Latest news with #Moby
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Automotive
- Irish Independent
Two more Wicklow towns added to Moby e-bike scheme
Each e-bike comes equipped with features that support safer, more convenient travel, including automatic gearing, GPS tracking and long-lasting batteries with a range of up to 70 km. Recognising that the hilly terrain in Wicklow can be a barrier to conventional cycling, the council has partnered with Moby to offer a practical and accessible solution. Cllr Paul O'Brien launched the scheme on Friday, June 13, in what was his final official duties as Cathaoirleach of Wicklow County Council, before passing on the chain of office to Cllr Melanie Corrigan. He stated: 'This is a smart, climate-focused initiative that will make a real difference to how people move around our towns. By offering a clean and convenient alternative to the private car, we're reducing congestion, cutting emissions, and improving the quality of life for our residents and visitors. This is a practical step toward a more sustainable future for County Wicklow.' He added: 'The scheme was a huge success when launched in Bray and was also recently launched in Greystones. I worked hard before my time was up as Cathaoirleach to make sure the scheme came to our county town. We are always seeing different schemes and initiatives taking place in Bray or Greystones, so it was great to see Wicklow town and Rathnew being treated the same. 'Obviously, we hope the scheme provides a big tourism boost, and I know from talking to the local chamber of commerce, they get a lot of requests from tourists and visitors looking to rent bikes. However, the e-bikes aren't just for tourists, we want everyone to use them, including residents of Wicklow town and Rathnew. The e-bike docks are dotted throughout Wicklow town and Rathnew, near to schools and attractions such as the Black Castle ad the Murrough. "E-bike stations are also strategically located near public transport hubs, schools, sports centres, tourist sites and residential areas, making it easier than ever to leave the car at home. "I also hope the e-bikes get the respect they deserve. I know there were some issues in Greystones with e-bikes being discarded along footpaths, and I hope we don't encounter the same issues in Wicklow and Rathnew.' Users can rent and return bikes through the Moby Move app, with designated parking stands and virtual zones helping to manage the service sustainably. The scheme operates 24/7 with flexible pricing, including pay-per-use options. New users will receive €10 in free ride credit to encourage them to try the service and make the shift toward smarter travel. CEO and founder of Moby Thomas O'Connell commented: 'Our goal is to support Wicklow County Council in making sustainable travel an easy and appealing choice. "Whether commuting, connecting to public transport, or exploring the area, our e-bikes offer a reliable and zero-emission alternative to driving. We're proud to help Wicklow lead the way in smarter mobility.' ADVERTISEMENT To further support this shift, Wicklow County Council's green team and climate action team will launch a workplace travel survey from July 21. This survey will form part of the TFI smarter travel behaviour change programme and will gather insights into how council staff are adapting their travel habits in light of new mobility options like the Moby e-bikes available in Bray, Greystones and Wicklow town. In addition to the bike scheme, a shared electric pool car will also be made available at county buildings.
