Or “please make sure we have remembered to close the doors”. The Economist on the truth behind airlines’ safety announcements.

The site Limerick Blogger (http://thelimerick.blogspot.com) has being doing a sterling job of collating information about the violence that has been unfolding in that city’s Moyross suburb. The apparently humdrum routine of petrol bombing your neighbour’s gaff segued into something far darker with the horrific arson attack on a car with two children inside. The children, […]

Mary’s gone, Tony’s leaving (eventually), and now G�ran might have to sling his hook. G�ran Persson, prime minister of Sweden for the past decade, is facing the possibility of being forced out of office if he loses next Sunday’s closely contested election. Persson is also leader of the Social Democratic party, which has, the Economist […]

In yesterday’s Sunday Business Post, Vincent Browne claimed that a sense of “menace” was a necessary quality for the leader of which Irish political party? A) Sinn F�in B) The Progressive Democrats Given that it’s the death-bed amanuensis of Charles J. Haughey writing, you won’t be surprised to learn that the correct answer is option […]

Almost five years on, and we still cannot not turn away. Trawling across the wasteland of digital TV, we still have to pause and allow that second plane–filmed from so many angles because its predecessor had done its job of alerting the world–make its inconceivable rendezvous with the South Tower. It doesn’t matter that the […]

This blog didn’t make me laugh, but it did make me smile once or twice. Wryly.

Sporting a scar running from his ankle to hip from when he was attacked by a buffalo several years ago, Hon. Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley, scion of Kenya’s Delamare dynasty, sounds like something Evelyn Waugh might have invented while suffering from a particularly nasty hangover. Think of a darker version of Basil Seal. The great-grandfather […]

The 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert was famous for his attention to detail. He was reputed to spend over a week agonizing over a single sentence, weighing up each word’s exact shade of meaning. It seems that Flaubert has some distinguished heirs among the tabard-wearing intellos who occasionally work for Iarnr�d �ireann. Commuter and intercity […]

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, an article by pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Blink) yokes together the decline of General Motors and the rise of Ireland Inc. The connection is demographics: just as the ratio of active workers to retirees became a major burden on the American behemoth, […]