On the airwaves: Yesterday was a quiet day on the campaign trail, but it was six seconds of silence that proved the most interesting thing on the airwaves.
Several news programmes broadcast Bertie Ahern's blunt refusal to answer a question on the controversy; complete with his handler's punctuating phrase of "next question please". But radio couldn't quite do it justice, and it required the evening television bulletins to give us a look at the whites of the Taoiseach's eyes. Or, rather, the whiteness of his lips.
He was, explained David Davin-Power on the Six-One News, "decidedly tight-lipped". Tight-lipped? Any tighter and Ahern's nose would have met his chin.
He didn't have a good media day. Radio and television reports repeatedly pointed out how slow Fianna Fáil has been in getting out of the blocks, and how, on his walkabout in Dublin city centre, Ahern kept getting asked awkward questions by both journalists and members of the public.
What must have made it all the more galling was how Enda Kenny was being spoken of in saintly terms. We learned that he is attentive, warm and great at dealing with ordinary people of any demographic. One commentator on Today FM's The Last Word observed that "women of all ages treat him almost as if he's a First Communion boy in a suit".
Drivetime reporter Fergal Keane followed the communion boy for the day, reporting back that "it was good. It was very good." After revealing that the fridge on Fine Gael's "battle bus" is well stocked with chocolate, when given the chance to interview Kenny, Keane opted for the sweet touch.
"The words Taoiseach and Enda Kenny, do they drip easily off the tongue?" he asked.
Kenny proved capable of adding extra doses of sweetness to all this light.
"I felt like some kind of rock star outside the school at Kill yesterday, with all the little children, and signing autographs," he said. "Maybe they thought I was somebody else."
TV3's evening news bulletins had a report on how the party leaders were using the posters to make an impression. Enda seems to be going for the youth vote, one man-on-the-street observed, but Bertie appears to have plumped for the "cuddly old man" look.
The Taoiseach hadn't got much of a mention during the morning, when Newstalk's Breakfast Show discovered that the big issue is which politician is the best looking. It triggered a big response from the public. Although, given the plaudits being heaped on some candidates' looks, there was a sense that the public was liberally sprinkled with campaign managers.
Liz O'Donnell's name came up a lot. "In any company she'd be considered hot. Not just hot simply because she's a politician," Ger Gilroy told his co-host Claire Byrne.
And if the listener required any one example of what separates Newstalk's coverage from RTÉ's, they got it in that sentence.
On Morning Ireland, meanwhile, the Green Party's Ciarán Cuffe warned about the dangers of cosmetic surgery - as they applied to posters.
Hang one too low and you're in danger of falling foul of what he called the "Willie O'Dea moustache factor. You want to be out of marker's length."
The comment came within a piece on the ubiquity of posters. A total of 640 tonnes of them in all, apparently. Although they would probably weigh less if the candidates didn't wear so much make-up.
Cuffe was asked about the environmental friendliness of his posters. They are, he insisted, recyclable. After the last election, they found a particularly ironic afterlife. "Last time round I had them recycled - maybe it sounds appropriate - into sewage pipes and manhole covers."
