James Galvin

I’m out in Vietnam for the week… in Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City at the moment, and will probably be heading up to Hanoi and Sapa next weekend. I visited the Cu Chi tunnels today; it was simply unbelievable. The network of cramped underground tunnels was started in 1948 when the Vietnamese were fighting the French. By the time the Americans were involved, the tunnels extended for 200km, with levels as deep as 30m underground. The design was ingenious - booby traps everywhere, tiny air holes every 10m (sometimes reached through a hollow bamboo cane), secret entrances, underground conference rooms, deeper tunnels with flaps to protect from poisonous gas and flame throwers, too deep to be reached by bombs. The American B52 bombers decimated the forest but most of the tunnels are still in tact. The Vietnamese recycled shrapnel from the American bombs, turning it into surgical instruments and spikes for traps.

Although I’ve heard about the tunnels so often in history and in the movies, the magnitude of it had never fully sunk in before. I was nearly sick just from crawling through a 20m stretch which has been widened to allow tourists to fit through… I don’t even want to consider what life was like for the thousands of soldiers who occupied the tunnels together. Saigon is great - I will write some more when I have time and will get some proper photos up too. The photograph on the left is of a hidden entrance to the Cu Chi tunnels. The guide is very small (only about 5 feet tall) but this does give an idea of how tight the tunnels were.

I’ve spent some today time browsing the website that posted about Tilt Scream Pong: Future Feeder. It’s a bit like BoingBoing but without all the Steampunk. There’s lots of good stuff there… one item that I thought was particularly interesting is this post about a Chinese artist called Xia Xiaowan and his peculiar glass art. Using many layers of thin panes of glass, his art has a unique, ethereal quality… see for yourself here.

Here is another reason why my MacBook Pro is better than your Thinkpad.

The gameplay revolves around two core principles:

• Tilt your macbook from side to side to move paddle
• Scream at your macbook to increase paddle size

This has to be the greatest invention since the seed drill, and it is open source.

A few months ago (here), I mentioned the fact that HBO might be making a TV series of George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”. This fan has matched each character with the actor he would like to see in the role (good call on the clerk from ER as the Greatjohn). Just looking through the lists I’ve forgotten half of the characters…hope I’ll be able to follow it when the fifth book, “A Dance with Dragons”, is released (probably later this year).

I had heard bits and pieces about somebody selling a vote for the Irish senate on eBay, and was surprised to see the coverage that it got in the Irish Times today.

Dan was disgusted:

I recognise that for a great portion of people the Seanad and all who sail in it are something of a joke, but the right to vote is a pretty basic idea that I would expect every citizen to have some respect for. I’m genuinely disgusted.

And I agree with him about the right to vote being a pretty basic idea. That is why I am disgusted by the fact that people actually believe this election should be taking seriously - a system that doesn’t allow your average working man to vote, but instead gives a voice to this guy:

All those of you who went to an Institute of Technology for four years, how does it feel to be inferior to him?

As Dan points out, every citizen, especially second class citizens, should respect this man’s right to vote. But seriously forks, I say fair play to dermotthegreat, protest votes making a mockery of this system are exactly whats needed here. But then again, the fact that nobody was even willing to fork out €1.62 for the privilege implies that perhaps the system is already a bit of a joke.

It has been over a year since thousands of French tourists caused havoc on our roads as they emerged like lemmings from Cork airport in their rental cars, driving on the wrong side of the road. As they spilled precariously onto the Kinsale Road dual carriagway, hurtling towards the oncoming traffic (which was already agitated by the chaos of the pre-flyover magic roundabout) they could only think of one thing: fromage. But if they had been able to think of anything else, they would surely have cursed the careless road sign maker who led them astray with explicit instructions to “Conduire a droite”.

As the seasons passed, the rogue sign makers slowly grew in confidence, knowing that the public would soon forget the former destruction. At last, they have returned, as John Finn presents evidence of more of their handiwork on display, down at the train station. Perhaps they are toying with our Dublin visitors who tend to struggle with their reading even when the spelling is correct. I recommend that you take a look at some of John Finn’s other photos, because he has some some great ones in there.