This is why prerecording links for a radio show is a patchy business at the best of times. I do wonder, if this is true, why bells didn’t start going off in the head of the jock in question the night before…
I Want To Be Here…
•July 2, 2009 • 3 Comments
Dead. Man. Walking.
•June 29, 2009 • 5 Comments
Go to Twitter #drinkorpink
Darren? drinks anything. Even meths will do… His secret weaknesses though are Moet champagne and Suntory whiskey…
The Night I Met Bill Bailey…
•June 29, 2009 • 9 CommentsIt’s weird.
It’s like looking into a mirror to the future…
Culch has the review, I thought he was brilliant and relentlessly smart and different as always.
http://www.culch.ie/2009/06/28/barnacles-are-the-work-of-vandals-bill-bailey-at-dublins-olympia/
Want to know how I got to meet him?
Not because I work in the meeja here. Nope.
Not because he reads my increasingly patchy blog. Nope.
I posted this on Twitpic at the end of his gig:
https://twitter.com/rickoshea/status/2363545495
Turns out @brogenhayes was in the private bar afterwards, knowing some mutual friends. The bould @realbillbailey takes out his phone, shows the picture of the gig and she says “I know him, he’s in the bar next door” and thus I was ushered in…
The magic of Twitter my friends…
Win A Signed AC/DC Guitar…
•June 25, 2009 • 5 Comments
I’d like to stress I did NOT set this up myself. Their record label did.
But if you’ve ever:
(A) Wanted to see the comedy value of what it would look like if you photoshopped my head onto Angus Young from AC/DC’s body…
or
(B) Wanted to win a free Gibson SG guitar signed by AC/DC or 10 albums from AC/DC’s back catalogue
then this is for you.
One passenger aboard the longest train gets the guitar, 4 others get the consolation prizes…
Chop chop…
EDIT
FAIL!!!!!!
Who forgot the hyperlink….?
Moi.
Here:
http://www.acdcrockandrolltrain.com/rickoshea
You Really Should Be Reading…
•June 24, 2009 • Leave a CommentAnd not just because they’re my projects
The Lives Of Others is continuing to throw up people’s posts they can’t put their name to and it’s now on Twitter too:
http://thelivesofothers.wordpress.com
http://www.twitter.com/livesofothers
And Culch has, amongst other things:
The latest Why So Series – Life On Mars:
http://www.culch.ie/2009/06/23/why-so-series-life-on-mars/
Ronan’s new Broken Spine book column:
http://www.culch.ie/2009/06/23/broken-spine-2/
Conformist tackles current TV:
http://www.culch.ie/2009/06/23/sainsburys/
And Amanda starts her run through the new season US TV with what ABC has to offer:
http://www.culch.ie/2009/06/22/tellybets-which-new-us-tv-shows-will-be-hit-or-miss/
The Ten Doctors…
•June 23, 2009 • 1 Comment*makes a screeching noise not unlike a small child on Christmas morning*
http://www.digitalspy.com/cult/a161598/bbc-denies-doctor-who-reunion-reports.html
The Science Museum…
•June 23, 2009 • 2 CommentsLondon’s Science Museum is one of THE most exciting places I’ve even been.
In one building they have…
Models from Wallace & Gromit:
A mock up of Apollo 11:
Charles Babbage’s difference engine. If it weren’t for this there wouldn’t be what I’m typing this on:
A Ford Model T:
The original model that Watson And Crick used for discovering the structure of DNA:
The *actual* Apollo 10 command module…
Their reception area:
An Enigma decoding machine:
And this. Listening Post. It takes fragments of text from chatrooms all over the internet and displays them, some with music, some without, some themed… It’s hypnotic:
They even have thermal imaging cameras you can play with
Best. Place. Ever.
You Should…
•June 23, 2009 • 3 CommentsI have no idea where to turn my eyes or indeed anything else when I read The Demure Lemur these days. She writes frankly and vividly on every aspect of having a sex life, just don’t go reading her with the boss looking over your shoulder…
Breakfast With Wittertainment
•June 22, 2009 • 4 CommentsSome weekends deserve a brief mention, some a few pictures, some, like the one just gone, really do need a bit of effort put into the telling of them.
