Monthly Archives: May 2011

Limited edition 9cm global revolutionary figures with rucksacks and hiking boots: Chairman Mao Zedong; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; Karl Marx and American author and poet, Henry David Thoreau.

£145 from Couverture And The Garbstore (currently sold out, which is not very revolutionary at all)

Jeffrey Martin, the founder of 360cities, was hired by Wembley Stadium to create a panorama of the 2011 FA Cup Final. He shot 1000 photographs of the 90,000 fans in attendance, then stitched them all together into a massive, 20 gigapixel, 360-degree scroller. You can see virtually every face in the crowd, and tag anyone you know.

Check out the final photo here.

via

Yeah, well, they always say that.

Swaddled in the afterglow, the Irish are trying to figure out: Was it true love or merely a one-day stand?

Not even a whole night, after all, since Barry O’Bama ran off after the ecstatic lovefest, muttering some incredible excuse about a volcanic ash cloud from Iceland.

The tall, dark stranger who bewitched an island didn’t say when he’d be calling again to help out with Ireland’s $100 billion debt. The American president was back in the arms of the Special Relationship. He even proposed a deeper commitment with David Cameron, calling it the Essential Relationship. And on Thursday he’ll be whispering je t’aime to the French.

But the ordinarily laconic lad had looked really happy while he was here, hadn’t he?

As J.F.K. and Bill Clinton discovered before him, Irish love is all-encompassing, a mother’s milk for needy politicians.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny was so enamored of the president that he offered an odd homage, a near-carbon copy of the opening of Obama’s victory acceptance speech in Grant Park in Chicago in 2008, changing the word “America” to “Ireland” and “founders” to “ancestors”

Don’t Be A Stranger (Maureen Dowd, New York Times)

(Photocall Ireland)

A 1964 essay, Seeking A National Purpose by Garret FitzGerald set out the former taoiseach’s political vision for the rest of his life.

What it and FitzGerald’s subsequent career lacked, says Vincent Browne in today’s Irish Times, was a commitment to end inequality.

“Garret had only a thin commitment to the ideal of equality, which perhaps is surprising because his personal dispositions would have suggested otherwise. But he was from privileged background – not in monetary terms but certainly in cultural ones.

Garret was not scandalised by the scale of inequality here and rarely exposed to it.

He believed it was politically impossible to radically redistribute wealth and income; he believed there could be only an incremental redistribution from aggregate increases in wealth and income.

He remained therefore content to live with evidence of radical inequality and was often dismissive of that evidence. And his contentment with radical inequality added considerably to the contentment of our political culture with radical inequality, such was his influence.

Garret’s Acceptance Of Inequality Had An Effect (Vincent Browne, Irish Times)

(Photocall Ireland)