It means “chief operating officer”, which makes Sandberg a Very Important Person indeed in modern corporate America. And the world, given Facebook’s claimed billion users, with around 650 million of those active daily.

The title refers to a Sandberg exhortation to women in business to “lean in” when they’re at meetings, rather than hanging back, not speaking, lurking in the corners of the room. It’s a manifesto for career women to stop accepting second place, Seize the Day, and the balls of the alpha males. And it’s good.

Setting aside the relentless energy and obsession with work – which Sandberg acknowledges – the book has a lot of universal truths about the respective roles of men and women in society, whether dressed up as equality in western countries, or blatantly unequal in other regions. When it talks about women downgrading their skills (often internally), not going for the big job, dropping out of a promising job because they can’t juggle children and career, it makes a lot of points easily recognizable by any woman who’s worked outside the home in the last 30 years.

Sandberg, I think, is brave to speak up. Although she works in an “enlightened” contemporary behemoth, and has been mentored and promoted by some formidable US figures, she is still taking a risk with “the gender thing”.  She could easily have enjoyed her success and not stuck her head out for her fellow women [oxymoron alert there!] That’s a syndrome she describes in the book as the “Queen Bee”, and is reminiscent of comments made about the late Margaret Thatcher, not an advancer of women despite her iconic status as Britain’s first female prime minister.

So well done Sheryl. (And also for squeezing this book into your hectic schedule, allowing for the input of some heavy-hitting academics and researchers.)

But there is one glaring lacuna in the book – if a lacuna can indeed glare. All right, we’ll call it an omission.

Sandberg devotes a lot of words to the issue of child care, and the importance of finding a life partner who is prepared to share.  Yet there is only mention that I can find of a child-minder. That’s on page where Sandberg recounts the chagrin she felt when her 11-month-old child went to the nanny for comfort, not his mother.  The nanny, incidentally, is not even named, in a book that relentlessly name checks everyone from Gloria Steinem to Marne Levine (a Facebook executive with a similar trajectory to Sandberg).

And that’s symptomatic. At one point Sandberg acknowledges that she and husband Dave Goldberg are very fortunate to be able to hire so much help (she puts it rather obliquely), but otherwise the childminders and nannies, whose input must have been large in the past decade, are just not there.

I noted one rather sour observation on the Lean In Facebook page that Sandberg has a lot of “white privilege to unpack”.

I still think she should be congratulated for the book, but it would be even more empowering to think there would be a sequel, written by one of the legions of women worldwide who work long, difficult hours too – as child-minders for men and women who are out building their sumptuous careers. Maybe entitled “Clean In”?

* Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell, W.H.Allen 2013

Sheryl’s TED talk, which preceded the book.

In Ireland, after you’ve hailed a taxi, the driver who takes you home might be a sex abuser (convicted), or a thief (convicted) or violent (convicted).

Just when we living on the Emerald Isle thought we couldn’t be shocked about the incompetence of the authorities (two and a half years into our economic bailout, each of us paying €14,000 to make up to rich speculators) – along comes the news that 6,000 licensed taxi drivers here have criminal convictions. That’s about one in six.

Here’s the link to the national broadcaster’s story: http://tinyurl.com/a2qq425

Some of them are minor. That’s what the responsible Minister said today.

So, by simple inference, some of them are not.

In fact the mean old Minister is going to remove the licence from people who were convicted of murder, rape or terrorism. What a spoilsport!

Well, excuse me for being old-fashioned, but I would rather not be being driven along a dark road in the middle of nowhere by someone who has done time for a sex attack.

Now you might think that’s getting a bit over-excited. But a few years ago it was revealed that the man in the notorious X case, where a 14-year-old girl sought an abortion after being raped by a middle-aged- neighbour, had on completion of his sentence, taken up life as a cabbie.

Unbelievable. What is wrong with these people? Not the convicted child rapist as much as those who blithely gave him a licence to be alone and in a position of power with individuals at all hours of day or night.

At the time, I also remember, there was some official mumbling that the man “had a common name” so it was difficult to isolate him as the offender.

Give me a break.

