• What’s with the hand gestures lads?
  Cowen:
  
  Sarkozy:
  
  Creative Ireland on Cowen.
  Twenty Major on Sarkozy.

• www.rosannadavison.co.uk; the official site of yes-you-would lovely girl Rosanna Davison.
• Nice Temple Bar menu shenanigans.
• Are VisitBritain.com robbing Irish Tourists?
• www.irishhandstamps.com - advertise on peoples hands. PR whiz Piaras Kelly talks about it here. With thanks to Le Craic.
• Europe to crack down on phone services, like subscription services, ring tone providers, and other businesses who if I ever meet the owners of, I would like to punch them in the face.
• An Irish startup are behind Muzo TV:This is an ad-supported streaming music video site which enables artists, labels, festivals, venues, fans and any other music content owner to broadcast their music TV on the web, “legally” and at no cost. Pointless youtube clone or much more? Techcrunch UK article. www.muzu.tv.
• If Jesus took photos, they wouldn’t be as good as Red Mum’s: St. Michaels Estate.
• Boards.ie on the survey that says Ireland has the lowest quality of life in the EU.
• More Oxegen fun: Crazy ass bitch climbing a support tower of the Pet Sounds Tent during MGMT’s performance which meant it was stopped temporarily:
  
  (vid via My Little Piebald, subscribe: mylittlepiebald@gmail.com ).

Reversed baldness sounds odd.

Nadine Coyle looks well.

And pictured above, is the Chinese restaurant in Bray, Co. Wicklow with an appropriate name.

Photo owned by bretthpatrick (cc)

Fair play to RTÉ on St. Patricks Day. It can’t be easy hoisting a camera in the face of the lovely public and asking them what they think on the one day where they are most likely to say something ridiculous. And they’ve gone the extra mile, with www.rte.ie/stpatricks, where you can view all their reports from all their parades around the country. -10 points for using real player, but hey at least they got the media up there.

The level of political comment filtering through to the parades was great to see, with floats of pharmacists beating up Mary Harney and several Taoiseach’s throwing brown envelopes into the crowds. It is funny too, how we all laugh along with it, and the man in charge ignores it all and keeps on trucking. Stall the Ball has some related pictures on this theme. (found via Captain Mulley.)

The Chancer has a Paddys day related caption competition today.

Fantastic photos of the better floats in the Dublin parade on this flickr photo set.

Every time an Irish lad goes to a foreign country, they comment on how beautiful the women are there, and how depressing it is on their return. Enter IrishBabes.net to piss all over that particular idea (Or does it?).

The domain is registered to an Irish guy. They have a bebo page too. There doesn’t seem to be any particular business model to it, just bog-standard what-the-internet-was-designed-for gallery posting. That is unless, as the bebo page implies, there is a print edition:

We’re looking out for the hottest babes from the Emerald Isle for online and future print editions of IRISH BABES .net If you think you sizzle then please get in touch

I sizzle. Do you sizzle?

Damien Mulley made a post yesterday asking for a wordpress (a really good blogging platform - it powers Jazz Biscuit too) plugin that would allow him to find creative commons licensed images and upload them to his blog.

After WikiCraic, I thought why not? So after a few hours yesterday I had BlogCCSearch. (The entertaining names part of my brain takes Sunday off.)

It uses the flickr api to do a search for photos, but only returns those licensed with the attribution licence type. [ More info on flickr & creative commons licences. ]

Once it returns the little thumbnails of the search results, you can click on an image and it’ll provide you with embed code for sticking the image on your blog and also a preview so you can see what the image you chose will look like at the size you picked.

It’s written in PHP so I was able to use the fantastic phpFlickr, a php class that handles all the XML parsing and communication with the actual API.

It’s hacky and it was literally thrown together, but so what. It’s fun!