Here is a selection of my published articles with a brief explanation.

This is a piece I wrote in 2015 for The Irish Times about healthcare in California. Although I wrote it as a humour piece, everything in there actually happened.

This is a piece I wrote in 2017 for Areo Magazine about our disordered relationship with animals. The original ( Read more... )

In 2000, my friend Gareth Hanrahan came across a new role-playing game. He was not pleased. His review of that game has gone down in international role-playing history as one of the funniest things ever written on the subject. It's also a very handy Guide To How Not To Write A Roleplaying Game ( Read more... )

If you flick across the non-standard cable channels, you may come across a lot of Oriental garbage. There is a lot of Oriental garbage in the world, and they are not ashamed of putting most of it on television. I guess we have that in common.

Recently, I have had reason to watch Korean dramas, which are by all accounts popular. I made the joke that ( Read more... )

On the 9th January, ABC broadcast episode 2 of season 16 of The Bachelor, a terrible show which always brings in high numbers.  I'll be watching it, or at least downloading it afterwards. I don't even know why.

The Setup:

The producers find some rich, pretty guy who wants to find a girl to marry. The producers source a bunch of exclusively white ( Read more... )

In 1994, Lars Von Trier wrote, produced and directed a show about a creepy hospital called Riget (Kingdom). It's very low-budget, with intentionally crappy camerawork and a really weird orange filter over every scene. It's about the most advanced hospital in Denmark, an experimental flagship of the Danish health care system, but supernatural ( Read more... )

Review of Chapter One, Part One: Sophoclean Irony

It's full of interesting ideas, and I'm very much in favour of the pro-feminist hippie message, but he's wrong about a lot of stuff. Not wrong "in my opinion"; just wrong. Despite the fact that he's clearly making an effort to be as vague as possible, perhaps not having enough conviction in his own ( Read more... )

This is chart-topping dance-floor anthem Big Brother by Paul Oakenfold, which reached number four in the UK charts in 2000 (zip forward to 48 seconds in if you like):

This is Hungarian Dance #20 by Brahms, which reached a fairly respectable number seven in the UK charts in 1869:

Hm.

Perhaps ironically, according to his Wiki, "Brahms ( Read more... )

Here I am, zipping along 30,000 feet over the ground, getting kind of bored. I know, I'll flick through the SkyMall catalogue, which the airline has kindly placed in the seatback pocket in front of me. Ooh look! A zombie. Zombies are cool, right? Zombies rule!

At this point in the narrative, something went badly wrong, and we were forced to wrest ( Read more... )

Twitter is where famous people come to have their asses handed to them. This weekend, Manchester United footballer Darron Gibson shut down his Twitter after two hours of setting it up due to waves of abuse from "fans". In August of last year, I ran into trouble with the comedy genius Graham Linehan for suggesting that he might want to tone down the ( Read more... )

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