In Papillon, the epic 1973 film about a pair of criminals sent to French Guiana for a life of hard labour, one of the many mistakes Steve McQueen’s captors make is to give him a butterfly net. When Dustin Hoffman’s near-sighted Dega catches a rare and beautiful blue butterfly, McQueen bargains with a visiting insect dealer for a passage off their tropical island prison.

Yesterday, the sports editor took the pickaxe from my hand, pressed a net into my sweaty, leathery palm, and told me to go catch butterflies at Cheltenham.

Ha! Little did he know that I was to turn his miserly €20 budget into a route off this inky hell.

So to the off. Crowd-sourcing is the newest trend in new journalism – the theory is that (lazy) journalists outsource tasks to a group of people through an “open call” asking for contributions. Sounds good to me.

I text everyone in my phone book from ‘Alan mechanic’ to ‘Zico’s Pizza’ looking for a tip as well as roaring into the echo chamber that is Twitter.

And after spreading yesterday’s newspaper across the kitchen table and circling any potential winners in red biro, like JR Hartley looking for his out-of-print fly-fishing books in that classic Yellow Pages TV advert of yesteryear, I went for Peddlars Cross.

In these straitened times, our budget, like everything else has been reeled in from last year’s €50 to 20. So a modest €2 flutter on the Jason Maguire jockeyed horse in the Neptune Investment Novices Hurdle was enough to wet my beak. Amazingly, he came in and the off-the-shelf misery-dripping intro I usually use was thrown over my shoulder, with a loud guffaw, into the waste paper basket.

My brother’s namesake Davy Russell was next up for me on Weapons Amnesty at 2.40. If I’d known he was owned by budget airline boss Michael O’Leary, I might have checked my slip for extra charges and brought my own bottled water with me. But nevertheless he romped (as they only seem to say in tabloids and horse racing) to victory. Another Ryanair arrival on time, despite a bumpy enough ride. That’s €21 in winnings to add to the €16 earlier. Not quite enough in the kitty yet to perform a well-rehearsed resignation speech on the sports desk, but we’re going in the right direction.

These race meetings are a time when peasant is cheek by jowl with royalty in the queue for the portaloos behind the champagne tent. So then to the regal sounding Kalahari King. A €1.50 each way stake brought in the princely sum of €3.19. Why bother? But then came the redemption for every reader and our own Ruby on Sanctuaire. A still conservative €2.50 each way topped up a good day’s work as I grabbed the chips off the table, tipping my head back and laughing.

However, if you know your 1970s film history, you’ll know Papillon and his accomplice are double crossed by the butterfly dealer. Papillon’s only reward for hard work and ingenuity is betrayal and disappointment.

So I too expected the final fence of the day – the Weatherbys Champion Bumper at 5.15 – to see my final pick failing to place. But as Henri ‘Papillon’ Charriere showed: try, try again. We tried again with Ruby on Al Ferof. He was beaten to second, but another €9 saw us top out the day on €46.51.

Okay, let me make a confession.

I nurse a clandestine habit that has driven me to the coldest and darkest corners of society.

When the house is finally still at night-time, I surreptitiously boot up the computer and, after checking over both shoulders, click into online forums to communicate with like-minded enthusiasts.

I visit specialist shops in the worst parts of town where the attendant nods discreetly as I slip into a familiar back room which holds the more unusual publications.

Yes, I can admit it now – I play the ukulele.

My quaint enthusiasm to what you might think of as a mere toy more than a musical instrument, a comical four-stringed ‘miniature guitar’ drives men like me to huddle together in cyber communities, exchanging the chords for the latest Vampire Weekend single or showing off a blue-grass strumming technique.

It’s a lonely life.

As Billy Connolly once said of the banjo, you never overhear a lusty-eyed woman in a bar lean into a friend and whisper: “See that guy with the banjo? He’s coming home with me tonight.” Rarely too, when someone asks, “Wow, whose car is that!?” is the answer: “Oh the Bugatti? That’s the banjo player’s.”

It’s not a dissimilar tale for the uke.

“Gwat has dish to glooo wick sporth!? I hear you splutter impatiently, dear reader, as bits of milky cornflakes speckle the breakfast bar.

Well, like a rare wild truffle or senior All-Ireland medals in the county of Mayo, us ukuleleists are thin on the ground. Therefore, I’m compelled to, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, jam online – using the free video-call software, Skype – with a greying middle-aged man who lives in a charming wood cabin on the Pacific coast of Oregon.

