bob marley

Life is not a Mongolian Restaurant

If you should ever find yourself in a Mongolian restaurant, take a bowl and make your way to the table where the uncooked meats and vegetables are laid out. Its there somewhere, look around. Fill the bowl with whatever you want, and then pass it to the mean looking man with the long sticks. He’ll throw it on top of a clay oven and shuffle it around until it’s cooked. Then, with the deftest of touches, he’ll deposit the resulting stew into your bowl.

Now all you have to do is find yourself somewhere to sit down and you can stuff your face. Read the rest of this entry »

Suspect is armed & dangerous

Is this the least likely (& most amusing) photo of a youthful Bill Gates you’ve ever seen? Haha… not by long shot it ain’t.

CAN’T TELL ME NOTHING (2007)

Babysitting my three month old niece Lola today. We went for a walk to Kilmainham Hospital and sat down and I sang her songs from my iPhone. Her favourites? Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds, The Kinks’ Lola (obviously, although if she grows up to be a promiscuous, transvestite man I may have to accept some of the responsibility), Danny Kaye’s Inchworm, and the Velvet Underground’s I’m Sticking With You.

She absolutely hates Kanye West and cried every time I put him on. But her favourite song by a country mile (as I was later to discover)? Read the rest of this entry »

Published: Village Magazine, February 5 2005

BOB MARLEY: STILL ROCKING AFTER SIXTY YEARS*

The late Bob Marley, whose 60th birthday is celebrated this month, wasn’t just Jamaica’s most famous son. He was also the Third World’s first superstar and one of music’s few truly global icons. And yet the image that prevails of this man is of a dreadlocked stoner, preaching ‘one love’ through a cloud of ganja smoke – “just a hippy” as the rock journalist Lester Bangs once described him. Such a verdict evinces a woeful underestimation of the man and his achievements. Read the rest of this entry »

SONGS OF PRAISE: COMING IN FROM THE COLD (1980)

STIR IT UP (1973)

Featuring the definitive Wailers line-up of Bob Marley, Bunny Livingstone and (an impeccably cool) Peter Tosh.