In my constituency, Conor “Kebabs” Lenihan has just got in on the first count.

To quote Dick Tuck, who spoke on the occassion of losing the race for a California Senate Seat, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

We all make mistakes. Lord knows, I do (having noticed this morning that I spelt the surname of the man who I sort-of-hope will be the next Taoiseach as “Kenney”!). But in this “knowledge economy” there’s now money to be made, and lots of it, from slips at the keyboard. Take the rather noisome figure […]

With the media moratorium on election coverage due to fall like a sheet over a disfigured corpse, it is time to reflect, even if it sets your teeth on edge, on the campaigns that are rapidly winding down. Alas, it was far from an electrifying spectacle. If the politics of ideology is a thing of […]

The American author Richard Ford is scheduled to give a reading at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre on June 6. I’m currently immersed in his latest novel, The Lay of the Land, a real baggy monster whose narrative leisurely meanders, with plenty of oxbow digressions, through the fertile mind of Frank Bascombe, the realtor familiar to readers […]

It’s been reported that J.K. Rowling has now pledged a “staggering” sum to the reward for the safe return of Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old English girl who was abducted in Portugal 12 days ago.This sum is in addition to the $3 million already raised, in part due to contributions from such notoriously media-shy figures as […]

You’re likely to relish Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed debut novel, Then We Came to The End, if you enjoy narratives that revoice the 19th century’s omniscient narrator as a sardonic first-person-plural Greek chorus in the style of The Virgin Suicides.Even if you don’t fall into that audience category, anyone who’s ever worked in an office “environment” […]

A Wall Street Journal article (link via Fimoculous.com) examines the “second-generation” impact of search engine technology: “When Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Her top choice: Kohler, an old […]

Frank McDonald, the environmental correspondent of the Irish Times, is a self-confident (some might say self-satisfied) journo who has succeeded in establishing a niche for himself as an expert. Long known for his blistering attacks on aesthetically crippled development projects (which often appeared–like the articles in Playboy–amidst reams of glossy hype in the paper’s property […]

As the flock of handsomely renumerated jurists take flight from the Four Courts after deliberating the fate of a 17-year-old girl wishing to terminate her pregnancy, I’m sure I’m not the only one left at the end of this week with a feeling of simmering outrage over the sorry episode.Outrage not just over the faintly […]