That’s just mad. Full story with links at Cool Hunting. (via.)

The shortlist for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards has been announced. The Community At Large is nominated in the best group blog category. Thanks to all those who voted for TCAL. Go here to see the full shortlist.

Cool footage from November last year at the Flaming Lips concert in Vicar Street where they handed out laser pointers to everyone in the audience.

via spoilt. Also a Flickr set from the same tour but somewhere else.
Official Flaming Lips site.
The Flaming Lips previously at TCAL.

Live version

Saved version, just in case they spot it and update it (2pm GMT)

Someone got a little distracted by the strawberries and chocolates and didn’t do a spell check! www.google.ie

The Police Tour

…are tonight in the point. How exciting. The official site. The nominees.

Nominations for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards are now open. There’s a post over on the official awards site about it.

The Nominations round for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards is now live. It will run until 11.59pm on Friday the 26th of January 2007. Go to http://awards.ie/nominations to nominate your own blog or another blog for one of the 21 categories.

The submission form is a bit fuxored at the moment, but they are working on updating it to allow multiple submissions at once.

Previously: TCAL won the Best Group Blog award at the 2006 Irish Blog Awards.

Want to know what’s really going to happen between now and the general election? Screw Questions & Answers, The Irish Times and everything else. Twenty Major has the entire election blow by blow, month by month, right up until July 07, posted at his blog. An excerpt from February:

After 34 gangland murders in Dublin in the first 3 days of the month the opposition accuses Minister for Justice Michael McDowell as being ‘as soft as Scarlett Johannson’s dirty pillows’ on crime. The PD leader says it’s not his fault and lays the blame squarely on middle-class recreational drug users saying if it wasn’t for them there’d be nobody to buy it.

Bertie Ahern agrees and threatens to plunge the country into recession unless people from Foxrock and Rathgar stop buying cocaine for their dinner parties. ‘Maybe then you’ll appreciate everything we’ve done for you feckless eejits’, he says.

Countdown to the next election @ twentymajor.blogspot.com.

Something 4 the weekend; online directory of adventure activities around Ireland. I’m not sold on the flash interface, but then who cares as long as you find what you want. sfw.ie.

Over 1000 people gathered in Nancy Pelosi’s district, on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, to spell out the message “IMPEACH!” “America is a great country,” said event organizer Brad Newsham, a local cab driver and author. “But President Bush has betrayed our faith. He mislead us into a disastrous war, and is trampling on our Constitution. He has to go. Now. I hope Nancy Pelosi is listening today.”

Cool photo. Organised by this guy. (via.)

Hi everyone HNY SBFsF!

So I went to funderland today. What a fantastic institution that is. Did you know they have a website: www.funderland.com. Its crap and so is the Euroshow one, the sister company. - In particular look at how when you load every page there some kids scream.

But, these guys are not stupid. They set up a BEBO page, and if you register funderlandrds.bebo.com look:

Put us in your top 4 friends, print off the page, bring it with you to Funderland and you and a friend can get in for free or enter a draw to win a free day out for you and 10 mates.

So now the bebo profile has over 500 friends registered. Funderland is still in Dublin until Sunday 14th so theres plenty of time to get down there and get into fights with scumbags.

I was looking for pictures of some of the rides I was on and look what I find: themeparks.ie.

This site is a gallery of some of the photographs (currently 1055 in total) which I have taken while visiting Amusement Parks and Fairs around the world. I visit a substantial number of new parks every year, and will be adding to these pictures on a regular basis.

Crazy guy has visited themeparks all over the world from the Gold Reef City in South Africa to the Nagashima Spa Land in Japan. The White Cyclone from there looks deadly.

Looking around a bit more, you find out more about this guys passion for rollercoasters at his own website.

Almost all my holiday time for the last few years has been spent at theme parks around the globe. I have (so far) been to well over two hundred hundred different parks in twelve countries, and I’ve been on nearly half of the Roller Coasters on this planet. I have never kept a regular diary, but I do write up trip reports from my park visits which attract a fair bit of attention from like minded people. I’ve also recently set up an album of my better photographs at ThemeParks.ie.

