An editorial of mine gets picked up by The Australia, and look at the idiot they put beside me…

Click to enlarge it.

It’s not just for Paddy’s Day anymore. The Sierra Nevada Brewery is going totally green, installing solar cells and fuel cells to make it 100% energy self-sufficient.

Story here.

Flagged by Damo comes a new political blog aggregator that picks TD names out of blog posts and presents them to you in a clean and tidy way.

Definitely a useful one for the poli-trackers.

It’s Politics in Ireland. Go click.

I had never seen this photo here before my mother died. It’s of her, aged about 21 (I assume), clutching a champagne bottle, with a glass on her head and obviously, from her facial expression, a fairly high blood/alcohol level. I found it as I sorted through her things in the house, tucked into an old briefcase she had kept since the 70s. I keep it in my wallet now.

This image of Mum is the best way to remember her. When myself and my sister were teenagers, the front door of our house was always open to every one of our mates, and parties were encouraged. Mum would often be the last up, drinking and chatting with our mates until the wee hours. It was fairly special, and we realised we had it pretty lucky.

Everything changed when she was diagnosed with MS. A substantial personality overhaul can be fairly common with MS, I found out later. Mum got less rational, more emotional and withdrawn, and then began the slide into physical deterioration. For someone so active, so alive, it was gut-wrenching to watch the person she was disappear. No more golf, tennis, sailing. We had to take the car away from her, and she went from using a stroller to needing a wheelchair. She could see it too, and the frustration of it drove her deeper into depression, and the spiral of decline steepened.

Mum spent the last year of her life, unable to walk and barely able to mumble a word or control her limbs, in a nursing home in Stillorgan. At 49, she was the youngest person in there by close to 20 years. [Read more →]

Forget Fake Steve Jobs, this week it’s all about Fake Osama. Australian TV is usually appallingly bad, but the odd time they’ll crack it, and often it’s down to the lads from Australia’s only satire worth a bean, The Chaser’s War on Everything. During APEC they drove a fake motorcade through the APEC security fencing, past the guards, and pretty much up to the front door of George Bush’s hotel, before jumping out dressed as fake Osama bin Laden. The footage is hilarious, and it’s here.

The lads face court on October 4, along with a horde of producers, etc, all responsible for making the PM, his photographer-bashing  police and the whole APEC shemozzle look entirely ridiculous.