I thought of my pal (who’ll remain nameless because a. I don’t know if his wife knows he plays ukulele with a red-raw Irish fella on the internet while she’s out at work and b. If he Googles himself he’ll get an awful shock to be in the Examiner) earlier this week when Irish rugby’s two maestros Paul O’Connell and Brian O’Driscoll – presumably Paulie has forgiven his skipper for tripping him with his head in Twickenham – both tweeted about a special treat they enjoyed in camp.

Legendary baladeer Christy Moore offered the squad a private performance in their Dublin hotel on Monday night. Drico even revealed that he was allowed ‘to murder’ City of Chicago. There’s better men crashed on the rocks of that that tricky second verse, BOD.

Anyway the reason I bring it up is because the only Irish artist my friend in Portland ever name checked during our scratchy video calls was Christy. A man who, he appreciated, has built a career on great tunes, an unapologetic political awareness and sweat – plenty of sweat.

You get the feeling actually, given his earthy and creative credentials that Christy would ordinarily, like a lot of us, have a lot of sympathy for the body-swerving, coke-smudged face of Welsh rugby. But probably not tomorrow.

Michael Moynihan of this parish conducted a great interview with Jamie Heaslip last week that was more Smash Hits than Sports Illustrated with the flanker revealing a gra for the likes of Mumford and Sons, Florence and the Machine and my main dude Dizzee Rascal. All right up my street I must say.

But what Heaslip did not mention is that he ‘put his hand up’ and ‘backed himself’ as the oval ball fraternity insist they do and asked the bould Christy to give us a few bars of Dizzee’s modern classic ‘Bonkers’ after he finished up the Lakes Of Ponchartrain.

We can now reveal here that rather than singing that or indeed Dizzee’s breakthrough track ‘Dance Wiv Me’, Christy penned a special song for the rugby lads. Below it is reproduced, in part.

[Heart stopping guitar intro that goes on a bit as he, introduces the song with a story about a wild horse on the Curragh, the 1993 Rose of Tralee and David Campese]

Verse 1

“Oh, Jedward are on the Sky box pulling out the stops,

Joe Duffy’s on a mission, closing down the head shops

there’s a fella from Offaly in charge in Washington,

but Deccie can’t decide between O’Gara and Sexton”

Verse 2

“Now, the Celtic Tiger’s been and gone, it must have been a dream,

Bertie’s on a book tour, he was last seen down in Sneem,

Joxer packed the van for Jo’Burg, he fancied a safari

But Henry stuck the hand out in Paris, and called him a taxi

Yeooow! [Tommy Bowe can’t help but grab the mic]

Chorus

Singing, oooh Lansdowne Rd, Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne Rd

Oooh Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne Rd

Don’t forget your shovel if you want to built the Aviva,

Croker’s closed again, so you better get your 10-year corproate ticket, I’m tellin’ ya

Oooh Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne, Lansdowne Rd… ”

It probably needs a bit more uke, Christy. But it’s as good as Ireland’s Call already.

Contact adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in this morning’s printed Irish Examiner edition.

Heineken İtaly Activation from Kreatif360 on Vimeo.

I don’t usually post advertising, but this is an unbelievable effort from Heineken in Italy.

(Thanks to Stephen O’Leary of O’Leary Analytics)

Weeshie Fogarty is a Radio Kerry DJ and Kingdom legend. Recently, despite the obvious links between Rockafella, Jay-Z and Austin Stacks, Weeshie had some difficulty pronouncing Mrs Jigga’s name after he discovered his sound engineer had gone to Dublin for a gig.

DJ Mek, a man who once stood idly by as I was man-handled by erstwhile hero Ian Brown, has offered us a superb mix of Weeshie’s confused on-air inquiries and a Beyonce track here.

UPDATE: Apparently, as usual, I’m late to the party; my old pal Ciaran Murphy and the Off the Ball Lads were the first to bring this to the country’s attention.

The Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski recently recounted a favourite quote he prodded like loose change from an interview subject.
Louis ‘Red’ Klotz, has the most unenviable jobs in sport; coaching the team that faces the famous Harlem Globetrotters every week.

The Washington Generals (also often known as the New York Nationals) are the journeymen stooges who, game after game, season after season, decade after decade are duped by the same flashy crossover and follow the ball-on-the-string trick like a loyal but obtuse dog teased with a biscuit treat.

In the 58 years since he’s taken charge, Klotz’s teams have beaten the Globetrotters just twice. Amazingly, they’ve lost — wait for it — over 13,000 times.

But Red yet still shelters an un-dimming flicker of hope. This past winter the Globetrotters, a well-oiled organisation more adept at slick marketing and cheap publicity stunts than the ad men of Madison Avenue, announced they’d face the Generals again. But this time on ice.

