Taking an opsimathic interest in the history of my hometown, I’ve been contentedly engaged by Maurice Craig’s landmark publication, Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City. Craig’s aphoristic style (“[In] Dublin luxuries have always tended to come before necessities.”) and interest in the wider intellectual milieu combine to produce a book that transcends the category […]
Watching General David Petraeus’s attempt to sell President Bush’s surge strategy to U.S. senators, I’ve been distracted by the matrix of ribbons and badges adorning the general’s chest, the profusion of which would not embarrass the late Leonid Brezhnev. Some of this luxuriant military “flair” is glossed here.
The ins and outs of Polish politics are a bit too sleazy and trivial for most so there follows a comparison of Polish politics and normal, Irish politics. My fellow monkey, Shane Barry, will doubtless bristle at the description of Irish politics as “normal” but there you are… Phone Tapping Yes, it happens in Ireland […]
Blaming the opinion pollsters (see earlier entry) is usually the resort of the washed-up but sometimes you have to wonder. In this weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza there are two articles concerning, among other things, mobile phones. Side by side they sit, contradicting each other. Polling agaency CBOS tells us that in a random sample of 903 […]
Snapshot of what’s concerning readers of the online Daily Telegraph as of lunchtime, Friday September 7:(The thought struck me today whether the obsessive focus by the media on this individual tragedy isn’t some weird displacement activity, distracting our attention from the hundreds of lives lost weekly in the Iraq hellmouth.)
One opinion poll puts the ruling regime ahead. Another, conducted a day ot two later puts rivals PO ahead by a good 8 points.
A wise man, who has risen above the distractions of mere commonplace things, will eventually discover that much can be achieved by apparently doing sweet FA.
Now that every news mag in the U.S. wishes it were more like The Economist (see the “Reagan’s Tears” cover for an example of Time‘s new Econo-like look), the New York Observer features a timely debunking of the British mag’s occasionally colourless/pompous prose style: “The Economist is less provocative than it is aggressively boring: “The […]
The news that Dublin’s central library will move from the rather grim precincts of the Ilac Centre to the grandiose, albeit down-at-heel, Ambassador cinema building seems like evidence of one of Dublin Corporation’s less calamitous planning meetings. The relocation will not come cheap: “The city council will become sub-tenants paying €1.2m annually in rent and […]
As you approach Kraków, or any other town in Poland, it becomes clear that when it comes to advertising billboards, anything goes. Confirmation of the abundant evidence of the outraged senses comes this week on the pages of Polityka, from the lips of one Jacek Maria Stokłosa: Several years ago all provisions concerning protection of […]
