How to make a perfect title about blogging about your nipples, wonder the publishers

What comes out if you throw a bucket of paint down the stairs? Do you expect it to be a beatiful painting or a symphony compared to a deaf artist like Beethoven? It could be either, at least if you're into John Cage. That is the feeling when I sometimes get when reading the so called poetry which I wrote when I was just starting to know what it feels like to be a teenager.

To make art, there has to be a purpose for it, an intention that makes you throw the bucket down the stairs. Otherwise is just senseless violence against either the bucket or the stairs. That is also why I love to read Steve Buttry's diary. He is a professional journalist, who also has the tendency to read everything he writes just to doublecheck his Craig's list. That kind of a journalism is dying, because everywhere, where journalists are preserved as the national heroes of the truth (or money, because in every country there is also approved the commentary against the mainstream journalism), an and journalists are to be expected to bulletwrite, bulletread, doublebullet-timeread, and go back in time again and read their to-be articles before they are already released. Common saying is that internet is killing journalism.

Is it?

I know there is some kind of a crisis going on in publishing houses. And it's not because there aren't good journalists in the world. It's because publishers don't get enough money to pay for journalists who can make money for publishers. The crisis is real. Specially when most papers do a lot of their income by advertising. But for some reason the big game is in the daily papers, even though there are journalists in papers which come out only once a month or so, and their journalists are being paid about the same, unless they work for BBC or FOX NEWS. Latter being, of course, the dream job of a playwright. 

Coming back to Buttry. He is a professional, who also does his blog because of, as I believe, enthusiasm (and to make a brand of himself, but that's what bloggers do) for good, written English, which is a skill I am trying to (still) learn. 

My points is that, even when you're an amateur blogger, you can always do better than just throwing your keyboard down the stairs when you actually have something to say about blogging.

I don't. Read Steve Buttry.

Local not-so-proud

Every city, town and metropolis has their own distinctive landmarks of a sort, where to plan meetings. In Dublin centre, they have this thing called The Spire and for 4 million euroes Dublin got their share of local people sharing their opinions. International public may be aware of the statue as the tallest sculpture in the world, but locals sometimes define it as "The Needle Statue Of The Drug Capital Of The World", "Far From Grand", "Just The Needle" and they also use some other names that you shouldn't use for someone or something you like.

If you want to make international comparisons, you should take The Eiffel Tower as a competition. Eiffel Tower was meant to be the highest building in the world and stay that way forever. The Spire had similar meanings when they started building the tallest sculpture in the world in a city of documented history close to 2000 years.

Also Eiffel Tower is a world famous building with top engineering involved. The Spire may have some of that. Considering that 21st century's engineering is prone to be hidden away from plain sight, The Spire may have had just wrong timing. It has a mass dampener to counteract the sway and the stainless steel is modified to reflect light smoothly, but you cannot actually see the technology. Oh, and The Spire had something to do polishing the central too.

O'Connell street, where the Spire is located, had trees old as century harvested, local shops were prohibited to use plastic signs (more like anything regarded as a cheap looking) to attract customers and the traffic lanes we're simplified.

The Spire was sold to the great public as a self-cleaning sculpture, but for some reason it has 200 000 euro maintenance budget. But it is not unusual that politicians may redefine the meaning of words. The Spire was self-cleaning before it was built and afterwards it was just illogical to believe the stainless steel tourist attraction would clean itself (quote is from nowpublic.com's article "Cleaning The World's Tallest Sculpture Is An Expensive Process").

Dublin theatre festival offers like 500 shows in a month

For being credited as a playwright in Finland for several occasions, I'm pretty excited about the Dublin Theatre festival.  I consider myself a drama enthusiast with a skill to sense comedy behind even the darkest play, even if you actually take in count that I have written few scripts which have made their way on stage with actual actors yelling lines wrought by me. For that reason I cannot actually wait for the festival to begin.

If this year is anything close to previous year, we will be seeing more than 500 performances on a couple of dozen venues in a timeframe of less than a month. That's like 30 shows a day.

Unsure what they will play there and what my budget will be, I decided that if I would work for the festival as a volunteer or as a trainee (fancier name for a worker who doesn't get paid) I could probably get free tickets. I have previously volunteered at Helsinki International Film Festival (Rakkautta ja anarkiaa) in a very simple job of guiding people in cinemas and making sure that people have right tickets to right shows. If it would be that simple, but this year it probably ain't. Dublin theatre festival's homepage sites that "The closing date for seasonal positions has passed."

Next year, if I still live in Dublin, I'll be prepared for applying long before the summer. Perhaps they could use a languagespecialist for finnish tourists?