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.)
“I won’t finish in hell, but I’ll do a thousand years in purgatory,” banker Giampiero Fiorani joked about himself. A strangely religious outlook for a banker, one might think, particularly when faced with the more pressing concerns of avoiding a possible jail sentence. Fiorani is currently under investigation by the Milan magistrature for a number […]
Review of Kevin Stevens’s latest novel, Song for Katya reviewed here.
In 1999, on a cold November night in Dublin, at the MTV European Music Video awards, Luciano Ligabue took to the stage, briefly. The Italian rock star was greeted by a baffled audience. Part of the price of staging a ‘European’ event many presumed. An interlude between Ricky Martin and Britney Spears. Last saturday, Ligabue […]
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 […]
Silvio Berlusconi, back in April, as he formed his second government of this legislature, admonished those in the Parliament who spoke of economic crises and a downturn in Italy’s fortunes. It would become, he said, in English heavily-accented by his cheesy grin, ‘a self fulfilling prophecy‘. It’s hard to face the challenge against world communism […]
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 […]