The Game
A special FX test shoot that turned itself into a mini short, by good friend and partner-in-crime at Kilkenny Music and My Music, Ross Costigan and featuring another partner-in-crime, Alan Dawson.
Hopefully some of those scripts he talks about come to light soon. Better be a part in there for me. Or you’re fired.
Go enjoy The Game.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date with kenmc.com. Maybe some of my earlier posts will interest you too! Thanks for visiting kenmc.com!
Roaming Cap In Play Today
All of a sudden it seems that I’ve come from a family who like to travel a lot. I’ve managed to get away twice this year, most recently to Portugal at the end of the May. My brother has just returned from there. My grandparents are just back from Poland. One cousin has just left for France for the summer while my parents are currently driving around Italy until the middle of the month.
I’ve a sneaking feeling they’ll not have brought my MAXroam sim but if they do get to catch up with the blog today, they’ll be happy to read (as will a lot of people) that the new cap on roaming charges comes into play from today including
- Receiving a call capped at 19c p/m
- Making a call capped at 43c p/m
- Sending a text capped at 11c p/m
Whatever about the call charges, I’d certainly be happy with the reduction of the text charges as (at least in Europe) I would tend to rely a lot on them for the usual light communication chit-chat (”there in a minute” etc.). That said, unless anything changes at the last minute or I take a notion, the next stint away within the EU will be Paris next May.
You can read more on The Guardian’s site, with details of pricing in UK sterling.
Kilkenny Open Coffee July - Change Of Venue
While we normally reside in the inner sanctum of the Kilkenny Cafe at Market Cross, this month’s Open Coffee meetup in Kilkenny will take place at the Rivercourt Hotel on John Street in Kilkenny. The hotel is located on the John Street side of John’s Bridge, looking onto Kilkenny Castle.
With London supposedly entering into a heatwave and the temperatures here over the past week, and again this morning, indicating the possibility of sunny weather this Wednesday, we’re aiming to meet up in the outdoor area of the hotel with plenty of seating available overlooking the river.
I’m not sure myself whether wi-fi access will extend to the outdoor seating but no doubt there’ll be a few laptops and mobile broadband connections available if you’re truly stuck. Kick-off is 11:30am as always.
KilkennyOpenCoffee.com is currently in development and will be used for announcements like this in the future along with providing information on those who attend, where to find us etc.
My Dear Rosencrantz
My evenings have been occupied this past week with rehearsals for two stage productions. Next month I’ll be stepping onto the Watergate stage in Kilkenny as Eddy in Willy Russell’s Stags And Hens. This weekend, however, is in complete contrast as I, along with some of my fellow deviants, stage a performance called Shakespeare In Bits as part of the Shakespeare In The House festival in Kilkenny.
The festival, now in its second year, sees Dreamstuff Youth Theatre (the theatre wing of Young Irish Film Makers) perform abridged versions of Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy Of Errors. Cartoon Saloon will be on hand to provide a Shakespearean animation workshop, there’s a 60-second Shakespeare film competition and then there’s our programme, which certain deviates from the norm.
As part of Shakespeare In Bits were bringing performances from The Tempest, extracts from The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare, a monologue or two from Hamlet, The New Yorker’s take on the recent Christian Bale rant (transformed to Shakespearean times), Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (above), culminating in a sonnet-off akin to the rap battles of 8-Mile.
Each day starts around 11am (this Saturday and Sunday) and it all takes place in Rothe House on Parliament Street, Kilkenny. Admission is free.
For the moment, however, the sun seems to have vacated Kilkenny completely, but hopefully the rain will disappear to make way for the sun once more.
Win A Copy Of The Lions Mane ‘Strands’ By Commenting
The Lions Mane, one of Kilkenny’s rising progressive rock acts, released their debut album ‘Strands‘ online last Friday. The 12-track album is available to buy here for just €10. If you like what you hear in the preview above you might also like to hear that I’ve got two copies of the album, digitally, to give away.
To win, all you’ve got to do is leave a comment here tell me you want a copy of the album.
Simple as that.
Competition closes 4pm on Friday and winners will be announced shortly afterwards and sent their copies of the album (at 320kb MP3).
The Adventure of The Hidden Microfilm
Saturday night was spent in the company of the Vultures cast and crew in Kilkenny as a select bunch of us hit one of Kilkenny’s taverns for the premiere of the latest installment of the Vultures webcom, The Adventure of The Hidden Microfilm. Watch it above via Blip.tv or check out VulturesPI.com.
