Small print

A round-up of today's others stories in brief

Pearls of Muppet wisdom

ENDLESS FILM promotion can be as tedious as it is annoying from a punter’s point of view, but somehow the Muppets have managed to endear themselves even further during the promo for their latest flick.

From Miss Piggy’s excellent takedown of Fox News, to Kermit the Frog mugging on the red carpet, they get away with things that actors would be instantly eye-rolled at for doing. The key is their wit, intelligence, good humour and spontaneity. And, on that note, here are

The Best Things a Muppet Has Ever Said.

Gonzo (on a discussion about death): “As long as I’m here, I’d like to donate my body to science.”

Rowlf the dog: “With your body, it would be donated to science fiction.”

Janice: “To donate your body, don’t you have to be dead?”

Gonzo: “So what? I believe in re-incarnation.”

Miss Piggy: “What would you come back as next time?”

Gonzo: “How should I know? I don’t even know what I am this time.”

“It’s almost as laughable as accusing Fox News as, you know, being news.”

— Miss Piggy upon being asked by a journalist at a press conference how the Muppets felt about Fox News’s Eric Bolling accusing the film of having a liberal agenda and trying to brainwash children.

“The Oscar – is that what they call it? – means nothing to me. After all, one does not labour to shape one’s craft just for some tacky statuette that looks like a hood ornament from an old DeSoto.”

– Miss Piggy

Statler: “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were reciting some sort of important plot point.”

Waldorf: “I hope so. Otherwise I would’ve bored half the audience half to death.”

Statler: “You mean half the audience is still alive?”

“I’m a professional. I’ve had three performances.”

– Fozzie Bear

Gonzo and Kermit in a hot air balloon. Gonzo: “I’d like to try this without a balloon.”

Kermit: “Try what? Plummeting?”

Gonzo: “Yeah.”

Kermit: “I suppose you could try it once.”

Taking a Tumblr

WHILE MUCH of the recent social-networking buzz has been about Facebook, and its recent IPO news, it’s important to remember Tumblr, which is exceptionally popular with teen and college-age users. In five years, the company has grown into an $800 million enterprise; its founder, David Karp, is now just 25 year old.

Why did it get so popular? Tumblr is a shorthand blogging service that offers the perfect fix for a network of communicators and commentators that typify the sentiment of current online media.

Sharing links, photos, videos and audio might be old hat online, but Tumblr has overtaken most of its contemporaries, with nearly 40 million blogs made up of 15 billion blog posts.

While traditional blogs now often veer away from brevity, Tumblr capitalises on this. With its re-blogging capacity, much like a retweet on Twitter, users can share and cannibalise content, so posts don’t just stay in one place – they become viral.

At a glance, it can feel like a landfill of photos and memes, so which Tumblrs should you be keeping an eye on? For the political nerds, barackobama.tumblr.comfocuses on Obama's re-election campaign, allowing for submissions and creating a sort of visual story-telling narrative as the campaign progresses.

Imremembering.comis a treasure trove of pop-culture nostalgia from the 1980s and 1990s. Awesomepeoplehangingouttogether.tumblr.com is an extremely addictive collection of photos of celebrities you'd never expect to see hanging out together doing just that.

Wearethe99percent.tumblr.comasked people about their lives, why and how they were suffering from economic inequality, and it has created a moving collection of personal anecdotes.

And finally, Tumblr thrives on frivolity, which is why you need to ask yourself the question "is Michael Fassbender a shark?" over on ismichaelfassbenderashark.tumblr.com. Yes, really.

Five ways we know the Irish spring is here

YOU CAN spend a lot of time arguing about whether or not spring begins in February or March, but the real signs aren’t just about where in the calendar the season slots into, they’re much more obvious than that.

JDIFF

With festival season now a year-round concept, the Jameson Dublin Film Festival kicks things off in earnest. It launched last week in the thankfully reopened Lighthouse cinema in Smithfield, and just because the weather is getting better, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be spending more time watching films.

Grand stretch

Your mum rings you to comment on the long evenings, the phrase trends on Twitter, taxi drivers remark on brightness at what was previously dusk, and all of a sudden you don’t have an excuse to go out early just because it’s dark. That’s right, there’s a grand stretch.

Lambs occupy the media

Spring means endless photos of cute lambs jumping around fields on every second newspaper page, creating warm fuzzy feelings for vegetarians and pangs of guilt from meat-eaters.

Warm clothes are impossible to find

Even though for much of the Irish spring, summer and beyond, it’s damp, raining, and occasionally snowing and/or freezing, that doesn’t stop high-street shops apparently chucking out anything that could prevent you from getting hypothermia. The minute the grand stretch starts and lamb photographs appear, it is almost impossible to find anything in the shop that doesn’t come under the general heading of “holiday clothes”. And if it’s not actually spring-like outside, you just have to suck it up and freeze. This generally coincides with everyone dumping their winter coats even though the temperature remains the same.

New television

The spring schedule kicks into life. For RTÉ, this means the airing of the wintry Other Voices, and for TV3, it means Nora Owen hosting Mastermind and Alan Hughes hosting Family Fortunes.