Topics

Can anyone tell me the artist and the name of the background song on this clip?
I'm convinced it is Gary Numan, but the brother doesn't agree.

Thanks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bhObRiiaU&NR=1

'Accident-prone' man in more than 12 previous personal injury cases

AN "ACCIDENT-prone" man who has sued Eircom after allegedly suffering injuries as a result of tripping over a manhole cover had brought more than a dozen previous personal injuries actions, the High Court was told yesterday.

Addiction counsellor and taxi driver Gerard McWilliams (52), Bawnlea Close, Tallaght, Dublin, told the court yesterday that, in the 1990s alone, he was involved in 10 accidents.

He also recalled proceedings for alleged food poisoning, for injuries suffered while out jogging and over falling in a neighbour's driveway but could not remember details of all the proceedings he was allegedly involved in.

Mr McWilliams told Mr Justice Vivian Lavan that another judge once described him as being either "the luckiest or the unluckiest man" due to being involved in accidents which, Mr McWilliams said, were not his fault.

Counsel for Mr McWilliams described his client as "accident-prone".

In his action against Eircom, Mr McWilliams claims that, around midnight on March 28th, 2003, he twisted his ankle on the edge of a PT steel cover located beside the kerb outside his home.

He claims the company was negligent and in breach of its duty of care towards him in the maintenance, repair, upkeep and supervision of the manhole cover and the area around it. The claims are denied. Yesterday, Mr McWilliams said the accident occurred when he was removing plants from the boot of his car. He said he was in immediate pain, and was eventually taken to hospital in Tallaght.

He was released from hospital and his ankle was put in a strap but he suffered ongoing pain and discomfort, he said. Following reviews from an orthopedic surgeon, he was fitted with a plaster cast. His ankle was "still not right" and he suffers from uncomfortable pain, he said.

Because of the nature of his work as an addiction counsellor, Mr McWilliams said he had tried not to take strong pain killers and had adopted a more holistic approach to his condition.

Under cross examination from Barney Quirke, for Eircom, Mr McWilliams denied the injuries sustained were his fault. While he knew the cover was there, it was "camouflaged", he said. "I don't go looking for holes," he said.

When Mr Quirke asked Mr McWilliams if he had been involved in 13-14 previous personal injuries actions, Mr McWilliams said he may have been involved in 10 or 11 cases arising out of accidents that "were not my fault".

Mr McWilliams said it was "probable" he brought proceedings and received compensation arising out of traffic accidents in 1990, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001. The case continues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrcqLOCBh3w&feature=player_embedded

From the publishers...

The Culchies Guide to Dublin captures all of the facts about the Big Smoke that we all know but are too politically correct to talk about – that Crumlin is a kip for example, or that Dubs know nothing about their own city. So we've produced The Most Honest Map of Dublin Ever showing all of Dublin's suburbs referenced with film certs so you know whether you should wear a dress suit or flak jacket when visiting.

We've also included a chapter on Things That Dubs Should Know But Don't – why they're called Jackeens and so on. But the Culchies Guide also does what it says on the tin – it's a genuine travel guide with a twist. You'll never look at the Book of Kells or the GPO in the same light again. All of this and more is covered in Jim Connolly's hilarious, factual and bleedin' deadly Culchies Guide to Dublin.

A legend of a hurler and a legend of a man!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6k2vQqZR40&

Hurling:

Munster SHC Quarter-final
Tipperary v Cork

Munster SHC Semi-finals
Clare v Waterford
Limerick v Cork/Tipperary

Leinster SHC Preliminary Round
Carlow v Laois

Leinster SHC Quarter-finals
Dublin v Carlow/Laois
Wexford v Galway
Antrim v Offaly

Leinster SHC Semi-finals
Dublin/Carlow/Laois v Kilkenny
Wexford/Galway v Antrim/Offaly

The draws are a bit of a disappointment,
In Munster the quarter final is the Munster final. In Leinster, we might as well present Kilkenny with the Cup now and not bother.
The Munster draw should have be seeded to have Clare and Limerick play the Quarter final.

