Culture Night Belfast #CNB14 Making headlines, Buggy Boogie, Science, Wonder Women & a Methane Mardi Gras

Culture Night Belfast is now well-established … and epic. Along with many other cities and towns across the island, this Friday night (19 September) Belfast will see thousands of people ambling about soaking up the balmy atmosphere.

A couple of hundred free events will pop up in streets and venues, mostly concentrated in and around the Cathedral Quarter. The full programme is online (and available in many cafes and buildings across the city). Here's a sample ...

1230-1300 – Ten x 9 – Black Box – A special lunchtime performance to hear 9 people who have up to 10 minutes each to tell a real story from their lives.

1500-1800 – CNB14 for the Under 4s ... and the Buggy Boogie! – Office of Important Art, Castle Court shopping centre – An interactive creative haven of art, photographic and singing workshops and cast your dreams upon the magical wishing tree! At 5pm the youngsters and parents will boogie all the way to Buoy Park in their very own Buggy Boogie! Look out for Belfast Met Art & Design students who are organising fun for children with origami  in University of Ulster from 1600-1800. Booktrust will encourage parents and carers to tell Super Stories for Super Heroes from 1600-1800 - costumes encouraged! And children’s workshops in Translink’s bus parked up in York Street from 1600-2100.

1830-2030 – Science in the Square – Writers Square - a taster from the NI Science Festival whose science buskers will give live scientific demonstrations: the physics of balloons to 3D printers, come get your geek on with some interactive science.

1600-2200 – Big Red Rocket – Writers Square – Bright Stem (artist and designer Andrew Wood) will be creating a whopping 4.6 meter high Red Space Rocket!

1800-2100 – Belfast Roller Derby – Writers Square - Watch the Belfast Banshees and Norn Iron Maidens as they demonstrate how this hard-hitting, fast-paced sport, which is growing rapidly in popularity, is played.

1800-1930 – Belfast's Annual Slow Bicycle Race – Academy Street – The last shall be first as spectators assume the role of judge and jury (equipped with whistles and horns) as they observe the competitors over the 20m course. The rules are simple: (1) Forward motion shall be provided by the muscles of the rider; (2) No part of the competitor's body may touch the ground; (3) he bicycle must maintain forward motion at all times; (4) The bicycle must remain within the boundaries of the course.

1600-2200 – Culture Knit Fever – Cathedral Gardens – can the city’s yarn bombers construct a gigantic outdoor installation in Buoy Park?

1600-2200 – Headliners! – Belfast Telegraph, Royal Avenue – Head along and see yourself on the front page!

1700-2200 – Dawsons Music Block Party – 121-125 Royal Avenue – Dawsons in association with Beat Emporium featuring live DJ sets, local musicians and Vibe Academy performers.

1600-2200 – Pop-up Cabaret – Assembly Rooms, 2-6 Waring Street – 4.15pm Swing Gals / 5.00pm Ursula Burns - the most dangerous harpist in the world / 5.45pm Kenneth Fall / 6.30pm The Late Twos (presented by EBAF) / 7.30pm Swing Gals / 8.15pm Ursula Burns / 9pm Traditional Irish Music

1600-2200 – Café Chess – Caffe Nero, 17-21 Lombard Street - Sit down and play chess with a friend, a chess player, or a total stranger.

1600-2200 – Unfolding – 70-74 Donegall Street – Jonny McEwan’s continuously developing, code-driven, generative art installation.

1600-2200 – Growing Up – Talbot Street – Every child dreams of a house but their imaginative doodles of fairy-tale palaces, fortified castles and galactic space stations rarely become a reality when they grow up. White Ink Architects have taken a 5-year-old's dream house doodle and turned it into an architectural installation, displayed for all to see and admire, that begs the grown-up question, "Is the dream beyond reach in the reality of adult life?"

1600-1800 – Not Nice Portraits – University of Ulster – Fine artist Miguel Martin will be turning his sketch pad on Culture Night participants to create some cringe worthy portraits.

1700-2000 on the hour – A Wander of Wonder Women – starting from Morning Star, Pottingers Entry – Belfast Feminist Network will take you on a wander through Belfast streets to meet iconic women from throughout history. Hear about their amazing lives as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Emmeline Pankhurst and other wonder women take over the city.

