I rather naively believed that the barrier free tollling system on the M50 was something that thought had gone into.

Then I went to the eflowsystem to see if I could make a payment despite the fact that I have been no where near the M50 in the last 24 hours. The e-flow website WARNS US that we only have until 2000hrs on the day following our tolling to make payment. I imagined that the payment system would be connected to an actual live database of recorded registration numbers. I imagined that If I inputted my registration number, a simple query to the database of payments outstanding for the previous day’s twenty for hour period would be made. Something simple, like um, “SELECT car_reg from TRAVELLEDACROSSBRIDGE_YESTERDAY where car_reg equals “08-D-12345″.
When the query was executed and ZERO ROWS RETURNED was the database response, then I imagined that the website would tell me “I’m sorry, our records show you were not on the M50 yesterday, you owe no money.Go away and stop wasting our processor time and bandwitdth.”

If they can’t even do something as basic as have a real live system, why would I trust them with pre-registering my details? Who are the muppets who developed this website? How much did it cost the tax payer? What happens if you make a payment but haven’t made a journey? Does a “paid in advance” system exist? I doubt that too. So, you don’t pay because you know you already paid. Do you then get a penalty notice? I wonder should I conduct that experiment. What really pisses me off is the lack of basic validation on this website. 08D999999 is apparently a valid car registration also. What happens if you accidentally type in the incorrect plate number and pay before you notice? Hello? Can we please have some validation. Can we please have a proper system. One where we go on to make payment. The record of your journey is retrieved from the journeys owing money table and deleted and moved on the journeys paid for table in real time.

I never really thought about Jerry Springer and where he came from. I had no idea he was of Jewish extraction however, his parents fled to England and later to the States from Germany. Berlin was the last city they lived in there.

The BBC recently featured him on their “Who do you think you are” series.

The story he tells about why his father never wanted to own his own shop and preferred to be a sales man running his business from his car is particularly poignant. His questioning of “what were these people thinking?” (i.e. the soldiers herding people onto trains to begin their journey to extermination) also gives pause for thought. What were the soldiers thinking? Were they really so terrified and brainwashed? A soldier has to take an order. That is the excuse. But, that assumes no one has a mroral compass of their own. They rounded up civilians. Why do you wage war on civilians? I became acutely aware of the Jewish suffering in WWII when I lived in Israel. History and wars and holocaust didn’t really get mentioned in primary school, only in secondary history text books. I went to Israel when I was still in primary school, so my holocaust education was quite comprehensive. There are many museums in Israel, the first one I visited was less that ten kilometers from our home. Every time I hear individual stories (even in a documentary about Jerry Springer) my heart breaks. I can’t imagine the suffering. Imagine having your business closed down, being told you can’t own a pet, being made to move into a ghetto, being forbidden from training to be a doctor (as an example), those horrors were difficult enough. What rational person would have imagined that it would have ended with concentration camps, mass murder, theft of assets, separation of families, annihilation of a whole people. I cry when I think about it. It’s the stuff of nightmarees. I still can’t understand how. In Israel, I failed to understand, the concentration and extermination camps we visited on a journey through Europe on our way home from Israel underlined the lack of understanding. Places that were names in exhibitions were suddenly real. How did people not speak up? If you saw your neighbours of forty years being dragged away by secret police, or being evicted because they were Jewish, would you really be such a coward that you turn your back on them? I hope to think I would not turn my back. I hope to think I would have said “this is wrong, you are wrong” and lived with the consequences of that particular action. Maybe in another time, in another place, I would have been a victim of such crimes. I have a surname that is a common Jewish name in certain places. Not here, in Ireland, but who is to say ancestors who came to Ireland were not originally Jewish?

Watching John Kelly’s, “The View” this evening, or yesterday evening, I was struck by one thing in particular. The programme in question reviewed the following:

Novelist John Connolly, columnist Roisin Ingle and journalist Richard Delevan will join John Kelly to review TV drama ‘Raw’, Chris Binchy’s novel ‘Open-Handed’, Icelandic film ‘Jar City’, and David Godbold’s exhibition ‘Art, Drugs and Prayer’ (Kerlin Gallery, Dublin).

A range of film, novel, art and a television programme. I’m with Roisin Ingle on Raw, cos I love it. I have the DVD recorder set to record it. I really don’t give a toss about whether the ATM on O’Connell street is on the way from Rathmines to the restaurant (I think Develan complained about this). Richard Develan left me scratching my head. Other members of the panel seemed to express something positive about all of the items for review. Develan dismissed practically everything, unless I was not paying close enough attention to the negativity coming out of his mouth to notice anything positive. I know he is American, a native New Yorker at that, although whether that is actually somewhere like Manhattan (probably more culturally sensitive than say, Dunkirk) or Upstate New York, a melting pot of culture I am sure, remains to be seen.

What I found interesting about the view was the cultural differnce. Irish people like to find something that they like and focus on that. Slating peoples’ endeavours is a bit pointless if they’ve put their heart and soul into it. I do believe Develan used the term “acid” in describing the paintings of David Godbold, which I found so interesting on the television screen, that I think I’d like to go to the exhibition. I dunno. Devalan seemed bored by Irish (and Icelandic and English in the case of Godbold) culture. At least the culture on offer had something going for it. Unlike, say the”HIGH RES” pictures Develan thinks we might be interested in on his website. Seriously, how vain is that? High res photos? Why? For the billboards? Is he that famous he has to provide them without demand? Are high res photos (that most normal egos would hide, because high res photos serve only to illustrate flaws) symtomatic of an underlying vanity and self belief that they are shit hot and shit handsome and they could do better than any art/film/novel up for review. (Not)). He seemed outnumbered three to one in his belief that every item reviewed had no redeeming feature. Which is what started my chain of thought about what was it that was terrible about everything? Is he of the opinion that it was all so terrible and he could do better if it was him? I always think about that when looking at art or watching a film or reading a novel. Sometimes it’s crap, but I ask myself - were you good enough to make a film, produce a novel, have a solo exhibition accepted? The answer is no. So, maybe i think something is not so good, but I remember that it’s not something I have ever achieved. Develan may be a successful journalist, but I hope he manages to have something published, or produces a solo exhibition or makes a film so I can slate him on my insignificant blog the way he slated others. Others who did not seem to deserve it.