The Dubliner Magazine

Stitch Up On Wye

Max McGuinness on the case of a corruptly awarded pig!!!

It's not much fun being a writer. You sit in a room by yourself all day and after decades of scribbling you might just hit the jackpot and get an advance of €2,000 from a small publisher and a print run of 4,000 copies for your first novel. Despite receiving a raft of favourable reviews, you sell 432 of these and the tweed-clad gent, whom you thought so winning and faithful when he paid for the sea bass and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and praised your literary efforts to the skies, cancels the rest of your book deal.

The only consolation is the ever expanding conglomeration of literary prizes which serve both to provide kudos and to pay off the overdrafts of struggling wordsmiths. It helps if you're female (the Orange prize is an oestrogen-only affair) -- better yet if you're a one-armed, lesbian Zoroastrian. But  the panoply of gongs for the best in belles lettres means that authors can just about scrape a decent living if they've remembered to review the judges' own books rather kindly.

But there's not much point to literary prizes if you reveal the winner erm...before you announce the winner.

Yet this is what has happened at Hay-on-Wye this year where the anticipated nail-biting dénouement to the 2008 Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction has been dashed thanks to a careless mix-up worthy of Bertie Wooster himself.

Dublin Makes Cluster Bombs History

A Deal was Reached on Wednesday Evening in Dublin, Banning Cluster Munitions

Here's the pick of the international news coverage of this great moral victory.

Jobs Going

"Dey need a driver for der first Oirish rocket to the moon"

Say goodbye to your sashimi and your affogatos, it will all be back like this again soon.

Thanks to Spike Milligan: Duirt sé leat go raibh sé breoite.

Clubs Selling Es to Babies

Do you know where your children are?

A classic 1993 Prime Time Investigates in which the mammies and daddies of Ireland get a hefty dose of the E menace.

Now spot the difference: the menace of Cake.

Vive La France!

Bastille Day in Dun Laoghaire

France and Ireland will be the best of friends this 12th of July at the Bastille Day Gala Dinner in the Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire.

As with last year, the theme of the evening is 'Le Paris Eternel; Le Paris du Moulin Rouge'. Lots of entertainers from Paris will be on hand, including La Troupe de Mademoiselle Clairette with their brilliant Moulin Rouge and can-can show.

Generation Y(ne)

Under-30, Underworked and Overpaid

The Sunday Business Post published an interesting meditation on Ireland's 'Generation Y' - read the full article here. Abie Philbin Bowman, a member of that generation, responds:

All human beings, everywhere, want praise and approval. One of the big differences in our generation is that we have the confidence, and emotional vocabulary, to ask for it. Do we really believe that our parents’ or grandparents’ generations were significantly more emotionally healthy than ours? 

I think we should celebrate the fact that many in our generation seek "meaningful work". Obviously it is facile to suggest that an entire generation of workers want the same thing, but to the extent that there is a job-seeking zeitgeist, look at the alternatives.

Don't Do Drugs...

...Or buy baby mice

You may be staring at your computer screen right now through a mound of fast food wrappers, discarded pornography and sodden tissues, but even you can feel just that little bit superior.

Science rocks

Dubliner staffers will be at these events next week at the Science Gallery. Will you?

If you haven't seen TechnoThreads exhibition yet, well... you still have two months. But if you go next Wednesday or Thursday, you also get to take part in these cool sideline projects. 

Bidet Bid-bee Bid-Zed

What do you mean you still use toilet paper?

You monster! In the future (or Korea as it's currently called), even your bog will have a remote. And analyse your poo á la The Island.

Find out more here.

Thinking Allowed

Max McGuinness on public intellectuals.

British magazine Prospect and Foreign Policy are repeating their poll of the top public intellectuals, originally won three years ago by Noam Chomsky. It might be argued that this sort of crude popularity contest is anathema to the lofty spirit of intellectualism. This is balderdash. There's not much point being a public intellectual if you can't get people to listen up and eventually esteem you.