The days of Northern Ireland with a Unionist majority are drawing to a close. Elections for the past 30 years show one thing and one thing only - the end is nigh. The number of votes that Unionism has in excess of Nationalism has shrunk from 272,000 in 1973 to 55,000 in 2005. Click on the image for a full and readable version. The data used to compile this graph was obtained from Nicholas Whyte’s excellent Northern Ireland Elections site.
A couple of months back my brother forwarded me a link to what is one of the funniest youtube video I have ever seen Dublin Rap Song. It is a comedic rap between two Dubliners from the “posh” Southside and the “working class” Northside. I’ve shown it to several of my american friends and had to translate the accent for them before they could appreciate the pure brilliance of this piece. Someone on the youtube site requested the lyrics but youtube claims that comments have a limit of 500 chars and the lyrics are about 2500 chars. I tried cutting the lyrics up into 500 char bites but youtube rejected those as being too long too. So here in all it’s glory is almost all of the lyrics - there are couple of bits I couldn’t make out for sure and probably some other errors.
Without further ado the lyrics, enjoy:
yo yo yo
anto story by
(ye ready, ye ready)
(ye fucking ready?)
my fro can gro i know
so gerrup outta dat
dutch gold i’m told is old
so gerrup outta dat
five blokes, ???, no joke
so gerrup outta dat
drinkin, boozin, suburuzin is what i do
so gerrup outta dat
12 years of school is a load of bollix
12 minutes to rob me new car’s hydralics
rippin down the motorway looking for mullingar
stopped for a drink but ended up with a bar
munchin and cruisin, smoking and boozin
fucked off me face reminiscin of susan
i’m quite an ugly prick
so i’m not one for choosen
beggers can’t be choosers
so i take what i can get
coulda been my bird with a 20 stone ???
with a set so big they’d smother you to death
i once left a granny with a dirty saggy fanny
she told me she was thirty and her first name was annie
she gave woppah head cuz she took her teeth out
but the dirtiest thing was her feet in me mouth
toenails orange and crooked as fuck
to trust my luck me dick’d get stuck
an unlucky bastard
a fucking disaster
but at the drinking
i’m the master
blackcurrent vodka, malibu and coke
nod your heads and just toke on your smoke
deseigner cloths, drama shows, bravo
gerrup outta dat
vienetta, polo sweaters, playing checkers
gerrup outta dat
my best friend wears ralph lauren and drives a benz
gerrup outta dat
private yachts, lots of dosh
but i’m not posh
gerrup outta dat
4 years at blackwork, then i went to clongowes
i’m smoking pot but it’s not as if my mom knows
went to morocco, daddy bought me bongos
now i drink strongbow and snort coke up my long nose
my bird is always on a beach in a bikini
while i’m making a pot of tea with a panini
i hope that one day i’ll lose my virginity
just year i graduated from trinity
i thought vinnie jones was great in lock stock
i wish i knew a bloke like that from foxrock
fresh out of D4, money i see more
i like to go shopping with my main man igor
we go to marks & spencers, park the cars
and whip out mom and dad’s barclay cards
it’s like riding a bike or flying a kite
and i’m a pure bred south sider for life, roysh
that’s right
shut your mouth you fuckin eejit
you go back to where ever you came from you, you petty commoner
get away with all your fucking money,
the state of ye fucking, ye fucking idiot ye
well i drive nicer cars and wear nicer clothes than you
yeah well i rob cars, ye bollix
Reading through my Irish News email (courtesy of Jay Dooling) I came across this Belfast Telegraph article discussing road traffic safety in Ireland (Republic Roads Are Amongst The Most Deadly In Europe). The Unionist Pravda is taking these tragic events are trying to spin an anti-Republic line.
A survey by the RAC Foundation found that drivers from
Northern Ireland were twice as likely to have a fatal car
crash in the Republic as at home.
While the overall UK1 per capita death rate is two-thirds that of the Republic of Ireland, Northern Irelands’ is right up there with the Republic. Someone should send them a calculator and then instructions on long division.
| The South | The North | |
|---|---|---|
| Population | 4,234,925 | 1,685,267 |
| Fatalities 2005 | 396 | 135 |
| Per 100,000 | 9.35 | 8.01 |
The MIT software development group Simile have created several interesting semantic web applications of which their Timeline javascript application recently caught my eye. I am very interested in alternate representations of data that yield a more holistic overview allowing the detection of patterns and relationships that are not easily visualised in flat text tables and the various bar/pie charts that hithertofore have been the gold standard. I want to be able to navigate the data in a manner akin to a mini-interweb, observe the types and nature of the relationships between related and disparate data sets but I get way ahead of myself.
Of course, one really needs sets of data to get realise this goal and boy is garnering that data tedious - as illustrated by the abandonment of my CDDB project soon after code completion.
Thankfully there are many people out there generating datasets of interest and making them available. One of those is a list of Orange Hall attacks during the course of The Troubles that Fair Deal a blogger from Slugger O’Toole has compiled. I have taken this database and ported it to Simile’s Timeline application Timeline of Orange Hall attacks.