1900-2000 – The Methane Mardi Gras – leaving City Hall at 7pm to head into Cathedral Quarter – A grotesque troupe of fracking’s evil offspring will take over the streets of the Cathedral Quarter to disgust unsuspecting Culture Night revellers. Beware as Pollution, Disease, Rogue Methane, Gas-Flare, Flow-Back, and others have a literal Blow Out all over your city, just like they will if hydraulic fracturing is allowed to go ahead by the Stormont Executive. Brought to CNB by Friends of the Earth & No Fracking Northern Ireland.

1900-2000 – Myths of Belfast – University of Ulster – A short 30 minute film explores the city’s architectural and urban identity and finds that it doesn’t have one! Instead, it has a constantly shifting set of agreed ‘myths’ tacitly accepted as ‘truth’. Through a series of interviews with architects, planners, community activists and built environment professionals this short film attempts to document these shifts over the course of the 20th century, exposing the unplanned and arbitrary nature of ‘urban identity’.

Cyclists should note that there St Anne’s Cathedral car park (off Academy Street) is offering a free and manned bike park on Friday evening. And watch out for Culture Night Radio which you may hear around the streets as well as online.

Watch out for other Culture Night Extra events running in and around the main Culture Night.

Saturday 1100-1200 – The Boy Who Dreamed of Space Rockets – Reading by Andrew Wood from his forthcoming début children's book.



Photo via KeithBelfast.

UUP election posters - reduce, reuse, re:cycle?

Walking up the Upper Newtownards Road after lunch, I was amazed to see a Lagan Valley UUP poster for Mark Hill and Basil McCrea at the roadside.

Turned out that it had been ripped in two and was being used to advertise the starting point of a bikers' event. Happily a case of reuse in aid of re:cycling rather than the Ulster Unionist Party completely losing its sense of direction!

Dusting off the trees in Victoria Square

Dusting gloves come in handy when the trees get a bit tatty!

Where were you when ... the NI referendum count finally finished?

Elections can bring about powerful political moments that become firmly lodged in society's civil memories. Perhaps the most classic example happened 14 years ago in the 1997 General Election: "Where were you when Portillo lost his seat?"

Last Friday night - well, technically last Saturday morning - I realised that for most people the answer to "Where were you when the NI referendum count finally finished?" was going to be, quite sensibly, "tucked up in bed fast asleep". But for eight people, their alternative answer was "at the Kings Hall!"

It was a quite a contrast to the previous referendum in Northern Ireland – the Good Friday Agreement poll – which was announced in the same Kings Hall venue to vast crowds of waiting politicians, campaigners and the world’s media.

After the final constituency count completed in Fermanagh & South Tyrone, the regional AV referendum result for Northern Ireland was finally declared at 2.10am in an almost empty Kings Hall … shortly after the overall UK result was finally able to be announced in London.

No official media were present when the announcement was made by Graham Shields, EONI’s Chief Electoral Officer, who stood at the special referendum podium that had otherwise remained unused all day and addressed the gathered group. Two Electoral Commission staff, one former Chief Electoral Officer, three Yes Campaign reps, and a blogger/electoral observer.

Collating the results together for the referendum ballot boxes that had been verified and counted in the eight count centres across Northern Ireland, the local results were less negative than much of the rest of the UK.

But it was a little piece of history – the final piece in the AV referendum jigsaw – so I slightly blurred my electoral observer role and recorded the moment for posterity!

Total number of ballot papers counted – 668,869

The number of votes cast in favour of Yes was – 289,088 (43%)

The number of votes cast in favour of No was – 372,706 (57%)

The number of ballot papers rejected was as follows:

a) No official mark – 0

b) voting for both answers to the question asked – 637 – this includes people who voted 1 2

c) Writing or mark by which the voter could be identified – 24

d) Unmarked or void for uncertainty – 6,401

The total rejected votes was – 7,062

The sharp eyed amongst you will realise that the numbers don’t quite tally, and there were in fact 13 missing votes – which is not unusual with a poll of this size. And the pre-printed date had to be changed from 6 May to the 7th!

"Like Lib-Dem economic policies, jelly is notoriously difficult to nail to a wall"

All the news that's fit to print, and then some ...

