Thursday, November 02, 2006

News round up

I've been immersed in the history of Dublin for days now, and have finally made it to the eighteenth century. This is the century of the Hellfire club, kidnappings, battles between the Liberty and the Ormond boys, and plenty of other general trouble-making. For sheer flamboyance of name, my favourite rabble-rousers are the Pinkindindies. As a gang name, it doesn't exactly instill cold fear. There's one account of them trashing a Dublin brothel, led in the violence by balloonist Richard Crosbie. Ooh a balloonist, scary... Anyway, I was highly amused just imagining the headlines from the period.

Listening to RTE and BBC radios this morning - everyone's talking about security on flights - I was reminded of the Eddie Izzard unattended bag sketch from the early 1990s. Don’t watch it if you’re travelling soon, because giggling when the safety announcements come on just makes everybody else nervous.

In other news, it's a stunning day here :)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny you mentioning security. On my way in to work this morning on London Underground, my somewhat crowded Northern Line train was stopped due to "passenger action" as someone had pulled the emergency brake -cue discreet rolling eyes and muttered groans from us sardines on the train, not to mention the couple of hundred people hoping to get onto the already crowded train. Ten stationary minutes later, it is announced that the person had pulled the break due to an unattended bag on the train which would now be found and examined. So, weirdly, rather than anyone getting stressed over this or furtively looking to see how quickly they could get off the train, instead people lost some of the annoyed expression (reasonable explanation for delay), relaxed and got on with reading/sleeping/day dreaming/yawning/protecting personal space etc, myself included. So, the rule about impassivity on the tube still holds firm.. and just in case you were wondering, the left luggage did turn out to be just that..

Travel safely

Sara

Orlaith said...

How bizarre!! It's funny how much threat can be absorbed into daily life and normalised.

They probably do that here except with landslides rather than bombs: "What's that, a massive slide dragged a car with its passengers into the sea and blocked the whole road. Hmmm, I can go up to Camacha and across - that's okay :)"

Anonymous said...

This whole liquids scare is a bit daft really. So you can't bring your shampoo onto the plane...but why would you want to anyway? I can understand people worrying about medicines, babyfood, things like that, but is it really a problem that people have to sit for 3 hours without access to deodorant?

Its a whole new market for Ryanair - selling onboard, disposable toiletries...I wonder how long before they start? "Get your scratch-cards, overpriced pringles and official Ryanair toothpaste."

Orlaith said...

Good idea! I'm sure Ryanair are working on an in-flight toiletry kit right now - reasonably priced (once you take altitude into account). What'll really sting is paying them an absurd amount for a bottle of water...