Shane McGowan celebrates his 50th birthday today. Who would have thought it? Comfort and joy all round. This must rank as one of the most unlikely anniversaries imaginable. As the great man says himself: “Smoking, drinking, partying – that’s why I’ve stayed alive as long as I have.” That’s the spirit lads. Give it a lash. Happy birthday Shane… And a merry Christmas to all of you out there, wherever you may be.
Daniel Larison points out an extraordinary passage from Bill Clinton’s appearance on The Charlie Rose Show on Friday. Bafflingly, Clinton seems to believe that the Northern Irish peace process qualifies his wife to be President: Clinton:…The only way to overcome our differences is not basically to try to erase the past, it’s to get used to working together. I mean it’s kind of a metaphor for the Hillary argument. If you look at last Monday, the… Charlie Rose: You are people are pushing me, so it’s not my — Bill Clinton: The new leaders of Northern Ireland came to Washington to see the president. They — it represents a stunning
Well, not always. From the New York Times, September 29th 1994, less than a month after the declaration of a (temporary as it proved) IRA ceasefire: Artfully casting off his old role as official outcast, Gerry Adams, the political spokesman for the Irish Republican Army, beamed from the steps of City Hall yesterday as New York politicians vied to be at his side and hail him as honored guest and newborn statesman… …A relatively small lunch-hour crowd of a few hundred cheered him, but the domestic political value of Mr. Adams’s official turnabout was demonstrated by the throng of local politicians who crowded about Mr. Adams. They pressed him to
This interesting story about jury duty in Baltimore brought to mind that old and favourite line from an Irish judge: You have been acquitted by a Limerick jury and may leave this court with no other stain upon your character.
As a coda to yesterday’s posts on Not Reading Books, it was remiss of me not to quote the man who may make a decent claim to being the greatest newspaper columnist of the 20th century. I refer, of course, to Myles na Gopaleen (“Myles of the Ponies”) better known to posterity by one of his other pseudonyms, Flann O’Brien. Here’s his solution to the reading problem: THE WORLD OF BOOKS YES, this question of book-handling. The other day I had a word to say about the necessity for the professional book-handler, a person who will maul the books of illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that the books will look