From the Londoner's Diary column of yesterday's Evening Standard newspaper

Wibbly-wobbly brain food at the Treasury

A dickie bird at the Treasury tells me the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has become obsessed with eating orange jelly. When this Whitehall civil servant ran into one of Osborne’s unfortunate flunkies recently in the corridors of power, she rolled her eyes and confirmed that, yet again, she had been despatched to stock up on jelly supplies from the canteen.

The Chancellor’s much commmented-upon weight gain is thought to be the result of all that late-night pizza he and his Lib-Dem sidekick Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, have to order in after tortuous budget-cut meetings.

It’s thought they have hit upon orange jelly as a low-calorie snack which they may recommend to us all in these difficult economic times. Jelly contains lots of sugar but no protein. It is feared it may make the pair hyperactive. Significantly, orange is the Lib-Dem colour, and the colour of Alexander’s hair.

Orange jelly contains Sunset yellow (E110), which is not a good thing. It’s a synthetic yellow azo dye, which must be heat-treated. Found in orange jelly and squash, swiss roll, apricot jam, hot chocolate mix, packet soups and canned fish, it is banned in Norway and Finland but not in Colonsay, the Hebridean island Alexander comes from.

“I think it’s a positively good thing that Osborne likes jelly,” says my budget-cutting informant. “It has made me feel far more fondly towards him, as though he is simply a small, excitable child — perhaps in a Roald Dahl book.”

John Major used to like jelly and peas when he was Chancellor but, combined with his family’s history in the music hall and the manufacture of garden gnomes, this only made people snigger.

Like Lib-Dem economic policies, jelly is notoriously difficult to nail to a wall.

(Image by James Lu on Flickr used under BY-NC-SA license)

Just the lift the Irish economy needs: "Accenture is to create 1 new job ..."

With all the doom and gloom, today's short article on the Belfast Telegraph website will surely bring a cheer to Irish spirits with the news that Accenture are creating jobs in Dublin.

MANAGEMENT consulting firm Accenture is to create 1 new jobs over the next four years at a research and innovation centre in Dublin. The company, which already employs 1,3 staff in Ireland, said the centre will develop advanced statistical modelling techniques known as analytics. The investment, which is backed by IDA Ireland, will form part of a wider global network.

The Irish Times have a more believable version: 100 new jobs on top of 1,300 existing ones!

On a serious note, it's the biggest set of jobs in the field of statistics and mathematics that I've seen announced for a long time. Now where did I put my STA304 notes from university days ...

Postcard from America – the Snailr Project

Having upped sticks and moved to San Francisco from the south of England, Anna and Bobbie have been documenting their experiences and induction into US culture in their own version of “inform, educate and entertain”.

Some readers may remember Anna’s witty and wacky live blogging of shows like Big Brother and Spooks in the Media Guardian. While Bobby was a frequent guest on the Tech Guardian podcast and became the paper’s west coast technology correspondent.

With changing work circumstances, it’ll soon be time to head home. But Anna decided on one last adventure – the Snailr project – to explore and document the vast country they’d barely begun to understand: a 14 day rail trip on which she’d write postcards about what they saw and send them to blog readers around the world.

In her own words ...

Basic Premise:

So much of the early evolution of travel writing was in the form of collected letters home to family or loved ones. We now communicate in shorter, punchier ways, and the idea of the travelogue or documenting a journey is affected by that. I like the idea of taking the idea of describing what you’re seeing directly to one other person, and combining it with the idea of social media - of firing missives and messages and status updates out around the globe to random strangers and whoever elects to receive them.

The plan

So the trip is 15 days in duration - 14 days on the actual road - and I announced on my blog that if people want a postcard, they should let me know, and send their postal address to me by email - I won’t do anything with it apart from one postcard, I’ll then shred all the addresses. Obviously I can only afford so many stamps, so I’ll cap it at about 10/15 a day. I’ve printed enough customisable postcards for just over that.

I’ll use the postcards to capture a single vignette, overheard snatch of conversation, observation or thing that I’ve noted along the way. And then I’ll post them off to people as I go along. I’ll keep a photograph of the card, and a typed transcript of whatever I wrote on it.

The idea is that, when pieced together, the messages would form an overall picture of the journey, and have some kind of travel narrative - in actuality, they’d just be spread across the globe. Short pieces of a longer journey - updates and glimpses like you would get from twitter, but personal, and tangible, an individually just a snatched moment out of context.

