Models and Magazines

Those of you hoping for a post about Naomi Campbell's spread in Grazia (Disclaimer: to my knowledge this does not exist, simply the first model and fashion magazine that sprung to mind) are going to be disappointed. The models and magazines are more akin to this:

Sniffing his finger Bond began to question his womanising ways...

You may have seen the television advert for this particular magazine recently and it created debate in our house. We were all taken aback by the size of it, 'nearly two-feet long and weighing twenty pounds', making it a 1:8 scale model as the advert and magazine indicate. It's bloody massive! Then our concerns turned to how long it would take to construct this mammoth model. It's a weekly magazine so our thinking, given it's scale, was years. The reality wasn't far off, 85 issues, so over a year and a half! And then there's the cost, courtesy of a YouTube comment, £6.99/€8.40 x 85 issues = £594.15/€714. €714 for a model, ouch! Now I know for that price you also get a magazine, plus the enjoyment of putting the thing together and who can put a price on that...

What also struck me about this advert was that I hadn't seen ones of it's ilk for quite some time. I remember watching TV as a child and these sorts of ads were everywhere. Now admittedly I was probably watching children's programmes and therefore the adverts were targeted at that audience, but this hardly seems a child's magazine or project, it's no airfix model. I really thought these magazines had died out. I have nothing against people who are into model making, but these just seem like such a scam. Here's why:

1. The cost:

It's hard to get past the cost of these things. €714, you can buy an actual sized fully functioning car for that. Okay it's no Aston Martin but you can sit in and drive it! Sure you can argue that it's only eight quid a week and that isn't an unreasonable amount but, when you figure out the total, it should make people think twice.


2. Potential of an unfinished model:

Whatever arguments you can make for the value, or potential value, of a well put together complete model, there's damn all value in a half finished one. And to my mind this is a very real possibility given that A) over the course of the year and a half the magazine might fold or if sales are poor simply cut it's loses and stop production, B) the person purchasing the magazine might decide not to continue for whatever reason (boredom, financial reasons, etc) and C) the person might miss and issue or it might get lost in the post. Any of these circumstances leaving the owner with an incomplete, valueless piece of junk.

3. "Collectibility"

Marketeers love to pedal these things as 'collectible' and hint at value in the future but, as any idiot that bought toys from the newer trilogy of Star Wars knows, the reality is that when things are marketed as being collectible they inevitably end up not being so due to the numbers produced. Even if there's only a limited number produced, producing things to be collectible doesn't work, if anything I'd imagine it's more likely to have the opposite effect.

However, I must be missing something because clearly there's a market there, these adverts were on national television stations and in premium advertising time slots.

I donno, just makes me worry about the world...

DIY RIP

I saw some news reports today that DIY skills will be extinct by 2048 and I have to say I'm not surprised. Now I know they won't actually be extinct by then and the logic behind this study seems extremely flawed, but I have no problem believing they are in severe decline. I've noticed staggering DIY incompetence amongst my peers, from being unable to change a light bulb to the blank looks I get when I ask if they have a Philips-head screwdriver.

What sort of wizardry could master this screw?

I admit that I probably have a bit more knowledge in this department than most given that my father was a builder for the twenty years before I was born, and to this day is still pursuing minor construction and DIY projects in his spare time. Throughout my childhood, and my brother's the same, we assisted him in whatever project he was undertaking, this usually meant holding a light, passing tools and turning things off and on to test progress. Observation and osmosis, as well as a few 'no the pliers, c'mon you know this' comments, have left me with a reasonable knowledge of all things DIY.

There's only one problem with all of this, though I learned a lot of terms and the process through which projects should be undertaken, I was seldom allowed put these into practice. My father is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to these things, his favourite saying being 'If somethings worth doing it's worth doing right', and so most of the time I could watch but not touch! So when there's a DIY job to be done, I'm relatively confident of how it should be done, but the results aren't always exemplary. Examples of my handiwork are dotted around the country, be it a poorly hung cabinet door, wires showing on a plug or paint spots on the floor.

