The Tart with the Cart; The Dish with the Fish; The Dolly with the Trolley

[Kilmatead]

Stewards to patrol Molly Malone statue to discourage 'groping'

While every denizen dweller in all the world knows that their county councils are populated by tossers, it's lost on my why said tossers feel the need to continually prove their provenance.

[nikos]

april fool, no?

[Kilmatead]

Dublin City Council Arts Officer Ray Yeates said the practice has caused "worry and discomfort" and he has concerns about the safety of people perching on the plinth to touch the statue.

He added that this is not an April Fool's Day joke.

Yeah, the first thought would be an April Fools thing (which, to be honest, isn't really done here), except Ray Yeates really is part of the Dublin City Council and it would be more in keeping to just attribute it to "an unnamed source" instead of having him explicitly state otherwise. Raidió Teilifís Éireann is the state-broadcaster who've had more than enough troubles this year without publishing fake nonsense.

Also, the City Council really is this stupid. There are other articles where in Wales and Scotland the city councils keep walling off (or raising off the ground) statues of lions and bears to "protect them" - as if the natural oxidisation process (the dark colour) is what must be preserved, and bronzed sculptures can't be reinterpreted through interaction with the environment.

As is usually the case, councils' "advising consultants" are not intelligent people.

[Tuxman]

There are also (bare-breasted) statues of women in a few German cities. When I once showed a visitor around Braunschweig, she was particularly taken with ours - she said it was unusual that the breast area of this statue hadn't already become shiny from all the rubbing.

People are strange.

[Kilmatead]

And now the council has moved on to Plan B where instead of hiring bodyguards for poor Molly, "Flowerbeds are to be installed around the statue in Dublin city centre in the coming weeks."

Dublin City Council has said it will consider moving the Molly Malone statue if the installation of flowerbeds around it does not deter people from touching the bronze sculpture's breasts.

In other news, Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) would like to announce that:

Two ukuleles, a bag of spuds, a Christmas tree and an inflatable Jesus were among the items lost and found on Irish Rail services last year.

Unfortunately no pictures of the Inflatable Jesus were shown in the article, which I found kind of disappointing. I looked it up on Amazon, but the results were somewhat lacklustre.

And who commercialised the miracles? You used to be able to see the Virgin Mary in hot Tamales bought off the street, or in the seeds of a hastily disassembled avocado. Now Jesus is lost in the national railway system.

Is it just me, or has the news lost a certain piquant urgency since the heady days when traveller gangs used to fight each other with crossbows (yeah, that really was a headline 30 years ago), and you could rob a bank on Dublin's main thoroughfare with nothing but a knife?

Now it's all family murders and arguments over Botox administration. <Sigh>

[Kilmatead]

Since we're already talking about silly stuff in the Irish news, I might as well include this complete failure of an attempt to "spin" a very poorly designed stamp, about which:

An Post (the State Post Office) has said AI software was not used to generate the artwork on a stamp which appears to show a television aerial on a building behind the nationalist leader Daniel O'Connell.

Because... umm... it clearly does?

Despite television not being introduced in Ireland until 1949, some 105 years after the image depicted on the stamp, a spokesperson said the stamps were developed by the renowned Irish designer and artist David Rooney who "included some sort of visual signal to link to the very modern global range and impact of O’Connell".

"O’Connell’s methods in terms of communications and galvanising the population were thoroughly modern, hence the inclusion of a sort of artistic anachronism to link those very points."

You can spin that any way you want, but if it looks like AI crap and smells like AI crap, it's a good bet that it is AI crap.

[nikos]

so artists/authors are going where programmers are headed...
how much did the guy charge for the design?