Ragtag Giggagon

Ant Man is a very enjoyable movie. Superman, Spiderman, Batman and the Hulk were the four superheroes of whom one was aware growing up. By one, I mean me. Captain America, Thor and Iron Man were lesser heroes. I had perhaps heard of Steve and Tony, but I would've struggled to recall their names. We all knew Clark and Peter. Comic book cynicism was parked long ago, when a quite good Smallville came along after the dire Lois & Clark crapfest. Expectations of an epicfail were never vindicated, and they've rarely been since, by either the DC or Marvel adaptations, even the ones that aren't sposeda be good, like Ang Lee's Hulk. All these people are doing entertaining work. Ant Man is pushing it in terms of name recognition, although it's great fun. Both the human dimension and comedy elements are among the strongest of all the Marvel movies. My problem with the Marvel Cinematic Universe Notwithstanding the TV shows - the massive Marvel **** - is that it has too much ...

From Part One . In 2008, Ireland was the only country in the EU whose people got to vote on the Lisbon Treaty. All the reportage and analysis at the Irish edition of the Sunday Times was against the Lisbon Treaty. Most of the main political parties were pro-Lisbon. And one of the paper’s journos, Sarah Carey, wanted to write a pro-Lisbon piece, but she was effectively told she couldn’t. She quit the paper. But who wants a weak Europe outside of the Sunday Times? There were rumours afterwards that Predden George Dubya Boosh had Rupert’s ear, and he was asking him to go anti-Lisbon in Ireland coz they could do without a European syoooperpower. Whatever the reason for the lack of balance, is this the kind of independent media we want to be paying for, signing in through a firewall for the privilege? If people have to pay for stuff, there'd better be breasts on page 3. Meanwhile, the BBC appears to spend its news budget attacking ITSELF lately, and when it attacks Cameron, it gets itse...

Kudos to Rupert Murdoch for the Sky Box. He went into tv in the late 80s, piping crap from the 70s into our living rooms. The qualitatively dire programming was a risk, a placeholder for better things to come. No doubt he’s taken the odd punt on himself, and put money into the technology. Fared income.  As I was watching BBC Newsnight yesterday evening, Evan Dragon’s Den was grilling a BBC guy and a Daily Mail guy about why the BBC needs to be so big. Does it need a weather app? They’re talking about reducing the BBC’s size. Hmmm. I don’t think we want a smaller Beeb, but a Beeb that supports local independent media a lot more (as suggested by the BBC guy) might not be a bad thing. Montgomery talked shit too! Rupert Murdoch owns Sky and Fox and the Sunday Times and the London Times and a few red tops and the Australian meeejia. These are the words of Rupert’s son, James Murdoch, in 2009: "Dumping free, state-sponsored news [ie, the BBC] on the market makes it incredibly difficult...

There's a little disappointment that often comes with word-of-mouth book reviews that suggest a book is brill. So don't listen to the reviews from the book clubs. If you plan on buying this book, don't read beyond this sentence: Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent, published 2014, is highly recommended, so go out and buy it if you don't have it already. The fact that the third last word of this book review is "piss" is no reflection on the book itself. If you don't intend to read it, you may eat the opening two chapters in a café, after buying it as a gift in a nearby bookshop, while quaffing a quappuccino. Do that, and you'll soytenly be borrowing it from the gift recipient after they've read it within a few days. The book's multiple POV narration (with a character getting a chapter, most more than one, to tell events from their perspective) allows for a couple of twists and turns. And there are more than a few twists in this tale. A teensy cri...

Seen on radio journalist and all round dayyy-cent chap Bob McKenzie's wall was an article he'd shared about one girl's dating fail that she's turned around for the betterment of humanity, and has gone viral. She's exceptionally beautiful. I had a few pictures of her here, but they're her photos, so it's certainly not right to share given the opinion I want to give. But check out her blogpost . It appears that they had a really great date, but he messaged the next evening to say that he was very taken with her face, personality, and everything about her, but he wasn't attracted to her body shape. He signed off by telling his date that he adores her. On Bob's wall alone, the guy has been branded an arsehole, a prick, a body nazi, impotent, a fuckwit, small-willied, an arsewipe, and his sexual orientation has been questioned. Women are, person for person, better than men. Generally, they're better bosses. They're more competent. They cope ...

1915 was the year of Billie Holiday's birth. A little known fact about Ms Holiday is that her mother had some Irish heritage. Billie was born Eleanora Fagan to a 13-year-old Sadie Fagan, and a 15 year old jazz-plank* man Clarence Holiday. Babies makin' babies! Back at a time before women had the vote, and having premarital babies at 13 was "frowned" "upon", her folks booted Sadie out of the family gaff and - also entirely abandoned, some claim, by her plank-spanking boyfriend - Sadie took to single parenthood against all opposition, sharing duties when she could with a half-sister. This is the cruel world in which Billie started life. And while not quite as Full Irish as a delicious pork-based breakfast, the Fagan ancestral link is a good excuse for a hooley in Dublin! Sure why not? The voice on her! We want a bit o' that!  In celebration of her wonderful, frequently-cracked but never broken spirit, Billie Holiday, the voice and icon, will be recognised ...

As many as over 7 billion people have survived a County Kerry house fire which saw owner-occupant, Mrs Agnes McGann, 73, die of complications arising from furniture combustion following apparent misuse of a cigarette last week.             The vast majority of the world’s population escaped unscathed when Mrs McGann, a widow survived by three children, fell asleep in front of the television while holding a standard, filtered, lit cigarette. Cigarettes, consumed through “inhalation”, must be “ignited” “at one end” using “fire” before being “smoked” through the “filter” at the “other end”. It is believed that “Mrs McGann” may have accidentally failed to extinguish the cigarette she had been smoking before drifting into a kind of unconsciousness called “sleep”, thus starting a fire that was somewhat larger than the one that is initially produced when lighting a cigarette.           ...