Following on from the success of this event last year, the club have endeavoured to step in up a gear this year.Running is the most basic fundamental movement, integral to all sports andf ittingly seen as the go-to activity for those keen to embark upon life style changes.

In Ireland, the recession has witnessed the running boom explode further with record entries commonplace at races nationwide. Accordingly, this event seeks to respond to this welcome burst of interest to offer advice to runners and wannabe runners on issues such as the key principles of training, strength and conditioning, nutrition and injury prevention.

A superb line-up has been arranged. The Irish Times athletics correspondent, Ian O’Riordan, author of Miles to Run – Promises to Keep, will be on hand to offer training advice alongside diverse experiences with some of the world’s best athletes and coaches, in addition to comparing such advice with that of our Kenyan counterparts.

Honing in further on these themes, Irish 800m record holder DavidMatthews will practically discuss how he has utilised his own running career tocreate his own coaching career (with Cork GAA) by demonstrating the importance of strength and conditioning for injury prevention and increasing running economyand thus efficiency.

Furthermore, in response to recent demand, a nutritionist will present all there is to know on runners dietary needs and debates. The event will provide a unique opportunity for everyone to engage in a lively question and answers session with the speakers and gain quality advice, irrespective ofyour abilities.

To further motivate your potential running ambitions, there’ll be a host of running prizes on the night, alongside a limited number of goodie bags with plenty of surprises.

In conjunction with Suas Educational Development, DUHAC will be significantly lowering the tone of the evening in a fundraising leg-waxing event to continue the discussions post-seminar.

Kicking off at 9.30pm in Kennedy’s pub on Westland Row, DUHAC’s finest (and sexiest) athletes will be baring their hairy secrets to a team of professional beauty therapists, who will be lashing on the hot wax for eager punters to rip off.

Entry being a mere €2, sadists can pay as much asthey like to see club captain Garret Dunne, sprinter Kieron Sexton, and distance runners Ger Claffey and Darragh McCashin feel the burn –all for a very worthy cause!

Rumours are circling that our guest speakers may join in to pledge their support. Suas has coordinated educational programmes in less developed countries such as Kenya and India, facilitating Irish volunteers to engage in local communities and assist in furthering the development of the schools and students. All in all, this event will stimulate a very interesting discussion whilst raising necessary funds for Suas.What are you waiting for?

Indeed, the alternative dance act from the UK who will perform at the ball for the first time this year garnered just 6% of votes on the ‘Who are you most excited to see’ question.

Leading the line-up in terms of excitement is Professor Green who, despite performing last year, was 24% of respondents’ most anticipated act. The Trinity Orchestra came in second place with Marina And The Diamonds on 18% whilst Irish-crooners Ryan Sheridan and The Kanyu Tree failed to receive a single vote.

In general terms 21% of people rated the complete line-up as ‘very good’ whilst 37% voted ‘good’, 11% voted ‘OK’, 21% voted ‘bad’ and 11% voted ‘very bad’.

The news that 58% of Trinity News Online readers rated the line-up as better than ‘OK’ will come as a relief for Ents Officer Chris O’Connor. Speaking to Trinity News earlier in the week O’Connor said of the line-up “it has something for everyone…it might just be the best year yet”.

It’s not all good news, however: a whopping 84% of respondents said they thought that 80 Euro a ticket was too much. All of this is not to say that people haven’t been buying tickets in their droves. Watch this space.

Do you disagree with our survey’s results? Have your say by following this http://trinitynews.ie/wordpress/archives/3893

As sports fans across the land will know, as well as some who wished they didn’t, the RBS Six Nations rugby tournament is now well underway. And what a tournament it has been! We’ve had a nail biting Calcutta Cup, a controversial Welsh win over Ireland and all the drama of a snow cancelled fixture; not to mention all the usual crunching tackles and snazzy handling that makes rugby union such a great sport to watch.

In light of all this, it goes without saying, I was particularly excited to meet with John Feehan, the TCD alumni with one of the most enviable jobs in the world (if you’re an alpha male that is). Indeed, as CEO of the 6 Nations, the British and Irish Lions and RaboDirect Pro 12, Feehan is a man at the top of most blokes ‘people I’d like to have a pint with’ list and last week I got the chance to interview him.

“Whatever you do”, my dad said when he heard about my interviewee, “be sure to ask for a couple of tickets’. Much to my Dad’s disappointment I did not ask for tickets, or indeed get given any; but I did get a good look inside one of the big brains in international Rugby.

Meeting Feehan at his swanky Ballsbridge head office the day before the 6 Nations kicked off (pun intended) I didn’t really know what to expect – some busting rugby bruiser the size of a family car? An atypical sportsy primadona who speaks purely in platitudes (‘its a game of two halfs’ etc)?

