April 1st Liam O’Maonlai - The Pavilion 9.00pm €22.50
April 2nd Aaron Dillion and Band - The Roundy 9.00pm Free
April 3rd David Kitt - Cyprus Avenue 8.00pm €15
April 5th Fred - The Pavilion 9.00pm €20
April 5th Liam O’Maonlai - De Barra’s, Clonakility 9.00pm €17
April 6th Mick Flannery - An Cruibin 8.30pm €20 SOLD OUT
April 9th Jack L - The Lodge, Mallow 9.00pm €22.50
April 9th Ian Whitty and the Exchange + Armoured Bear - De Barra’s, Clonakility 9.00pm €10
April 12th Colin McLean Trio - An Cruibin 8.30pm tbc
April 17th Jinx Lennon – De Barra’s, Clonakility 9.30pm €10
April 18th DJ Jazzy Jeff – The Savoy 10pm €20
April 18th Vyvienne Long – Crane Lane 7.30pm €20
April 23rd Jodavino – Cyprus Avenue 9.00pm €12.50
April 25th Juliet Turner – The Lodge, Mallow 9.00pm €22.50
April 29th R.S.A.G (Rarely Seen Above Ground) – Cyprus Avenue 9.00pm €10

Swingeing – adjective (Brit.)

Severe or otherwise extreme: swingeing cuts in expenditure.

- ORIGIN from Old English, ‘shake, shatter’.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.

Abraham Lincoln
16th president of US (1809 - 1865)

According to an article in The Irish Times today we are a nation of ‘brooding pessimists’. The article states that new international research reveals that ‘Irish people have the darkest outlook on the economy and believe the current crisis will last longer here than anywhere else’. I’m not sure this is the best time to be testing the optimism of Irish people considering that the economy keeps dipping and every day brings some new banking scandal. It’s no wonder that Irish people currently have a jaundiced view of future economic recovery. I wasn’t surprised to read that the majority of Americans expect their personal circumstances to improve over the next six months but it was a bit depressing to read that the Russians are more optimistic than the Irish about economic issues! At least the rugby grand slam win has given us something to smile about. :-)

Some colourful flowers to remind us that spring has arrived.

Silence is a text easy to misread.

A. A. Attanasio, 'The Eagle and the Sword'

Sesquipedalian – adjective (formal)

(of a word) having many syllables; long.
full of long words; long-winded.

- ORIGIN from Latin sequipedalis ‘a foot and a half long’

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt
26th president of US (1858 - 1919)

Lent started on the 25th of February and I decided this year to go back to what I used to do when I was a kid and give up chocolate. Last year I gave up ‘confectionary’ and was on the receiving end of a lot of slagging off. This year my objective is clear and the rules are as they were when I was a kid. Basically I can’t have chocolate at all until Easter Sunday with the exception of a break for Paddy’s day. I can still eat biscuits, cakes and ice-cream as long as there is no chocolate in them. You’d think this would be very east but it’s amazing how many biscuits on the market have chocolate chips in them or are covered with a layer of chocolate on top. The only good thing about abstaining from chocolate is that I am rediscovering alternative biscuits that I had long forgotten. I’m becoming particularly fond of gingernuts and I adore dunking them in milk. The only worry I have is that I may end up eating my own body weight in gingernuts by the time Easter Sunday arrives!

I think a man and a woman should choose each other for life, for the simple reason that a long life with all its accidents is barely enough time for a man and a woman to understand each other and. . . to understand - is to love."

William Butler Yeats

Ostensible - adjective

Apparently true, but not necessarily so.

- DERIVATIVES ostensibly adverb
- ORIGIN Latin ostensibilis.

This article was published in the Irish Times last week, but I only saw it on Monday when a friend at work gave it to me to read. You can check it out in their Popular Stories section where it is the 4th most read story and the most emailed story at the moment. When I read it I kept waiting for the punchline but it never came. Is the author, Newton Emerson, completely taking the piss?

NEWTON'S OPTIC: THE ANSWER to all our problems is staring us in the face. It may even be quite literally staring at you, right now, across the breakfast table. So put the paper down, stare back and ask yourself a selfless question. Does the woman in your life really need a job? Admittedly, this is not a fashionable question. From Iceland to Australia , men are blamed for causing the credit crunch, while a more feminine approach to finance is proposed as the solution. Of course there will always be a place in the world of business for exceptional women. Women also have an important role to play in jobs that are too demeaning for men, like teaching. But the general employment of women is another matter. Indeed, working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch by bringing a second income into the average household, pushing property prices up to unsustainable levels. Whether working women actually caused the credit crunch is now a moot point. The point is that removing women from the workforce would mitigate its effects. Consider the issue of unemployment. There were 221,301 men on the live register last month and just under one million women in work. Surely at least half these women have a partner who is earning? Surely at least half would be happier at home? One half of one half is a quarter and one quarter of a million is roughly 221,301. I think we can all see where this argument is going.

It would be ludicrous to suggest that women should be sacked purely to give men their jobs. In many cases, their jobs should be abolished as well. Women are twice as likely as men to work in the public sector. They account for two-thirds of the Civil Service and three- quarters of all public employees. Yet they are barely represented in the useful public services of firefighting and arresting people. Encouraging women to leave the workforce would go a long way towards addressing the budget deficit without any downside whatsoever. Further benefits of sacking women have been uncovered by the Central Gender Mainstreaming Unit at the Department of Justice. According to its research, twice as many woman as men travel to work by bus and train, potentially halving the impact of cutbacks in public transport. However, it is probable that three-quarters of the Central Gender Mainstreaming Unit’s staff are women, so these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. While the economic case for fewer women in the workforce is irrefutable, we should also acknowledge the social advantages. Women make the majority of spending decisions in Irish households and make almost all of the purchases. They are far more likely than men to regard shopping as a leisure activity, far less likely to make savings and investments, and were even almost twice as likely to spend their SSIAs.

In short, women were the driving force behind the greed, consumerism and materialism of the Celtic Tiger years and it was female employment that funded their oestrogen-crazed acquisitiveness. The time has come to build a more sustainable, equitable and progressive society. Why not make a start by telling your other half to quit her job? She can ask you for the housekeeping on Friday.