I’ve been meaning to post this for a number of days but the humdrum business of looking for a new job occasionally gets in the way of the far more important task of blogging.A friend of mine, Joe Skelly, a reservist, is currently stationed in the Civil-Military Operations Center, Baquba, Iraq. As anybody who has […]
More depressing news from the sometimes shameless realm of Irish public life: RTE has just reported that “The Standards in Public Office Commission has decided not to investigate the awarding of contracts by Minister Martin Cullen to PR consultant Monica Leech.”I wonder just how ethically dubious a Minister’s actions have to be for this toothless […]
Bologna is basking in the glow of attention afforded by American writer John Grisham, who has chosen to ambient most of his latest novel The Broker in its medieval city centre.
The story revolves around an imprisoned, high-profile lawyer (obviously) who receives a controversial pardon in the dying days of an administration. On his release he is spirited out of the country, by the CIA, to a new anonymous life in Bologna. Of course there is skullduggery afoot, and in truth our hero has been placed out of American Jurisdiction in order for the rest of the world’s baddies (Mossad, the Saudis, and Red China) to get a shot at eliminating him.
While Bologna basks, in Milan a row has developed over the last three weeks between the Italian magistrature and a number of Government ministers over a case against three supposed Islamic militants.
Bologna is basking in the glow of attention afforded by American writer John Grisham, who has chosen to ambient most of his latest novel The Broker in its medieval city centre. The story revolves around an imprisoned, high-profile lawyer (obviously) who receives a controversial pardon in the dying days of an administration. On his release […]
Friday’s Irish Times’s article on Irish bloggers (which inexplicably failed to namecheck yours truly) took the community to task for focusing on international matters–frequently US foreign policy–at the expense of native issues. (See Gavin’s Blog for extensive extracts from the piece).I sometimes do feel a tad guilty for failing to address the burning issues at […]
From Friday’s Breaking News section of Ireland.com16:26 Plans to shoot Lassie in Ireland announced
Many of you might have come across the remarkable 2.5 gigapixel photo (see here) created by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research that allows you to zoom right up to the modern office and retail parks that hedge the historic core of Delft. Now, according to an article from Wired, a former Cold War […]
Koren Zailckas has written a memoir, Smashed, about her drinking experiences and her eventual renunciation of the bottle. The only surprising thing is that Zalickas penned this tale at the tender age of 23–in other words, she’s somehow managed to cram the whole cycle of tentative experimentation, excess, and clear-eyed abstinence into less than a […]
I might have given Colm T�ib�n�s novel, The Master, a bit of an uncalled-for kicking the other day, but I have to admit that his waspish criticism is very much worth reading. He seems to have a gift for showering his subjects with faint praise. Or lauding their achievements while demurring on one or two […]