Interesting little book review on the Irish Times website about the role of Cromwell in the disappearance of wolves in Ireland. Kieran Hickey’s book (possibly entitled The Natural and Cultural History of Wolves in Ireland—the article makes no reference) seems to confirm the role of Cromwell’s appearance in Ireland with the hunting and eventual extinction of the Irish wolf. I’m not aware of any attempts to reintroduce wolves to Ireland, and as this post on the Blather points out, there were fears that no one had learned from history, when policies in recent years called to cull badger numbers in the hopes of combating bovine tuberculosis.
Ireland may have been the land that saved western civilization, ((À la Thomas Cahill, How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe.)) and certainly enjoyed a period of setting priests alongside agricultural products as the major export, but that’s not to say that nothing good came out of the experience. Their perhaps unique relationship with the Catholic church has put Irish comedians in a wonderful position, and combined with a deep love/hate relationship with the English, provides a rich source of material for us all to enjoy. Republicans, Catholics, Patriots, Atheists: here are some of my favourites of Ireland’s sons.
Andrew W. K. shows us the dangers of partying too hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6H6n_onZI0
No smoking. And soon, no drinking and no talking!
You have to give it to the man who wrote this. I still remember laughing at Eddie Izzard’s little piece on the smoking ban in California. Smoking bans have since then proliferated to such a state, that the Pacific island of Niue is intending to ban smoking altogether. And fair play to them. One wonders how long down the line before such a blanket ban appears in some larger nations. Smoking is essentially acceptable, despite the decades spent fighting it, and an outright ban would appear to be the only logical conclusion. Whilst opinions based on fact can cause uproarious controversy in the world of drugs, alcohol and tobacco remain relatively immune. But every step towards removing tobacco from the public light is a step towards the ban which will put tobacco in with cannabis and LSD.
Perhaps then we will see an end to these rediculous signs, and churches can go back to focusing on telling people to stop begrudging their neighbour’s donkey.
[Photo by Simon White]
The Fold
Many of us are probably familiar with the idea advanced in the early days of the Internet, that most users don’t know how to scroll through a website. Today that seems pretty unbelievable. The vast majority of websites, and indeed many of the most regularly visited, not only favour scrolling but to a large extent rely on it for navigation. So have the rules of the so-called ‘fold’ changed since the Internet’s inception? And what role should it play in decisions made regarding a website’s design today?
Viewing the web can be a very personal experience. Depending on your very own choice of browser, monitor or resolution, the web can look a very different place. If you’ve ever for some reason been forced to view one of your regularly visited websites on a much lower resolution monitor, for example, you’ll know what I mean. What once appeared spacious and easy to read suddenly seems squashed and cluttered. The cute little thumbnail images now take up good chunks of room and force you to scroll around them to get at the text. And should that site employ a fixed-width design that is wider than the current resolution, even more space goes to waste with the appearance of a side scrollbar.