Pity that public transport is so dire in Ireland (Dublin ain’t great but better than the provinces), another serious dereliction of duty in times of economic crisis and 15 per cent unemployment. But I guess that is a better option than the risk that your taxi driver might take out a baseball bat if you get a bit mouthy in the back-seat (that actually happened to a family friend).

There are many decent, hard-working men and women driving taxis. So that makes it all the more imperative that their reputations are not blackened by association with very undesirable comrades.

How on earth did the Taxi Regulator ever let this happen? Or the gardai?

As it happens the Taxi Regulator’s office was dissolved two years ago, and the National Transport Authority is now in charge of taxis.

And if you don’t believe the story about the rapist, here’s a link to a contemporary story explaining the “mistake”: Independent story on rapist granted taxi licence

By Angela Long

Times are tough: many of you reading this are worried about the mortgage, the bills, the future. But imagine a nasty situation blows up in your street or estate, so nasty that you have to head for the airport and leave the country. When you arrive in a seemingly civilized destination, you have to tell an inquisitor the original name of Croke Park stadium, before you are allowed stay in the country.*

Absurd? It might be, but this is the equivalent of the type of question considered suitable as a test for people seeking asylum in Ireland. And, if the person cannot answer correctly about their home country, they are deemed to be ‘unreliable’ or mendacious, and their case takes a turn for the worse.

The 5,000 people living in our country today seeking asylum are at the bottom of the pile of concerns for legislators, authorities and the average citizen. But that should not mean they suffer inhumanitarian treatment. And the way they are treated by the Irish ‘system’ is nothing less than racist and cruel.

Innocent people can be put in limbo for three, six, even 10 years while a lethargic civil service dabs occasionally at their cases.

On September 27 a Congolese man who has been awaiting a decision on his refugee application for six years took his life at the refugee hostel in Mosney, Co Meath – a pleasant setting, but a remote location, like most of the hostels.

Suicide is a regular feature of the so-called system whereby Ireland lives up to its obligations under international treaties. Another, deportation, is the target of a new campaign for justice launched by asylum-seekers and their supporters.

 AntiDeportationIreland has just been launched to protest at the regularity and psychological brutality with which deportation orders are executed. (Earlier this year a woman was deported from one asylum camp, even though her child had not yet returned from school. Numerous examples of this type of callous treatment are described by Elena Moreo, who has written a report explaining the grievances behind AntiDeportationIreland.)

There have been hundreds of deportations a year since the late 1990s, with Nigeria the most common country of return. Nigeria is a huge country, of 160 million people, with a wide variety of situations and levels of security. Possibly the Department of Justice and Equality is well-equipped with experts on the country – but a solicitor who advocates for asylum-seekers says he has found much of the knowledge on which decisions are based comes from Google searches.

Deportation is the tip of this iceberg. The length of time it takes the authorities to decide whether applications for refugee status are valid is long – three, four, five years is not uncommon. And while they are waiting, they are not allowed to work. Instead they have to twiddle their thumbs in hostels run by commercial operators and live on €19.10 (nineteen correct) a week. Frustration turns to depression – mental illness is a recurrent risk.

At the launch of AntiDeportationIreland, some asylum-seekers spoke out about their experiences.

“We are less than human,” said one African man. “The way we are treated, it is obvious that we are not considered to have human rights.”

A woman who lives with her three-year-old child in a hostel spoke of the fear of child abuse. “We have been given talks about child protection, but if there is an incident, the offender is just moved to another centre and nothing else is done.” It’s all too reminiscent of the Catholic Church strategy for dealing with priests who were sexual predators. Has Ireland learned nothing?

Some people spoke passionately and angrily at the launch, which was by force of circumstance a semi-private meeting. The asylum-seekers and their supporters want to raise the issue – but know that individuals who speak out could be targeted for retribution, if they are identified.

So one has to be coy about the identities of the people who tell their stories in protest. But there’s no doubt their situation is untenable: take even the simple matter of food.

Food is provided in the hostels where people seeking refugee status are housed. However, the food chosen is often hard for people from African or other countries to eat. An analogy would be an Irish family finding themselves in rural Nigeria and being surprised, unfavourably, by dishes they have never seen and cannot stomach.

