Chancellor Schr�der’s decision to call early elections came in the wake of disastrous election results in North Rhine-Westphalia. Apparently, the electorate gave the Social Democratic Party a kicking because they don’t like the government’s fairly timid attempts to reform the economy (in particular the so-called Hartz IV reforms, which introduced cuts to unemployment and social […]

Walter Kirn reviews Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good for You” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review today. Johnson’s book is attracting quite a lot of coverage for making the apparently counter-intuitive proposal that watching a lot of television or playing a lot of video games is actually a Good Thing. Apparently, the […]

Here’s two examples of well-crafted bile from the week worth noting in the blog:The British MP George Galloway may be a shady ego-manic, but he can hurl a great, almost baroque, insult. From the Gruaniad, which describes an exchange before Galloway proceeded to demolish a Senate committee ostensibly convened to grill the Scot on alleged […]

Just finished Brian Fagan�s The Long Summer, whose subtitle �How Climate Changed Civilization� sums up the book�s premise. Specifically, Fagan describes the coincidence of the rise of human civilization in about the last 15,000 years with a period of unusual warmth and climactic stability in the millennia after the end of the last ice age. […]

Lenihan should not quit, says Minister states the Irish Times in relation to the moronic “kebabs” remark made by junior minister Conor Lenihan.Er, yes he should. Lenihan’s boss, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern, claims that ‘the remarks had been made “in the heat of the moment.”‘ But even if they were, such a verbal […]

On the seemingly interminable (10+ hours) flight back to Ireland from Arizona, I managed to finish Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s slim, amusing, and mercifully short novel, Television (translated by Jordan Stump). Its slight premise–in short, a man decides to stop watching television for good–had a certain appeal after three weeks’ exposure to U.S. TV. (It’s not really […]

Ah, holidays–a time of year to wander around a video store 5,000 miles away from home and realize that Blockbuster, although significantly cheaper than your local video store (whose late fees kick in around 12 seconds after your five-plus euro 24-hour rental is up), has exactly the same range of offerings. (Remember the good old […]

This is the first post of May. The gap in posts is not just down to being on vacation (on vacation from what? some might say) but can also be explained by various dull Internet issues, flaring back pain, yada yada yada. In the past week or so, I have actually used to time that […]

The other day, while I was trumpeting my minor contribution to the most recent issue of Three Monkeys Online, I forget to mention some of the other stuff on the site worth taking a look at. In particular, the mag has somehow managed to wrangle interviews with both Peter Jackson and Naomi Watts, director and […]