That, I can imagine, would be the response if you invited the “cool kid” from school over to your house to play this touchingly ill-begotten attempt to help children “discover fundamentals of computer programming by playing a board game!”(As reported by Wired news.)

Review of Kevin Stevens’s latest novel, Song for Katya reviewed here.

The most recent issue of The Economist features an article describing the finding of the Chernobyl Forum, “a group of several hundred scientists, economists and health experts supported by the three governments involved�those of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.”Broadly speaking, these experts conclude that the long-term effects of the disaster are significantly less severe than was […]

Saturday’s Irish Times featured an entertaining review by Booker-shortlisted author John Banville of Neil Steinberg’s Hatless Jack: the President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat.This exhaustive compendium of headgear-related facts attempts to correct the myth, of which I was blissfully unaware until yesterday, that Kennedy’s aversion to hats doomed the industry. Steinberg points […]

From Saturday’s Irish Times article headlined “Two homeless found dead in 12-hour period”:When contacted for comment, Alice Leahy, director of the homeless charity Trust, said homeless people dying on the streets of Dublin is now “almost a weekly occurrence”.

I’ve held off writing about the disaster until now for a number of reasons:a) After the hours of saturation coverage (no pun intended), I thought what’s there to add?b) I felt guilty at not having paid sufficient attention to that equally awful but now almost forgotten contemporaneous calamity in Baghdad.c) I didn’t want to join […]

Last night’s performance by the Irish soccer (I have to use that term instead of “football” to avoid growls from GAA supporters) team in the World Cup qualifying game might have disheartened many, but for those who hanker after submerging their individuality in the warm bath of patriotism can shake their fists with joy this […]

The New York Times has a profile of the reclusive author, S. E. Hinton, author of such teen classics as The Outsiders, and Rumblefish.The enduring popularity of her work is staggering:”Her most famous book, “The Outsiders,” about teenage gangs and alienated youth in Tulsa during the 1960’s, transformed young-adult fiction from a genre mostly about […]

Blogging might be a bit patchy over the coming days (when isn’t it, some might argue). Apart from noisome tasks associated with contract work, I’m doing some reading in my spare time (well, spare spare time, assuming that non-working hours should be spent being a good and patient father) for an interview I hope to […]