The Rusty Wire Service

From William Hill giving me absurd odds on political and cultural events to updates from Glasgow Rangers' administrators or invitations to Shoreditch art installations and City investment breakfasts, the Croppy's inbox can be quite a treasure trove.  Change.org is one of the many organisations that send emails and updates to The Rusty Wire Service every day.  For those of you who’ve not heard of them,   Change.org   is (in their own words) “a social action platform that empowers anyone, anywhere to start, join, and win campaigns for social change.”  Formed in 2006 by two former classmates from Stanford University Ben Rattray and Mark Dimas, they  have offices in San Francisco and Washington DC, with organisers around the world.  This morning, I was being asked to sign a   petition against sweet stem broccoli   grown from trademarked Monsanto seeds being sold in Sainsbury’s and Waitrose; the word ‘Shibboleth’ just popped int...

At the end of his 1898 novel The War Of The Worlds , HG Wells has his narrator describe for us the ultimate downfall of the Martian invader: “slain by the putrefactive and diverse bacteria against which their systems were unprepared....slain after all man’s device had failed, by the humblest things that God in His wisdom had put upon this earth.” It seems in 2012, those same ‘humblest things’ could prove our undoing in a turn of events that the Bromley science fiction pioneer would almost certainly appreciate for its irony. When the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Margaret Chan told an audience in Copenhagen on 14 March that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could mean " an end to modern medicine as we know it",  she wasn’t exactly letting the cat out of the bag. The seriousness of the problem has long loomed large in the minds of health professionals around the world. The over-use of antibiotics has led to a situation where “many other ...

St Patrick’s Day. I love it. The whole schtick. I’m sorry, I just can’t help it. Being Irish on St Patrick’s day is the best thing in the world; it’s like a Leprechaun hanging up a drunk Santa and then beating him like a piñata until all the presents fall out. It’s that tipsy-topsy-turvy day when the world seems full of vicarious Paddies. The parade, the pipe bands, the wearing of the green, the sinking of the black. From Buenos Aires Hurling Club to the Irish steak house in Vladivostok , on  faraway   corners of foreign streets stand taverns that remain forever Ireland. Does this annual outbreak of soggy patriotism come from a hooky sentimental ‘far-from-hearth-and-home’ cawboguery? Some of it, sure and what’s wrong with that? If the Irish at home are embarrassed by the excesses of emigrant and diasporic Paddywhackery, I’m sure – as the money from the next generation of leavers starts to roll in again –  they’ll find it in their hearts to indulge us in t...

Can women really have it all? One of the great questions of Metropolitan life that one; apparently it often gets asked round tables of women about a bottle and a half of pinot grigio into an evening away from hubby/boyfriend/kids. Let’s start with first principles here. Which ‘women’ are we talking about, what is ‘all’ and what the hell does ‘really having it’ mean anywho? The truth is, the key demographic in that ostensibly all-embracing proposition turns out to be a rather narrower on closer scrutiny. The ‘women’ who can purportedly ‘have it all’ are from a relatively small population group living in Western Europe, North America and various scattered enclaves around the rest of the world; they are solvent, literate, independent and always upwardly aspirational. If they sound like a target audience, it’s because they are. The seemingly inexorable rise in women’s purchasing power has meant that advertising has pandered shamelessly to women and targeted them rut...

Newspaper men never want to make the headlines themselves; just ask the boys and gals over at News International in Wapping. President Higgins visits the Olympic Stadium on recent state visit The Irish Post however, for the second time in six months, found itself last week at the front and centre of a furore all of its own making. Back in Autumn 2011, the paper was in the news because it was going to the wall, having signally failed to respond to its changing demographic or the new media business model. On this occasion (having in the interim found a white knight in the form of Loot owner Elgin Loane), the ‘Post made the headlines with its coverage of a Presidential visit.  The first State visit on the part of the recently elected Irish President, Michael D Higgins should have been a straight forward assignment, lots of photo-ops with an imminently, quotably, loquacious President. The Irish media’s coverage of the first state visit of the country’s ninth...