Soon after we met, however, my mind was put at ease. He was relaxed and charming and as I walked though the memorabilia-filled headquarters with complementary coffee in hand (I am a student after all) I began to realise just how big a business sport can be – a fact personified by the Gordon Gekko-esque desk and chair from which this CEO runs his shop.

Feehan is a Dub, middle-aged and is built like a rugby player, a tight-head prop to be exact, who once played for Leinster to be even more exact. Rugby was clearly an early passion (he was a Trinity rugby scholar) and yet, as he explains, he never saw himself or considered it an ambition to work in rugby.

After leaving Trinity Feehan embarked on all sorts of jobs including work at a major brewer (how laddy can one lad be?) and initially joined the 6 Nations as Commercial Director. “I sort of stumbled upon the job”, he says before making plain that, as the head of a nine-figure firm, he is a business man and not a rugby player “I report on money, I’m judged on money, I have to make money”.

Feehan’s job, like any business man, is to sell rugby to consumers. So, I ask him, what makes his product, his sport so great? Why should Arsenal fans hang-up their shirts and switch channels to watch Wasps or London Irish? “Because it’s exciting”, he quickly replies. “It’s different, there’s a lot to it, it’s not just kicking a ball around”.

Clearly many share his opinon – every year rugby (both union and league forms) get more and more popular. For Feehan this is evidenced not only through rising ticket demand but also by an increase in media attention (“there has bever been such buzz and hype”, he explains) and the evolution of rugby players as celebrities.

And, he hopes, with the Rugby Sevens entering into the Olympics in 2016 this trend is only going to get stronger. “We hope this (Rugby Sevens) will have a knock on effect for Rugby Union”, Feehan describes, “the idea is that nations with no tradition of rugby will pour money into training and the development of the sport with the view to picking up medals at the Olympics”.

And all this despite an international recession? “Corporate entertainment may diminish as it did in South Africa for the last Lions Tour”, he responds nonchalantly, “but you’ll always fill the stadium”.

As one of the world’s favourite sports rugby is able, as well as generating oodles of cash, to wield political power as well. The 1995 World Cup, for example, helped South Africa re-establish itself after the turmoil of the Apartheid era.

In Ireland too, however, rugby has played a part in uniting an often divided nation. “Rugby is more historical than it is political” is Feehan’s considered response on the matter adding “It harks back to the time before civil war, before the struggle for Irish Independence”.

Politics, dosh and rugby aside I’m keen to know what this CEO thinks of Trinity. “I had an immensely happy time at Trinity”, he says, “it offers a unique experience in that it is a campus university snuggled in the heart of Dublin”.

But what about Trinity students? With our plummeting position in the world rankings and the continued budget cuts, is Trinity still as respected by business as it was 20 years ago? “It is no doubt still a culturally rich place, a centre of learning…but when it comes to hiring its more about the person sitting in front of you rather than their university”.

Finally, I ask him if he thinks he’s got the ideal job, that is if you can call being paid to fly to Scotland on Sunday to watch international rugby working. “Well it’s not half bad”, he says modestly, “but at the end of the day a job’s a job”.

This leaves me with an odd sense of despondency and bitter realism – if Johnny Feehan, CEO of the 6 Nations, the British and Irish Lions and RaboDirect Pro 12, still gets the Sunday night blues, is there any hope for the rest of us?

Dear Uncle Jamie,

I await your response to this hairy issue.
Anon

——

Dear Anon,

Don’t fret. You are not alone in this pubic palaver. In my (at the risk of immodesty) considerable experience, both guys and gals alike are struck with the dilemma.

Get it right and you’ll feel sexy and empowered and drive your partner crazy with lust; get it wrong and you could end up with a crotch that resembles Zach Galifianakis’s beard on a bad day.

But picking a ‘style’ or deciding what (if at all) to trim isn’t purely an aesthetic decision – you must also consider the hygiene, the cost and crucially the level of maintenance work needed to keep it in A1 condition.

That said, if you stick to few age old rules, you can’t go too far wrong.

Firstly, when possible, you should always go for a professional job: no matter how skilled you may be in topiary, no matter how many bonsai trees you’ve nurtured in your time, a DIY job on your beaver’s barnet is never advisable.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, less is more. When was the last time you saw Rosie Huntington-Whitely snapped on a beach with stray spiders legs creeping out of her bikini? When was the last time you saw a Rihanna music video with misplaced muff?

And so to those bitter rivals – The Hollywood (all gone ) and The Brazilian (all gone bar a ‘landing strip’). Now, I really can’t stress enough how much of a personal preference this has to be; but for my money it has to be The Hollywood.

Why I hear you ask? Well imagine its 4 o’clock in the morning, you’ve had a crackin’ night down Coppers and even managed to bag a man/woman (delete as appropriate).