The Pinkertons are closing in on the increasingly frazzled and paranoid detectives of V.P.I. when a mysterious fugitive shows up on their door. The fugitive has stolen a microfilm from the Pinkertons. This fugitive is in possession of a secret microfilm belonging to the rival Pinkerton agency. Except he doesn’t know exactly where he put it. Although he suspects it might be inside him. And it could be a floppy disk or a USB key either. He’s really not sure. Can V.P.I. strike a blow to the Pinkertons before they’ve even opened? How do they get the microfilm from the fugitive? And really, who is this Natalie Blaise we keep hearing about?
Vultures, written & directed by John Morton & Paddy Dunne, is the story of three private detectives who run a small scale private investigation agency in small town Ireland. The moderately successful business is called Vulture Private Investigations and specialises in dealing with divorce cases, fraud, missing persons, animals and plants and occasionally, just occasionally, they’ll be served up something that approximates a mystery.
Ross, as director, has more here.
Dopplehammer Trailer
This one was screened before the Vultures Episode 5 premiere last night in Kilkenny… it can only mean one thing - the next installment of Vultures hits the web later today. Keep an eye on VulturesPI.com for the release of what is quite possibly the funniest episode to date. Bless that Noah Hennessy.
Kilkenny Open Coffee For June, Today
photo credit: Mykl Roventine
The next Kilkenny Open Coffee takes place in Kilkenny City today at 11:30am at the rear of the Kilkenny Cafe, Market Cross Shopping Centre, Kilkenny. Unless a super cool open-air coffee venue appears on the map between now and 11:30am, that’s where we’ll be (the weather in Kilkenny has been hitting 26/27 degrees).
Maybe we could change it to Open Picnic instead?
For more on dates, maps and to find out who’ll be there, you can check the Open Coffee Ning group here, or by visit IGOpeople.com.
Where’s A Net Cafe When You Need One?
So, I’m in Portugal, and have been for the past few days to celebrate John getting hitched. Vilamoura is the current location, then it’s on to destination Faro and Dublin tomorrow morning.
They’ve got the sun. They’ve got the sea. They’ve got great food and cheap alcohol. But internet access leaves a lot to be desired.
I’m sitting in Sete (a bar part-owned by Figo) where you can grab wifi access for the price of a dinner (ten euro for 5 hours access). The hotel I’m in (the sign above the door says it’s a four star) is charging 9 euro an hour for shit quality access through a very restricted Vista-based kiosk in the lobby. If you need anything that requires javascript access (Hotmail, Gmail etc.), forget it.
While I’m away, I rely on internet access. Dubai was easy as there was great access in the apartment and I was never far away. I was mad enough this trip to pay 50 euro for 50mb data access on my office mobile to pull headers via the Gmail app (S60). Two sessions on the laptop in the bar makes it a total of 70 euro, plus another tenner in the hotel brings it to 80 euro. For 80 euro, I happily get FOUR months of mobile broadband access at home.
For 80 euro here I could also get in the region of 20 bottles of wine. And for all our going out, I know I haven’t spent 80 euro on alcohol.
There an internet cafe / kiosk type place up the road from the hotel that’s very much chained up, broken down and left with wires hanging out of the walls.
Yet while they’ve got everything else here, the one thing I’m not seeing is an internet cafe, of any description. Plenty of bars, plenty of TVs to watch Barcelona whip Man U around the place last night, but no internet cafe. The resort seems extremely popular with Irish and English tourists who I’m sure wouldn’t say no to getting online to check things out, or their kids hanging around Bebo and MySpace for the day (give them the option and they’d likely take it).
The description of the hotel touted laptop connections in the room. I must have mistaken power points for ethernet points.
That said, who am I to complain. It’s 33 degrees, possibly in the shade too and the wedding was the business.
Maybe I’m one of those people who just can’t unplug.
Anyone in the market for opening up a chain of cheap internet cafés in heavily populated Irish and English tourist resorts in the south of Portugal?
The C Word
One of my alter egos is involved in the running of The Devious Theatre Company in Kilkenny. We write new works, produce and direct in house, run a great rotation system on all of our productions since our launch in 2006 and this weekend we’re getting set to announce the first part of our 2009 program of theatre.
When things go right, they go very right. When things go wrong, they’re usually followed by “the C word”. At least that used to be the case. The word has lost all meaning and is now a total Devious Theatre term of affection.
We’ve been plugging a string of videos from a production of Trainspotting we did last year (one of three productions of 2008) over on DeviousTheatre.com and we’ve just released the final video aka The Cunt Cut.
Needless to say, it was a very popular word in Trainspotting… can you count how many are there?
