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Back in October, I wrote a brief post on a piece of music that Stephen and myself have been getting into again this week. For this reason I’ve bumped it up again, the original post below (slightly edited) and then some links you can use if you like it as ...

There hasn’t been much by way of weird news this week so I thought I’d go Monty Python on you all: “And now for something completely different” I ordinarily hate spam mail and all that other crap that gets forwarded around the planet mostly from people I don’t know terribly ...

Belfast has a brand new shopping centre called Victoria Square and my wife and I went to see it last Sunday. What an amazing piece of architecture, absolutely state of the art and modern. In light of this new development local commentators have been babbling on about how Belfast is ...

Spitzer’s Sin has been of great interest to me, for a host of reasons. One of those reasons is obvious to our regular readers: we’ve always argued that prostitution should be protected in law as a legitimate right (and I recently wondered if banning it may be unconstitutional, a case ...

If I ever saw an advertisement in which libertarians were portrayed as ugly numb-skulls with small penises (including the women) would I be offended? No, not even a little bit. I respect the rights of all people to express themselves and speak their mind, and I’m not going to get ...

Recently I’m pleased to see that a number of stories I have written about have panned out the way I argued that they should. I found out yesterday that another story went down the only rational path available. I wrote about gambler Graham Calvert taking a bookmaker to court for ...

Steve Chapman summarises my position exactly on Spitzer’s Sin: “I understand why Spitzer’s alleged hiring of a call girl was stupid, selfish, reckless, immoral and a betrayal of his family. What I don’t understand is why it was illegal. …. Some brilliant lawyer ought to ask the courts why the ...

When he wrote the Ten Commandments on a few chunks of rock held by a young Charlton Heston, God’s omniscience let him down and he neglected to mention a bunch of stuff that was sinful. Thankfully we have the Roman Catholic Church to help us out. As if 10 Commandments ...

The Belfast Telegraph printed another letter of mine today. It was a response to an Irish Language enthusiast pontificating about “Irish language rights.” http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/letters/article3509436.ece In her letter (Write Back, March 5) Janet Muller talks about language rights and, in particular, Irish language rights, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she ...

It’s been tough to find the time to blog recently, but so much is happening that I’ve been dying to talk about. Take Spitzer’s Sin, for example. An LA Times editorial argues that the New York Governor – who is a customer of Kristen the sex worker – is actually ...

Writing to newspapers is a little hobby of mine, and I’ve enjoyed a good hearing from one local paper in particular, the Belfast Telegraph. My most recent offering was published today: a reply to journalist Alf McCreary about public funding for the Ulster Orchestra. I can’t find his original article ...

We all have our own “nightmare” scenarios: places we never want to be or things we hope never happen to us. A few of them might be: 1. Being caught masturbating by your mum 2. Dying and then finding out that Muslims were right after all and you’re now going ...

It’s been a good week for freedom of speech. I wrote an article a few weeks ago about the restaurant Goodfellas taking the Irish News to court for defamation because of a bad review they printed. You can read my article on the matter here: http://72.1.240.112/2008/01/25/bad-laws-bad-restaurants-and-bad-coke/ Today the Court of ...

God bless the House of Lords. As much as I struggle with the fact that they aren’t elected, I can’t deny that they make some very good judgments. The most recent came earlier this week when they refused to hear a case brought by the activist group Christian Voice attempting ...

History was one of my better subjects at school, but now it seems my history teacher might have got it all wrong about how we won the Second World War. For a long time we thought it was a combination of an excellent navy and more importantly an excellent Royal ...

Stephen King once said that sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation. I’ve only ever really appreciated the truth of those words since I had my son 17 months ago. I wouldn’t be without him and he can be really great fun, but some of ...

This is one of the most entertaining performances I’ve seen recently, by Liam Finn, making creative use of a looping effects pedal (reminiscent of K.D. Tunstall’s live performance of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree).

Davy Sims reports on a great story: the Dallas County District Attorney finding an old vault in his office stuffed full of previously undisclosed documents and files on the JFK assassination. An even greater part of the story is what he did next: digitise them and turn them over, unarchived ...

There is so much that is wrong about rights; more specifically the way people speak and think about them. The topic is becoming pretty hot here in Northern Ireland at present with a Bill of Rights creeping ever closer. At its most basic a Bill of Rights will be a ...

This certainly ranks among the strangest stories I’ve heard lately; a woman who went into the toilet of an Indian train, passed out and woke up to find that she’d somehow given birth to a baby who had fallen from her body through the toilet from the moving train onto ...