So, less than an hour after I posted my why-oh-why plaint about Airtricity, the following message arrived, from the company’s Senior Marketing Executive no less:”Hi ShaneThanks for your emailThe current Customer Agreement Form can be used by both commercial and residential customers signing up to Airtricity. We should have the new Residential form up on […]

A rule of thumb for living in the Irish capital is that most activities are, unless you’re a government minister, about 20-25% more awkward than they should be. Making token gestures at environmental friendly behavior is no exception. Public transport is shambolic, so you fume at a bus stop or (eventually) take the car. Bottle […]

An Irish Times piece on Saturday by Shane Hegarty has pre-empted today’s blog rant but had not appeared when I brought up the subject with two friends on Friday night (during the earlier, more coherent stages of my birthday celebrations). I announced that I found it hard to stomach the fact that my local community […]

Yeah, I really had your there for a moment. Real headline–Robert Fisk: Bush’s new strategy – the march of folly.Incidentally, for Christmas, my brother bought me Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (1,392 pages) and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (1,104 pages).I didn’t know whether to thank or throttle […]

The hoopla over Apple’s iPhone appears to reaffirm Steve Jobs’s famed ability to generate a reality distortion field. The virtual demo at the Apple site certainly looks slick. However, two questions come to mind, one reasonable, the other curmudgeonly. First, how are blind people or people with impaired vision expected to interact with this “advance” […]

That Dublin’s traffic chaos is world class. A New York Times article comparing Beijing’s auto mayhem with the Irish capital’s explains how skyrocketing car ownership in Ireland is canceling out environmental improvements elsewhere (in power generation, for example):”No trains run to the new suburbs where hundreds of thousands of Dubliners now live, and the few […]

A while ago, I decided that in the upcoming general election, scheduled to take place sometime in the first half of 2007, I would bite the bullet and give Fine Gael candidates my first preferences. It was not a case that I’m wildly, or even mildly, enthusiastic about the party’s leader or policies. My support […]

…by ignoring it! This extract from an Indo report details how monied (and oblivious) Irish folk are doing their bit in baking the planet: MOTORISTS are turning away from smaller family-style cars for higher performance vehicles. […] The trend shows how increasing prosperity is driving up the size and quality of car bought by tens […]

Please go here for my festive sign-off…

The BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time, presented by Melvyn Bragg, is a perfect show for a bluffer like me, as it covers some weighty topic, such as the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes or China’s Warring States period, in a cut-to-the-chase 30-minute format. Bragg is an able moderator, asking questions that a reasonably […]