If Klotz was perplexed at this curious arrangement or fearful for the safety of his boys, he didn’t let on. In fact, he made a foolhardy statement that encapsulates his entire outlook: “We excel on ice”.

Yes, that’s right. After decades playing the pantomime villains and losing every game bar a couple, he thinks ice (ice!) will suit the Generals’ playing style.

With unflinching optimism like that, he must support Sligo Rovers. Or Shels. Or be a season ticket holder at Dalyer. Or any League of Ireland club.

Tonight the Airtricity League kicks off after a 12-round close-season that left even Roddy ‘Queensbury Rules’ Collins punch-drunk. While its players went, scandalously, unpaid, Cork City endured a court-room drama so protracted and convoluted I thought I’d put the Boston Legal DVD back in the Lost box-set. The once great Derry City also dropped a division in a winter of discontent.

But tonight, after all the off-field attrition — though the battle scars are admittedly yet to heal — a football match will break out. And then another. And a few more. It’s perhaps an apposite time to reaffirm some of the many reasons why we love domestic football.

1. The quaint stadia, like the Carlisle Grounds. Bray Wanderers’ home is the only stadium that needed a Hollywood budget to bring it up to 1920s standards with Neil Jordan casting the charming, seaside ground as Croke Park in Michael Collins. The Dart spin is nicer than a Tube journey too.

2. We’re on the way, meet you in… Kennedy’s of Drumcondra; The Black Lion, Inchicore; The Horseshoe on the corner flag in Turner’s Cross Tavern; the Yellow House in Waterford. Wherever.

3. The Aviva Stadium. It looks like Optimus Prime’s foot spa but it’s ours now too. The Palindrome will likely host Bohs and Rovers’ Dublin derby in August. The RDS and elsewhere was grand in the interim but it’ll be good to be knocking about Lansdowne Road again for the big days.

4. Ryanair. You don’t have to pay Michael O’Leary to use the toilet on the way to Flancare Park. Though Longford is like a foreign country sometimes.

5. Jonny Logan. The Eurovision titan’s Hold Me Now was appropriated by Bohs fans after a particularly successful sing-song in a
Stockholm bar. You don’t hear that on English terraces.

6. Terraces! What am I saying? There aren’t any terraces in the EPL. If I wanted to sit in a comfortable seat with affluent middle aged men for an hour and a half I’d queue for a prostate exam in the GP’s waiting room.

7. Gary Lineker’s MOTD puns have ruined more of my Saturday nights than nightclub doormen.

8. Ball was there ref, the ball was there!

9. Neale Fenn’s first touch.

10. Walk away, player!

11. Gary Twigg. The Scottish striker has a haircut that’s heard around the world, but he’s the most natural scorer this side of Ashley Cole.

12. Ashley Cole

13. Friday night football. A pay-slip, a hair-cut and a pint before kick-off is, scientifically, the best start to any weekend, right?

14. Fans’ jokes when UCD visit: ‘Come on lads, these have bleedin’ school in the morning!’

15. Watching a midfielder steaming into a tackle before emerging from puddles of blood and gnawed bone with the ball, then turning to your pal and saying: “I used to have him in my pocket at U15s, ‘member?”

16. Mick Wallace’s Italian renaissance in Wexford. And his Youths side wear pink. Forza.

17. The asterisk; we usually boast more than any other league in the world.

18. Summer football — the sun shines but we excel on ice too.

Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

“He Marvin Gayed his own nephew. The boss of the family.”
- Vito, (referring to Uncle Junior shooting Tony)

Melfi: “How’d that make you feel?”
Tony: “I wished it was me in there.”
Melfi: “Giving the beating or taking it?”

“There’s an old Italian saying: you fuck up once, you lose two teeth.”
- Tony

“You’re not gonna believe this. The guy killed 16 Czechoslovakians. He was an interior decorator.”
- Paulie

“All due respect, you got no fuckin’ idea what it’s like to be Number One. Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fuckin’ thing. It’s too much to deal with almost. And in the end you’re completely alone with it all.”
- Tony Soprano

Tony: I called you here, ’cause I got something to tell you. From now on, I’m gonna rely on you more and more, ’cause you’re the only one I can fully trust. Sil and Paulie… they’re old friends, but you’re one thing they’re not.
Christopher: What’s that, T?
Tony: Blood. You’re gonna lead this family into the 21st Century.
Christopher: Well, Tony, technically we’re already in the 21st Century…
[Tony looks at him, confused]
Christopher Moltisanti: Forget about it. You won’t regret this, T.

What fucking kind of human being am I, if my own mother wants me dead?
- Tony

There are no scraps in my scrapbook.
- Phil Leotardo

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