Someone apparently tried to hack into the system on Tuesday and Eircom then closed down its system from 7pm on Tuesday and kept it closed down for 24 hours. Eircom has a marvellous reputation for screwing things up, but they really excelled themselves this time. It’s all too typical of what passes for service in the commercial as well as the public sector here in Ireland. Trying to do business in Ireland can be very trying at times, so sometimes I wonder why so many US multinationals are still so keen to set up shop here, unless it’s for the very generous tax advantages, which means that they will end up paying practically no corporation tax at all.
On a more pleasant note, an interesting exhibition has just opened at the Louvre in Paris. A €400 million extension of the Louvre is due to open in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates at the end of next year and the show that’s just opened in Paris shows 160 of the items that will be on show in Abu Dhabi, everything from a 13th century Bible to Renaissance and 20th century paintings. Bravely, the new museum says that it’s going to have a very open policy on matters of religion and sexuality, a brave step for the Middle East.
Another even more interesting heritage exhibition can be seen at the Institut du Monde Arabe in the 6th arrondissement until the end of August. It’s three restored Orient Express railway carriages. The Orient Express started 130 years ago, running between the Gare de Strasbourg in Paris and Istanbul. The last return journey on this route was in 1977,while the last Orient Express train ran as far as Vienna in 2009.But also in Paris, it looks as if the saga of the renovation of the Picasso museum in the 3rd is set to drag on and on. It was meant to reopen this summer, but it now looks as if we’ll be lucky to have it reopened some time next year. And now, Eircom doesn’t have a hand in this particular venture!
I also see, talking of art and heritage, that moves are under way to have the Promenade des Anglais declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Segolene Royale, presidential candidate in 2007 and now the new environment minister, has denied a report in Le Point that women working for her ministry are going to be banned from wearing plunging necklines!
Over in Lille, on the Metro there the other evening, a 29 year old mother of four was sexually assaulted by a drunken teenager for 30 minutes. The assault was seen by a whole lot of passengers and bystanders and no-one did anything to help. Typical, but this isn’t just a French problem.
Down in the Jura the other day, a carpenter found he was holding up all the traffic. He had lost his driving licence, so he took to going to work in his donkey drawn cart, with predictable results for the traffic behind him.
One answer to all the chaos in the world at present came in Cologne, where a big contemporary art fair has been taking place. A Swiss performance artist called Milo Moiré performs in the nude; she fills her vagina with paint-filled eggs then stands up on a couple of trestles and lets them pop out to splatter on the canvas beneath, thus creating a “work of art”. I liked the opinion of The Guardian columnist on the subject who said it was all an apt summing up of the current state of the contemporary art world!
Meanwhile, on the subjects of vaginas and the like, one daily newspaper in Dublin made a very embarrassing mistake the other day. It has a feature called the Wordwheel, in which the aim is to make as many words as possible from a combination of letters, all within 10 minutes. Except that the other day, four letters together spelled out CUNT. An obliging competitor newspaper promptly published a screen grab to add to everyone’s embarrassment.
Also in Ireland, a website called Waterford Whispers is really clocking up visitors. Its news content is absolutely outrageous, but all the stories are fictional. In one recent story, it had Bill Clinton opening the first all African brothel in Dublin, which had been mainly funded by a well-known telecoms and media millionaire. All totally untrue of course, but great fun! But in real news, a senior manager in Air France and his wife have been accused of running a huge prostitution scam between Brazil and France. In Paris, a couple of officers at police headquarters have been charged with sexually assaulting a Canadian visitor to Paris, who had herself once been in the Canadian police.
In New York, the other day, a mishap of another kind. A French tourist kindly gave a down and out hobo a pizza, but the hobo turned out to be none other than actor Richard Gere putting in a very convincing performance. Also in the US, but on a much more serious note, The Guardian came up with a very telling phrase about Barack Obama’s performance: it called him a passenger in his presidency.
Also related to the US, there’s the story of a Bosnian woman who now has French nationality and is married with two children, living in Chambery. The whole family had paid well over €2,000 to go on a holiday in the US, but when they checked in at Geneva airport, the woman found she was on a US no fly list. The reason? Her name is Aida Alic and on her passport, she is listed with surname first, Alic Aida. It all sounds rather too close to comfort to a certain terrorist organisation. The woman in question said that she’s repeatedly tried to contact US immigration to get them to correct their mistake, with no luck at all. Let’s hope the Americans are a bit more efficient when it comes to managing their response to events in Ukraine!
These days, it seems impossible to get anything done properly! But at least, I did my lecture on the great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, to the Irish Byron Society. The script is included in full with this week’s blog. I was very amused to find that the middle aged, middle class audience most enjoyed the story about Kavanagh in a Dublin city centre pub. Fellow literati bet him a shilling he wouldn’t shit on the floor-he won his bet and pocketed his shilling!