So, the heads of the Protecting Human Life In Pregnancy Bill have been published, and, to noones real surprise, it doesn't please anyone. At least, that's the spin from the Irish media, who are presenting this as some sort of Compromise akin to unsealing the Gordian Knot. Almost all the coverage, such as this partiularly egregious example from the Irish Times, which manages to make the entire debate into a strictly internal Fine Gael bun-fight.

After all, the entire debacle was supposed to be about the Right of Women to a termination, and that's just not permitted in the Irish Media, who prefer to have their debates moderated by the internal factionalising of our Political Parties or the omnipresent Iona Institute.

In all of this, the Labour Party, after an initial flurry of activity, has been acting mightily oddly. The original Bill presented by Reilly called for a three-person Star-Chamber type interview of suicidal women, Labour members threw a fit, dragged the matter off for a week of "discussions" and came back with a three-person Star-Chamber type interview. Since then, members of the Parliamentary Labour party have been posturing wildly for the cameras, eager to be associated with this wonderful new bill, the same Bill they balked at a week earlier. Reports today of the meeting of the PLP are replete with self-congratulation - particularly of Minister Kathleen Lynch, who had the job of copper-fastening, I mean, "renegotiating" the three-person requirement over the past week. Ivana Bacik also crops up quite a bit, who is apparently "excited" at this new dawn for the women of Ireland. All are satisfied, the Bill is great!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we learn from Health Minister James Reilly that a woman who fails the Star Chamber Test for a termination on the grounds of being suicidal could be forced to spend the remainder of her pregnancy in a psychiatric unit. That's really going to commend the new system to suicidal pregnant women.

We also learn today that the Irish Family Planning Association is warning of an upsurge in the number of women taking the option of "amateur abortions" - usually by purchasing medication from abroad and taking it at home. Under the new Bill, such women - desperate, financially unable to travel to the UK, probably fearful of incarceration by Reilly's StarChamber - will be subject to a 14-year jail sentence if caught. How many of those women, having taken the drugs without medical supervision, will find themselves in dire need of medical assistance, yet won't dare to seek it for fear of a lengthy jail term?

This Bill forces women to undergo an interrogative process in the case of suicide, threatens those who fail that standard with incarceration in mental institutions, and increases the likelihood of more deaths or long term injury for women who can't face that threat. Some dawn for Women in Ireland.

I'm frankly getting sick to death of this entire bagatelle masquerading as a political process. The facts are very simple: In the X-case the Supreme Court held, and has since reaffirmed, that under the Constitution a woman has a right to an abortion where there is a risk to her life, including a risk of suicide, in continuing the pregnancy. End of discussion.

This excrescent waffle about suicidal ideation and termination as a treatment for same, or having a football team of doctors sitting in judgement, all of it, every word, is an attempt by foul means to overthrow that judgement. This usurpation is being carried out by a shower of Neanderthals whose base line presumption is that all women who want terminations are wanton whores, unfit to be members of our pristine Catholic Christian nation, and certainly willing to lie to get one.

Let's stop the pussy footing around, what's being proposed is the overthrow of the Constitution by sectoral interests whose core organisation facilitated the mass rape and abuse of children in this country for decades. I'm tired of these people having their personal gripes and attitudes presented as if they were automatically entitled to force them down the throats of the rest of the population. Its the same people who argue against marriage equality, the same ones who argued against divorce and barring orders. Enough. This country has abortion on demand, we just outsource it to the nearest neighbour. We've moved on, let's make this a nation for all its citizens, not a chosen few.

Margaret Thatcher is dead.

An extraordinary woman...

Margaret Thatcher was an extraordinary woman but she was extraordinary for mostly the wrong reasons. So many of her policies were wrong and heartless. Nevertheless, I don't rejoice in her death. I commiserate, as I do with the death of any person. In contrast, she showed no empathy for the victims of her harsh, ruthless policy decisions. -- Peter Tatchell

...damned with faint praise...

I recognise and admire the great distinction of Baroness Thatcher as the first woman to become leader of a major UK political party and prime minister. I am sorry to hear of her death and offer my sympathy to her family. -- Neil Kinnock

...whose legacy today...