Once home your thoughts turn to the matter of sex and how it might reasonably be accomplished given a) your level of intoxication and b) your level of attraction to a person who was ‘shiftable’ on the darkly lit dance floor but who in the cold light of your flat is a middling 2 or 3.

Frankly both you and your man have got enough on your plates without the added complexity of a bushy beaver, without the bumbling embarrassment of trying to find what’s what. With the Hollywood, however, everything is plain sailing.

It’s the difference, you could say, between shopping in TK Max where finding what you want takes forever (if indeed you do ever find it) and shopping in the easy to navigate shelves of, say, Top Shop where you can get what you need in a matter of minutes.

Lastly I would urge girls to stay away from the much touted Vajazzle – as Jack Whitehall says “no guy has ever gone down there and thought ‘oh this could do with redecorating”.

Yours indubitably,
Uncle Jamie

1. Viral Animal Vid of the Day – Acrobat monkey

2. Comedy Classic – Mr Bean invisible drum kit

3. The lambshank redemption -

4. Happy birthday Joseph Gordon levitt – 500 days of summer

5. “Extreme” of the day

6 Costa Rican Superman !

7 – Trinty Ball Music Vid of the Day – Friendly Fires – Hurting

8. Film Trailer of the Day – Here come the men in black

Normally people off of the telly get angry when you ask to move things around but for O’Doherty (or The DO’D as fans know him) this isn’t the case. “It worked out quite well actually”, he tells me as we walk into the kitchen of his Portobello crib, “I’m really into playing squash at the moment so this was the perfect excuse for a game”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man who describes his comedy as “very low energy musical whimsy”, the house is messy, its strewn with ink scribbles on bits of paper and every available surface plays host to old-looking, sleeveless vinyl records. He makes us two cups of (excellent) tea and we begin.

Doherty’s stand-up career officially began in 1998, but he had caught the comedy bug much earlier. During his much fabled year at Trinity, for example, he was the go to man for funny.

“I spent a lot of my time introducing things”, he says, “concerts and bands, that sort of thing”. “I remember once my brother once bet me I couldn’t get the word ‘spaghetti’ into an introduction for a piano recital in the Edmund Burke so I stood-up and said ‘my brother has bet me I can’t say the word spaghetti and I got a laugh’.

Did he enjoy college? “I never did much work in college”, he responds, “but just to be around people who were gifted and interested was cool”.

Leaving Trinity behind O’Doherty embarked on a series of comparatively tedious jobs. There was the stint as a telemarketer, there was the admin work as a temp, there was even the job picking-up sausages from the floor in a German meat factory.

As well as the mundane, however, he was also writing a children’s book and it was through this that he found ‘comedy proper’ – of the transition he says “there’s very little difference between the two: it wasn’t a huge step”.

He began gigging around Dublin and in 2000 made his first trip to the Edinburgh Fringe with a show entitled ‘The Boy Who Saved Comedy’ which received a nomination for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award. Edinburgh did two things for O’Doherty.

Firstly it cemented for him the viability of a career in comedy but perhaps more importantly it also allowed him to find his really quite unique ‘style’. “At Edinburgh you’ve got a whole evening”, he ponders, “so you can really dictate things”.

For those who haven’t seen or heard any of his material, O’Doherty’s routine entails toy-keyboard backed songs which are punctuated with fairly fantastical outbursts of stand-up.

Imagine if you will the musicality of Tim Minchin or Flight of The Concords with the alternative stand-up of say Noel Fielding. In one song, a duet (although “Shakira couldn’t make it so I’ll be singing both of our parts”), O’Doherty recalls the night that the Colombian star arrived at his door begging “David, David, King of Everything / let me feel your sexy body let me feel your skin”. “Shakira”, he responds, “get a hold of your sexy South American horn for just a minute” before ordering her a taxi to the airport.

As you might have guessed his comedy is a pretty odd, very relaxed and extremely funny; even if most of the time you don’t know why you’re laughing.
If Edinburgh allowed O’Doherty to find and get confident in his comedy, it was the people that he met there which boosted his career prospects.

As well as befriending Flight of The Concords duo Brett McKenzie and Jermaine Clement (who he would later support during their sell-out dates in Dublin) he also met Tommy Tiernan (with whom he toured Ireland), Rich Hall (who he accompanied on a UK tour) and Demetri Martin (on his tour of the US).

And since then there has been no looking back – he’s won an if.com Award, starred alongside Dylan Moran in “A Film With Me In It”, published a book entitled “100 Facts About Pandas”, written a series of ‘bad pun-based’ crosswords for the Irish Times, made countless TV appearances (including his hosting of BBC 2’s Never Mind The Buzzcocks) and performed to audiences in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America.

