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Continue reading →: Tivo box and Netflix then hols
I recently looked at the competition’s broadband, tv and phone bundled prices. It confirmed that we were being overcharged by our supplier. The phone call to say we were dropping their service got the predictable response. “You are overdue an upgrade”. That meant that our monthly outlay was halved…
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Continue reading →: Do not offend the gods – keep your clothes on
More evidence that Westerners just don’t get it. A party of young tourists thought it would be a laugh to strip naked and take selfies of themselves on top of a mountain. The group was blamed for a magnitude 5.9 earthquake after stripping off on Mount Kinabalu, in Malaysia (pictured).…
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Continue reading →: Writing workshop
Last night was the second of three writing workshops with ‘place’ as its theme. We had three opportunities to get scribbling, treating the task: (a) dispassionately, concentrating on a raw descriptive style (b) putting the emotional associations into the description and (c) focusing on a particular event at the place.…
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Continue reading →: Nobel Prize Winner’s Gaffe
As the spectacled gentleman stood at the lectern, he reminisced about his life in the laboratory. “The years I have spent crying into petri dishes doesn’t bear thinking about. Luckily, there was always a woman’s shoulder nearby to soak up my tears. Men are much more emotional than people think…in fact…
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Continue reading →: Drinking alcohol may be entirely natural
Street corners in Belfast are often populated by young men with ‘slabs’ of beer cans at their feet. Drinking 24 cans of beer can induce the sort of behaviour that makes this pastime a nuisance. But scientists have discovered that our propensity for alcohol might be an entirely natural evolutionary trait. For 17 years researchers…
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Continue reading →: A right Charlie
Knee jerk reactions are popular with those who struggle to understand the complexities of any given situation. So it should come as no surprise that Charlie Hebdo got branded as a racist publication by people who didn’t understand French. One of Charlie Hebdo’s writers, Robert McLiam Wilson, patiently expressed his displeasure in…
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Continue reading →: Gregory Pardlo
I was encouraged to hear that a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Gregory Pardlo, had not had it easy. A family history of alcoholism and the rejection of his writing by major publishers did not deter Mr Pardlo. Such perseverance has to be applauded and marvelled at. I wonder if his route to poetry was helped…
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Continue reading →: Did the earth move?
Omnipotence is a terrible responsibility, particularly when your divinity compels you to lay waste to cities, slaughter thousands and watch as children die in agony. What can we mortals do to avert such horrors? Some clerics may have the answer.. “Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray,…
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Continue reading →: Prose poetry and drama
I was lucky enough to win a pair of tickets to see Sean O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman at the Lyric yesterday. My son and I tuned our ears to the rapid Dublin dialogue and enjoyed watching the humour and tragedy burst from the stage. I can’t claim to closely…
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Continue reading →: Scientific proof of virgin birth
Science and scripture have not always been easy bedfellows, but today there is incontrovertible evidence of the virgin birth. The only wise men on the horizon were ecologists whose findings have been published in the journal Current Biology. The latest virgin births do not herald a new messiah, but may have…
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