The trip reports are listed here. How amazing is that? I goto funderland and we all end up finding out about an Irish living legend who has been on nearly half of the Roller Coasters on this planet.

Finally: Look at this from brainiac:

Doesnt that mean we are all being duped? They are talking about it on boards.ie.

‘Unethical behaviour’ of Sam Smethi, now ex-editor of TechCrunch UK & Ireland is responsible for the blog going on hold after unfavourably reviewing Le Web 3 conference in Paris, whereupon:

Conference organizer Loic Le Meur, however, took offense at the post and left a regrettable comment, calling Sam an “asshole”.

It’s all in the ‘Crunchnotes‘.

Pointed out by a thrilled Rob. The review of his gleaming new baby, panthius.com shall remain on the front page until the ‘hold’ is lifted. Congrats!

The kick ass Dublin Community Blog says:

Tonight, over the skies of Dublin and Ireland, if the weather allows for it, I suggest that you look up.

But why DCB?

The largest meteor shower of the year, the Geminids meteor shower, will result in shooting stars being visible every 20 - 30 seconds to the naked eye.

Cool. Fingers crossed for no cloud. The Geminids are back in town:

The Geminids are a meteor shower caused by an object named 3200 Phaethon, which is thought to be an extinct comet. The meteors from this shower can be seen in mid-December and usually peak around 12-14 of the month. The Geminid shower is thought to be intensifying every year and recent showers have seen 120-160 meteors per hour under optimal conditions.

Wiffy reports on the Wii launch today and reports that if you haven’t already got one, you may well have to wait until January to get one. We’ll have our review online in a few days.

In 30 to 50 years, the human race as we know it will cease to exist. Computer power continuously doubles over some short period, leading to a quickening pace of technological evolution. This pace reaches massive acceleration beyond the knee of its exponential curve, and at that point the world becomes inconceivable to us as contemporary humans. This point is the Technological Singularity. Eventually machines will outstrip the computational and memory capacity of the human brain. Inevitably these machines will build other machines that outstrip the computational and memory capacity of all human brains. As the human brain is reverse-engineered, the primary mechanism of evolutionary progress will be handed from biological processes to technological processes. The new paradigm is human-machine symbiosis, where varying forms of real and virtual human-machine hybrids collaborate in a sociological technocracy. The ultimate fate of the universe is a merger between humanity, matter, and energy - the saturation of reality with intelligence of human origin. Continuation of the nova is bound only by the limits of the universe. An infinite universe has infinite raw material for intelligence expansion, and hence the entropic trade is unending. If the universe is finite, progress has a limit, and the saturated universe is left to revolve through equivalent self-reconfigurations of matter, energy, and intelligence.

Previously.

I’ve given you the gist of it in the post title, so head on over to Piaras Kelly’s blog for more on what happened.

JoinRed

Hollywood legend Al Pacino will collect a prestigious gong at Dublin’s Trinity College today.

The eight-times Oscar nominated star has been awarded the honorary patronage of the university’s Philosophical Society.

Full story @ Ireland.com.

On Sunday December 10th you can run along the Dublin Port tunnel before it opens. Only mad as biscuits bastards will be running in it once it opens obviously. You can register to run here, and apparently there’s a lorra (did you know Cilla Black (official site, wikipedia) posts here?) runners going for it, so get your skates on. Particularly if you want to cheat. Geared Up Blog, Ireland’s best outdoorsy blog has more.

The official bertie hole website (www.dublinporttunnel.ie) has info on it too. And a port tunnel aside: Have a look at the tolls. Squarely aimed at stopping cars and light vehicles using the tunnel, it costs a whopping €12 to get into bertie’s hole at peak times.

Lordi they aint.

Ireland’s entry for the 52nd Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Helsinki in 2007, will be performed by the Co Sligo based traditional Irish band Dervish.

There will be a public competition for songwriters as in previous years, with the emphasis on writing for the chosen act. The chosen act is not precluded from entering one of their own compositions.

An independent auditor, Michael O’Neill, of PricewaterhouseCoopers, will oversee the process to select a song.

Song competition page at RTE. Dervish official site.