On Monday Fianna F�il senators and TDs gathered in Westport, Co. Mayo for their annual “think-in.” One suspects that such events are designed as much to send out signals about the party’s intellectual credentials (“You know, we’re not just cute hoors who skull pints in the FF tent at the Galway Races”) as they are […]
Der Spiegel’s English-language website features an article on the latest “taboo-breaking” book on the Third Reich to appear in Germany. The book in question, Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead (apparently the punchline to a joke), deals with the incongruous subject of humour and joke-telling during Hitler’s regime. What is suggestive about the article is […]
Recently, a billboard on the N8 route near the Port Laoise bypass, advertising “Frans Crash Repairs,” was castigated by self-appointed guardians of grammatical purity, the Apostrophe Protection Society. Personally, when it comes to apostrophes I find sins of omission (leaving them out) less offensive than sins of commission (putting them in where they don’t belong). […]
Summer is over, the evenings are drawing in, the roads are again clotted with traffic, and, if you were not sufficiently depressed, the country’s worst journalist is back in the saddle. Yes, Orna Mulcahy surpasses even chick-lit author “Kate” Holmquist and R�is�n Ingle in the production of the most vacuous prose appearing in The Irish […]
Like Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines, like President Bush to New Orleans, like Bertie Ahern to, er, Fagan’s , I have returned. The reasons for my online absence (or should that be “offline presence”?) are varied and prosaic: the demands of a new job and “quality parenting” stand out. Of course, we should not discount […]
In their article in Gazeta Wyborcza the three young economists offered up the following statistic: in 1960s Poland for every retired person and invalid in receipt of welfare there were 12 people working and paying taxes. Turning to this week’s Sunday Times I read that in Ireland in the 1960s there was a tiny 1.4 […]
Western readers will notice something peculiar about the stern and impressive Stefan Chwin’s latest novel and other works of fiction from this part of the world: the unashamed name dropping. I mean brand names. starannie ogolony i spryskany O… S… carefully shaven and sprayed in O… S… W supermarkecie A… In A… supermarket niczym dostawca […]
I blame Bia?oszewski. For the short sentences. In fact, fragmentary. Sentences, that is. Very annoying. He wrote a book once. Famous. Pami?tnik z powstania warszawskiego. It was called. Miron Bia?oszewski wrote short, abrupt sentences in a sometimes successful attempt to capture and reflect the urgency and chaos of Warsaw during the uprising. Polish lends itself […]
On Thursday, in the sleepy provincial city of Lublin, things got exciting. A motorist noticed that the driver of a Cherokee jeep (price: around 150,000 zl — you can buy a flat for that) was behaving erratically, weaving all over the road and stopping and starting for no reason. On calling the police he was […]
Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza has an interview with Lorenzo Vidino, an Italian terrorism expert, about the recent near-attack on trans-atlantic aeroplanes. The interviewer is the ever incisive Mariusz Zawadzki. The headline is “Why Great Britain Again?” It is quite a puzzler, alright. Vidino is able to help: he says that Britain is perceived the world over […]
