Eoin Butler

It’s Not Easy Being Green (and Red)

Right. I’m outta here. Got a call last night to see if I wanted to go on tour with Ian Dempsey and Mario Rosenstock and their Gift Grub thingy. I’ll be writing about it for the paper, you understand. (It’s hilarious the number of people I’ve told, who assumed they’d asked me to perform. What? On the back of this? Really!?) Read the rest of this entry »

Are these the greatest consecutive tweets ever?

I must admit, I’m belatedly warming to Twitter. One guy who followed me on there (so I reciprocated) posted this the other night. He followed that shortly afterward with this… Read the rest of this entry »

Miscellaneous Amusing Items I’ve Come Across #35

How the hell have I never heard about this until now? Johnny Slade’s Greatest Hits is a 2006 screwball comedy featuring virtually the entire supporting cast of the Sopranos in what appears to be an ill-advised, campy gangster romp. It looks absolutely really, really terrible… I have to see it!

Document sets out the minimum calorie intake required by Gaza’s 1.5m population, according to their age and sex*

On Monday, the BBC published a full list of goods permitted into Gaza, under the Kafkaesque terms of the Israeli blockade. The contents of that list had long been the subject of exasperated conjecture for both humanitarian organisations and commercial importers. (Some of the proscribed items include jam, chocolate, wood, fruit juice, textiles, and plastic toys.)

Yesterday, I received this email from Eoin Murray of Trócaire (who kindly helped arrange my visit to the besieged city in the summer of 2008.) He wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed this last night…

Contender for greatest ever blog comment here.

“Here’s an act of random kindness… Put some bloody trousers on!”

RONAN HARRINGTON
Move over organised religion. There’s a new game in town.

You’re a non-profit company that manufactures underpants. Is that correct?
No, no… We are ARK. It stands for Acts of Random Kindness. We’re a clothing brand with a big idea. Every time a customer wears something of ours, we ask them to perform one random act of kindness that day. We pay ourselves a wage, but any profits we make beyond that are invested back into the company to spread the message. Extra monies we make further down the line will go into a charitable fund. It started out with t-shirts, but we’ve since branched out into Ark Underwear… For Undercover Kindness! Read the rest of this entry »

This is What I Imagine All of Your Weekends Looked Like:

So how was your Bank Holiday weekend? Kick back, relax, re-connect with friends and family, did you? Spend quality time with your pets? Contribute to the betterment of your community? Well, that’s nice and all. Read the rest of this entry »

Gerry Ryan: His Part in My Downfall

It is a laudable Irish custom not to speak ill of the recently deceased, and one which I sincerely hope I’m not in breach of here. Read the rest of this entry »

Published: Unpublished, summer 2007

Readers Letters

Dear Eoin,

I’ve never been lucky when it comes to love. My first husband Michael was great with the kids and the sex was fantastic. But one day he ran off with my best friend Tracy and the contents of our bank account.

I found new love with Dan. He was great with the kids and the sex was fantastic. But one day he ran off with my brother-in-law Pete and the contents of our lingerie drawer. 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 »