Tina O'Toole

New York doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of picture. Construction of Co-operative Insurance Society tower, Manchester, 1960s (Manchester Libraries).

Three Irish Traveller boys - Billy, Steven and Paddy - using an abandoned car as their makeshift playground in Carrowbrowne, Galway. Photo by American photographer Rebecca Moseman, part of a series 2017-23.

Born #OTD 1931, Evelyn Owens was a true pioneer: the first female president of an Irish trade union for both sexes, the first woman to chair the Labour Court and, as a member of the presidential commission, the first woman to sign an Irish bill into law. www.dib.ie/biography/ow... #DIBLives

“Countries have to wake up to the harsh and dangerous realities,” UNRWA's Jonathan Fowler tells DW News, after Israeli authorities seized a UN site, the UNRWA Headquarters in #EastJerusalem, in blatant breach of international law.

International law must be upheld.

Marx Brothers Café on Georges St, for all the same reasons

It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”

Thanks for sharing - excellent piece, that makes things pretty plain …

The media will follow if political parties have the moral courage to lead.

X has lost its position in Ireland. It’s no longer a serious centre of political or media influence: its advertising audience is down 18.3%, a 6.5 point drop.

Clinging to a declining platform isn’t strategy — it’s inertia.

Buzzard perched on a Whitethorn branch.

Buzzard on Whitethorn in a wintry sky, East Cork. #Birds

Some good news …

Niall Stanage doing Irish journalism proud here, and the fact that such an exchange is a relative rarity in that room tells its own story.

"On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns."

I cried my way through it twice …

Forget, for a moment, that AI is a plagiarism machine and a psychotic environmental vandal (though it is both those things).

Of particular importance in the aesthetic sphere (though of course not only there) is that AI is also, as @himself.bsky.social* has pointed out**, a mediocrity engine.

So, about these AI data centres …

The assumption is that you’ll wheel them in a trolley to your car, or at least so I always supposed - as I struggled along the pavement with arms wrapped around one - just hope it doesn’t rain!

A large (maybe 3 feet wide by 5 feet tall) sign on the end of a row of bookshelves that tells the “address” of books that have sensitive content.

Sometimes I think it’s going to be the librarians who will save us all.

If a sizeable number of people in Britain believe immigration harms the country the government’s job is to reeducate them not to use their prejudices as the policy making springboard. It’s a Labour government founded on the principles of socialism, compassion and solidarity not expedient cruelty

The new Pope has made an edict that time spent on the platform at Limerick Junction can be deducted from time in purgatory.

What Carrie says:

'It's a lost map!'
'Where did you find it?'
'In the Map Drawer, in the Map Room of the Map Library'.
OH is seriously thinking about doing a talk on data and discovery entitled 'why we keep biscuits in the biscuit tin'. Seems appropriate.

All the this ^^

Worth a read …

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Reasons to visit your local haunted bookshop: Open Until Very Late (image: moonlit bookshop) Staff with nine hundred years experience (image: skeleton bookseller) Home delivery by Headless Hoseman or flying fiend (image: deliveries being made) Readings from famous authors (Image: Shakespeare zombie) Stay and browse forever (Image ghost in a bookshop)

Three @theguardian.com books cartoons from previous halloweens: 1. Haunted Bookshop

A White House with a dark roof behind several tall trees with bare branches silhouetted against a sunset of red and orange

Not yet Samhain, but soon…

#speirgorm #wildatlanticway #sunsetphoto

Saying that it's "too hard" to get on the Irish president ballot when an independent woman got the entire Irish left to back her, got the biggest vote ever and beat two historically dominant parties is not just wrong - it is breathtakingly offensive and outrageously dishonest.
#Aras25 #Speirgorm

Turns out voting for Catherine Connolly is a rural pursuit.

One of our most frequent #ruralPursuits #aras25 #rtept

We knew this would happen. Note how realistic the visuals and voices are.
This AI deepfake video of Catherine Connolly ‘withdrawing’ from presidential contest and that Friday’s poll is ‘cancelled’ is live and viral on Facebook tonight.
1000s watching, commenters believing it.