Cusack reveals Cork's sliotar 'gamesmanship'

ALL-IRELAND winning goalkeeper Donal Óg Cusack has revealed the 'gamesmanship' which Cork employed in a 2005 Munster SHC final with Tipperary.

In his book Come what May (which is published tomorrow), the former All Star has lifted the lid on their sliotar strategy used for penalty situations.

He said: "There was already a bit of history between Cork and Tipp with regard to sliotars. They won a penalty against us. Eoin Kelly stepped up. We had a plan. Once we had been awarded a penalty or we had given away a penalty, we were to create a bit of commotion, a diversion through which to get the right ball in play.

"If we won a penalty we'd be getting rid of the O'Neill's ball and getting one of our favoured Cummins All Star balls into use. If we conceded a penalty I'd get rid of the match ball in use at the time and the dud ball would be rolled in. Never handed over. Rolled in, so that it would just appear to be lying on the grass waiting to be picked up. There was nothing obvious. It would just appear there. On the day, Kelly picked up the dud ball. It had been a job of work for one of our men to soften it up and still have it look like a newish O'Neill's ball.

"It gave me great confidence to see him pick it up. To reassure opposing players, what we used to do was write the opposing county name in marker on the ball. Tipp!

"Eoin Kelly picked up the ball, looked at it and placed it for the penalty. I said to the boys, 'we have a chance here now with this'. He took the penalty with it and we saved it. (Kieran Murphy got a point with the same ball seconds later when it broke down field, so if anybody every argued with us we could say that Kieran Murphy put the same ball over from 50 yards!)"

Cork won the game (1-21 to 1-16) and went onto win the All-Ireland final.

The Cloyne man admitted it wasn't an isolated incident. "You'd get a great kick out of something like that afterwards. Before a game it would be a little something up your sleeve. Pulling it off in the heat of battle gave great satisfaction. And we'd have a bit of crack with it. Sully (Diarmuid O'Sullivan) nearly got raped by Limerick fellas in 2006, running the length of the field with an All Star sliotar in his shorts for us to take a penalty with."

But he is adamant that Cork were doing nothing wrong.

He reasoned: "There was room for all this carry on with sliotars because the GAA left room for it.

"We'd always be for pushing the edge with stuff like that where the GAA leaves the door open."

I never realised DJ had become a comedian! 

--

Carey says Walsh is victim of rivals' cynical tactics

Thursday August 27 2009

KILKENNY legend DJ Carey has hit back at the critics of Cats' wing-back Tommy Walsh, branding their assessment of the Tullaroan star as "unjustified" and "very unfair".

Carey claimed that Walsh is "booked before every game" and is the victim of cynical tactics because of his reputation. He also went on to suggest that a camera could be focused on the Kilkenny wing-back for the entire All-Ireland final to prove once and for all that he is "not a dirty player".

"He is booked before every game," Carey said. "Every game I specifically look at Tommy Walsh to see what is happening and invariably from the throw-in, and even before the throw-in, (teams are) tearing into him.

"I think if a camera was put on Tommy Walsh during a game, you would see how dirty he is. And you know what, if he is (dirty) he should be sent off.

unjustified

"I think it is totally unjustified. I think Brian (Cody) doesn't come out and say that because he is not that type of guy. But I would be very angry.

"I would also be angry if a Kilkenny guy was dirty. I would not like to see it and I don't condone it but also I don't like to see a guy being hammered, whether it is Tommy Walsh of Kilkenny or it is some other guy from around the country. It is unjustified and it should not be happening."

Last year, Walsh was criticised for tossing his hurl across Diarmuid Lyng's legs in the Leinster final and he was the centre of attention again after this year's provincial semi-final win over Galway, when he seemed fortunate to escape further censure despite picking up a yellow card early in the game.

However, after winning six consecutive All Star awards in four different lines as part of an all-conquering Kilkenny side, Carey believes it is a case of success breeding contempt.

"Maybe it is because Kilkenny are so successful and Ger Loughnane came out with that statement about Kilkenny guys living on the edge a number of years ago -- now the cameras are honing in on that.

"But, you know what, I have broken all my fingers and a lot of them were justified because my hand was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am not going to turn around and say that there was a dirty tackle if my hand was there for the ball. It is my job to protect that.