Irish Independent
06-06-2025
- Irish Independent
Bleeper bikes service returns to Castleknock and Carpenterstown
Approximately €10,000 worth of damage was done to the Bleeper bike fleet this year in Dublin 15, with vandalism and theft rates going 'off the charts' after March 1, according to Steven McGinn, walking and cycling officer with Fingal County Council. 'So, rather than allowing that to progress and potentially put the entire [Bleeper] scheme at risk, we pressed pause in Dublin 15 and removed the bikes while we met with the local gardaí,' he said. Mr McGinn said this was 'very fruitful' and allowed Bleeper and gardaí to recover 15 of the 28 stolen bikes. Now the council is ready to progress with the first phase to reintroduce Bleeper bikes to Dublin 15, he told the local area committee yesterday. 'That's going to be around the Castleknock/Carpenterstown area. We're going to monitor that really closely and just make sure that everything is going to plan,' he said. 'Then we're planning to move back out to Hartstown and a few places like that. 'We'll reintroduce the bikes slowly, we'll keep an eye on the scheme and make sure everything's working the way it should. We will hopefully have a full reintroduction of the service in the next four to six weeks.' Councillor Angela Donnelly said the reintroduction was 'fantastic news'. 'I'm really, really pleased to hear that because the couple of people that came to me, it was their journey from their house to the train station that they really found the Bleeper bikes very useful,' she said. Fingal residents are entitled to a 'Fingal Pass' with Bleeper bikes, which allows them to cycle pedal bikes free for the first 30 minutes of their journey. After this period, they will be charged the regular rate of 4c per minute. The firm also offers e-bike options, with a higher rate of 16c a minute charged for those journeys. Mr McGinn added that the council was finalising a deal with another bike sharing provider, Moby, to bring their e-bikes to Dublin 15 in the next two weeks. Moby has also partnered with several other local authorities such as Dublin City Council and Wicklow County Council. Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
Extra.ie
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Saoirse Ronan to star in new video for Talking Heads' 'Psycho Killer'
Saoirse Ronan is set to appear in a new music video for Talking Heads' Psycho Killer, marking the 50th anniversary of the band's first gig in New York's CBGBs. It will premiere today, June 5, at 5 pm. Earlier this week, Talking Heads shared a post on social media including Psycho Killer and today's date. In another post made on June 3, the band shared a clip of Ronan brushing her teeth with the iconic track playing in the background. The new video will see the Oscar-nominated actress acting out in a series of domestic and work locations, and is directed by Mike Mills, best known for his previous work with The Divine Comedy and Moby. Psycho Killer was originally released in 1977 and was the first song that David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads wrote together. Talking Heads last performed together in 1984 and officially disbanded in 1991. Check out the new music video, premiering at 5 pm, below:
Hindustan Times
02-06-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Pet Appreciation Week 2025: 30 quotes and messages to honor your furry friend
Pet Appreciation Week is upon us, and it's time to extend a special round of warmth for our furry friends. Started in 1981, this week typically begins on the first Sunday of June and lasts up until the next Saturday, which means that this year the week will last from June 1 to June 7. Given hectic schedules and busy lifestyles, pet owners often tend to filter through the love that is due to their pets. Hence, this week is a time for pet owners to let all barriers loose and go the extra mile in appreciating and treating those closest to their hearts. Here are some words of wisdom to help you realize the true value of pets in life. 1) 'Scratch a dog and you'll find a permanent job.' – Franklin P. Jones 2) 'Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.' – Moby 3) 'My fashion philosophy is, if you're not covered in dog hair, your life is empty.' – Elayne Boosler 4) 'What do dogs do on their day off? Can't lie around – that's their job.' – George Carlin 5) 'The dog is the god of frolic.' – Henry Ward Beecher 6) 'I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross, and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.' – Mark Haddon 7) 'I don't understand people who don't touch their pets. Their cat or dog is called a pet for a reason.' – Jarod Kintz 8) 'Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.' – Franklin P. Jones 9) 'Dog is God spelled backward.' – Duane Chapman 10) 'All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.' – Charles M Schulz 11) 'There's a saying. If you want someone to love you forever, buy a dog, feed it and keep it around.' – Dick Dale 12) 'A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.' – Josh Billings 13) 'Actually, my dog I think is the only person who consistently loves me all the time.' – H. G. Bissinger 14) 'No matter how you're feeling, a little dog gonna love you.' – Waka Flocka Flame 15) 'Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.' – John Grogan 16) 'You cannot share your life with a dog … or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.' – Jane Goodall 17) 'Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.' – Anatole France 18) 'The difference between friends and pets is that friends we allow into our company, pets we allow into our solitude.' – Robert Brault 19) 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.' – Mahatma Gandhi 20) 'You cannot look at a sleeping cat and feel tense.' – Jane Pauley 21) 'People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.' – Jonathan Foer 22) 'The animals are right here, right in front of us. And how we treat these companions is a test.' – Linda Blair 23) 'Happiness is a warm puppy.' – Charles Schultz 24) 'Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.' – George Eliot 25) 'Pets have more love and compassion in them than most humans.' – Robert Wagner 26) 'Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal: Difficult standards for people to live up to.' – Alfred A. Montapert 27) 'Animals keep you company when you're really lonely. It helps because when you have a friend around who always likes you no matter what – it's harder to feel bad or down.' – Aaron Carter 28) 'Our task must be to free ourselves … by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.' – Albert Einstein 29) 'The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend.' – Lord Byron 30) 'The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.' – Mark Twain Wishing you and your furry companions a happy Pet Appreciation Week!
