Colin Manning

I was disappointed to learn today that President McAleese signed both the Defamation Bill 2006 and the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill 2009 into law. The president of the Republic has only two non-ceremonial powers. One is to refuse a Taoiseach's request to dissolve the Dail and the other is to refer a potentially unconstitutional law to the Supreme Court. One would think that since both of these laws were so controversial that they would have been worth testing. In fact the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill 2009 is probably exactly the kind of law that the framers of the constitution would have had in mind when they wrote it. The President's role is to protect the people and against any government that might attempt to trample on their basic rights. But President McAleese is not the kind of president that is going to rock the boat or stand up to the government. She never was. The people of Ireland are slightly less safe now and their civil liberties are damaged. Hopefully th...

Recent problems in the finance industries have given many commentators good cause to call for better regulation of the sector. I am a great believer in the power of the market to sort the wheat from the chaff and I generally think that the market should be left to its own devices. Free market economics has gotten a bad rap lately, especially in Ireland. For many years government policy fanned the flames of the property bubble. A variety of tax incentives distorted the property market and cause prices to rise much higher than they might have had the market been left to function normally. Yet somehow the facts have also been distorted and much public discourse seems to revolve around the premise that the free market is to blame for the country’s woes. There are indeed reasonable arguments that tighter regulation of the financial sector might have made things a little better. But of late these have been distilled into the simplistic principle that regulation is good and deregulation is ba...

The exhibition of photographs taken by Spencer Tunick last year was on recently. It was called an exhibition, but they didn't even go to the expense of making prints. The photos were projected from a PC. It is interesting that despite the huge fanfare that accompanied the taking of the photographs, the display of the photos themselves was a non-event. The artist, as far as I know, did not even put in an appearance. This suggests that my suspicions were justified. It was never about creating photographs. It was about hundreds of people getting naked in a field. The photography was a side show. I am a bit disappointed by the pictures that were displayed. I found some of Tunick's other work very interesting. The Blarney pictures are a bit twee, sort of John Hinde postcards with naked people.

The googlemobile drove past my house today at 1442, so I guess I will be on street view in due course. I was expecting it to look more impressive. I had hoped to stage some frightfully clever piece of performance art in the front garden. Perhaps a commentary on the survielance society, but in the end all I had to show was my empty coffee cup on the window sill. The siñorita will probably give out about about that once a week every week until the googlemobile comes around again. The month in the run up to an election seems like an unfortunate time to build up a street view database. Election posters all over the place will obscure some views, will date the pictures, and will send the face blurring algorithm into overdrive.

I like Weeds. The episodes are short and densely packed with plot and wit. It is a dark drama based on a widow who turns to drug dealing to support her suburban lifestyle. There's plenty of interesting commentary and observation of the conformity of suburban life, and the thin veneer that covers the dark goings on behind closed doors. Weeds inhabits the same world as American Beauty. I think though that it misses the mark slightly. The problem with Weeds is that it is not dark enough. The inevitable violence of the drug business has a cartoon quality. So the danger that drives much of the plot and the tension is somewhat unreal. When one character is very seriously injured in a non-drug related incident, his injuries and his pain and suffering are played for laughs. Some interesting characters have become cartoon stereotypes. So when another character is beaten up (off screen) by a drug gang it's hard to take it seriously. Instead of being like the Desperate Housewives meets...

Thee doesn't seem to be a place to report a concern about an application on the iTunes music store. So I am posting my concerns here. I downloaded Lemonade Tycoon last night for my iPhone. I'm very new to the App Store and I was surprised to find so many free applications. Apple vets all the applications before putting them on the store. The vetting process is, by all accounts, very tough and developers complain a lot about it. But I guess it's important to make sure that applications don't contain anything malicious. After all, an iPhone virus sweeps around the globe story would be too juicy for the world's media outlets to resist. I think Apple has missed something though and I don't think the vetting process is strict enough. I downloaded a translation application last night. The free version of this program connects to a server to do the translation online. The paid version has off line translation built in in to the app. The iPhone is clever enough t...

I got an iPhone for my birthday. So far I'm pretty impressed with it. If I was in charge of Apple there are a few things I'd change, but it's pretty clear that a lot of thought has gone in to it. I wouldn't want to write a novel on it. But I could certainly read one.