Ireland's "Crack" Habit - Explaining the faux Irish pub revolution.

Of particular interest to me (especially the readers' comments), as both an appreciator of "authentic" Irish-American pubs and a former American "barmaid" in the UK.

damali ayo (creator of rent-a-negro.com) was interviewed in Bitch magazine's Fall 2005 issue.

I found a lot of it inspiring and/or paralleling to my own aspirations and/or practices in political art.

(I don't really agree with the very first sentence--on all art being activism [though that might depend on how you define activism]--but the rest is just beautiful.)

"'I believe that all art is a radical form of social activism. In the art world and in our society, we've made the grave mistake of separating the two--sometimes, when we look at socially minded art, we think it's less artistic, when it's actually the height of art.'"

"'Satire cannot exist without reality,' she insists, 'and only reality can be absurd enough to build solid satire. I find reality to be far more provocative than anything I could ever make up...'"

"'Intellectualizing and comedy both create an atmosphere where action becomes an option. This [book, How to Rent a Negro] is in between those two extremes--it is at once really funny and really not funny.' Following the modest proposal once made by Jonathan Swift, Ayo [sic] believes in the need for startling provocation in order to instigate meaningful change. 'We need to throw the pepper in the sauce [in order] for people to start tasting things. When you intersect the radical with the mundane, the socially weighted with the everyday occurrences, that's when things get really fascinating."

from BBC News- Slobodan Milosevic: Your comments

What is your reaction to the death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic?

"I think it is appalling that he didn't recieve the healthcare he required. He should of been kept in best health so he would survive the trial, then we could put him to death. That's just good, sensible justice, after all."

I emailed Princeton University Press with this question:

This is a bit of a random question, but I was wondering about a font used on a Princeton Paperback book. The book title is "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" by Susan Okin; I'm curious as to what the font on the back cover is. Let me know if you can help me in this quest! :)

I found the response kind of amazing:

I was hoping to be able to answer your question about the font on the back cover of the Okin book, but I'm afraid I haven't succeeded.  I have the book on my shelf, and I took it to one of our senior deisgners to see whether she could identify the font.  She could not, and she said it wouldn't be possible to do so with certainty without having the original cover files.  To complicte matters, the cover was designed by a freelance designer who is, I believe, no longer living.

from "Inside The Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World Of The Carnival Midway" by Bruce Caron (text) & Jeff Brouws (photos)

"[Sideshow freaks'] lives were tracked with the same ardor that fans would later show for Hollywood's own freaks: its movie stars. For it takes a parellel heroic to live with either deformity or celebrity in an age of advanced conformity.[...] The freak show's spectacle of human diversity- from physical deformity to ethnographic titillation- fed a voyeuristic hunger in the assembled crowd[...] raised on a daily diet of God-fearing normality."

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homely (according to the Oxford University Press Dictionary)

British: 1. simple but comfortable; 2. unsophisticated
American: 1. unattractive

"The whole time I daydream about a paradise planet where everyone lives forever, and their primary pursuit is falling in love with each other and then saying goodby and going away for a million years. They'd say the saddest, sweetest so-longs. In fact, saying goodbye would be this planet's most popular art form. Then a million years later, they'd meet up again and, you know, it'd be great, and people would spend a few thousand years just catching up."

- -Bill Brown, Dreamwhip #13

I could very well apply this to Ri Ra. Except only for a million years it's once again for a short visit every thousand or so years until a million years have passed...

nor·mal
adj.
1. Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type
2. Biology. Functioning or occurring in a natural way; lacking observable abnormalities or deficiencies.
5a. Relating to or characterized by average intelligence or development.
5b. Free from mental illness; sane.

- dictionary.com

"In an attempt to seem quaint or old-fashioned, many store signs such as 'Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe' use spellings that are no longer current. The word ye in such signs looks identical to the archaic second plural pronoun ye, but it is in fact not the same word. Ye in 'Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe' is just an older spelling of the definite article the. The y in this ye was never pronounced (y) but was rather the result of improvisation by early printers. In Old English and early Middle English, the sound (th) was represented by the letter thorn (þ). When printing presses were first set up in England in the 1470s, the type and the typesetters all came from Continental Europe, where this letter was not in use. The letter y was used instead because in the handwriting of the day the thorn was very similar to y. Thus we see such spellings as y^e for the, y^t or y^at for that, and so on well into the 19th century. However, the modern revival of the archaic spelling of the has not been accompanied by a revival of the knowledge of how it was pronounced, with the result that (y) is the usual pronunciation today."

- dictionary.com

According to Sinn Fein News (random, I know, they were highlighting Dublin, naturally).

1. Tokyo, Japan
2. Osaka, Japan
3. London, United Kingdom
4. Moscow, Russia
5. Seoul, South Korea
6. Geneva, Switzerland
7. Zurich, Switzerland
8. Copenhagen, Denmark / Hong Kong, China
10. Oslo, Norway
11. Milan, Italy
12. Paris, France
13. New York City, NY, United States / Dublin, Ireland
15. St Petersburg Russia
16. Vienna, Austria
17. Rome, Italy
18. Stockholm, Sweden
19. Beijing, China
20. Sydney, Australia

Oi! You! Get out now!
You dirty English bastards!
We’ve fucking had it!

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Secondary Definitions Of 'Irish'

fieriness of temper or passion; high spirit
- Dictionary.Com

offensive illogical or apparently so
- Those English Bastards Again (Oxford University Press)

"When I was fighting off the great white shark, with only a floatation device fashioned out of my pants, I thought back fondly on my college canoeing class."

- Judy