I KNOW that as a citizen of this great nation, I should have been doing my patriotic duty these past weeks and reading up on the referenda.
Unfortunately, the particular lobe of the brain responsible for concentrating has now been eroded to around the size of a pea after all the smartphone use, social media distraction and something, something, sorry I lost my train of thought.
I know it’s not good enough. I know that our democracy is precious and that, unless we mind it, we’ll truly miss it when it is gone, a bit like RTÉ or Animal Bars.
But every time I switched on the radio over the last few weeks I was bored to the verge of tears by whoever was on, getting into all sorts of fantastical What-ifs about what’ll happen depending on how we voted this weekend.
Some of the What Ifs had my mind-boggling… more than usual. Cats may inherit whole swathes of the countryside if their relationship with their owners is deemed ‘durable’ in the eyes of the law.
Women could be barred from housework in perpetuity by some radical feminist Dáil and men could be forced into decades of domestic labour beyond their abilities.
Grandparents could be legally forced into babysitting for years and have no Constitutional right to refuse to watch Peppa Pig on repeat.
Or something like that. Ah well, only time will tell … or the Supreme Court, perhaps!
Ben Affleck’s a Rising star TO give you an example of the sort of story that has been side-tracking me from my research duties, did you read about Ben Affleck and the Rebel Runners? Yes, full-time Hollywood star and part-time internet meme Ben Affleck has been pictured in a pair of Nikes commemorating the Easter Rising.
Affleck usually appears in my timeline as a versatile meme, smoking a cigarette while looking completely bewildered, but this time he was papped (yep, it’s a verb!) in a pair of Nike SB Dunk ‘Éire’ edition runners, which were originally released on the 90th anniversary of 1916 by Nike.
This was news to me. I mean, how did I miss that memo back in 2006? Nike’s original pitch for the shoes read ‘On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a group of Irish nationalists seized key locations in Dublin from the British Army and proclaimed an Irish Republic.
Ninety years later, Nike released this Dunk Low Pro SB ‘Eire’ to celebrate the historic insurrection.’ What more comfortable way to escape up the hills of West Cork and Kerry from the Black & Tans, I ask you? What more sturdy option for your arches, as the arches of the GPO collapse around your incredibly well-supported Fenian feet?
According to Ireland’s paper of record – eh, Joe.ie – the shoes are a mix of green, white and orange, with an orange Irish harp embroidered on the heel.
They also feature an allsuede upper, rather than the usual leather finish.
Which is exactly what Padraig Pearse would have wanted. For those of you bolting straight to the local shoe shop to bag yourself a pair of the revolutionary rubber dollies, I’m afraid they are now a collector’s edition and almost impossible to get your hands on.
They go for between €600 and €2,000 on second-hand seller’s sites, which is robbery on the scale of the six counties.
Still, they could be quite a gift for the radical moustachioed hipster republican in your life, I would have thought, especially with Paddy’s Day approaching.
Willy Wonky Experience IF all that wasn’t random enough, it seems you have to be very careful about what family events you sign up for these days.
Police in Glasgow were called to an event called ‘Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience’ after families turned up to an empty warehouse billed as ‘the place where chocolate dreams become reality’.
What happened instead was the stuff of nightmares for the poor children and their parents.
The promotional materials for the show featured vivid images of sweets and fantasy worlds but it turns out they were all created in AI, as was the script for the weird performance, which ended up terrifying the children as their parents forked out £35 a ticket for the pleasure.
There were no chocolate fountains or fantasy world sets. Instead, the kids were offered a half-cup of lemonade and a small ration of jelly beans.
The place was hilariously empty with some poor actors forced to perform from an AI script that introduced a character called ‘The Unknown’ who is absent from the traditional Willy Wonka plotline, and who purportedly ‘lived in the walls’. Oh, the horror.
