If only life were that simple…

From the Irish Times, in Ferdinand von Prondzynski's column (he's President of Dublin City University), which is actually more serious than this makes it sound:

In his book, The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr, the late chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, suggested that a university president has three key tasks that the institution’s main stakeholders will expect to see achieved: “sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty”. Only the last of these, Kerr suggested, presented a problem.

Advertising - even The Inferno's too good for them

Finding a screwed up piece of newspaper on my desk, I realise that it's because I wanted to post an extract from a witty column, in the Irish Times Saturday magazine. I often pull book reviews out - and only buy a tenth of those I save (thankfully).

Anyway, this is John Butler ranting about the hair dye advert featuring two bossy little girls:

Looking at that strange smile, it's hard not to think that a small part of the melancholy stems from the fact that this man will never again be able to read the newspaper in its entirety on a Sunday. He seems to convey great regret at having fathered these two girls, along with grief for his weekend and for his wife - because frankly, his children are out of control. The five-year-old has been possessed by a much older, image-obsessed harridan, who believes that Daddy will never again have sexual intercourse unless he dyes his hair, and a second daughter who agrees that this is somehow both their business and their responsibility.

And so it goes on in a similarly droll vein… Girls: mummy's dead, and her replacement will be cruel to you. You'll deserve every second of it. And when the advertising genius who came up with this dies, I hope there's a hell consisting of little girls who rub hair dye in his eyes and smash up his iPhone over and over again for ever.

Brief notes

Doonesbury has another go at the terrible diversion that is Twitter. His line is that it's appallingly narcissistic.

Got some proper twee in the post today: God Help The Girl's 'Come Monday Night' 7" single. They're a Belle and Sebastian side project.

I've also discovered pitchfork.com, for all your indie needs (farewell, Word and other magazines for aging losers), and Jim Carroll's On The Record blog at the Irish Times, which Anita assures me is highly reliable for hot indie tips.

Here's some Th' Faith Healers - there's not a lot out there, probably because they split in 94.

Happy birthday, grandma!

I'm away for my grandmother's 96th birthday party - she really is immortal, which hopefully means that I'll live long enough to bore your grandchildren too. As it's a family occasion, we're all sitting in separate rooms, reading newspapers (siblings apart - illiterates all). I've just read the Irish Times, and it's a real pleasure. It's still a massive expanse of newspaper, still running pages of close-type small ads, and clearly limited in its global reporting (lots of wire-service pieces), but it's beautifully written. 

It's an odd paper. Formerly the voice of the bitter Ascendancy which took several decades to come to terms with letting the culchies run the country, it's become a sophisticated, largely liberal paper which takes a cool, disinterested (is this the character of Church of Ireland Protestants?), rather despairing long view of the vagaries of Irish politics and governance - a bit like the Guardian but without the slightly desperate attempt to be cool, probably because it's the paper of record with no serious competition. There's something delightfully old-school about a paper in which letters start with 'Madam' (editor Geraldine Kennedy) and end with 'a chara etc.' The paper seems suffused with the barely suppressed notion that, had it been consulted, the country wouldn't be in its current economic, political and moral turmoil - and it's probably right.

None of this applies, of course, to the Saturday supplements. Like the Guardian and all the others, they're obsessed with something called 'lifestyle', which seems to consist of consuming vast quantities of food while wearing expensive but ephemeral clothes. I hoped that, with a recession, this rubbish would fade away, but apparently not: the Guardian featured a man's shirt for £850 yesterday. I know that I'm a penny-pinching git, but this seems excessive. I can see the point of paying £5000 for bespoke suit that will last for an entire lifetime, but that much for something which will seem unwearably outdated in a few months' time just makes me incandescent with impotent rage. 

The Irish Independent is a bigger seller, but that rag is an hysterical, reactionary turd of a publication - much more like the Mail than its sister paper in the UK. I rather like the Examiner too - formerly the Cork Examiner, making a play for national status. Unfortunately, however, the British tabloids and mid-markets are muscling in on the market by adding 'Irish' to the masthead and sharpening their most stridently unpleasant views even further: they seem to believe that the Irish are even more insular and racist than their home readership. Say it ain't so!

I browse through other papers too: Libération, L'humanité and Le Monde sometimes, and struggle through a few in languages I barely recognise - good for the soul and brings a new perspective.