The Dubliner Magazine

Beadle No Longer About

Veteran TV Host, General Knowledge Connoisseur and Practical Joker Pops His Clogs

So that's it. Jeremy Beadle has died. A whole compendium of Beadle-related humour has just slipped from poor taste into downright offensive. Nothing takes you out of the firing line like an untimely death. Although it obviously has it downsides.

Still, it means nothing like this will ever be produced again (even if Beadle's About is put on constant repeat):

Ah, the early nineties. When contemporary TV satire made Game for a Laugh look like Hedda Gabler. Jeremy Beadle RIP.

Dubli(NYC)

Lindsey Reiser asks: is Dublin the new New York? Seriously.

Dear, dirty Dublin has become more like dear, even-more-dirty New York over the past few years. If you haven’t picked up on it, take a glance around: Starbucks franchises spreading like cocaine, cocaine proliferating like Starbucks franchises... We are well on our way to becoming another Big Apple.

Beautiful People Walk Past Dubliner Office

Paul Trainer gets the shock of his life

I'd nipped out for a rasher sandwich for my lunch. It was just another day on Grafton Street.

Then I spotted them, dressed immaculately in black, clad in designer sunglasses. Seventy of them, marching right at me with a soundtrack playing in the background – a vision of classic fashion style. Was I finally going to be invited to take my rightful place among the Beautiful People?

Not quite yet. But I was invited to the Nokia Young Fashion Designer Award 2008 – the city’s most prestigious fashion competition.

All final year students from the design and fashion colleges across Ireland have been invited to create one garment inspired by the sleek and mysterious Nokia Prism handset, the latest in Nokia’s fashion range.

Dubliner readers are invited to apply for tickets to attend the live finale on March 11th by registering at www.nokia.ie

Have a look at the video below to see our close encounter of the fashion kind.

Anniversary of an Assassination

60 Years Ago Today, on January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was Shot Dead by a Hindu Fanatic

At the commemoration service today, one woman said simply: "hope he is reborn".

This is one of the few existing recordings of his voice: "all that I can advise is not to attempt the impossible."

The Wizard of Oz

Controversial Australian Comic Returns to Dublin

Last March, The Dubliner published an exclusive interview with controversial Australian comedian Steve Hughes, in which the outspoken former rocker expressed concern for his homeland and reacted to allegations of anti-Semitism.

This Thursday (January 31) Hughes makes a triumphant return to Dublin, where he will headline the monthly Barrel o’ Laughs Comedy Club in CrawDaddy. To mark his return, we're republishing the original interview here, in full. 

Two Long-Haired, Bearded, Political Comedians Walk into a Bar...

Abie Philbin Bowman talks to Steve Hughes

It's weirder than the plot of a Kazakhstani soap opera. [Later this week, Crawdaddy] hosts Australian comedian Steve Hughes, whose one-man show (appropriately entitled The Storm) led to him being labelled as an “anti-Semitic… left-leaning, angry, Australian conspiracy theorist". These accusations seemed all the more credible – or incredible – because they did not emanate from a Zionist Rabbi, but from fellow comedian Jamie Glassman, a writer on The Ali G Show, which featured the profoundly anti-Semitic ‘Borat’.

How Deep Is Your Hate?

"God hates the sordid, tacky bucket of slime seasoned with vomit known as Brokeback Mountain"

Some in the American Right regard the death of the late Heath Ledger as divine retribution, because he portrayed a homosexual on screen. (They fail to explain why the same vengeful Almighty, in whom they put so much faith, has failed to take out Graham Norton, Jodie Foster, George Michael, Martina Navratilova, Elton John, Ellen DeGeneres...)

Nazi Comedy #103

The Post-War Fallout

Tom Lehrer penned this particular ditty in honour of the former Nazi scientists who were headhunted by the victorious Allies to fire up the Cold War.

(Ignore the sycophantic introduction)

Put Dublin on the Board

Vote Early and Often

The makers of the classic board game Monopoly are holding an on-line vote to select which cities should be included in the game's first global edition.

It is a matter of municipal pride that Dublin be included. We have just slipped from sixth to seventh place. Only the top 20 cities will be featured.

 You can vote once a day, here, at www.monopoly.com

When the proper nomination closes, two ‘wild card’ cities will also be selected by public vote. Cork and Galway are in the running. 

A well-known historian notes: Traditionally, the game has been set in a particular city -- London, or Dublin -- with the properties named after famous streets such as Bow Street, or Shrewsbury Road.

Monopoly is regarded by many as having been instrumental in the collapse of communism. Illegal, homemade editions of the game were produced by artisans in the former Czechoslovakia during the early 1980s. Pope John Paul II and Vaclav Havel were both reputed to be great fans of the game. In 1989, a heated dispute about the rules regarding Free Parking spilled onto the streets of East Berlin, leading to the riots which sparked the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

When the Euro was first introduced, the makers issued a Eurozone edition where the properties were named after European capitals (including Dublin). However the chief novelty was that the banknotes were designed to look like Euro notes! The traditional £1 notes were even scrapped in favour of a plastic €1 coin!! Proposals to issue 'Chance' and 'Community Chest' cards in a range of European working languages proved more controversial. However, helped by extensive funding from Brussels, the game proved extremely popular with Erasmus students and European Finance Ministers.

It has since been withdrawn.

 

The Philosopher's Moan

Max McGuinness on John Gray's self-delusion

Philosophy is really, really hard. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century, described reading his predecessor David Hume's work as "a form of torture" though the Scotsman's tomes are mere beach books compared to the Austrian's own intricate reflections on language.

But that's the way it should be.

No one ever complains that nuclear physics or brain surgery is too hard for the layman to understand. The complexity of those subjects is recognised to be necessary for them to be carried out successfully. The same should go for philosophy – but because the subject's only tools are thoughts and words rather than plutonium, many assume that anyone of reasonable intelligence should be able to follow philosophical debates without prior experience. When they discover that philosophical concepts have been so refined as to be unintelligible to those who haven't been keeping up with all the argument's twists and turns, the phrase "ivory towers" is never far off.

There thus exists a permanent opening in the literary market for vacuous, platitudinous books, often written with superficial style, which can be touted as philosophy to the lumpen-intelligentsia, who are desperate to plug a gap in their dinner party prattle.

Bumper Dublin Quiz

Thanks to everyone who took part in our Bumper Christmas Quiz, compiled by Ednalor - hope you all enjoyed it!

We were pleasantly surprised to find that a number of people got all of the answers correct, so well done to them. The winners' names will be printed in the February issue of The Dubliner.

Continue inside to find out all of the correct answers.