All the other things, from sitting in Britney’s living room on Friday right through to leaving London last night at 7.30 will come later when I have time to do it properly, but I wanted to get this out now as I’m so excited about it.
This was a pilgrimage.
See Simon Mayo is someone worth looking up to in my business. He’s been with the BBC since 1981 and spent a long period presenting the Radio 1 breakfast show. He was one of the few to survive Matthew Bannister’s cull of presenters in 1993 and since 2001 has been an award winning speech presenter on BBC Radio 5 Live. In my business he’s someone who has been successful and, more importantly, made the extremely hard transition between primarily music and primarily speech broadcasting.
Ledgebag.
Mark Kermode I’ve watched doing movie stuff on the BBC (Culture Show, Newsnight Review) for as long as I can remember. I genuinely think him the most clued-in person I’ve ever seen on the subject. That I agree with him quite a lot of the time probably has a lot to do with it.
My favourite podcast is their double hander they do on movies every Friday on Simon’s show. Download it. Seriously. They have the kind of easy rapport combined with pithy intelligent content it’s almost impossible to sustain over a long time in radio.
And thus to the weekend. I’d mailed the BBC Culture Show like so many other hopefuls to get into the audience for the first ever filmed movie double hander the two had done – an attempt to transfer the success of the radio thing to the little screen. Friday afternoon at 4.45 I got a call from a lovely lady saying it was all go.
Wow.
Fast forward to Sunday morning and we’re here:
A nondescript bar and screening room on Borough High Street in South East London.
There were around 40 people in the audience, we all filled out forms beforehand to give them an idea of what we were interested in and the like. And to keep us busy while they set up
Eventually they brought us in first.
Us.
Christ.
I was terrified.
I’d been earmarked as a troublemaker…
When the good doctors M and K arrived they got settled in and while they were doing camera tests Dr K asked if anyone in the room had seen Transformers 2. I was the only hand up. “Isn’t it terrible?”, he said? You know where that led…
There were two sessions, rock documentaries and summer blockbusters in our half of the day, with a different 40 people in the afternoon tackling School’s Out and Music Biopics. They readily admitted to us that it was a learning curve as this is a totally new undertaking for the two of them but it didn’t show.
The whole session flew and the natural easiness that you can hear between them on the radio kept going in a bit more of a stop-start way admittedly given the nature of what TV is.
Before we started Simon asked where was the furthest anyone had come from, I thought the two of us would win hands down. The guy above, on the right? He came from VANCOUVER.
*takes off hat*
As for impressions of both of them having been in the same room, Dr K – lethally intelligent, warm and funny with a strong handshake, Dr M – quieter with the same smartness and a really strong command of interviews. Both were lovely and chatty with the crowd and each other and both seemed the sort of people you’d kill to have a beer with.
I asked the good doctors for a picture and they were only too happy to oblige…
The segments will go out over the 4 Culture Shows on July (I think) and I’m in the audience for the first two. In the small possibility they don’t cut my contribution it’ll be in the second one. You won’t be able to miss the inappropriately loud shirt…
You can catch the good doctors here and here and here and here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/programmes/mayo.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/
THE Greatest Thing Ever. Bar None.
•June 19, 2009 • 1 CommentWow.
Just got a phone call from the BBC that I got 2 tx for the audience to see Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo do their first ever TV version of the movie things Mark does on Simon’s Friday BBC 5 radio show.
It’s for this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cultureshow/
SWEET HOLY CRAP!!!!!!!
Back from London on Monday with many tales!
The *ULTIMATE* Treehouse…
•June 19, 2009 • 6 CommentsNo, no, no!!
Buy me this one instead!!
http://www.monkeyreview.co.uk/2009/05/20/its-a-house-made-out-of-an-aeroplane/
Buy Me A House?
•June 19, 2009 • 8 Comments(A) I love this because it’s in Blade Runner
(B) I love this because it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
(C) Buy it for me. I’ll let you crash anytime you’re in LA.