Phillip soon regretted taking his father's advice of using his head when it came to DIY too literally.

Yet, though my work is often unpolished in it's finish, I do usually get the job done and it's tremendously satisfying. I really do think this decline is a sad state of affairs, I shudder at the thought of someone calling an electrician to change a light bulb! There really should be a compulsary course in schools at least for one year that teaches the basics of DIY. Transition year is an ideal opportunity for such a course, at the end of which every student should at the very least be able to change a fuse/wire a plug, change a light bulb and tell the difference between flat head and Phillips-head screws. Parents too have a responsiblity in all of this, get out there with your children and do something practical, build a tree house with them for instance.

There are of course people laughing all the way to the bank with this, the plumber getting the cost of a call out to change a washer on a tap or the electrician making a mint changing fuses on plugs. So I urge everyone to at least give it a go, especially with the internet, there's so many step-by-step instructions and video demonstrations (something I'll be discussing in another post) that there really is no excuses.

So go on, stop the decline and Do It Yourself!

Nous Sommes Toutes, Les Enfants Des Immigrés!

The year was 2002 and I was on a week-long trip to Bourg-en-Bresse in eastern France, under the auspices of a 'Young Caretakers of the Environment' conference. Do I care about the environment? Yes, as a matter of fact, I try to do my bit. I recycle, turn off lights when I'm not in rooms and appliances when they're not being used (televisions on standby are a pet-peeve of mine). But truth be told, on this occasion my motivations weren't the sort that would bring a ringing endorsement from Al Gore. A friend and I signed up primarily for a week off school and so that we could, we hoped, meet some lovely French girls. As it turned out the only female that paid us any attention on the trip was the leather-skinned teacher of another set of exchange students from Greece, who took a particular shine to my friend!

However, my abiding memory of the trip is neither our environmental campaigning and utterly humiliating attempts to chat-up French girls, nor is it the fact that I spent the first day with my host family in bed with some form of sinusitis (not, and I'll never live this down, sun stroke as I was led to believe, but that's a post for another day). It is in fact the events which gave this post it's title.

The title is part of a chant that reverberated through the halls of the school we were in, and soon after the streets of Bourg itself. The chant in it's entirety goes like this: 'Premiére. Deuxième. Troisième génération. Nous sommes toute, les enfants des immigrés!' For those of you not versed in French it translates as 'First. Second. Third generation. We are all the children of immigrants!' The reason that the students were taking to the streets, and we of course were only too glad to join them, was that Jean Marie Le Pen, the controversial right-wing politician, had polled second in the first round of voting for the French presidential election.

I remember being blown away at the time by how passionate and relatively organised the protesters were. Up to that time my only other experience of a protest had come the previous year, during the teaching strike in Ireland, when we had half-heartedly staged a walk-out from class. And if memory serves correctly, as we were only Junior Certs at that time, we loved the protests as they more often then not meant days lounging around outside!

The reason this experience came to mind is the ongoing protests that we've had in Ireland over the last number of months. It's not that these protests were insignificant, but they do tend to pale in comparison to those in other countries. Take the recent student protests for example, the issues both here and in the United Kingdom were relatively similar, but as the links illustrate the protests certainly were not. I'm not suggesting that there has to be violence to make a protest significant, but there is an undeniable difference between the two, and it does seem as though Irish society lacks that aggressive edge.

The country as a whole has never been more enraged at politicians, at bankers, at developers and at the regulators, it's positively palpable. Yet, there's no riots in the streets, no burning of cars, etc. Sure there are protests, but these are in the main respectful and peaceful. Don't get me wrong I'm not advocating violent protest, but leaving aside a few minor incidents, I'm surprised by it's absence.

One thing I did notice during the Irish student protests was the slogan on the t-shirts they wore 'Eductaion not Emigration'. That got me thinking again about the French demonstrations and the fact that the chant pointed out that we're all the children of immigrants. This made me think of all the new places Irish people would now be settling and possibly staying to raise families, for let's not forget every immigrant is also an emigrant, and it's these emigrants that will form whole new immigrant populations all over the globe. And it was all this thinking that reminded me of a cartoon I drew a while back:

"They'll be back!"