Despite all this O’Doherty has yet to garner the level of fame we might expect. “If I walk through Trinity or UCD people might recognise me”, he reflects, “but everywhere else it doesn’t really happen”.

Why is this the case? Well, perhaps most obviously O’Doherty maintains a ‘cult’ following because his comedy is, well, a bit ‘cultic’. In his stand-up, for example, we find none of the usual observational fodder trotted out by Messrs Macintyre and Evans (to name only two) and we certainly don’t have to endure jokes made on the back of being Irish.

“Look I’m inescapably Irish”, he says on the subject, “but playing-up to all that would make me a terrible stand-up comedian and the material about how long it takes a lady to get ready has just isn’t funny anymore”.

What then makes for a good comedian? “The only thing that I’ve learnt from ten years in stand-up is that you have to talk about things that you find funny”, he responds adding, “for me this means searching for big ideas and then finding the interesting minute details about them. There’s an old Jerry Seinfeld quote which goes: if you talk about your town on stage people think ‘why is he talking about his town’, but if you talk about your road people go ‘oh ok’, and I really agree with that”.

Its’ no great shock then that his own tastes in comedy are skewed towards the alternative. “Most stand-up I don’t really care about,” he submits, “but stuff from people like Noel Fielding and Daniel Kitson is what gets me really fired-up”.

Throughout our meeting it’s abundantly clear that O’Doherty is, despite what his onstage persona might suggest, very serious about comedy. He takes reviews “ridiculously personally” and the near absurdity of his writing process hints at a man obsessed with precision.

“I am constantly saying things into my phone, writing on my hands, writing on my laptop”, he says of his method, “once I’ve got about six hours of material I’ll do ten gigs to try it out and put the best stuff into the show”.

Given the arduous nature of creating comedy, I’m keen to know, once it’s written, which performance medium he prefers. The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is stand-up. “With TV you’ve got producers and directors telling you what to do or when you write a book there’s editors who have a say in it”, he explains, “but with stand-up it’s just you”.

It may be the most direct form of comedy; but there can be no doubt that stand-up is also the most trying. There are the long hours alone trying to be funny, the crashing defeat when a gag doesn’t land, not to mention the endless hours spent on trains and motorways.

With this in mind, I ask, does he actually enjoy it?

“I know I’m very luck to do this job”, he responds emphatically, “but I’m also aware of how fucking hard I have to work to make a living out of it” and by the time I leave I certainly don’t doubt that he does.

The full announcement was made on the Trinity Ents Facebookpage in the early hours of Monday morning. “I think it has something foreveryone” Ents officer Chris O’Connor told Trinity News, “It might just be the best line-up yet.”

Having released their second album, entitled Pala, to considerable critical success last May, Friendly Fires recently ended an international tour that saw them play a series of concerts in venues such as New York’s Central Park and London’s Brixton Academy that should mean the band are more than prepared toheadline the Trinity Ball.

UK hip-hop act Labrinth, who is set to release his debut album Electric Earth late next month,is another rising act that will be headlining this year’s ball. Despite his single “Earthquake” becoming the second highest selling number two of the year,the musician is still largely unknown in Ireland.

But while the headliners of previous years tended to be established and recognisable names from the UK hip-scene such as Dizzee Rascal and The Streets, this year the Ball’s organisers have chosen a more diverse selection.

While this does mean there is greater genre diversity in the line-up, it also means many may not have heard of all the headliners. “I don’t know a lot of songs from Marina & the Diamonds” fourth year student Annelise Berghenti told Trinity News,“but I really like her song ‘Hollywood’ so I’ll probably try and see her on thenight”.

But not all students were as optimistic about this year’s line up.“Underwhelmed and unexcited” was how final year student Aoife Crowley said she felt after hearing the full line-up, before pointing out that considering the ticket cost she would like to have seen a more high-profile act on the bill.

Aside from the headliners, a number of other bands will beplaying the ball including Erol Alkan, rapper Dot Rotten and Dublin band The Original Rudeboys. Also joining the line up are Trinity Orchestra, fresh from their successful Pink Floyd concert last week.

“We’re delighted to be asked toplay the ball,” Peter Joyce, Auditor of Trinity Orchestra, told Trinity News, “the orchestra is really on an upward path at the moment.”

Although the previous two years have set new records for ticket sales, whether a more diverse line-up will see a greater influx or less interest remains to be seen.

The Trinity Ball will be held on April 20th and the full listof acts playing as well as interviews, profiles and advice can be found in The Ball Guide, produced by Trinity News and out on campus now.

What do you think of this year’s line-up? Tell us your thoughts by taking our short survey. Just click this link! http://trinitynews.ie/wordpress/archives/3893