Eoin Butler: writer, journalist and Mayoman of the Year

Tripping Along The Ledge


Blog

If Lupus means “a penis”, then yes, most probably.

Lupus
Keep seeing this ad here.

Let’s light a fire, girl. Pour some wine. Lay your body down next to mine. We’ll bump and grind the whole night through.

jw5nk
And then I’ll take your purse and maybe steal your car keys too. Yee-haw!

The girl with the black eye

rockwell
To be a man is to be a suspect. Years ago, on a J1 in America, my girlfriend and I were swimming in a backyard pool. We were only kids. I was showing off, doing backflips and somersaults. She attempted a backflip, but contrived somehow to knee herself in the face. She was okay, maybe a little shaken. But as she resurfaced, an enormous ugly bruise was already becoming visible.

At the time, we were sharing rented accommodation with some other J1 students. Ours was tempestuous relationship and we were living in quite close quarters with relative strangers. Read the rest of this entry »

“When soldiers got back from Vietnam, they got debriefed. Well, my head was like a warzone. But who was going to debrief me?”

JohnHealy (1)
The council flat is a modest affair. There’s a yoga poster on the wall and a laptop computer sitting open on a desk. The living space otherwise is frugal almost to the point of ostentatiousness. The thin, white-haired man who answers the door still has the rolling gait of a boxer, which he was in his youth, several lifetimes ago now.

In the early 1990s, the press dubbed this man a “smiling psychopath” and he was shunned by polite society. But at 67, whatever menace he once exuded has long since faded. As he fills the kettle to make tea, he seems a pretty unremarkable London-Irish pensioner. Actually, he is anything but. Read the rest of this article here.

2010: End of end-of-year round-up

birthday party
Hero of the year Sharon Corr. For her outspoken stance against music piracy. One question, who the fuck is illegally downloading Sharon Corr tracks?

Villain of the year The general public for doing all that cocaine in the RTE toilets. Seriously, what are we like? Read the rest of this entry »

No, nay, never… freckle-boy

Andy and Conan
In the late 1990s, Amy Poehler was a sketch regular on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, playing sidekick Andy Richter’s little sister Stacy. It was basically the same bit, recycled over and over again. But somehow it managed never to stop being funny. Read the rest of this entry »

Seasons Greetings

fat santa
From Mssrs. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush & Zimmerman.* (*Had intended to post Bob Dylan’s Must Be Santa here, but embedding blocked for some reason.)

“To be fair, we did just whizz past in a bright pink discotheque on wheels. He might have been a little bit distracted.”

pink-fire-engine-limo
‘I THINK I went to school with that guy,” mutters 28-year-old Chris Dunne of Absolute Limos as he navigates a roundabout in Clondalkin, west Dublin. Its 8pm on Saturday and we’re en route to the first pick-up of the night. When the passerby does not return his salute, Dunne is disappointed. “He didn’t even acknowledge me!”

To be fair, I point out, we did just whizz past in a bright red discotheque on wheels. He might have been a little bit distracted. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark E. Smith’s Guide to Writing


Via @glinner

Published: Irish Times, December 11 2010

“Say I wear the Christmas jumper to the pub Stephen’s Night. Can you guarantee everyone will think I’m cool and no one will laugh?”

christmas jumpers
Are you kidding me? If anything, we’re having to warn customers that, if they wear their jumpers to the pub, there is a danger they’ll stolen. It’ll be warm, people will take their jumpers off and they’ll be stolen. That’s literally how in demand these things are. Read the rest of this article here.