Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government John Gormley shows why the Green Party is so popular with da kids by telling us how he spends his days in his blog.This week, John’s in Bali. But he’s not like those FF types with their sleazy junkets. John’s just here to save the planet:”I arrived […]
The most charitable epithet for John Waters’s column in today’s Irish Times is “misconceived.” A more accurate description would be don’t-know-where-to-look awful. Waters’s musings on the death of a young Irish socialite, Katy French –whom Waters admits he met just once–presents the dismaying spectacle of a writer who has floated free from the moorings of […]
Having reached about the half-way point of the novel during this morning’s commute, I can see why Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses won the IMPAC award and secured a berth on so many best-of-2007 lists. Almost every page features a line or paragraph embedded with a truth you didn’t know you already knew. And it […]
2007-05-30 Telekomunikacja Polska. Press release. Darmowe rozmowy przez całą dobę. (Free conversations all day long.) That was May. This is December. The company’s subscribers have received a letter from one Jacek Mrozik, Marketing Director. Certain changes have been made in the nomenclature of Telekomunikacja Polska’s rich array of offers. Namely: “plan tp 60 minutes for […]
Addressing the unfolding meltdown in the financial industry, a recent cover of Fortune magazine depicted some of the Wall Street head honchos who were forced to fall on their swords. Above the photos of the fallen, the strapline asked “What were they smoking?” A salacious story in the New York Times on the suspicious death […]
Chavez has gone and spoiled it all. He only went and lost the constitutional referendum. Not only that, but he has had the impudence to graciously concede defeat! Dziennik quotes him as saying “We respect the rules of the game. Venezuela is not a dictatorship.” Further, he called on his supporters not to cause disturbances […]
Describing a book as “beautiful” can be dismissed as a lame start to a piece of criticism. A word more at home among the spidery handwriting of a schoolchild’s book report, the self-respecting critic treats it as gingerly as someone with high blood pressure handles the salt cellar. But (aside from the fact this is […]
In one of the rituals of approaching year-end, the New York Times has unveiled its 10 Best Books of the Year. So far I’ve read only one, Joshua Ferris’s rollicking satire of office life, Then We Came to an End (see here for my take on the novel and here for my high-falutin’ reflections on […]
…Angola?? Stats nerds can now download facts and figures for 80 countries from the Economist‘s The World in 2008 microsite.(Ireland’s GDP per head figures remain difficult to swallow.)
There was a stick but there was carrot too. Among the ways in which the Communist authorities in Poland tried to keep writers and creative types in line was by introducing in 1978 a tax free allowance of 144,000 zł per annum for them. This at a time when the average monthly wage was 4 […]