"I think what teams are looking at, whether it is individuals or whether it is management, or whoever it is, they are looking at this and they are saying, 'rattle Tommy, get stuck into him and you might get him sent off'. I think it is a game-plan to actually get him sent off which is something that should not be happening in the game.

"If he deserves to be sent off, absolutely, send him off and I would have no argument with that. But this thing of off-the-ball stuff has to be cut out of our game because there is too much of it happening in both hurling and football."

Carey believes the Tipperary front six represent the most potent attack Kilkenny have faced all summer and urged Brian Cody to start Noel Hickey at full-back despite his ongoing injury problems and let JJ Delaney out to his 'best position' of wing-back

"If I was Brian I would be putting Noel Hickey in, but whether he will or not I don't know because Brian is pretty strong on guys being fully fit.

"The last time Brian didn't play guys that were fully fit was the 2001 All-Ireland semi-final against Galway (which Galway won 2-15 to 1-13) and I think he swore to himself that day unless guys can prove they are 100pc fit they won't be going on the field.

"Kilkenny are coming up against a threat that they haven't come up against in the last number of years and that's a goal-scoring team.

"I think potentially Tipperary have goals in them, which Kilkenny have not really come up against bar Galway. But I think Galway -- if you take Joe Canning out of the set-up -- struggled, and struggled all year."

http://www.independent.ie/sport/hurling/carey-says-walsh-is-victim-of-rivals-cynical-tactics-1870750.html

["I'll tell you a funny story. Around 1995, I was staying with some friends in Connemara and they told me to visit Doolin, in Co Clare. So my girlfriend at the time and I were driving into Doolin and we passed all these people screaming and roaring on the side of the road."It turned out it was the day of the hurling championship, and Doolin hadn't won it in 80 years. So we got into the town and the place was apoplectic. They were going nuts. We pub-crawled for the night. It was great."]

On the QT

By Declan Cashin

Friday August 14 2009

It's hard to get a word in edgeways when chatting to Quentin Tarantino. That man can talk, especially when it's on his favourite topic: cinema. Within moments of our meeting in Claridges in London, he is waxing lyrical about his two favourite movies of the past year.

"I loved Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, and that Seth Rogen movie Observe and Report," he says, settling into his chair in the suite. "Everyone was saying, 'This is Seth Rogen's Punch Drunk Love'. I was like, 'Punch Drunk Love my ass! This is Seth Rogen's Taxi Driver'!"

As he speaks, the publicist is miming behind his back, indicating that I have just 15 minutes in total for the interview. It seems a tad rude, but the only option is to cut across Tarantino whenever he seems to be wandering off the beaten track. Because, even though he's now older (aged 46, can you believe?) and looking a bit pudgier than before, he still has the same extraordinary energy and enthusiasm as the young man who giddily accepted the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction back at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival.

Now, after a shaky few years, Tarantino is back on blistering form with his latest flick, Inglourious Basterds, which opens here next week.

Basterds is not an easy movie to describe. It's a violent, often uproariously funny World War II revenge action-thriller-cum-fantastical-alternative-history-lesson that is also, true to form, an homage to the power and influence of movies and movie makers. The film's deliberately misspelt title is itself a quirky wink to Enzo Castellari's 1978 Italian war movie Inglorious b**tards (and wouldn't you know it: Castellari has a cameo in Tarantino's movie).

A mustachioed Brad Pitt (playing the leader of a troop of Jewish-American Nazi-hunting vigilantes known as 'The Basterds') heads an extraordinary cast that includes German-born, Killarney-raised Michael Fassbender, Hostel director Eli Roth, Teutonic totty Diane Kruger, and, best of all, Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who is at once charming and chilling as the 'Jew Hunter' Nazi colonel Hans Landa.

Basterds has been on Tarantino's mind for some time: the idea first came to him in the late 90s, but it never seemed to fully come together. Last July, he finally finished the script, and then decided he wanted to rush Basterds into production and get it made in less than eight months so it could premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival (where Waltz won the Best Actor prize).