I’m certainly not claiming to be more interesting than anyone else: we all dip into and out of each others lives this way all the time. I’m just offering to send you a postcard.

The journey wasn’t without incident. Their Amtrak train sliced through an 18 wheel grain truck parked across a railway crossing. Seventeen of the 96 people on board the train were taken to hospital, though there were “no life-threatening injuries”. No postcards were hurt in the accident.

My postcard arrived in Lisburn last week.

It’s not really a tourist attraction per se, but it’s very interesting being a person used to living in San Francisco, visiting other places in the US, where the politics is not so unusually liberal, and finding shops packed with things that, when I lived in the UK, I would have looked on as available for novelty or ironic purchase only. In New Orleans, I find a shop where you can find an oil painting of past and dead Republican presidents playing pool together and laughing like old college room-mates. Reagan, Nixon, both George Bushes, Lincoln. It’s literally horrific.

There’s a snap of said painting (a cropped postcard of it stuck to the front of the Snailr postcard) to illustrate what she’s talking about.

The vignette is naturally limited, but when they’re all pulled together, the postcards should provide a contemporary window onto US culture and economy, as well as an object lesson on the difficulty of keeping electronic devices powered up and connected to the internet when you’re speeding across the country in a metal box on rails. (Check out the Snailr blog to see other postcards that have safely arrived.)

And lastly, the postcards will keep graphologists in business for years to come analysing Anna’s handwriting … which was a unique ability to alternate between lower and upper case As in the same word. Like my degenerative scribblings, she’s spent too long over the last few years in front of a keyboard!

(Photos from Anna Pickard and Bobbie Johnston via blogs and Flickr)

Gound Hog Day?

Signage in Belfast's Victoria Square mall isn’t a new subject on the blog.

Regular commenter Coke Shy Hero brings us the latest gaff!

Bookworm (via Mila's Daydreams)

A brilliant photo from a brilliant blog.

Check out Mila's Daydreams for a regular supply of inventive baby snoozing photos from Adele, currently on maternity leave!

Guerilla knitting hits the Waterfront flock

It's not the first time the sheep (and shepherd) in front of the Waterfront Hall have been decorated.

In March last year they adopted red noses to coincide with Comic Relief.

But over the last few days, someone has taken pity on them standing out in the summer rain and made them more cosy ... as well as more colourful.

I'm not sure whether it's related to the Trans / Urban Arts Academy festival running in the Waterfront - maybe the weekend Clothes Customisation course? - or whether it's an unrelated act of guerilla knitting? But I'm sure someone will know and comment.

Update - local legend Moochin Photoman has the story of "yarn bombed as part of Craft Month organised by Craft NI" ... and BBC NI News Online!

Dinosaur nests and a Zeedonk

On Saturday we headed across to Groombridge Place "Gardens and Enchanted Forest". As well as giant swings and an aerial boardwalk, there were other child-friendly attractions that would have looked appropriate in an episode of Primeval.

Not sure if the deep water was the only hazard in the photo above?

And then there was the Zeedonk - a donkey with stripy legs.

Spot the anachronism?

Spot the anachronism in the history of computing section of London's Science Museum?

Given the Acorn/BBC Computer Literacy Project get together in 2008, and rumours of an upgraded display, the computing section was disappointing, despite the decent history and exploration of the contributions of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (which includes Babbage's brain and several machines built using Babbage's plans).

The C.S. Lewis Belfast International Airport … or maybe Jim Megaw?

Whenever Belfast City Airport announced that they were going to incorporate George Best into the airport name, I remember an online rumour that the other airport would join the trend and become the Gloria Hunniford Belfast International Airport.

A flyer with the message below was distributed to delegates at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in June.

I have a dream –

“ The C.S. Lewis Belfast International Airport.”

At a time when many people feel downhearted and many Christians feel under attack, I would like to share a vision which is positive, uplifting and will be appreciated by literally millions of people around the world. My vision is that we name Belfast International Airport “The C.S. Lewis Belfast International Airport.”

C.S. Lewis is Belfast’s, Ulster’s and Ireland’s most famous, widely read, quoted and popular person. Literary criticism, Christian Doctrine, children’s fantasy, allegory, science fiction, letters and a diary describing his experience of bereavement – he was a literary giant and most of his work is still in print. Most of the people flying into Belfast International Airport will know who C.S. Lewis is; that he came from Belfast may surprise them. Let us honour this great man and remind the world that Ireland is truly a land of saints and scholars sometimes both in one person.

