irish times

They’re calling it Ireland’s Mount Rushmore. Honest.

Window display in Counter Propaganda, South King St. entitled “The Wealth of a Nation is its People.” The creators are speaking figuratively, I hope. Right now, I’m worth about 25p! (P.S. With thanks to Counter Propaganda for flattering me absurdly and to Rosemary MacCabe for spotting this and sending me the photo.)

The March of the Wooden Soldiers

Forever let this place be a cry of despair
And a warning to humanity, where the Nazis
murdered about one and a half million men,
women and children, mainly Jews,
from various countries of Europe”
Inscription at Auschwitz-Birkenau Read the rest of this article here.

Miscellaneous Amusing Items I Come Across #49

Apologies for the irregular updating (and frequent re-posts) on blog in the last week. I’ve just moved apartment and, for the time being, am stuck on crappy mobile broadband. For now, you can always follow me on Twitter. Yesterday, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand (I think it had to do with the property crash) someone posted this alluring image.

Published: Irish Times, March 8 2008

“Piddlers… Piddlers!? Can you imagine?

It’s eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening in leafy south Co. Dublin. The tea has been poured, biscuits passed around and I’m about to get my ass handed to me in Scrabble by a woman old enough to be my grandmother. The popular board game is celebrating its 70th birthday this year. In that time, 100m sets have been sold in 29 languages across 121 countries.

But the Irish Scrabble-playing community are a small, tight knit bunch. Anne Lyng knows most of the faces. “One of our regulars is an inmate at the Central Mental Hospital” she chuckles. She rummages in the cloth bag, plucks out seven tiles and passes the bag across. “He’s very good,” she says. “He has them all playing up there now.” Read the rest of this entry »

Before I begin, I’d like to address a few words to the Garda Road Traffic Corps…

Officers, lads… I know we’ve had our differences. We’ve both said things that, in the light of day, we probably regret. But look what you’ve reduced me to. I’m using public transport. Dear God, hasn’t this madness gone far enough? Read the rest of this article here.

Wayne Coyne Battles the Bad Buzz Robots

Electric Picnic 2005. I had only a couple of minutes notice I’d be talking to Wayne Coyne. No time to prepare questions. So I got to thinking, you know, the guy is always so insanely happy. Wouldn’t it be funny if I just tried to depress the shit out of him. So I tried. Did it work? Well… Read the rest of this article here.

“With Damien I could just stick my thumbs in my waistband and stand there like a Thunderbird…”

IT’S A GORGEOUS Monday afternoon; one of those rare, life-affirming days in the early summer when the world, however fleetingly, appears vibrant, green and new. But at our table in a bustling Italian restaurant on the banks of the Grand Canal, Lisa Hannigan isn’t brimming with the joys of summer just yet. She’s anxious that if she orders food, she may accidentally spill something on her blouse. (There is a photo shoot to follow.) She’s anxious that if she doesn’t eat, the restaurant may want the table back. But for the most part, she’s just anxious about where I might be going with my opening question. Read the rest of this article here.

“A coward is somebody who dies a thousand deaths because they haven’t got the courage to express what they think…”

Fair enough, I’ll come right out and say it then. You’re an idiot, Marco. Read the rest of this article here.

‘Lots of writers I admire – Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Vonnegut – served in the military.’

DERMOT
Private First Class, French Foreign Legion

Tell us about yourself.
My name is Dermot, I’m 24 years old and I’m from Balbriggan. I didn’t always want to be a soldier. In fact, when I did my Leaving Cert in 2003, I wanted to study journalism in DIT. But I missed out by ten points.

So you decided to try something less cut throat instead?
I worked a while in insurance first. Then I did three and a half years at one of the state’s largest bank. But by 2008, my feet had started to get itchy. My friends were all heading out to party on Bondi Beach. I decided to do something completely different. Read the rest of this interview here.

“I bailed out and landed in the sea. The other pilot… didn’t make it”

Both aircraft were critically damaged. The Irishman managed to save himself by gaining enough altitude before his aircraft disintegrated to parachute safely. In dramatic footage that’s available to access on the internet, his parachute can be seen opening a split second before he hits the water. The Swede, meanwhile, plummeted to his death in the Mediterranean Sea. Read the rest of this article here.