Dublin Opinion

Always find something to chuckle at on Graham Linehan’s ‘blog’ - secondlast time we looked my kids and I were cul par terre (as they might put it) at 5 minutes of footage of some appalling American woman demonstrating a mouth exerciser (I kid youse not). Yesterday I took my weekly peek and I noticed this post What it amounts to is Graham returning to how he came to some of our attention in the first place - brilliantly ripping the unmerciful piss out of celluloid turkeys. Only difference this time is that he’s doing it not in Hot Press but on-line with hundreds or thousands of others on some new-fangled* web thing called ‘Twitter’.

Graham is coordinating his watch with a small army of fellow masochists to watch M Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ on DVD at 21.00 GMT tonight and they’re going to share their contempt/amusement on this Twitter thing. Judging by the poster for the film he’s put up on his blog - it looks like what used to be called a ’straight to video’ where the scriptwriter appears to have drawn inspiration from Spencer Tunick for a horror movie. That’s for those of us yet to be convinced that what Tunick does isn’t already ‘horror’.

All seems fine to me - except that here in the backarse of France - with the video shops stocked with the local barracks in mind - every effin’ night is ‘Bad Film Night’! (apart from when I manage to slip out to the cineclub). I’m also a bit lost in all of Mr. Linehan’s blinding science. He reels off a list of names of sites or applications : ‘Twitter’, ‘Tweetdeck’, ‘Tweetie’, ‘Twitterers’ that seem to me to be nicknames other lags have for sex offenders or something. I expect I must be from the ‘elsewhere’ category of :

those grumpy luddites in the broadsheets and elsewhere, who don’t understand it, can’t be bothered to learn how it works and are frightened at the prospect that people are entertaining themselves in a way that doesn’t involve accepted media forms.

For me, despite one of the funniest Dubliners in a few decades enthusiastic description of it -Twitter still sounds to me to be another version of the internet’s plethora of variations for networking lemmings - oh shit - we’re back with Spencer Tunick again..
Sez the grumpy old luddite talking to the pigeons..

* Graham Linehan says he has been signed up to it for 2 years - so it’s only ‘new-fangled’ to auld gets like me.