Forbes
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Sunday Conversation: The National's Matt Berninger On His New Solo Album
How to describe an interview with The National frontman Matt Berninger? Like talking to Moby or Liz Phair (who along with Robert Plant might be the smartest interview in music) it is a fascinating labyrinth of cerebral twists and turns where you just hold on and do your best to keep up. It is as compelling and enlightening as his music. Which is saying a lot because along with Nick Cave and the timeless Bruce Springsteen, Berninger, with The National and on his own, has been, to me, the most consistent rock act in the first quarter of this century. Once again, Berninger stuns with his second solo album, Get Sunk. A gorgeous slice of life that, like the writing of Raymond Carver, is deceptively complex and profound, Get Sunk is, as Berninger describes it, a romance with ghosts. As we discussed, it is a record of memories, of life, of hope. Steve Baltin: I'm a big believer in environment affecting writing. So, was it Connecticut that lit the spark for this album? Matt Berninger: The Connecticut part of it maybe colored the process. This record has a lot of Midwestern atmosphere with creeks and trees and animals and bike rides along rivers and stuff. I've always been writing about that stuff. But yeah, getting to Connecticut, back in an area that is like what it was like in my youth and particularly on my uncle's farm. The place I live now, I have a barn, and I have a little bit of land. But I have all this stuff and there are trails in the woods and creeks all around where I live now. And that's where I spent all my most memorable stuff of my childhood, it all happened at that farm in Indiana. So, Connecticut really inspired that part of it. But I think anytime you uproot and go to a new place, or take a vacation, you're riding a train through Italy, like suddenly, you're going to write differently and be inspired to write different kinds of stories. So, I do think, I think changing the soil you're in every 10 years is really smart. Baltin: So that's something that you've done regularly, move every decade or so? Berninger: Yeah, I've moved from Cincinnati, moving out of your house or your parents' house, and then going to college in an apartment, that feels like two different types of living. Then I moved to New York City in '96, and I was there for maybe 15 years, and that's where I met my wife, that's where my daughter was born. We'd been in Brooklyn for close to 15 years or something. Then we just felt we had squeezed New York for every drop of inspiration and so we moved to Venice, California. We lived out there for 10 years and then I wrote five or six, seven records, did so much stuff out there and met Mike Mills and became a collaborator with all these amazing filmmakers and stuff. So that was an amazing decade of creativity and then my daughter was about to go to high school, and we all wanted something new, and we had family in Connecticut and it's so close to New York. I didn't want to move back to Brooklyn, but I really want to be close to New York again. I go to New York every week and ride the train. So yeah, it's really new and inspiring and I think that is really good and it does jolt me, although some of this record I started five years ago in Venice. Even some of the songs that are talking about Indiana, and the Midwestern pastoral scenes were written when I still lived in Venice during the lockdown. So maybe I was just dreaming of wandering the woods or going back to a time. But I always write about that stuff. But moving and changing your environment does change your brain. Baltin: Would this album have been made anywhere now at this time? Berninger: Yeah, I feel like this would have been made anywhere at this point in time. I do, and I have been saying this recently because I've been trying to answer that question. Because yeah, a lot of this record does go back and it's a really conscious effort to try to reshape, not in the details and truth, but in the emotional memories of things and write a great story, and of a great 45-minute immersive connected experience. And it was really important for me on this record more than anything I've ever done, I think. But you're right, what is our past? What is it? And often, I've been saying this, that our past is a story we tell ourselves. and we remember it differently. Our memories of it change and our memories are memories of memories. So, it's our own version of (the game) telephone constantly going as we go and try to retell the stories of what happened and why am I like this and what was my childhood like and what were my relationships with my parents like and what was it? It's all fantasy and it's just the same way your future is a story you're telling yourself. What you want, why you're doing what you're doing and where you're trying to go and how long you want to live and what you want in your life and what experiences you want to have going forward is also just a story. And what experiences you had in the past so you're just telling your story of those experiences. All those things, traumas, good things, can totally shape you, yes, but sometimes we can be confined by our own definitions of ourselves and that we create a little bit of a prison or a trap around ourselves and we say, 'I'm this way because of this and that's why and I'm going to stay this way.' And right now you're seeing in the world, everybody, it's an identity crisis. People don't know. I'm a Catholic, but there are so many Catholics identifying with something else that is so un -Catholic. And that kind of thing, but there's so much, 'But this is me now, I'm this and I identify with this.' I think we really trap ourselves into our ideas of who exactly we are and I think it's a dangerous thing. I was trapped in an idea of what I was. Like I was this type of guy. I'd written all these stories. I had manifested becoming this melodramatic, unhinged character. And then I was leaking into that facade or that story I had told had started to become a little real. And it wasn't real. And so, yeah, I think that this record is trying to maybe go back and kind of recontextualize some of the beauty and I think the good things mostly. There's a lot of darkness in this record, but I'm a happy person. I've had very unhappy times. I've had very dark, long depressions. Everyone has, but my core is optimistic, hopeful, kind, brave, and happy mostly, and I remember that. And I learned that from my parents. I learned that from my cousins. I learned that from my uncle. I learned that from nature. I learned that from the farm. I learned that early, and that hasn't changed. I identify as those things, but sometimes you get lost in these other prisons of other things that you think you are, but you're not. Baltin: That's so interesting on so many levels. As The National started getting bigger, do you feel like personally you became a character people wanted you to be? Berninger: I was actually in my early 30s before we got successful. But when you get your first taste of success and people are really reacting to your work that is some of the most extreme, darkest parts of your personality, or the saddest parts, and those become the best songs because I'm being honest about something. But when you're writing those songs in your 30s, and then you get successful, I'm sure subconsciously I've elevated that idea of that guy in my head. There's more currency to that character, I realize. And so maybe you start to manifest it, and you keep building this weird sculpture of these little Legos of melodrama and anger or rock and roll songs and all these things. Then they become this really weird cool sculpture that everybody buys tickets to see. And then the next thing you know, you're stuck as this thing that wasn't what you intended. Baltin: You and I have talked over the years too about literature being inspiring and I feel like there were very literary and cinematic points of this album. Right when we got on the Zoom, I was listening to the record again. I love 'Silver Jeep.' That one has almost like a Raymond Carver feeling to me. Berninger: Yeah, there's a few of them. Some of them are more kind of blurry, abstract, impressionistic, emotional descriptions of emotional things or descriptions of process, like 'Nowhere Special' is a totally different song from a lot of the other songs and so is "End of the Notion.' I don't think about it when I go in but I see that I'm often trying to write a type of song I've never written but I've written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs. But "Silver Jeep" and "Bonnet of Pins" and "Frozen Oranges," those are three examples of songs that are like scenes. Or "Bonnet of Pins" is maybe just an hour or a couple of hours of reconnection between two people. Then "Frozen Oranges" is a whole day, a long bike ride filled with medicines and joys and fruit and sunshine and bugs and juice and it's a really healthy song. Then 'Silver Jeep' is a is an echo of the same character from 'Bonnet of Pins.' That character is not really present much in 'Frozen Oranges.' But then at the end of the record, I think 'Silver Jeep' and 'Bonnet of Pins' are a little bit of a return to that relationship or that dynamic. What is it? Well, they're always chasing each other. They're always seeking each other, but they're always there. The line in 'Silver Jeep' that I like is, 'I see you out there somewhere in a silver jeep.' Maybe only in my mind but you'll always be there whether I ever see you in person again, you're never leaving. This person might already be dead. The whole record is about a ghost but it's not a singular ghost, it's not one person, it's a ghost of something. It's a really romantic record. It's a romance with a ghost, I guess.
