Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Sean Cooke, (Anniv).
11.00: David Donovan Coyle, (Anniv).
6.30: John Mannion, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

It was a bad week for cheaters and frauds! Those ads for L'Oreal mascara had Penelope Cruz walking around sporting eyelashes like two giant squids. This magic potion will make your eyelashes 60 per cent longer than they are at present! But those spoilsports, the Advertising Standards Authority, intervened to say that Penelope's eyelashes had once functioned as rats' tails. Their dimensions had nothing to do with mascara! Future ads would have to make this clear.

The BBC was fined £50,000 and apologised after a visiting child posed as Blue Peter competition winner on BBC One last November. Similar skeletons began to tumble out of the cupboards of other TV channels. In September, viewers of the children's show TMI were led to believe that a member of the audience had won a competition. But it turned out to be a member of the production crew. Fake callers were phoning in the names of fake winners of fake prizes! This was unreality TV at its best.

But First Prize for 'Cheat of the Week' must go to the Tour de France. Followers of the sport reeled this week from the news that race leader Michael Rasmussen had been kicked out of the race for cheating. For good measure, the pre-race favourite Alexandre Vinokourov was also expelled because of positive drug tests. The France Soir newspaper ran a mock death notice for the Tour de France on its cover. It said the Tour died Thursday "at age 104, after a long illness."

French philosopher Roland Barthes published a short essay, "The Tour de France as Epic" in 1957. He saw the Tour as a symbolic ordeal which created a caste of heroes and villains.

Indeed, the sheer intensity of the riders' suffering elevates them to the pantheon of martyrs. Here they are in touch with supernatural forces. This 'divine rub' makes exceptional performances possible. Barthes dubbed this 'divine' burst of energy "The Jump": "This is a veritable electric influx which erratically possesses certain racers beloved of the gods which causes them to accomplish superhuman feats." But even then he recognised that "the jump" also had a hideous parody: "To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious as trying to imitate God. It is stealing from God the privilege of the spark." And God, he warns, will have His revenge on the dopers.

But this divine revenge, in the shape of poisoned bodies, has been ineffective. Where the prize is enormous, participants will take great risks. And, thanks to sponsorship, the prizes today are enormous. If the risk includes drugs, so be it, writes physician Hans Halter: "No one can expect that these extreme athletes, tortured by tropical heat and freezing cold, by rain and storm, should renounce all of the palliatives that are available to them."

But, when healthy skepticism gives way to a creeping cynicism, the first casualty is trust. Trust is the glue that binds the producer to the consumer, spectator to participant. If the masses no longer believe what they are seeing, then they - and the sponsors - will walk. For the sake of true sportsmanship, this must happen. This pharmacy on wheels has run its course.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Some Interest

A Vicious Cycle

Childline Online

Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's Childline Online is setting up a unit in Galway and are recruiting volunteers (aged18+) to give 4 hours a week to offer support to young people via text and email.

Unfortunately, this is now an area of great need. We really do need volunteers to join us. Contact Brighid Connolly 091 752387 or email childlineonlinegalway@gmail.com.

Galloping Horses

Oh, this is the week when no rhymster may rhyme
On the joy of the bush or the ills of the time,
Nor pour out his soul in delectable rhythm
Of women and wine and the lure they have with 'em,
Nor pen philosophic if foolish discourses,
Because of the fury of galloping horses.

This is the week for the apotheosis
Of Horse in his glory, from tail to proboscis.
That curious quadrupled, proud and aloof,
That holds all the land under thrall of his hoof.
All creeds and conditions, all factions and forces,
All, all must give way to the galloping horses.
Galloping, galloping -- sinner and saint
March to the metre, releasing restraint.

If it isn't the Cup it's the Oaks or the Steeple
That wraps in its magic the minds of the people.
Whether they seek it for profit or pleasure,
They all, willy-nilly, must dance to the measure.
The mood of the moment in all men endorses
The glamorous game and the galloping horses --
Galloping horses -- jockeys and courses --
They gallop, we gallop with galloping horses.

-C.J. Dennis

Money on the Nose!

Belgium's Trappist monks have turned their beer into world-famous brews, but the skill doesn't seem to have been passed to their cloistered sister. Trappist nuns in the village of Brecht produce a pleasant variety of natural soaps and shampoos. The 33 nuns have failed, however, to place their products beyond a small circle of shops in other convents or religious goods stores.

"Marketing is our weak point" says Sr Katharina, head of the soap factory. "After all, we are an enclosed convent. In principle, that means we never go outside our walls. And we don't have sales people who go to praise our products to shops and customers."

They wouldn't have to go far to get advice - Brecht is only about 10 km from the Trappist monastery at Westmalle, which produces thousands of bottles of its extra-strong beer every day. The nuns say that they drink the dark brew at lunch and call the monks their brothers. But dropping by to get a few marketing tips is not exactly the Trappist way to do things.

-From The Tablet, 28 July 2007.

Valid HTML 4.01 Strict