I'll spare you all full reviews of Romanzo Criminale and Casino Royale, given the shrill bleatings emerging from certain quarters lately concerning my blog.

Romanzo Criminale was excellent. The casting was superb, as were the dialogue, locations and cinematography. Rome has never looked as good in a film. The characters' rough accents added hugely ( Read more... )

It's quiet in the office so I'm taking the opportunity to post. As ever, life is relatively uneventful. I went for dinner with a friend from the Irish College in Paris last night. We went to Tante Zoë for the early bird menu. It was quite good. I had ( Read more... )

I want to buy a laptop, and Dell are doing a special at the moment: €549 for a Celeron-equipped job with 1 gig of RAM. Is it a good buy? I read once that the Celeron CPU is merely an updated Pentium I. Is that true? Will a Celeron chip be compatible with Vista when it comes out? Does that even matter?

Advice greatly appreciated...

I went to Wong's in Ranelagh for dinner for my dad's birthday last night. I wasn't impressed. To be honest, it was no better than a run-of-the-mill Chinese takeaway. We ordered a set menu for €38 per person (we were five), plus wine on top of that. Now, for that price, the food should have been very good ( Read more... )

God, Esperanto is such a hilarious language. What's the point?!

My, my, what a turnaround for our glorious leader. The divorce payments scandal seems likely to go down in history as one of those occasions when a whole quagmire's worth of mud was slung at the Taoiseach, but none of it stuck ( Read more... )

Had to clean the house last night 'cos the estate agent is showing people (or one person - who knows?) around this evening. I stayed in work late yesterday helping to prepare for the Big Upcoming Event that's happening next week, so I only got home at about 8. I then sat on my arse for about half an hour eating cornflakes and watching The Bill ( ( Read more... )

This morning, as I walked through town on the way to work, I noticed a scarlet Maserati Spyder at the lights, about to cross the Liffey. Naturally, I did a double take. The driver was a middle-aged type in a shirt and tie. As the lights went green, he appeared to gun it - but then the car stuttered, the revs died, and he looked rather foolish. "Ha ( Read more... )

God, these default layouts for Livejournal are shite, aren't they? I'm too lazy to go fiddling with settings to change the look of my page.

I think I might start listening to more Peter Gabriel. His voice reminds me of the eighties. And Prince. Must get more of their music. A decent stereo would hurt, either. autosuggested and partlet have subwoofers that could ( Read more... )

My father made a bet yesterday. It concerns our embattled Taoiseach. If Bertram lasts more than a month in office, my father must buy his friend a bottle of Bushmills whiskey. Bushmills is quite a decent tipple as whiskies go, but it's hardly the nectar of the gods ( Read more... )