celticman's blog

The publication date is important here, 2008. Let’s say Sylvia Browne wrote the book in 2007. That gives us a baseline to work out how accurate her prophesies are in May 2022. Confirmation bias tends to confirm what we already know, or think we know. Sylvia Browne cannot see a human race beyond the end of this century. With global warming that seems possible, if not probable. ‘…we’ve got a planet that’s slowly warmed to the point of cataclysmic...

There’s a quote from some writer, and I’m sorry to say I can’t remember her name (you might). It goes something like this. ‘Tick, Tick, Boom… That what it is to be a writer. You just keep throwing yourself against the wall and hope something sticks.’ James Robertson’s books usually stick with me. This one doesn’t. It slides down the wall. It’s probably his most autobiographical. The commentator and narrator, well, mostly, is Douglas Findhorn...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000df09/being-gail-porter ‘I’m no longer a pretty girl,’ Gail Porter says in a conversation she’s having with an old friend, but she’s also speaking to the viewer. We judge so much by appearance. And she’s right. She’s no longer young and she’s no longer pretty. Alopecia has robbed her of her trademark blonde hair. In 1999, she was one of the most well-known presenters on telly. Her naked image was...

Fergal Keane: Living with PTSD, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, presenter Fergal Keane, Director Mike Connolly. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0017795/fergal-keane-living-with-ptsd There’s a contradiction Fergal Keane suffers from Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder (PTSD) but he’s in Ukraine. He’s on the frontline. He’s been there before. Cutting his teeth in the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He’s been in South Africa and Rwanda. The British...

A lot of big hitters in this movie. I wasn’t sure about it, but I gave it five minutes and watched to the end. It jumps between 1973 and 1986. Daniel Raneri (with very long eyelashes) plays J.R. Maguire, a kid returning to his grandad’s house in Long Island. Tye Sheridan plays an older J.R. His mum, Dorothy Maguire (Lily Rabe) has a mattress attached to the roof of their car and all her worldly belongings. She’s going home, but carries with her...

My pet theory is that authors write the same book again and again, until they get it right (write). James Robertson writes about Scotland. No headline there. He always writes about Scotland. He can mix it up a bit with Saints, God and the Devil, but you know where you are with him. Here we have an ensemble cast that takes us from Scotland in the 1950s to the kind of Scottish Devolution nobody much wanted, but we settled for. The book kicks off...

Around seventy years ago, Mahmood Mattan was hanged for the murder of Lily Volpert, a shopkeeper, who happened to be Jewish and under five-foot tall. His conviction was found to be unsafe by the three Appeal Court judges in 1998 and he was exonerated. In the Epilogue, Mahmood’s son Omar was found dead on a beach in Caithness, Scotland. He’d said in an interview: ‘Until I was eight, I was told my father had died at sea. Then one day the Salvation...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b64mbt/house-of-maxwell-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b64n6s/house-of-maxwell-series-1-episode-2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b64nww/house-of-maxwell-series-1-episode-3 Who are you? What are you? Robert Maxwell. 'All life is a choice. And if you want to succeed, you’ve got to commit yourself. Be single-minded. Duty is more important than love. That’s what I was...

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel about a magical underground railroad that took slaves from the South not to safety, but not to slavery either. Harlem Shuffle has no such tropes. Ray Carney is trying to get by selling furniture on 125 th Street. 1959, America is on the up and up. Not that you’d know if you were a black man. He needs to walk the line of being crooked enough to be straight. Everyone is on the take from the cop...

Roddy Doyle makes you smile. You just need to think of that line from The Commitments , ‘We are the black men of…’ whatever it was. I’m never very good at remembering. He wrote about the housing crisis in Dublin. Rosie ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09lk76z/rosie ). How letting the market sort things out is darkest doublethink, whilst helping take a hammer to poor people’s lives. What I’m building up to saying is aye, Roddy Doyle, but...