Been busy lately… going to be even busier over the next two weeks, as we launch Emerald Radio – our college’s 1 week long Internet-only radio station, which I’m manager of – and the reason why I recently created a 15 minute documentary programme on the Irish language (thanks, Orlagh!).

If you’re interested, the station broadcasts to the world for limited hours daily from March 8th to 12th. More info will be on the web site (which I’m responsible for).

On a slightly unrelated note, here’s Thin Lizzy with “Emerald”:

I like mashups… and I like a wide range of music – from all forms of dance including trance and house to metal, hip-hop and cheesy pop… and I like trying to mix genres together in mashups to create something new… but for some reason, metal and pop mashups have never really come together properly in my eyes. It either comes across as sacreligious towards the metal track or just something created just for the point of adapting something that rocks so that it can be played in a nite club.

One example is this god awful “80’s rock megamix” track doing the rounds (- and it features on our jukebox in work) which melds classic 80’s rock tracks from Guns ‘N Roses, Metallica, Nirvana, Europe, Bon Jovi, AC/DC and a few others – all sped up or slowed down so their BPM’s match – together with a horrible dance style drum-machine beat, and yes, I must admit to having used it in gigs before…

And a quick youtube search, and here it is… (*cringe!!!*)

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way… you’ll understand how pleasantly surprised I was to stumble across a band like Rock Sugar. They’re making pop rock… mashing up pop tracks with metal songs live and making it work.

Check out their version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” in the style of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”:

Love it!

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• Metallica + Journey = Rock Sugar (metalsucks.net)

During my two weeks in i105-107 (I was there for a week of college work experience, but stayed longer out of choice), I was working on news – this involved writing copy, doing interviews (including Eddie Hobbes!) & editing down clips from them, doing vox-pops and putting packages together (including voicing them). They liked the packages well enough to actually air them during the main (12.45pm) iWitness news bulletin… which was nice

Here’s some of them:

“Brief History of Willie O’Dea” package for iWitness News by niallok

“Love is…” package for iWitness News by niallok

Tonight is the night that the Christmas FM crew finally get a chance to have a get-together and enjoy themselves after “bringing the magic of Christmas” to Dublin and Cork for a month. I’ll be there, as I featured on the station, reading Christmas Stories on Keith Shanley’s Breakfast Show (along with my college classmate and friend Suzanne Scollard) and presenting a show on Christmas morning itself.

The station, which broadcast from the D4 Hotel in Ballsbridge, managed to raise a whopping €70,000 for their most Christmassy of chosen charities, the Simon Communities of Dublin and Cork – an incredible achievement – while helping bring a bit of Christmas spirit and joy to it’s many listeners.

Here’s a brief documentary video (by Jen) about the station, that even features me…

I meant to post this on Sunday… Dundalk man Jim Corr’s appeared last weekend on RTÉ’s new Saturday Night Show (hosted by that appalling Cork man Brendan O’Connor). Crap name for a show? Maybe… but at least it’s not “The Brendan O’Connor Show”…

And yes… Jim’s still bonkers… and he’s still going on about the New World Order stuff that he ranted about on the Last Word almost two years ago ahead of the first Lisbon Treaty. He’s still in way out of his depth and still abusing his fame and celebrity to spread this stuff and (repeatedly) promote his activist shite peddling web site.

I mean SURE… he’s entitled to his opinion and he’s certainly entitled to express it if he wants to… (although I believe RTÉ gave him way too much airtime here and any other presenter would have pulled him up on a few points far better than O’Connor could) – but if you’re to believe him, you’d have to believe the following: