But might not some publicity be utterly pointless? We ask, because we have come across some that seems to be just that.

Now ordinarily, a little blurb about your event in a paper like Dublin’s The Irish Independent would be a PR coup. After all, the 103-year-old paper is Ireland’s most widely-circulated daily newspaper.

But why on earth would they be sending a shout-out to local alternative paper Free Press Houston’s weekly Recession Thursday’s concert series?

But in the November 15 issue, there it is, in a feature about how cultural life worldwide has been affected by the economic crisis: “In Houston, Texas, one venue is running a series of gigs billed as The Free Press Recession Thursdays where $5 admission gets you half a dozen bands.”

We had no idea a bunch of local bands appearing together on one cheap bill was a sign of worldwide economic collapse – it just seems the way things have been done around here forever – but the Irish Independent thought differently. In their article, it was akin to the demise of the leisurely French lunch and a sharp downturn in the caliente Spanish sex trade.

Hair Balls called Free Press’s Omar Afra (on the left in the picture) to ask about how he felt about his publicity coup. “The who wrote us up?” he asked.

The Irish Independent, we replied. They’re a big paper over there.

“Well, that’s pretty cool, I guess, but we aren’t even doing those things until February,” Afra says. “Technically, when we started those we weren’t even in a recession, in the strictest sense of the word, so we were a little ahead of our time. They were kind of hit-and-miss, so we are gonna really push ‘em next year.”

And if an angry mob of disappointed, bargain-seeking, music-loving Irish tourists attempted to storm Recession Thursdays former (and likely future) home of Numbers last night, Afra didn’t mention it.

– John Nova Lomax