Tarantino made the deadline, but it meant rewriting his own rulebook about how he approaches film-making. "It wasn't the quickest I ever shot a movie: Reservoir Dogs was five weeks and Pulp Fiction was 10 weeks," he explains. "But as far as the canvas and the scale were concerned, this was the most intense.

"Because the story had been in my head for such a long time, the normal instinct would be to be precious about it, to really take my time and stretch it out. But I knew I didn't want to go that route with it. I'd spent time on the script and it was ready. I wanted that energy to get it done quickly, and I wanted that energy to find its way on to the screen."

It's also, at times, a very gory movie, which is sure to resurrect the old Tarantino screen violence debate that has dogged his work from the get-go. His response? Let them say what they will. "I just don't have to engage with that any more," he states, firmly but politely. "I've been around for 17 years now. I don't need to defend myself. I've said whatever I'm going to say.

"You know, I never really set out to shock. Some things I've done might be shocking, but they've been dictated by the movie or the characters. At the same time, I'm a lot less shockable than other people, so I had no idea that people would respond, say, to the Mr Blond ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs until they did. I didn't think that was anything!"

Basterds is an important movie for Tarantino, for it seems to have put his career back on track after Death Proof, his critically and commercially panned half of the 2007 Grindhouse flop. After a decade of near-uninterrupted praise and hits, starting with his early 90s features through to Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill double whammy, not to mention some sterling acting and directing on TV shows including Alias, ER and CSI, Tarantino had his first taste of failure.

The memory of that experience is clearly still with him. Did he feel a lot of pressure to deliver the goods this time round? He thinks about his answer for a long time. "It's not so much I feel pressure about it. But if Grindhouse had been a big hit, I probably wouldn't be sitting here with a finished movie that's this much of a big deal quite this soon.

"I probably would have taken a bit more time and enjoyed life a little bit. That was my first real failure so there was this element of jumping back up on the horse right away and righting the wrong.

"There will always be critics or movie goers who just don't get me. I'm making movies for myself. I'm not trying to second-guess a faceless mass out there. I'm making movies I want to see, and I'm just betting that there are other people like me out there."

There have been other film-makers out there who are "like" Tarantino: he has inspired an entire subgenre of film-making that has been labelled 'Tarantino-esque'. So, has that development been flattering or irritating?

"No, it's very flattering," he says with a smile. "One of my favourite directors is Sergio Leone, and he created a new kind of western that then spawned a genre of over 300 movies. Some are good, some bad, and some are great. My type of crime movie did inspire a new type of crime movie -- okay, not as many as Leone -- but it's a big honour, and there are some I like and some I don't like."

Tarantino has been called "the ultimate film cannibal": the guy who obsessively watched and discussed movies all day while working in Video Archives in California, who now flits from one genre and style to another, constantly referencing and copying from his favourite movies and movie-makers. So what does he have planned next?

"I have a few ideas but I have no real clue until this movie is put behind me," he replies. "One of the big rules in cinema apparently is to always have your next movie set up before your new movie comes out. I don't believe in that at all. If that's the way professional movie-makers go, then I'm proud to be a rank amateur."

With that, the publicist is back up, signalling that our allotted time is up. As he poses for a picture, and signs my copy of the Pulp Fiction screenplay (addressing it to 'Delecn'), I ask him about a rumour that he had visited the Galway Film Fleadh last month on the QT with his new pal Michael Fassbender.

"No man, just a rumour," he replies. "I've actually driven around Ireland a few times, and tried to deal with roundabouts and trying to stay on the right side of the road. A few people recognised me, but a lot of the places I ended up going were older pubs, so the old guys couldn't give a f**k.

"I'll tell you a funny story. Around 1995, I was staying with some friends in Connemara and they told me to visit Doolin, in Co Clare. So my girlfriend at the time and I were driving into Doolin and we passed all these people screaming and roaring on the side of the road.

"It turned out it was the day of the hurling championship, and Doolin hadn't won it in 80 years. So we got into the town and the place was apoplectic. They were going nuts. We pub-crawled for the night. It was great."

Inglorious Basterds is in previews from this weekend.

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/on-the-qt-1859879.html

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3vHtBAPeOA