I’ve been meaning to post this for a number of days but the humdrum business of looking for a new job occasionally gets in the way of the far more important task of blogging.A friend of mine, Joe Skelly, a reservist, is currently stationed in the Civil-Military Operations Center, Baquba, Iraq. As anybody who has […]

More depressing news from the sometimes shameless realm of Irish public life: RTE has just reported that “The Standards in Public Office Commission has decided not to investigate the awarding of contracts by Minister Martin Cullen to PR consultant Monica Leech.”I wonder just how ethically dubious a Minister’s actions have to be for this toothless […]

Friday’s Irish Times’s article on Irish bloggers (which inexplicably failed to namecheck yours truly) took the community to task for focusing on international matters–frequently US foreign policy–at the expense of native issues. (See Gavin’s Blog for extensive extracts from the piece).I sometimes do feel a tad guilty for failing to address the burning issues at […]

From Friday’s Breaking News section of Ireland.com16:26 Plans to shoot Lassie in Ireland announced

Many of you might have come across the remarkable 2.5 gigapixel photo (see here) created by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research that allows you to zoom right up to the modern office and retail parks that hedge the historic core of Delft. Now, according to an article from Wired, a former Cold War […]

Koren Zailckas has written a memoir, Smashed, about her drinking experiences and her eventual renunciation of the bottle. The only surprising thing is that Zalickas penned this tale at the tender age of 23–in other words, she’s somehow managed to cram the whole cycle of tentative experimentation, excess, and clear-eyed abstinence into less than a […]

I might have given Colm T�ib�n�s novel, The Master, a bit of an uncalled-for kicking the other day, but I have to admit that his waspish criticism is very much worth reading. He seems to have a gift for showering his subjects with faint praise. Or lauding their achievements while demurring on one or two […]

It’s gone too far, and somehow this exploding cult needs to be reined in. I’m talking about the way supporting football clubs, in particular those in the English Premiership, is becoming less a hobby and more a means by which people are beginning to identify themselves. The hysterical coverage of the game is one of […]

Late last week I received Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Beach and hope to post a review on the main Three Monkeys site in due course. When I was reflecting on how much I like Murakami’s work, I tried to remember what it was about my first encounter with his writing–reading the incredible Wind-up Bird […]