I am officially finished college, having been given my exam results for my final year today. I walk away from DCU with 2.1 in Languages For International Communications (Japanese). Next stop, Okayama.

Woohoo!

With each passing week, I begin to wonder if Joe Duffy is not in league with the underworld, set upon us to herald in a new dominion of Beelzebub. At the very least, I assume he in their employment as a harbinger of doom - capable of whipping the entire nation’s housewives into a frenzy with one snide, ridiculous remark.

A few months ago, I had the displeasure to listen to Joe lead his merry band of housewives on a witchhunt against Debenhams. Debenhams, you see, were demonstrating a variety of kitchen utensils instore, and lucky shoppers could even walk home with free samples. Surely Joe’s Militia Mothers couldn’t find fault in that?

But, of course, they did. A veritable sign of the rot in society, apparently. It will drive people to murder, they said. One woman actually said that being presented with a free kitchen knife would be enough for someone to go and stab another human being to death. Forgive me, but I’m not sure that mentally-fragile sociopaths are hanging around Debenhams in the early afternoon looking at demonstrations of salad servers and garlic presses.

More recently, a woman rang up Joe, screaming PAEDOPHILE. While going about her daily business, she saw a man get out of particular type of car and have an altercation with a little darling boy whilst stopped at a particular junction at a specific time. The Liveline sprang to life, and this man was all but sentenced to life in solitude for his disgusting sexual perversions, when, miraculously, the accused could give his side of the story. It turns out that he wasn’t some reprehensible sex creep, but rather an upstanding member of the community who was attempting to discipline the little darling - who turned out not to be a little darling at all, but a vandal thug who had just trashed the man’s property. No harm done, unless the man’s boss, or friends, or family had been listening to the opening act of this story, and took these wild, unfounded accusations on board. So be careful what you do in public, Joe has eyes everywhere, and if you’re seen doing something innocent that can be twisted into a good story, it will make national radio.

And only last week, I turned on the radio as the frenzy was in full flow. “Joe, it’s an absolute disgrace that I’ve to travel to Dublin to do it!” said a zealot from Sligo. Initially, I empathized, figuring that he was a man awaiting cancer treatment or a personality transplant. Not so.

The disgruntled man, and his many supporters, were lambasting the fact that he had to go all the way up to the big smoke in order to collect his lotto winnings. What a bloody inconvenience, eh?

I’m often tempted to ring up Liveline to complain about the blight on human society that is Joe Duffy and Liveline. My hand is stayed however, because no will is strong enough to whitstand the Militant Mothers and General Joe if they’re on your case.

Rots your brain. I chose the domain name for this blog because consumers of pop-culture have, for decades, been told that such culture is bad, unhealthy, and rots your brain. From rock ‘n’ roll to video nasties and more recently to videogames, pop-culture has been an easy scapegoat for the ills of society.

It’s not been a good week for pushers of violent videogames, with the news that Britain’s BBFC, Ireland’s IFCO and America’s ESRB board have all effectively banned Manhunt 2from sale, and Nintendo and Sony won’t license it to run on their systems.

The initial instinct is to lambast the censorship boards for being out of touch with the consumers of society, or to insist that the responsibility lies with parents. However, in my view, these arguments have little or no merit.

Lets take the first point, that the censors are over-strict or out of touch with reality. As a regular film goer, I have a lot of time for John Kelleher. Generally, he and his his office conduct their duties with the goal of classification rather than censorship, and as such operates one of the most progressive, consistent, open and lenient censorship offices in the world - certainly more so than American, British, Australian or German counterparts.

Do you know how many violent videogames were banned in Ireland prior to Manhunt 2? Zero. Bearing this in mind, and assuming that the staff of the IFCO haven’t had moral lobotomies over the last few weeks, we can assume that the content in Manhunt 2 is simply too graphic and too violent. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s the case, but track record would indicate it is.

But hey, so what if it’s violent? Why can’t the parents monitor and decide what their children play? I used to a proponent of this school of thought. Then, I had occasion to work in a games retailer. The policies in place by my employer were faultless - as well as enforcing legal age restrictions on titles rated by the IFCO, the voluntary PEGI guidelines ratings were also enforced, even to the detriment of sales, and even on harshly rated titles like Timesplitters 3 (18+).

Did it make a difference? Not really. In theory, parents should be responsible enough to monitor their child’s videogaming habits. Those theories are probably based on one’s views of one’s own parents, who are probably genuinely nice people. They’re probably not based on the kind of parent I’d often be confronted with - the kind of parent who, after hearing the laundry list of horrors of Grand Theft Auto, shrugs it off and buys it anyway for their darling, because it’s just a videogame. The kind of parent who shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

Until parents educate themselves about the content of videogames and their affects on young children, they cannot be expected to act as censors.

And what of Manhunt 2? I won’t shed any tears if I never play the game. The franchise was dead and buried until the Daily Mail brigade whipped up a ridiculous frenzy long after the original was released, and sales spiked hugely. The sequel’s existence is a cynical cash-in on this hype - it was created to revel in gore and graphic violence and the media hysteria bound to greet it, and its banning is frankly of no loss to the discerning videogamer.

Indeed, there may be an upshot of all this. If this can encourage publishers and developers to shed their hang-up on violence and lose their hard-on for gore, we might see more genuinely innovative, interesting, creative and engaging videogames.

Spoilers.

The final episode of The Sopranos aired on HBO in the US last night, bringing to an end the award-winning drama series. First airing in 1999, the show spanned six series and captured the hearts and minds of viewers all over the world. In recent times, when lowest-common-denominator television masquerades as intellectual just by name-dropping classical literature, or paying lip-service to international events and sentiments, The Sopranos stood alone as being a genuinely intelligent, captivating and frighteningly realistic piece of entertainment.

In many ways, The Sopranos is the antithesis of modern US television. Compared with recent successes such as Lost and 24, it can move glacially slowly. And for a show that, superficially at least, is about the mafia, it’s not uncommon for whole episodes to focus almost entirely on domestic life, on long, drawn out therapy sessions, or other more mundane affairs. And yet, on the flip side, characters can be snuffed out in an instant, friends can become enemies in a heartbeat - what is the bread and butter of most TV shows is often glanced over in The Sopranos, and the show is all the better for it.

All that being said, the last episode was something of a disappointment. In the hour-long episode, very little was definitively resolved. Supposedly, series creator David Chase intended for the penultimate episode to actually be the last episode, the series ending with Tony Soprano settling into his bed in a safe-house holding an automatic weapon. In truth, it would have been a better ending than the actual finale.

Over those final 60 minutes, the feud with Phil was brought to a conclusion, only to be replaced by  the imminent threat of the FBI and characters from Tony’s past finally exacting revenge. By in large, the main characters remained unchanged. AJ was still struggling to find his place in life, Meadow was still planning on a career in law, Paulie was still loyal to his boss and Tony was still under pressure. That the final episode didn’t end with one of the many ghosts from the past in the diner taking a pop at Tony, or with the FBI knocking on his door, signals to me that nobody really wants The Sopranos to end - not the fans, the writers, or the network.  I’d be surprised if, down the line, The Sopranos wasn’t revisited in a movie or mini-series.