There he was tormented by demons, in the form of great black birds that swooped around him.

Finally, he rang his bell, and the demons fled, perishing in the sea beyond Achill Island. Read the rest of this article here.

Miscellaneous Amusing Items I’ve Come Across #34

In Ballyhaunis for my mother’s birthday. I brought her out for dinner in Claremorris. It doesn’t much swankier than that. Have to head to back up to Dublin today to cover a camper van jamboree that’s going on in Louth over the weekend. It’s really a shame because, when it comes to bank holiday action, there’s nowhere else even at the races… Read the rest of this entry »

“I haven’t been this excited about a technological breakthrough since they invented the dish scrubber with the washing-up liquid inside it…”

Until quite recently, I was very pernickety about punctuality. Your punctuality. If you were five minutes late to meet me in a cafe or a bar, I’d be strumming my fingers on the tabletop when you arrived. Ten minutes and I’d be shooting you the old stink eye. Twenty minutes or more and I’d have prepared a short monologue in which I outlined all your deficiencies as a friend and a human being. Yeah, I was kind of a hard ass. Read the rest of this entry »

This is funny

Though not, of course, as funny as this.

What’s the dealio, yo?

A while back, I made a kinda ham-fisted joke here about hipster babies. (The joke, I suppose, was that the very notion of hipster babies seemed just inherently silly and ridiculous to me.) Well, let’s just say, I hadn’t gone shopping for baby clothes in American Apparel at that point… Read the rest of this entry »

I have climbed the highest mountain…

And I have roamed through the fields. Then a mighty nettle stung me, and I got chased by a massive bullock, and then… Read the rest of this article here.

Ouch…

In case you missed it, here’s Jeremy Paxman getting his ass handed to him on live television by Eurfyl ap Gwilym of Plaid Cymru. (Really gets going at about the 2:15 mark…) You’d almost feel sorry for the guy, were it not for the incredibly patronising introduction he had just given the Welsh politician.

“I’m joined now by Eurfyl ap Gwilym, who is Deputy Chairman of the Principality Building Society, in which august position he is also Plaid Cymru’s senior economic adviser…”

Last time I ever mention this idiot. I promise.

Last week I expressed surprise that Ian O’Doherty had not been taken to task over some really callous homophobic invective in a recent newspaper article. Now I’m a little wiser. Having a rational argument with O’Doherty, I realise, is like having a fist fight with a toddler. There is no glory in it.

Yesterday in the Indo, he fired back at me. Well to be fair, he first chipped in a really stellar (even by his own lofty standards) think-piece about bras, which concluded with the burning question: “After all, who wants to live in a world where chicks with massive hooters aren’t celebrated?” Then the gloves came off.

Though professing not to know me, nor to have any quarrel with what I had written about him, he referenced (apparently without irony) my supposed “bitterness” and “talentless outrage.” Really, in terms of the guy having a comically low self-awareness, he could only have topped that by singling out my drooping jowls and pass Leaving Cert standard English. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m Straight (1973)

Glenn Greenwald reads my blog

Look, I could try to contrive some clever ruse by which to casually drop this into the conversation. But we’d be here until Christmas. So I’ll come right out and say it. Glenn Greenwald linked to my blog yesterday. As T.S. Elliot once said, In your face, motherfuckers. Oh and Evan Dando? Consider yourself well and truly gazumped…