John Gerard Cullen, a Leitrim-based solicitor who tries to help asylum-seekers, says the direct-provision hostels are run only for commercial profit and subject to no licensing or review.

Cullen is highly critical of the Refugee Appeals procedure. The default position towards those who appeal a refusal of refugee status is ‘throw them out’. One member of the appeals tribunal has turned down all 140 appeals he heard. As Carol Coulter has pointed out in this paper, Ireland’s rate of refusal of refugee status is far higher than comparable countries.

People who come to a distant country seeking refugee status are unlikely to have done so unless powerfully provoked. As a Sudanese asylum-seeker (six years’ waiting a decision on his status) commented, poor treatment of people in his position is big news in countries such as Australia and Canada. In Ireland, there is barely a whisper.

Because these people have no votes and incur resentment by their very presence in a depressed state, they are ignored. But this avoidance of scrutiny means their treatment can slip below international norms – or even common decency.

 http://antideportationireland.blogspot.ie/

*Jones Road Sports Ground (among other names)

WERE THE Nazis mad? Was Hitler possessed by some demon of the mind, which enabled him to carry a nation with him in his genocidal campaigns?

The answer is often a lazy ‘yes’. Collectively we cannot accept that such inhumanity to fellow creatures could be a sustained campaign for a whole nation.

But Jose Brunner of Tel Aviv University begs to differ: madness would have undermined the project. An incompetent or weak mind could not have sustained the huge undertaking which was the Second World War, and the extermination of whole races of people.

“Why do people say the Nazis were mad?” Brunner challenged a conference on totalitarianism in London. ‘They could not have prosecuted a war of that magnitude, over all those years, if madness was the prevailing condition.”

Likewise, says Brunner, a philosophy professor, the comfortably dismissive notion of Hitler as a madman distinct from society does not wash with his career. “If Hitler had been just mad, he would have lived his life in a garret, would never have been able to do what he did.”

Also director of the German history institute at Tel Aviv, Brunner was addressing a gathering of historians, philosophers and psychoanalysts at the Wellcome Centre in London. They had come together to consider the links between totalitarianism and psychoanalysis.

The Holocaust and the Nazi regime were major themes. The 20^th century history of psychoanalysis – and in particular how it took root in the United States due to the arrival of many Jewish analysts, fleeing the storm in Europe – was largely seen through the prism of the Holocaust. A key organizer, Daniel Pick of Birkbeck College and the British Psychoanalytical Society, has just published a book on the conundrum of the Nazi mind and the motivation for the Third Reich.

 The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind uses, naturally, the case of Rudolf Hess as one key to the thought processes behind Auschwitz. (Hess was the senior Nazi who was captured after he parachuted into Scotland in 1943, and spent the rest of the war at   Spandau prison camp. There was little doubt that he was mentally ill, with even Churchill weighing in to comment that Hess was a “medical not a criminal case”).

Pick’s book also contains some fascinating material assembled by the OSS, one of the precursors of the CIA, who ‘profiled’ leading Nazis from a distance during the war. Some studies were done at closer quarters during the Nuremberg trials.

But were they certifiably mad? You’ll have to read Pick’s conclusions, but there is certain merit in Jose Brunner’s argument.

On the subject of a more contemporary horror, the debate raged both inside and outside the Norwegian court-room where Anders Behring Breivik stood trial for the murder of 77 people in July 2011. An eminent London psychiatrist told this writer, “Breivik is not necessarily mad because of what he did. He just made different choices.” And the court, in the end, decided that Breivik was sane.

There has been a recent manifestation of interest in Hitler, the Nazis and their inner workings. As well as Pick’s work, Laurence Rees’s book and BBC series, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, has just been published. It’s not immediately obvious why this has re-emerged at this time. It is 73 years since the Second World War was under way, although coming up to a tidier 70 years, in December, since the attack on Pearl Harbour which sanctioned the US entry to the conflict.

Whatever the immediate cause, the fascination with the evil of Hitler and his henchmen will remain. The darkness lurks within human beings: we crave to know what causes it to escape.