She created today's housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefit rather than register them as unemployed because the Britain she inherited was broadly full employment. She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed, and the benefits bill, the legacy of that, we are struggling with today. In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong. -- Ken Livingstone

...becomes a footnote to history.

We now live in a country in which John Major is our greatest living politician.

— Armando Iannucci (@Aiannucci) April 8, 2013

No great loss.

Her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free. -- The Guardian

"For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."

The TNG rewatch over on http://tor.com has come to an end, and all I can think of is those lines from Q, almost at the very end of the series. 19 years ago, and they still move me as much now as they did then.

In the past five years, we've spent more money bailing out casino banks than the predicted cost of the worst case scenarios for a long-term Mars Mission. More money was spent by the US, in adjusted terms, on invading Iraq than on the Apollo Program. We are hide bound by petty miserable concerns, largely foisted upon us by powerful elites who demand our sacrifice to their interests.

“We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”

Iain Menzies Banks has late-stage gall bladder cancer, and possibly only a few months to live. He made this announcement to the world today, and it has shocked me mightily. I've made a donation this evening to Cancer Research as a result, because Fuck Cancer.

Fans of his are invited to leave a message on a website set up and dedicated to this purpose, here's what I had to say:

Eliot came to mind instantly - April is the cruellest month - but that hardly conveys the shock I experienced when i read the news. All the joy and wonder which you've imparted to me, and I can barely summon the words to thank you. For providing me with a touchstone of common decency in your fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, for holding out the possibility that we as a people can do so much better than we are and giving form and stature to that idea, for all of that, and more, so much more, my sincere and unashamed thanks.

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Been too busy with the family over the last weekend to actually write anything, but here's some stuff which caught my attention.

This pollster type chap claims that the disastrous poll showing for labour would translate into just three seats. Read the details a bit, and it turns out he does down-ticket apportioning by using the d'hondt system, which seems odd. Sodium Chloride to hand when regarding this site in future methinks.

Ratko Mladic stayed out of the clutches of the Hague Tribunal for fourteen years, acquiring a reputation as a slavic Scarlet Pimpernel in the process. The details of how he managed this are actually quite sordid, being a combination of revanchist security services in present-day Serbia and his own fanatical paranoia. Well worth a few moments of your time.

Finally, xkcd has been running an odd little cartoon since last Monday. Called 'Time', it features two of his most recognisable characters building sandcastles. It has updated every 30 mins since last Monday, and some kind soul is using his perl-skills to bring this animation of all cells so far to us mere mortals.

As this Good Friday had gone on, I've become more and more saddened by the passing of Richard Griffiths. I saw him live once in Bennett's The History Boys, was astonished that he seemed so eternally fixed in age.

Tonight, in celebration of his talent, I shall be watching Withnail & I in place of my usual Good Friday fayre of Life of Brian. While Bruce Robinson has the writing credit, Griffiths made the role unquestionably his own, earning the life long veneration of millions of students. With his leaving us, the very world itself is bruised, night has fallen and we are left alone to camp. Ave atque vale.

Finally happened They lasted a lot longer than I thought possible, but the Labour Party is now in the final death throes. Below 10%, they start losing seats wholesale in Dáil sims, while, in the real world, they start haemorrhaging members at local level, which reduces their ability to fund raise, which kills them in the local elections, and so on. See the PDs and the Greens for the inevitable fate of a party which betrays its principles for short term gain.

Having previously vented at some length about Sky's habit of shouting over credit sequences, I find that it is only fair to report the following:

They Appear to have Stopped. This should be both Noted and Deemed Praiseworthy.

Was catching up on some Mad Men eps taped from Sky Atlantic, and they've stopped. This is great news, but, as yet, is only tested by me on repeat episodes of Mad Men. I don't know if they've done the same with their first run stuff, although it is to be earnestly hoped that they have done.

Speaking of, what is the correct terminology for the action of recording a televisual entertainment to the hard disk of a PVR like a sky box? Taped, as used by me above, really isn't descriptive of the action anymore, as there are, to my knowledge, no longer any tapes involved. I loathe the phrase Sky-plussed secondarily because it is descriptive only of a very specific act but primarily because it fails the test of tripping gladly from the tongue as a lamb in springtime.

