Brian Lynch will talk about and read from his novel ‘The Winner of Sorrow’
in Pearse Street Library next Wednesday 14 May at 6.30pm. Admission is free.
see Brian Lynch’s website.

Multilingualism is a special feature of the EU, but at the same time it presents an obstacle to understanding. Should Europe agree to use English as a lingua franca or must it promote each individual language?

Europe’s Babel
[via Digg]

GREACEN Robert Henry (Sandymount and formerly London and Belfast) - April 13, 2008, aged 87 years, at St Vincent’s University Hospital, husband of the late Patricia Hutchins and loved father of Arethusa. Poet and member of Aosdana. Sadly missed by his family and his circle of friends and fellow writers. Memorial Service (following private cremation) in Abbey Presbyterian Church, Parnell Square, Dublin (Findlaters) on Saturday, April 19 at 12 noon. Refreshments afterwards at the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square. Family flowers only, donations if desired to Habitat for Humanity, Quadrant House, Chapelizod, Dublin 20.

Björk’s new video, Wanderlust. Magical as usual.

This is Björk’s video gallery, on which, oddly enough, Wanderlust isn’t available as I write.

A beautiful essay as endorsement of Obama by the great Alice Walker, who argues that

we must build alliances not on ethnicity or gender, but on truth.

Alice Walker on Obama, The Root.com

[via Daily Kos]

Apologies to those of you who use Internet Explorer and have got an “Aborted” message when visiting this website. Hopefully the issue is resolved now.

I would have continued to be unaware of it but for Christine Clear and Rosemarie Rowley. Rosemarie sent me an email wondering if my website had moved. In Christine’s case, her friends and family who use IE complained that they couldn’t access her website. As her website is crucial to her work, I offered to help track down the reason, as it was fine in Firefox, and so I opened the dreaded Vista and gave it a go.

These things can be like a needle in a haystack, but finally I removed The Pale Blue Dot, that wonderful video excerpt from Carl Sagan’s TV series from, I think, the seventies, which was embedded in her site as a YouTube video. Suddenly IE was happy, Christine was happy and I was happy.

But then this morning I remembered that I too had that video embedded, along with several others in this and my alternative party website.

So I log out of my Ubuntu (Linux) comfort zone, and fire up the dreaded Vista and Internet Explorer (7) once again.

Yup. It viewed both sites and then threw up the page Aborted notice and the page went to, ironically, an IE notice full of javascript. Thanks a bunch, Microsoft. You spend billions developing software and yet you can’t cater for the world’s most popular video site. I normally try to avoid MS bashing, but once again your crappy software has taken up far too much of my time. So now I have to trawl the web to find a solution.
Thankfully I found it at Eastwood Zhao dot COM, for which many thanks.

The solution is simpler, of course, but it’s not the YouTube standard, so we have to do it the MS way once again.

May I implore those of you who use IE to switch to Firefox(or Safari - anything!).
For the more adventurous among you, consider Ubuntu. It solves all these problems at once, as Firefox is its standard browser. You can see my Ubuntu site under Sister Sites in the column to your right.

Thanks once again to
Christine Clear and Rosemarie Rowley, and to
Eastwood Zhao dot COM for the solution.

Also, hat-tip to Daragh and Graeme at Letshost for maintaining an interest in this problem.

hello! spring is here… and the Shell AGM approaches in May. We have 6 shell shares to give away! You must be prepared to be an active shareholder!! (go along to the meetings either in London or Holland on Tuesday 20th May 2008)
http://www.shell.com/home/content/investor-en/shareholder/faq/rds_shareholder_faqs.html
You will have to give some personal details.

for contact see The Rossport Solidary Camp website.

Who would have thought it? Ireland owns part of the US debt, according to a scary article in The Daily Telegraph.

As of June 2007, foreigners owned $6,007bn of long-term US debt. (Equal to 66pc of the entire US federal debt). The biggest holdings by country are, in billions: Japan (901), China (870), UK (475), Luxembourg (424), Cayman Islands (422), Belgium (369), Ireland (176), Germany (155), Switzerland (140), Bermuda (133), Netherlands (123), Korea (118), Russia (109), Taiwan (107), Canada (106), Brazil (103). Who is jumping ship?

Who is jumping ship, indeed! Guys?

We are the seventh biggest owners of the debt, in fact, owning $176 billion dollars of it. That’s enough to keep the occupation of Iraq going for - how long?

Now how did that come about? It’s not the naughty Irish banks using our savings, I hope. Because with the dollar going down the toilet, it would mean the value of our savings doing the same, right? (I’m no economist, so I’m open to correction).

Anyway, read The Telegraph and be very scared.

Tempus fugit.

When I was asked some time ago by Sarah from 7Towers to read with Oran Ryan, March 19th seemed like an age away.
Now suddenly it’s here.
In case you think that Chapters is still in Abbey Street, it moved to a fine, spacious premises on Parnell Street, a minutes walk from the top of O’Connell Street.

Wednesday 19.03.2008
Chapters and Verse Reading: Philip Casey and Oran Ryan

Oran Ryan is the author of The Death of Finn and Ten Short Novels by Arthur Kruger.

Philip Casey is the author of The Fabulists, The Water Star, The Fisher Child, and Dialogue in Fading Light.

Venue: Chapters, Parnell St, Dublin 1
Time: 1.15pm-1.55
Admission: free

In my rare idle moments of late, I’ve been musing on South America, a kind of daydream, really, probably because I was playing a little flamenco on my computer which progressed to a little tango and eventually to Vuelvo al Sur, with Astor Piazzolla & Roberto Goyeneche. You can look up the lyrics in Spanish and their English translation at Planet-Tango There’s something lovely about this song, the music by Piazzolla and the lyrics by Fernando “Pino” Solanas, but I thought I wasn’t quite getting what was haunting about it, so I went looking and found this video. Now I think I get it.