Links:

http://www.beyondthecouch.org.uk/?unique_name=events&item=60

 http://www.law.tau.ac.il/Eng/?CategoryID=242&ArticleID=171&Page=1

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/?view=usa&ci=97801683

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/01/pursuit-nazi-mind-daniel-pick

It’s the internet, stoopid. And the crumbling of our brains. That, I’ve realised, is why I’m the blight at every enthusiastic mass-praising of Danny Boyle’s Olympics opening ceremony.

“Wasn’t it marvellous!” Brit-crowds crow. The gang was still burbling about it when I was in London last week. Mass adoration always irritates me. Unless I am the recipient.

But the lemming-like rush to declare it was such a fabulous event made me think of Leni Riefenstahl or Cecil B. De Mille and those grandiose cinematic extravaganzas which were calculated to make the poor schmuck in the cheap seats drop his popcorn.

Well, it was technically astonishing, and an awful lot went on. Then you’d expect at least those qualities for your £27 million.

However it was all over the place, and to my mind failed to fulfil three key requirements: was it a good piece of entertainment for the people in the Olympic Stadium?

Was it lucid and compelling for the vast television audience?

Did it act as an introduction to the great sporting event it was to usher in?

Taking the last first, the spectacular obviously meant to knock people’s socks off and be the memorable part of the evening. But the Olympics is about talented and dedicated athletes, not about directorial ego.

Was it lucid for a television audience? Probably more so than for the punters in the arena, who could only see bits and didn’t have the long-lens benefit of the cyber- and TV viewers.

But it was still very bitty – ooh, there’s Kenneth Branagh, now forget about him because the grass is all disappearing, there’s Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web, now there are people on hospital beds and lots of dancing and finally, finally, it stops. It was a mass of ideas and half-ideas stuck together with verve, chutzpah and lots of money.

Had the theme been Berners-Lee’s incalculable gift to society (he’s a Brit after all) and that alone, it would have been clear, clean, and obviously afforded all sorts of spin-offs. You can get anything on the Internet, and a brilliant creative person like Danny Boyle could have chosen from a myriad possibilities. Choice, however, was not the keynote of the night, but rather a philosophy of throw everything in. And that does, in fact, mirror the effect of the internet on our lives, but no clear line was drawn between Berners-Lee’s fleeting appearance and the rest of the show. No, the ambition was bigger than that.

As Charlotte Higgins wrote in The Guardian, “it was bewildering enough, at times, to its domestic audience; abroad it must frequently have been plain incomprehensible.” (Although she went on to explain that it made sense to the British, saving for some stuffy Tories.)

It sounds a bit like the disdain for dreary old ‘facts’ that is being displayed by the Republican presidential campaign in the US. Lord, why should anyone be able to understand this fiesta? That would be commonplace and predictable.

The Olympics opening ceremony ritual has gotten out of hand, with the Greeks and the Chinese much to blame for their ludicrous shows that went on way too long and cost way too much. Maybe Rio will calm things down a little. Maybe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/he-said-she-said-and-the-truth.html?smid=tw-share&_rmoc.semityn.www

Prince Harry might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor the most mature 28-year-old in Britain.

But then, look at his father – and I’m not talking Prince Charles here.

However, surely he is entitled to have fun with friends in private, as long as nobody gets hurt. And if his friends enjoy games of strip pool, whose business is it?

But the whole world, thanks to our ‘responsible’ media outlets as well as those characters categorized by Australian PM Julia Gillard as ‘the nutjobs on the internet’, has been privy to snaps of the prince enjoying himself in Las Vegas, and wearing….a watch.

A lot of  pompous stuff has been voiced about the prince’s responsibilities as a senior member of the royal family – ooh, only the other week he was the ranking royal at the Olympic Games closing ceremony. Granted, you might not like to think of the Queen au naturelle, or Prince Charles. But would that mean their credibility as a dignitary, a focus for national pride? Would that be forever dented if some media platforms had published photos of them in the nip?

For some, every time they see Harry on TV or wherever for the rest of his life, those blurry but genuine late-night shots will come to mind. And he doesn’t look too bad, quite fit, as proper for a young serviceman whose upbringing has featured every advantage – except a mother after the age of  13.

