h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My daughter was talking the other day about what tourists do when they come to Dublin. She admitted she had no idea what there was in Dublin worth seeing, and talking to a French person she was told that Dublin was famous for its statue of Molly Malone.

I was thinking about this and I realised that there are loads of good statues in Dublin, and you could make a good tourist trail out of them. So I've created an entry of the Dublin Statue Trail. I've kept it to about 20 statues, because I want it to be the interesting ones. The distance covered is 7 kilometres, which seem like a reasonable distance to me, but I'm going to put a shorter route in too, which will cut it to 5km for those who tire easily. This will cut out four of the nicer statues, but will give the walker a chance to see Leinste House (home of the the Irish government), the Defence Forces memorial pyramid and the statues of Boyle and Rowan Hamilton at the building which is now the office of the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) but was the college of Engineering when I studied there.

Unfortunately, the moderators have hidden my Entry until an Editor has time to look at it, probably because it has the word "sexuality" in it, or it might have been the reference to Phil Lynott being black. I'm sure they'll sort it out soon.

Here's the Entry, but don't bother going to it until the mods have released it: A659757

This should keep me busy over the next few weeks, because I'm going to have to visit each of the statues and note all the details such as who made them, and possibly take photos of each.

It's visible now.

What a wonderful idea, Gnomom.

That's one way of finding out about Dublin

Fascinating entry, Gnomon - I remember we discussed statue nicknames somewhere a few months ago.

I have a few PR-type comments, but I can see it's a 'work-in-progress', so I'll wait until it's ready.

Icy

I remember when the Flat Cap & Muffler club did our Dublin trip. The tourist bus trip pointed out a number of statues, though he wouldn't tell us what the Oscar Wilde one was nicknamed - I'm guessing that was one reason you got modded.

I think I like the sound of this trail Gnomon It sounds a lot more sensible than the only one I've done before in Dublin, and that was a pubcrawl, loosely based on Bloomsday. (I don't think I've ever really recovered from the time I read Ulysses)

Excellent idea Gnomon!

The sculptor of Wilde is Danny Osborne.

The ones to mention in College Green would surely be the two in front of Trinity College, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith, by J H Foley, who also did the O'Connell monument.

The Wiki article on Dublin statues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statues_in_Dublin gives a lot of alternative nicknames for pieces, but these become tiresome after a while. I do like the name Tonehenge, though http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3145/2296049772_71525dcb62.jpg though I can't stand Delaney's sculpture.

he one that started the craze for nicknames was Eamon O'Doherty's Anna Livia Fountain of 1988, which was soon christened 'The floozie in the jacuzzi' and 'The whore in the sewer'. It was commissioned by Jefferson Smurfit (I think) but totally unsuited to the location, which needed something many times bigger (it now has the Spire).

Next was probably 'The time in the slime', the countdown clock to the year 2000 (I can't bring myself to call that the millennium, even though I did celebrate it) submerged in the Liffey, but withdrawn before its due date on account of the filth that covered it.

Eamon O'Doherty is also responsible for the tree outside the Central Bank.

Oh fab idea Gnomon - 'specially since I'll be descending on the Fair City in October and will be needing something to do!

Hey, Recumbentman, concerning the so called millenium: http://www.tdv.com/html/pedants.html

Share and Enjoy

Why is the entry dated 20 November 2001 if you've only just created it?

They've erected a statue to Susan Boyle, in Dublin!

Begorrah!

It would never have occured to use down Cork way!

It never occurred to me that it was the nicknames of the Oscar Wilde and James Joyce statues that were causing this to be modded. I'll comment them out for now and re-insert them when the whole thing is a bit more ready for publication.

Thanks, R, for the suggestion of the two statues on either side of Trinity Front Arch. Many sites talk about the Grattan statue on the traffic island, but it's not particularly impressive, and the two Trinity ones give me a chance to mention Trinity.

That must be the 30th time that my Entry has been referred to the moderators. I can't take this any more.

I agree, it's crazy. You would think that you would get an exemption - to save the mods unnecessary work. And of course, you can't do any more work on it until it is returned can you?

If you've only commented them out, it's probably an automated filter which is trapping them, Gnomon. Maybe it fires each time you edit it.

No, I hadn't just commented them out. The Eds assigned a programmer to talk to me. He admitted that once an entry has been flagged in this way, it will continue to be referred to the mods every time it is edited, even if the suspicious words are removed. I have done this with two copies of the Statue Trail entry, now. Each of them has only one sentence, but if I edit the entry it is hidden until the mods look at it:

A807905

A659757

The first of these had the full text of the Statue Trail entry in it, and the moderators actually looked at it and decided to hide it because "Your message is off-topic for this particular message board or online community."



And yet, the banner across the top of the alabaster skin says: "On h2g2, you decide what goes into the Guide".

...by the side of a bicycling fish.

The Editors used to have the ability to unflag entries like this, so maybe this is some sort of internal flag which is out of their control?