Hottie, Beam Me Up…
•June 18, 2009 • 2 Comments
The Ducks In The Bathroom…
•June 18, 2009 • 4 Comments
The rest of the correspondence follows here:
http://www.27bslash6.com/strata.html
I don’t remember the last time I laughed so hard…
In The Firing Line
•June 17, 2009 • 6 CommentsIf you seek genuine bravery in the modern world then how about this?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html
How I Survived Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen…
•June 17, 2009 • 4 Comments
I’ve calmed down.
I think.
But last night, after 10pm I needed a stiff drink or two. Or three. Movies don’t normally have that effect on me, but Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is no ordinary movie.
It is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most bogglingly poorly sewn together and overblown pieces of cynical plotless nonsense I have ever seen, bar none. Genuinely I think Michael Bay said to them, “Hey, give me $200m and just let me go off and blow stuff up, it’ll be a surefire winner!!” and thus the deal was done.
The story really, genuinely, is such nonsense that I couldn’t be arsed trying to explain it or just how complex and full of made up bullshit it gets in the second half. I don’t remember it all anyway. There’s another energy source that they’ve made up after the one in the last film was destroyed, some evil dude on the far side of Jupiter, a machine to destroy the sun and a lo of incredibly poorly guarded Decepticon stuff allowig them to get back into the game. This is all sprinkled with poorly mashed up references to Gremlins, Power Rangers and BSG. Some of it looked like Indiana Jones, and with Shialebelebelebeouffff in it I started having flashbacks to the last Indiana Jones car crash.
The story has holes so big you could drive Optimus Prime himself through them and, just a thought for future reference Michael Bay, A MOVIE ABOUT TWO SETS OF GIANT ROBOTS BEATING THE CRAP OUT OF EACH OTHER SHOULD NOT HAVE A STORY THAT BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE TO FOLLOW!!!!!
I’m not committing any plot spoilers (there’d have to be a plot) when I tell you that for a lot of the time it’s hard to understand which mound of metal is beating up which other mound of metal, which element of gibberish militaryspeak is being sold to us or just what in the name of sweet baby Jesus is going on. Then, after investing 147 minutes of your life in it, the ending is such a damp squib that my friend sitting next to me zoned out for a moment and then said “Is that it, was that the ending?”.
Yup.
Not even Megan Fox running across the desert in a tight top (to the Baywatch theme tune in my head at least) did anything to redeem this example of everything that’s worst about modern, studio, big budget, summer sequel tentpole moviemaking. After an hour and a half a couple of us had lost the will to live, after TWO AND HALF HOURS we were laughing hysterically and fighting our way through the crowd to get out.
Look, there are a few good points. I quite like the opening sequence in Shanghai when it looked like there might be the chance of some genuine invention in the action sequences (turns out later there isn’t any) and it is quite funny in places, but it’s impossible to believe that this was written by the same two guys who wrote Star Trek.
Yes, the robot fighting stuff is entirely realistic, apparently there are 8 billion moving parts (or something) in the CGI Autobots and Decepticons, but with that, and a lot of the gibberishspeak backplot nonsense that happens in the second half of the film, I could only but be reminded of George Lucas and The Phantom Menace.
Yes, Michael Bay, you’ve rendered each bolt on each fighting warcraft perfectly but you’ve left out everything else…
(Originally HERE)
Anything For Reluctant Rent
•June 16, 2009 • 5 CommentsI’m a shit blogger. Feel free to agree in comments.
I’ve had so much to do here and writing anything of substance seems like an impossible hill of keys to climb. Youtubes? Links? I’m yer man. Anything proper and more than 100 words? Maybe not.
It’s not like I don’t have things to talk about, so in the time I have available to me now I’m going to throw some words together about things I’ve seen recently…
The Last Days Of A Reluctant Tyrant at The Abbey Theatre
Lots of other bloggers have already written about this so I’ll keep this one particularly brief. I was thoroughly taken in by the play, the world it’s set in and the principal performances. The cast are sharp all round, the set design is epic, the lighting really adds to the atmosphere and Marie Mullen’s performance is a force of nature at times.
