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Donald “Traitor” Trump has 2 big policy goals: 1. Give Ukraine to Putin; and2. Withdraw from NATO. He’s just said so. You don’t need to be especially adept at reading between lines. Never was the need for a united European army more obvious – the idea that Russia and China will leave us alone andContinue reading “Trump’s 2024 Manifesto”

Very few songs manage to be simultaneously silly and worth listening to.  In the niche category of “silly, but good”, here are some long-time fav oddities. Just noticed how many of them are from the 196os / 70s. That figures. Not much silliness in popular culture nowadays. Here we go: —————————————————————————————————— Nervous Norvus‘ The FangContinue reading “Silly, but good”

British government ministers are taking environmental advice from a business leader whose company was fined millions for pumping sewage into British waters. These scoundrels exist in all countries. Invariably, these are the type of people who wave national flags in a performative manner, and accuse their political opponents of “lacking patriotism”. I merely offer aContinue reading “Pumping patriotism”

Our kids read The Beano. Of course, so do I … a couple of years ago, I noticed that “Fatty“, of Bash Street Kids fame, had been re-named “Freddy“. And as the Daily Telegraph reports, “Sensitivity Readers” have now been busy bowdlerising Dahl. Among the usual po-faced excisions, the word “fat” has been removed fromContinue reading “Censor-itivity Readers”

In 2023, most business travel is entirely un-necessary. Much of it is blokes flying abroad to sit in a room and have a PowerPoint read to them by people they already know, and have already met in person.  It made sense to do this. In the 1990s. (Just as it used to make sense toContinue reading “Most flying is un-necessary”

FYI 1: Irish Gaelic football is divided into county teams and club teams. In any county, there will be lots of club teams. As an amateur organisation, GAA rules require that all players who play for a club or county must actually be from that club or county area – there is no transfer market.Continue reading “Does the GAA have a bias problem?”

“For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude.” – Samuel Beckett. Years ago, I started a bandContinue reading “Teamwork is opposed to art”

We’re going to get our cat chipped, and I mentioned, casually, to our little ones that it would be a good time to get them chipped as well, so we could keep an eye on them. Cue massive and sustained uproar from the back seat of the car lol.  I had to confirm that IContinue reading “Blu Tack”

Aged 15, in RE class at school, our teacher asked whether we considered the world to be primarily friendly, or unfriendly. The class split roughly into friendly and unfriendly camps. When the teacher asked me what I thought, I remember saying “neither“, and that the world largely was “indifferent“. I’ve always had that view. AsContinue reading “Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés”

That, ladies and gentlemen, was the jaw-dropping title of a recent BBC podcast. There is a species of pop-cultural revisionism, put about by arrogant white millennial women who are very lightly-informed about pop and rock before they were born, that “strong women in pop” started in the 1990s with so-called “girl-power” bands etc.  (Big MamaContinue reading “Is Taylor Swift Our Greatest Living Poet?”