Harry’s only real failing in this silly affair is how he picks his friends.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, the saying goes, but one of Harry’s group wasn’t listening to that voice in her head. She was listening to the much more hearty and confident one telling her she could make big money selling pictures of a naked prince, especially with an attractive lady somewhere in the frame.

The prince’s security staff have come in for some stick on why they didn’t leap in –perhaps rugby tackle the woman? Confiscate her phone, more likely.

And Harry will have to learn more sense than to invite randomers back to his hotel room for jolly japes. Get the boy married, to someone like Katie Price perhaps, and all this would stop…

But the brouhaha all returns to the ethical question, for the media, of whether public figures are entitled to a private life. If you can’t have a private life – or, like Boris Johnson, seem able to ride heedlessly, so to speak, through all embarrassing revelations – then you might go a little bit mad.

Max Mosley must have read the Harry coverage – and looked at the pictures – with interest. The Formula One millionaire continues to campaign against media intrusion after his success in suing the News of the World (remember that?) over whipping up a ‘Nazi sex orgy’ story about him.

But with the red-headed prince it’s fabulous gossip, delicious gossip, and plays to the fake prudery with which the tabloids, in particular, like to address their made-up world.

Links: OK, to be fair, here’s a link to James Hewitt denying he could be Harry’s father.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-139425/Hewitt-I-Harrys-father.html

And here’s one to somebody seeing Lance Armstrong’s disgrace and Harry’s embarrassment as two ends of the same spectrum. Not sure that I get the point – or, in fact, Harry is particularly embarrassed!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/brain-flapping/2012/aug/24/prince-harry-lance-armstrong-psychology?newsfeed=true

When Mississippi politician Todd Akin opened his mouth and let out a scandal, it took a hell storm of media and public ire to make him realize. The US Senate candidate had told a TV interviewer that it was less likely for victims of ‘legitimate rape’ (Akin’s term) to fall pregnant, because a woman’s body would ‘shut down’.

Whatever the crazed Southerner was trying to say, he soon found out that he had given enormous offence to a certain category of people – let’s just call them ‘women’.

So he took the line frequently heard by people whose real problem is that they leave the house in the morning…”I misspoke”.

His full explanation was: “In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it’s clear that I misspoke in this interview, and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for the thousands of women who are raped and abused every year,”.

‘Misspoke’ has gained in popularity in recent years. For example, last May President Obama misspoke when he called a concentration camp in Poland a Polish, rather than a Nazi, ‘death camp’. The White House Press Office was quick to correct that one. But the President doesn’t make mistakes, he misspeaks.

Social media, the broadcast of the masses, gives everyone a chance to say something stupid in public, so reeling back in those unwise off-the-bat comments has become something of an art. Not art at a very high level, it is true. ‘With mature reflection I can now appreciate that I might have misspoken,” intones the politician or public official who has just declared that all women are whores or all Republicans wear terrible ties or four-year-olds should be allowed to drive cars.

What misspoke really means is “God, I’m stupid. Please ignore everything that comes out of my mouth (but vote for me anyway).”

It joins a growing list of new euphemisms, ‘newphemisms’ I like to call them, which are burrowing under the skin of 21st century language.

When announcing sackings from the beleaguered News Corp ‘digital-only’ newspaper, The Daily, in New York, the chief executive chose to say that ’50 people would be released’. As if they would joyfully greet the news that they were about to be freed – from the encumbrance of a salary.

‘Firing’ and ‘sacking’ have long been regarded as terms too distasteful to describe people being parted from their jobs. So ‘severance’, ‘retrenchment’, ‘redundancy’, came into use. But, once everybody had cottoned on to the fact that all they meant was firing and sacking, another emollient term had to be found.

