Eoin Butler: writer, journalist and Mayoman of the Year

Tripping Along The Ledge


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“Sure, he dresses like a hobo. But that only shows how secure he is in his own domesticity…”

dog
“Why are you dressed like a tramp?” is a question regularly put to my friend Jarlath by girlfriends, doormen and prospective employers. It’s a legitimate inquiry, but one to which he can offer no satisfactory reply. You might as well ask why his hair looks stupid or his car smells so bad. It is as much a mystery to him as it is to anyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

June 17th, 2010. 10 Comments »

Gimme a D! Gimme a P! Gimme an R! Gimme a K!


Fuck the rest of you, I’ve got my colours out and I’m nailing them to the mast of the world’s funkiest Stalinist basket case totalitarian dictatorship.

June 16th, 2010. Comment now »

Intermission

rte test card
Feck it…. Doing some quick arithmetic here and there’s just no way I can watch three World Cup games a day, do my job and blog all at the same time. So I’m gonna suspend this blog until after the World Cup. Believe me, I do not take this decision lightly. The idea of not giving up a couple of hours of my time unpaid, every evening, to write shite on here that all of you can come on and leave sarcastic comments about… Well, I’ll just have to live with it. Read the rest of this entry »

June 14th, 2010. 15 Comments »

Hell Is Around The Corner (1995)

June 14th, 2010. Comment now »

How To Get The Girl

Paris kiss Robert Doineau
THE POLISH GIRL with the tea trolley is trying to work out what the fuck is going on. A tall, athletic young man in a tight-fitting black T-shirt is standing in the centre of Room 202. His hair is meticulously tousled and a tacky necklace pendant bobbles on his chest. He is a rising inter-county hurling star, but that probably doesn’t ring any bells with her. She’s more likely to have noticed that he’s holding the hand of another (identically kitted-out) young man and leading him in a graceful twirl around on the spot.

On the far side of the room, a third boyband clone is filming the pair on a digital camcorder.

I wouldn’t presume to know exactly what’s going through this girl’s mind at this moment. But I’d be surprised if the words “gay” and “porn” aren’t pretty high up in the mix. Read the rest of this article here.

June 14th, 2010. Comment now »

This is Funny


If laughing with the England World Cup squad of 1998 does not sit easily with you, take some consolation from noting what appalling music tastes they have.

June 12th, 2010. 4 Comments »

Brass Buttons (1973)

June 10th, 2010. Comment now »

Published: The Dubliner, June 2010

“If it didn’t fly in the face of all known social conventions, I’d challenge him to a duel…”

ice cream van
A stranger paid me a compliment the other day. She called me a gentleman. Admittedly, I’d just let her muscle past me in the queue for an ice cream van. (She had two small children. I was a single man in the queue for an ice cream van. Fuck it, she had seniority.) The people behind me grumbled a bit. But I take my compliments where I get them. Read the rest of this entry »

June 10th, 2010. 16 Comments »

Have you got a SLVNLY, NHLSTC side?

wkd
Is it just me, or is anyone else concerned about the wellbeing of the WKD gang? When those irrepressable jack-the-lads first burst into our lives they were brimming with mischief and effervescence: whether it was playing football in their underpants, hilariously pretending to be gay or engineering any number of japes that revolved around someone appearing to have pissed themselves. It was a golden age for hi-jinks.

But five years on, the reservoir of alcopop-fueled jocularity appears to have run dry, plunging the WKD gang into a downward spiral. Boisterous, imbecilic good humour has now been replaced by an all pervading sense of nihilism and apathy. Read the rest of this entry »

June 9th, 2010. 2 Comments »

O Mio Babbino Caro (1965)

June 9th, 2010. Comment now »