t’d be nice to be able to start the new year on positive note. So here it is: doooooooooooh.

And here’s another one: Meeeeeeeeeeee.
And another: Sooooooooooooo
And finally, a rare example of what we would all like to get the world to sing in:
Doooooooooooo
Soooooooooooo
Meeeeeeeeeeeee
Doooooooooooo
There you are. Perfect harmony at the stroke of a keyboard. They said it couldn’t be done. I hope that you have been reading this in full surround-sound for maximum effect.

You know I really did want to come over all bouncy and cheerful today. This, after all, is hotpress’ 30th Anniversary year and we have lots of exciting things planned by way of celebration both before and after what will be our official anniversary issue in June.
By way of a small but extremely appetising taster, this first hotpress of the new year features an Irish exclusive that we’ve been working on for some time: an interview by hotpress Assistant Editor Stuart Clark with Simpsons writer and sometime Executive Producer Mike Scully – the man who is currently putting the finishing touches to what promises to be one of the blockbusters of the year, Simpsons: The Movie, which is scheduled for release in July.
In anticipation, we’ve turned this issue into a bit of a Simpsons-fest with a variety of ne’er do well rock’n’rollers, comedy writers and media types expounding on their favourite Simpsons’ episodes characters and lines. And Mike Scully himself picks his top ten Simpsons jokes: read them and weep.
As Mario Rosenstock, of Gift Grub fame says: “It’s not just one of the best comedies, it’s one of the best TV programmes ever.” And so, it seems like a good way to start our anniversary year, to get others to join us in paying eloquent tribute to what is an example of popular culture at its finest, the kind of thing hotpress has always flown the flag for.
Also on the anniversary front, the entries have been pouring in for All Write Now, the hotpress wriiting competition for students, which is being run in association with Vodafone. Full details of the competition – there are separate sections for sixth Years and for Third Level students – are to be found on pages 38 and 39 inside. If you are thinking of entering, remember that the closing date is January 29, 2007.
Now, get writing…
What’s good is this: 2007 is an election year. Already you can smell the fear as politicians line up once more to put themselves at the mercy of the electorate. By any standards, it’s a bizarre way to make a living. But you can only have so much sympathy. On the one hand, the country is awash with money. On the other, so many of our essential services are in a mess. Someone has to be held accountable – and the general election at least provides us all with an opportunity to let those who are putting themselves forward as being capable of running the country know what their priorities really should be.
There’ll doubtless be a bit of fun to be had along the way, as the scrabble for seats gets going in earnest. Is there anybody out there with anything new to say? Is there anyone with a vision for Ireland that will offer even a half realistic hope of addressing the deeply rooted problems of educational and social disadvantage, illiteracy, poverty and alienation that are at the root of what is increasingly being criminalised as anti-social behaviour?
Is anyone going to offer a different way of addressing the issue of crime, as an alternative to the cynical drift towards tougher policing and harsher sentences that are being advocated by all of the major political parties?
Is anyone going to take a stand against the steady, stealthy erosion of civil liberties that has been a mark of political and security developments in the US, the UK, Ireland and Europe since the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001? We’ll keep you posted.
What’s bad… well, there’s so much that’d give you heart-burn, it’d be impossible even to begin to catalogue it all. But the grotesque murder of Saddam Hussein on New Year’s Eve offered a thoroughly sickening start to 2007.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. He was responsible for a litany of appalling atrocities. It would be impossible for anyone in Ireland or the UK or the US, looking objectively at what he represented, to support him in any way. Or so you’d have thought.
But that is precisely what the US government did, when it supplied – or authorised the supply of – the money and the weapons, including chemical weapons, with which Saddam butchered people. They were complicit in the genocide he and his henchmen visited on the Kurds. They were complicit in the devastation suffered by Iran in the war he waged on that country.
Now they are complicit in the nasty, sordid example of victor’s justice that his sham trial and squalid execution represent – all the better to ensure that he can never tell the truth about how he was aided and abetted in enforcing his brutal regime by those who ultimately hunted him down.
Of course neither George Bush nor Donald Rumsfeld will ever have to stand trial for the atrocities they have committed in Iraq and elsewhere. And as for Tony Blair – what a pathetic figure he cuts now, unable to cleanse the butcher’s blood from his hands, as he desperately tries to engineer things so that he can leave the stage with people shouting for more.
It’s the rancid hypocrisy of it all that’d make you retch. Not a good way to start the new year at all. But we’ll recover. A bit of musical therapy might be a good way to start.
Doooooooooooh.
(Simpsons pic: The Simpsons TM and © 2007 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.)