Yes, it’s long and complex and Russian and agrarian and deals with hard topics that cover lifetimes but it’s thoroughly engrossing and very much worth your time.
Anything For Her at The Lighthouse Cinema
Just brilliant. A story of a man whose wife is imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit and just how far he goes to save their marriage, their family and her sanity. You genuinely believe the detail it’s told in, the reality of what he has to go through and where the story ends up. If it were American I’m absolutely sure it would be a completely different beast but it’s not – an absolute must see.
Rent at The Olympia Theatre
Overall? You really should go. The main cast are nothing short of pros through and through and it’s hard to believe they are what they are – amateurs. The band are great and the energy they put into it is infectious. Now the downside. I went last night and the lighting guys were all over the shop. These things happen but I’m sure it should have totally thrown the performers – it didn’t.
My main beef with Rent is unfortunately the musical itself. It has some very catchy songs but is impossibly cornball in parts and I lost interest a few times. But again I want to emphasise the cast are genuinely brilliant and on a par with professional outfits I’ve seen and the production is carried off and worth seeing because of them alone.
Tomorrow? Transformers 2…
We Has Winners…
•June 16, 2009 • 2 CommentsThe two randomly chosen bloggers who’ll be going to the Irish premiere of Transformers 2 tonight are Restricted View and Pint Of Unspecific.
Well done lads, and you both have mail…
MOMArs Attacks…
•June 15, 2009 • 6 CommentsThe art of Tim Burton is coming to one of my favourite places in the world – MOMA in New York. Time to book another trip, so…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/gallery/2009/jun/12/tim-burton-moma-art-exhibition?picture=348803252
Your 60 Minutes Of Fame…
•June 15, 2009 • Leave a Comment
You know how much I love Antony Gormley…
This is his new project for the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square – people
Irish/Iranian Rail…
•June 15, 2009 • 1 CommentThis is just mega…
via http://cianginty.com/2009/06/mahmoud-ahmadinejad-uses-irish-rail-train-on-his-posters/
THE Dublin Horse Show Event!
•June 15, 2009 • 4 CommentsI wasn’t sure when details of this were being announced even though I’m on the organising committee but it looks like the cat is very much out of the bag
This year there sadly won’t be a Horse Show Ball to coincide with the aforementioned Horse Show at the RDS in August. Recessionary blah blah blah blah. Instead, Brainwave, the charity I’m proudly national patron of, are organising a very cool event on the Friday night of Horse Show Week instead.
Krystle Nightclub have kindly allowed us to book out the whole venue FOR THE NIGHT So from 9 til whenever it’s our party, bands, DJs and a band.
All proceeds from the night are going, as always, to Brainwave and help them fund badly needed projects that run throughout the year. Tickets will be going on sale July 1st.
I’d be eternally grateful if you could link to this post from your blog or RT this as much as possible or if there’s anything you can do to promote this. We’re such a small charity that every euro from every punter on the night will make a huge difference
There’s more information here:
Or the Facebook event is here:
Dead Fun
•June 15, 2009 • 2 Comments
I have to rave this morningabout the Dead Zoo exhibition that’s currently on in Collins Barracks Museum. I used to spend loads of time from childhood up through cheap student years and to bringing my little ones, right to the point where the stairs collapsed a couple of years ago.
I loved the dank, the old, the stuffed, the centuries of careful work on animal cadavers, some of which had bullet holes in them(!), but they were different days. The new exhibition has a small section of items but beautifully displayed in the old riding school building in the original cases. The two main differences are that they’re all beautifully labelled these days and they have some of the long boxed away geological exhibits on show too, including moon rock!!
There’s also a dinosaur!
I never remember there being a dinosaur…
Apologies for the poor quality of the pictures but you’re not allowed take any and thus these were all taken without flash when the security guard was walking the other way…
This is a meteorite that you’re allowed *touch*!!
Proved very popular with my 2 year old…
It’s free in, there’s free parking and the kids loved it.
Go.