In that far country still known as the United States, I know that people from certain limited geographical areas have been wont to declare that they have tivoed something, but, again, this is both specific to a certain provider and, moreover, is done oft times in some sort of hauteur, as if by association with some piece of technology not available to the common folk the cachet of ownership will reflect kindly onto their own fragile ego construct. Similar objections can be raised to the concept of "V-plusing", which is primarily a method of telling the listener that you are so far above the bog-standard Sky user that your very emanations smell like Richard Branson's wig.

I suppose one could say disked, but I've not noted it in general parlance, no matter its manifest attractions. PVR'd is an abomination unto Nuggan, forcing, with malice aforethought, a Three Letter Acronym into a verb. Furthermore, no-one ever talked about VCR-ing something off the tellybox (or did they?) as doing so renders one susceptible to being properly deemed a pillock, even if you could remember what the Ts were meant to represent in the A, which certainly isn't true for most people. Indeed, isn't the V somewhat redundant in the modern usage? There isn't any videotape so why the hell does the recording need to be demeaned so, like some shoulder-pad wielding monstrosity sitting in your living room declaiming the benefits of the Laffer Curve on their DynaTAC while snorting Charlie through a hundred-denomination note.

So, for now, Taped it is, and taped it shall remain, until such time as someone manages to convince me otherwise.

The Irish Times has undergone a sea change in design. Where once readers had information, we now have pictures. Where we had journalism, we now have bling. On my desktop PC, the site is awful, a mish mash of conflicting styles, with different graphic elements sprinkled around the place like confetti. The menu bar thing appears to have been copied from Vodafone's awful site, and often doesn't load properly, leaving a smear of colours on my screen.

On mobile devices, the alleged focus of the design, its even worse. On my nexus 7, the site renders glacially slowly, finally offering me a screen which is mostly advertising, with the image link, but no content link, for the top story appearing. Scrolling down, I am presented with an awful mess of a page, more unrelated graphic elements, variable guttering, random typography, inconsistent appearance of links.

On my wife's HTC Wildfire, the site which "has been redesigned and restructured, with a particular focus on the growing demand for the best possible user experience on mobile devices" not only doesn't render, it actually manages to crash the device entirely.

Not that she's weeping bitter tears over this, as the experience of the site on my Nexus S is so lamentable. Pictures spill over text, graphic loading times go on forever, page renders are worse than the 7, and so on.

In observing the discourse regarding the changes on twitter yesterday, a pattern became apparent. Those praising the site, almost to a fault, were (from user agent strings) using iOS devices. They all praised the new site and how great it looked on their iPad or iPhone. The sneaking suspicion became a hardened cynical position when, in a pathetic effort to stem to tide of derision, David Cochrane and Hugh Linehan posted the above linked article, and displayed their mobile credentials with... an iPad and an iPhone!

It seems fairly clear to me that the worthy creatives of the Irish Times designed the site for creative people who all have iOS devices hardwired into their consciousnesses. When they say "mobile device" they actually mean "my iPad". I asked David Cochrane on twitter yesterday if they actually tested the site on anything other than iOS devices, he hasn't responded, nor I expect shall he.

I asked Hugh Linehan why they felt the need to make the site so un-newspaper like. He responded (in the same snide manner many of us remember from his handling of the Kate Fitzgerald affair) that if I wanted a newspaper, I should go buy one. This, remember, is the online editor of the paper.

When I've used a device on which the site works, it is still indescribably awful. Even short articles are split into two or more pages, the entire user experience is like something from a geocities site back in the day. The content, where it exists, is so hidden, so entombed in pointless bling that no comfort or information can be drawn from it.

I've deleted the Irish Times from my most visited sites page in Chrome, I think I'll be more content without it there. I'll also be dropping the two or three physical papers I get a week, its clear that if I want a newspaper I'll not find it in the Times.

EDIT: Just saw this on the twitter machine:

.@irishtimes frontpage loading stats: 23s, 139 requests, 7.4MB transferred (chrome 26 on linux)

— Niall Sheridan (@confangry) March 10, 2013

7.4MB transferred! On a site that's been supposedly designed for mobiles. The stupid, it hurts us.