God bless you.

Rev. Jack Lamb, minister/teaching elder, Townsend Street Presbyterian Church, Belfast

If you share my vision please consider telling your local minister of the Gospel, councillor, MLA, MP and MEP. With your help I believe this dream can come true.

It’s unfortunate that C.S. Lewis is best known for his childhood in East Belfast, closer to the City Airport than the International!

And while C.S. Lewis is certainly a worth export that Northern Ireland can be proud of, if there was justice in the world, shouldn’t someone be suggesting that it become the Jim Megaw Belfast International Airport?

Augmented Reality tackles Sudoku

It's beginning to feel like a mini-series of iPhone app posts all inspired by Ewan McIntosh's blog! Today's post should start with the confession that I don't have an iPhone. Nor do I enjoy Sudoku.

Augmented Reality is about superimposing electronic information over a view of the real world. Like a head-up display in an airplane cockpit or Terminator, or the cricket scoreboard that pops up mid-over to remind you of the state of play.

By combining the real-time video image from mobile phone's camera with the GPS location, some applications can download pertinent local information and overlay it on the video feed on the phone's display. Useful for tourist information, or finding the entrance to the nearest Tube station.

But what about giving you a hint about the tricky Sudoku puzzle that's been baffling you in your local paper? Wait no longer ...

(AR image from Mr3641 on Wikimedia; Original post on Sudoku via Ewan McIntosh)

Bonus - It should really deserve its own post, but check out the video of The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly too, and the story behind it.

It's a Phone-Book

It's a book. It's an iPhone app. It's an iPhone inside a book. It's a kind of interactive book on which you can still turn the pages, but it also allows you to interact with the story. It's for kids. It has a touchscreen. It'll be hard to get out of parents' hands.

PS: It's Japanese.

(via Ewan McIntosh)

Sunday's Coming - movie trailer

"You'll probably want to blog it" said the guy who forwarded on a link to the video below. And he wasn't wrong!

From the nice people at Inside North Point who aren't afraid to take a long hard satirical view of what they (sometimes) do.

Belfast Telegraph outsource fact checking to their readers?

If this morning's online edition is anything to go by, then fact checking is a thing of the past at the Belfast Telegraph!

Unless there's been an overnight upset, Seamus Close is still an Alliance councillor in Lagan Valley when he comments about the local government shenanigans ...

... and in a story about the PUP, you'll find that John Kyle is the interim leader, not David Lyle (though at least it rhymes).

Welcome !, Authority 1 - Libraries NI online signup

If Libraries NI are wanting to make it easy for people to sign up to use the shrinking number of public libraries, then perhaps they need to fix their online registration process.

While I might normally appreciate being able to opt out of spam, in the case of my local library I might have welcomed the odd marketing email to let me know about events.

The final screen also lacks the personal touch! And it would be handy if they finished specifying the "Text about bringing in ID".

Strangely, at the end of the process, Libraries NI don't seem to send out an email with your details, registration number and instructions of what you need to do when you first visit a physical library.

The information about bringing proof of name and address is explained on the opening page of the registration process, but that's really not when you'll be paying attention!

My eyes are dim, I cannot see

There’s a certain irony when this kind of email arrives from a US-based glasses/eyewear retailer who hasn’t looked closely enough to realise that Alan in Belfast is not really talking about - or to - their target market.

Hi Alan,

My name is Chad ____ and I have recently taken a look at your website.

I work for P______ G______ USA, an online prescription glasses retailer and would love if you could review our site, products and/or quality on your website.

We would love in exchange for a posting about us to offer you a free pair of our discount glasses (prescription or frame only). Please let me know if you would like any assistance from us.

A posting would preferably be a few paragraphs long with a link to our site. We also offer discounts and a paul frank bicycle giveaway contest for anyone that joins our facebook page.

Thank you for your time.

Chad _______
P______ G_____ USA
http://www.notgivingthemthepublicity.com

Maundy Thursday hits Cornmarket? Qu'est-ce que c'est?

So what is it? What were they doing?

Thanks to Destroy All Onions for the photo from Cornmarket Arthur Square this lunchtime.