My path into town takes me past the Guinness brewery, so passing by during the day guarantees a few tourist spottings. Today, while on the bus at the stop closest to the brewery entrance, the driver directed a passenger towards the brewery entrance. In case there were more, shyer tourists on the bus, he turned [...]
After the multi-year, $1,000+ madness involved in getting an American green card (permission to live and work in the States essentially indefinitely), I had a difficult time accepting that the analogous process in Ireland would be so much simpler as to create a divide by zero error while comparing the two. I could not wrap [...]
I’ve neglected my corner of the blog so long I’m surprised there aren’t colonies of spiders and layers of cobwebs blocking my way in. The sad truth of the past year is that I’ve had nothing I wanted to share with the Internets: grim accounts of thesis writing, power struggles with my PhD advisor and [...]
If a speech depends on nothing else, it depends on the crowd receiving it. The best thing about the speech I gave on Friday night was that I was facing not my usual crowd of stoney-faced academics, yearning for a coffee break, but a jubilant, recently-fed crowd with ready access to alcohol.
Perhaps I should [...]
I was a member of what was perhaps the last year of undergraduates to have known the old Lincoln’s Inn. Apart form the clever joke, the best thing about that pub was that, inside its purple-and-white livery, it was an uncompromisingly dingy pub. The important thing was that it was a friendly, uncompromisingly dingy pub. [...]