecdote from Boorman's Adventures of a Suburban Boy about Lee Marvin getting belligerently drunk at Jack's on the Beach never fails to make me laugh

In cheering news, the 13yo and I have ended the evening almost incoherent with mirth at the bit in Bagthorpes Versus The World where four year old menace Daisy is going round a hospital ward assessing whether patients are going to die. "And is your legs long or short?"

Planning to establish an adult cochlear implant peer support network. Will be helpful for adults with a CI/anyone deemed eligible. Sharing experiences to help others who are in the same process & navigating the Irish health system. Online first, then regional meets depending on numbers. Plz share!!!

Doing some mending and am forced to conclude that I need a new varifocal prescription. Either that or I am making stitches so tiny they are worthy of a Victorian infant (they are not).

FAO Dublin folk who travel via the North Strand, buses going all round the houses from town, looks like Newcomen Bridge is closed and there's a large army green truck on it.

Putin is 73. Trump is 79. Xi is 72. I worry about the kind of world these elderly men are leaving our children and Keith Richards.

The last few years has been a competition between Philip K. Dick stories to be most prophetic and it's sadly it's never the one about the dog who thinks garbage men are space aliens

Last night I met a guy who said everyone in his office uses ChatGPT "because you just type in two lines and it generates a whole email for you!" And I *very correctly* replied that "no one wants that 'whole email' they just want the two lines - and they all hate you"

Hobbs is a full-blown lunatic and shouldn't be taken seriously by anyone in any capacity.

And now, from the "wisdom of the ancients" department...

Watched Close Encounters with the 13yo this evening and it's *such* a gem of a film.

The great power behind the lies from government and assorted racists is imo that they appeal to our great national sense of begrudgery - someone out there is getting something for free and you aren't

Remind me again how the government are making road safety a priority? He accepts what he did was wrong but didn't immediately rule out appealing the conviction? If he agrees what he did was wrong and is remorseful, on what grounds would he appeal the conviction?

Just almost convinced a guy in the office that Vanessa Paradis had a whole album called "Le Transport Publique", and her follow up to Joe le Taxi was called Pierre le Bus.

‘We had a great meeting. The Prime Minister jingled a bunch of keys, perhaps the greatest bunch of keys in history. Beautiful keys, incredible. People say they’ve never seen that kind of jingling for any President, ever.’

Friday.