And another usage related to those more, ahem, mature members of the community, is undergoing a painful and protracted birth. This morning I watched a short promotional film from a large international consultancy. The speaker was talking about “the end of the digital beginning”, and how everyone was going to be using tablets and smartphones and so on instead of reading poor old newspapers. He described how ways had to be found to ‘reach out to’ (so much reaching going on these days, there must be a terrible lot of muscle strain) and engaging ‘experienced consumers’. What he meant, of course, was older people, but he wasn’t going to be caught using a nasty term like ‘older’. Nobody wants to be older! Because, nestling in that is the three-letter obscenity, ‘old’.

Garrison Keillor, the US humorist describes his fictional Lake Wobegon as the place where ‘all the women were strong, all the men were good-looking and all the children were above average’. In that sort of scenario everyone over 35 is ‘experienced’, not middle-aged – or worse.

So we must all thrash through these newphemisms, peering intently into them to make out the real meaning. Just make sure you don’t mis-read, misinterpret, or miss the bus. Although perhaps you could tell the boss: “Sorry, I mis-arrived on time.”

P.S. And here’s a link to the whole Akin brouhaha.  The photo is nice – begging for a speech balloon to emanate from the soldier on the left who has been shocked out of peeling his orange by whatever Akin is saying – maybe that it is only in cases of ‘legitimate terrorism’ that people get hurt by a bomb?

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0820/todd-akin-legitimate-rape-comments.html

And, indispensably, The Onion on what Akin really meant…

http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-misspokewhat-i-meant-to-say-is-i-am-dumb-as-dog,29256/

REAL IDIOT’s GUIDE TO THE TOUR DE FRANCE

On the final rest day, I took a breather from watching those lithe bums en masse and the adorable scenery of la belle France, and attempted to work out what the hell is going on.

What is it?

The Tour de France is a very-big-deal cycling race that is held every summer, late June-July.

In France, yeah?

Mostly. They often dip into Spain and Italy because it’s Europe, man, there are countries wherever you look. One year they somehow or other included Ireland and have been to old enemy Angleterre three times – 1974, 1994 and 2007.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Tour_de_France

Cycling? Pedal-pushers?

It’s men only, for the same reasons (as far as I can make out) that the gentlemen’s singles at Wimbledon is men only: they’re goddam stronger than us, girls.

Competitors

There are about  200, and these guys are part-man, part machine. They have to cycle a couple of hundred kilometres every day for three weeks, with just two rest days. They are professional cyclists, sponsored by big companies like Sky, which is in pole position this year. And they’re all in their twenties and thirties – the oldest guy to win, ever, was 36.

Winning…

This is the really tricky bit. I have been surfing net for simple cycling sites (alliteration!) and listening to my husband’s patient explanations for years, and I’m still pretty hazy. However, I think this is right:

• The overall winner is the guy who completes the course in the shortest time. He gets to ride through the last bit, the climax ride through Paris
• The yellow jersey is given, each day, I am told! to the guy who has done the course in the quickest time at that stage. So it is cumulative – on day three, if Pierre Vitesse zooms through the 140 km in an hour, he will still not be the winner unless his times for the three days are still the lowest in the competition. The jersey winner gets to wear it all the next day. Isn’t that cute!
• There is also a king of the mountains, who does the best time in the hilly bits (some of which are savage – think of cycling up the side of the new Shard building in London). This guy gets the spotted jersey.
• There is also a junior winner, the best time under 25, who gets the white jersey (le maillot blanc – everything sounds better in French.)
• There is also a green jersey, for the person who gets the most points for various speedy and good things done. Bit boring so that’s all you need to know.

Team Tactics

When you’re watching, you often wonder about the bunching of guys in the same team colours, and why their star rider is tucked away. It’s all strategy: like chess on bicycles, moving people here so they can advance somewhere else brilliant later. I don’t concern myself with this too much as I am admiring the chateaux – and the derrieres.

The Peloton

 This is the mass of riders – kind of like the lumpen proletariat of the Tour, only they are all aristocrats. There is a breakaway group of small speedsters, then the peloton. I don’t think they have a word for the laggards at the back – les aussi-courants?

 Most Famous T de F winner

For the general public it’s Lance Armstrong, the American who incredibly came back from having testicular cancer to win the Tour SEVEN TIMES (1999 to 2005). Unfortunately, his name has been linked with illegal drug use more recently. Some people do say that it would be impossible to ride the T de F without using some extraordinary substance, ie, it’s not actually humanly possible. It sure ain’t for ordinary mortals.