                 Government plans to reverse emigration are roundly criticised.

Martin Turner I ain't, I appreciate that, but this is my own protest at the fact that so many of my friends have already left in search of work and more of my generation will undoubtedly follow, possibly including myself. But for now I dedicate my cartoon to all those who've left our shores in search of better opportunities.

No doubt if and when you do eventually come home, there'll be plenty on kettles on the boil.

Love in the time of Facebook

Facebook has been in the news a lot lately with it's new valuation, and throughout last year with the enjoyable 'The Social Network' movie and allusions to the fact that with over 500 million members, if it were a country, it would have the third largest population on the planet. Now rather than talk about the phenomenon that is Facebook, something that has been covered elsewhere by far more able writers than myself, this post is about the impact the social networking site has had, and will have, on relationships. This is also something that has no doubt been covered by a number of writers, but recently two things happened that sparked my interest in the topic.

Firstly, I was told of a relationship that had it's roots on the site itself. In a nutshell, two mutual friends of the owner of the profile in question commented on the same status update of this user. These two people had never met before in person, yet whatever was said in those comments, and unfortunately I'm not privy to the specifics of that information, lead the two to exchange emails, meet in person and eventually start dating.

Now maybe I'm out of touch and you're thinking to yourself, big deal, but at the time this seemed staggering to me and to a certain extent still does. I mean, I'm not shocked at people meeting prospective partners online, be it through chat room, dating site or whatever, but this was the first Facebook romance I had heard of. However, the more I thought about it the less staggering it began to seem and in a lot of ways made perfect sense. There are undeniably routes through which people meet their partners and 'mutual friend' is definitely one of the most common of these. Certainly speaking from personal experience I've found this to be the case both with myself and friends. So why do you have to meet this person at the mutual friend's party or on a night out? Seemingly you don't. And surely that can only be a good thing, I'm all for anything that brings people together.

However, great and all as it is having another avenue through which to meet a potential partner, Facebook undoubtedly has created more pitfalls both for those in relationships and, worse still, those ending them. It's the latter that brings me on to my second point.

I heard one of the most sweet but also most heart-wrenching things in this regard recently. The couple in question decided to spend some time apart, and while both acknowledged that this was something that needed to happen, neither wanted the relationship to end. Both had profile pictures with the other person in them, and seeing as they were going to be at the very least taking a break, it would be necessary to change their profiles. Yet neither wanted to be the first to do this, as to do so was a confirmation of what was happening and also potentially sending the wrong message to the other party that this was an easy thing for them to do, and so for a number of days both kept the images up.

I don't think anyone can fully appreciate the impact Facebook has had heretofore and will have on relationships henceforth. The above is only one aspect of this, there's also obvious aspects, such as changing the 'relationship status' if this has been set (something I understand can't be done entirely discreetly, it gets published on your page regardless, even if you do delete it immediately after) and deleting photos you've uploaded of each other. Yet, there are slightly less obvious aspects such as removing tags of yourself in friends' photos of the two of you together to consider and the culling of friends that were 'more their friends' than yours.

These things of course existed before Facebook, albeit in slightly different guises, but it has made it more difficult and above all more public. And it's this public element which is the real negative in all of this to my mind. Facebook can create a situation whereby a friend, be they bosom buddy or casual acquantice, can know or at the very least have an inclining that a spilt has occured even before you've had a chance to, in your own time, discuss it with them.

One of Facebook's missions was to put the aspects of (initially college) social life and interaction online. It has achieved this to a staggering extent and what's more impressive (or depressive) is that it's created whole new ones. And make no mistake, they're here to stay. Will it be in the form of Facebook? Possibly not, maybe it will be replaced by something else and become, as some like to say, next years MySpace! But one thing is for sure, people have got a taste for online social networks and I can't see that abating anytime soon, changing sure, but they'll be here for a long time to come.

