The Sound of Paint Drying

The other morning, after a night of torrential rain, my first, irritated waking thought was, “Well, if it’s going to piss down, and I have to go out in that, I just hope there are hundreds of fat, boring businessmen meeting on golf courses today.” I’ve never been glad to see the back of summer but […]

The End, Part 666

We’re way, way more doomed than we thought before the weekend. We moan and whinge about potholes in this country but imagine waking up to find that the actual entrance to hell has opened up in your back garden? They certainly woke up to that ‘reality’ in Guatemala City the other morning. In yet another piece […]

Scrabble: now available in “moron”

The world of ‘rules’ is in mourning tonight, after Mattel announced that the forthcoming new edition of Scrabble will make proper nouns acceptable. According to a ‘spokesperson’, “this is one of a number of twists and challenges included that we believe existing fans will enjoy and will also enable younger fans and families to get […]

So, this is what’s “Cúl4Kidz”, nowadays..?

OK, so what do we have here? A nice colour-it-in picture from The Irish Times’s Cúl4Kidz supplement – it depicts two burly hurlers in action, a nice bedroom wall or fridge adornement for little culchie children to colour in, while protecting themselves from the elements of rural Ireland, while they sit with their tumbler of Mi Wadi […]

Fred Wedlock 1942-2010

It’s with much sadness that I note the passing of Fred Wedlock, the Bristol teacher-turned- folk singer and humourist. For me and many other pop pickers of my generation, he’ll always be remembered as the man who made ‘The Oldest Swinger In Town’ famous, taking it to number 6 in the UK charts in 1981. Although Fred wasn’t the […]

New Head Shop opens on Grafton Street

The national scandal – far worse than child-raping priests, profligate bankers or amoral, incompetent fuckwit politicians, all of which continue to be ignored or even tolerated – continues unabated with the opening of Gimme Head on Grafton Street.

The ladder that spawned a thousand lightbulb jokes…

Regular readers (reader, maybe) may recall the recent escapade involving my office’s purloined toilet seat, and its eventual, painstaking replacement by the baseball-capped, bluetoothed, jobsworth pain-in-the-arse who looks after such things in this industrial park. Well, here I present more photographic evidence of his utter inadequacy. The vertically-challenged amateur pedant and his careless-in-the-community sidekick were in our […]

New men’s mag hits the shelves – repeatedly

Slow news day but at least it’s nice to see a new, fun publication for gentlemen in the shops this weekend.

Scarlet Fever

The magnificent Fever Ray in chilling form during her acceptance speech for “Best Dance Artist” at the P3 Gold Awards in Gothenburg, in her native Sweden. Although maybe not as terrifying as some of the goons who normally given awards for doing any old amateur rubbish, it’s a behind-the-sofa moment like no other I’ve ever seen.

Masochistic, cannibalistic pigs in Clonmel

Because I’ve been vegetarian most of my life, I have an inbuilt belief that butchers are somewhat evil. Well, I’m sure in their own way and in their personal lives, some of them are very nice. (Like Hitler, perhaps; a friend once pointed out to me that Adolf was probably very nice to Eva. “Here is a […]