Big names

This year a British man, Bradley Wiggins, is looking good, riding for the Sky team. Early favorite Cadel Evans, the Aussie who won it last year, is beginning to catch up after a slowish start which wasn’t helped by some so-and-so throwing a packet of tacks all over the course.

This year’s finish

Will be on Sunday July 29, in Paris. This is the finishing-line cycle, and not as exciting to watch as the earlier days when they are sweating up mountains or gliding through beautiful villages.

And the money?

Fancy leaving this out the first time I uploaded! The total prize pool is around €2 million euros, and everyone gets something, even if only €400. The winner gets around half a million which they earn in blood, really. Again, the prize allocation stuff is complicated so here’s a link from some Kiwi experts http://www.roadcycling.co.nz/TourdeFrance/tour-de-france-demystified-part-2.html

I would be very grateful if anyone cares to correct this very simple guide, written to help my own understanding, and with the thought that there are other vague-ohs out there like me. Thanks to John Sills, who helped me out with the yellow jersey! John is also omniscient – and passionate (seriously, correct use of word) – about pop music. He is at  http://tfw5.com

In fact the Wikipedia entry is pretty good but too detailed if you don’t want to do a thesis on competitive cycling.

The official site is too much head-in-the-spokes for me – but there are pictures of the jerseys. http://www.letour.fr/indexTDF_us.html

And here’s an interesting piece on the diet and general superhumanity of the Tour de France riders, from my friends at The Conversation website in Melbourne, Australia. http://tinyurl.com/cxl3f95

PS If anyone wants to read a pleasingly surreal account of man actually merging his atoms with that of a bicycle, there is the work of Irish genius Flann O’Brien, and The Third Policeman (although I don’t think the Tour de France ever gets a mention in this 1940s novel). http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5684946 

MY local gym has many simple pleasures, including dim lighting (no glare on the guilty flab), friendly instructors, and compact TV screens wired up to the running machines. But best of all are the newspapers, arrayed in the old-fashioned way on wooden sticks, available for a good read on the comfy sofas in the little-used sitting room.

I usually pop in for a quick flick through The Irish Times – only for five, maybe 10 minutes. And it’s struck me how valuable this scanning session is for finding out what is going on in the society, and what’s coming up (or I missed). And yes, I am too poor to spend the couple of euro every day.

Yet I spend much of my day reading news or written studies of one sort or another, principally on screen.

The sensory ease and facility with which we flick through a newspaper is something that is being lost in the rush to digital. Personally, I think the digital move is inevitable and unstoppable. But I do believe – hope? – that there will be a remnant of written news material in the future. Perhaps this will take the same form as high-quality editions of hardbacks. Some people are prepared to pay for quality binding, good paper, intelligently-chosen fonts, and an appealing cover design. So there might be a parallel in news product, of newspapers surviving in printed form and with high-quality content and design.  Market forces will decide.

In the meantime, I get a happy warm feeling from the flick through the paper. This activity is like a bird flying from branch to branch, alighting where it sees something of interest or a tasty morsel. I’ll see an article by a favourite columnist, some surprising news from overseas, or a report of an upcoming conference I want to attend.

Somehow, this effect is not replicated on the internet. Surfing never quite did it., perhaps because those virtual waves can carry you too far from where you started.  Try to check out what play is on at the local theatre, and you could end up deep in a words-and-graphics explantion of fracking. It’s all information, Jim, but not as we used to know it.

News websites do their very best to show the ‘visitor’ the riches of the offerings they hold, a mouse click or two away. Hence we have the busy-busy-busy format of the successful sites such as the Huffington Post and mailonline.co.uk. Loads of headlines, taster paragraphs, some pictures, a barrage of voices and stories. But this can be too much at once (although admittedly those sites are the big successes in terms of page visitors). But do those page visitors walk away from the computer feeling they have checked out what’s happening in the world today, and that their trusted news provider has given them a fair summary?

Hail of hyperlinks and all, I don’t really think so.