Friday 24 May 2013
To mark the snappily entitled Dying Matters Awareness Week, our local Public Health Agency has been running a campaign which, in the immortal language of leaflet-speak, is aimed at highlighting "end of life issues."
Does Pippa Middleton tour the country, fascinator on stand-by, actively seeking out society weddings to attend?
I feel a bit like one of those slaves in the old Spartacus movie (the one currently aped in the TV ad) where supporters stand up one-by-one to defend the leader of their revolt by claiming to be that man. "I'm Spartacus!"
The Brits have always been sending their experts to Northern Ireland to show the locals how to do their job. The G8 summit is going to have 3,600 of the boys and girls in blue arriving from the mainland in a month's time to teach the PSNI how to do their job.
Sheryl Sandberg says that it's ok for women to cry in the office – "I cry at work" – adding that women are not "one type of person Monday through Friday" and "then a different person in the nights and weekend. I think we are all of us emotional beings and it's ok for us to share that emotion at work".
Sometimes life's just inexplicable. Take poor Ryan Dolan.
There used to be a phrase in Northern Ireland to characterise those who carried out non-political illegal activity. Remember "ordinary decent criminals"? They were burglars, car thieves, muggers, TV licence dodgers, double do-ers and spivs. Fair enough, it's a wide moral compass to the word "decent" but we got the point.
At what point do we stop offering love, tolerance and respect to delinquent kids and, instead, make them take responsibility for their own actions?
This week I want to talk about The Fall. Not the Mancunian post-punk legends, whose latest album, Re-Mit, is every bit as good as the rest of their 35-year blistering output.
Just over four weeks ago I was reading a book by Kate Atkinson called Life After Life.
Loved a line from Oscar Wilde I read recently -- "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."
I wonder what a dissident republican would do if he was in a car accident and the PSNI arrived at the scene within minutes to help him. Would he stand on his principle of hatred?
As another football season ends, don't worry about your future in the European Community, or the slaughter in Syria, or the forthcoming G8 summit in Fermanagh.
Members of the Ulster Orchestra were hitting the right note this week by lending support to the 'Enough Food For Everyone Campaign (IF)', at a press conference in the Palm House in Botanic Gardens.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. But uneasier still is the bottom that sits on a throne.
So, a couple of weeks after pre-judging Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby adaptation as shallow and ill-judged on the basis of its shiny fashion-tastic marketing, I can now confirm that, once more, I was wrong.
I first heard about the TV drama The Fall more than a year ago, when it was being filmed in Belfast. I had a tip-off that Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan were in town, working on a major crime thriller. To say my curiosity was piqued would be an understatement.
I didn't think I'd write about Angelina Jolie this week. I didn't imagine there would be much debate about her frank, thoughtful and sensibly unsensational piece in the New York Times explaining why she'd chosen to have a cancer-preventative double mastectomy.
Many years ago, a young trainee journalist was sent to the house of a well-known vicar in his patch, who had been the subject of a substantial burglary.
Where Nick Clegg may have slipped up when he described how he and his wife buy their children's clothes from Primark, was that he was wearing a £600-plus designer suit at the time.
Hangover star takes 87-year-old to premiere
Novelist Dan Brown's description of Manila as "the gates of hell" has officials in the Philippine capital seeing red.
The charity Help For Heroes has been swamped with donations, leading to its website crashing after Drummer Lee Rigby was murdered while wearing one of its tops.
The Duke of Cambridge is to welcome football officials from across Europe for Uefa's 37th annual congress being staged in London.
George Best was the finest footballer of them all, according to England World Cup winner Ian Callaghan.
They know each other inside-out as a result of having squared up so often in the past. As well as having gone head to head on such a regular basis, most of the protagonists are Irish training camp regulars. In addition, many of them have been Test match colleagues.
Justin Tipuric hopes Sam Warburton's selection as British and Irish Lions captain will not harm his chances of earning a Test spot against Australia.
Actress Amanda Bynes has been arrested in midtown Manhattan after she heaved a marijuana bong out of a window, police said.
Cutting It star Ben Daniels is joining the department store costume drama The Paradise for its new series.
DJ Nick Grimshaw and chart stars Rizzle Kicks have been lined up to host a pair of new music shows for Channel 4.
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