Social networks are here to stay and so are the problems, and to be fair opportunities, that they present. How long before the self-help book 'Relationships and Facebook: When Someone You Love Doesn't Want to Poke You Anymore' is on the shelves, if indeed it's not already.

So unless you're one of the ever shrinking few in the online world that has avoided the grasp of Facebook, this is probably something you'll come face-to-face with in the future (pun intended btw).

Relationships can be challenging at the best of times, but thanks to Facebook, things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Celestial events - Who bloody cares?

Okay well probably quite a few people, astronomers, star-gazers, this guy...

In old age the Monopoly man turned to world domination.

Honestly though I mean sure they can be fun to look at and we can all 'oo' and 'ah' when it goes dark during the day from a solar eclipse or enjoy the shooting stars of a meteor shower, but haven’t we evolved beyond making a big deal of these things. Don’t get me wrong I’m not ragging on space altogether, I’m all for space exploration and will be glued to Sky News’ second by second coverage when an alien mothership does finally visit our planet. Banner news flying across the bottom of the screen ‘Aliens said to favour retention of the euro zone’. And in time I might break all my personal rules and watch the episode of Jeremy Kyle with the tagline ‘It's rocket entered my atmosphere, now it won’t pay the alimony’.

I just don’t understand the hype over a few meteors or some daytime darkness. The reason these events were so engaging to ancient civilisations and why they built the likes of Newgrange, was because they were unexplained phenomenon and often linked to manifestations of divine activity. Nowadays we fully understand these events or at least an explanation is readily available should we want one. Yet, they continue to be newsworthy, with articles telling us that we won’t see this again for years or in our lifetime. So what? At best there's some good photos in it (see image 4 in previous link).

If the planets aligned in such a way as to cause a lunar eclipse that made it look like the some guy giving the finger, a giant fuck you to Earth, that might be worth tearing myself away from The Wire (I know, I know, I’m late at getting to it and yes it’s amazing)  to have a gander.

Tired of mooning the Earth Luna adopted a new tactic.

  
Otherwise, I can’t really imagine myself in forty years time regaling the younger generation with stories of how I saw a once in a lifetime meteor shower. Which, in all likelihood, if I’m being honest with them I probably didn’t see much during because it was a cloudy night and I can't be certain whether what I did see was a shooting star or just the bottle of wine I had waiting for it to start, playing tricks with my eyes

So by all means keep watching the skies, but I'll be watching the stars.

To-do list, check. Timetable, check. Implementation...

I’ve done it for as long as I can remember. There are tasks to be done, so I make a list of said tasks and tick them off as they’re completed. Problem is I think I can count on one hand how many times I’ve successfully ticked off all the items on a to-do list. Now that’s not to say that all of the items on the list aren’t completed, but chances are that a good proportion of them migrate onto a more up-to-date list.

It’s the same with timetables. I love to make timetables. Especially when I was in education, although admittedly by university I had ditched the feminine/OCD highlighting and colour coordination that took up so much time during my school days. Other than actual class timetables I don’t know that I’ve ever followed any of my creations for more than a week. And yet I continue in the practice even though it seems destined to failure. Here is my most recent attempt at the art...

I was actually quite proud of this particular timetable at the time. It’s realistic (a 10am start {I’m unemployed and not a ‘morning person’}, time to check email at the start, events broken up into manageable time segments), it’s substantial enough (standard 8 hour day with the activity most likely to run-on into ‘overtime’ at the end) and if I stuck to it I knew I’d feel productive. But as always in reality it ended up more like this...

 
I get annoyed with myself when I can’t stick to a timetable and I do question whether sometimes they’re counterproductive. And then it hits me, maybe the timetable needs a little tweaking, but the fault doesn’t lay there. If I can’t stick to an infinitely reasonable and flexible timetable of my own creation, there’s really only one place to lay the blame… subprime mortgage holders.

Okay, so it’s me, I’m the problem. Is admitting you are the problem the same as admitting you have a problem? I’m not sure, but I’m counting it as the first step. What’s the next step? Well that’s easy right.

 
Happy New Year.