Part of the reason There Will Be Blood is in greatest ever film territory is the weak fury of Paul Dano. If you had someone less weird trying to take on Daniel Plainview it becomes an alpha lion type dynamic rather than what it is, which is Nietzschean and unsatisfactory (in a good way).

Just found out on here that baseball is popular in Curacao, which suggested to me that it is possible they have some examples of the rarest thing of all: football/baseball dual stars.

Because the football feed is covering the draw it allows up and downvotes, thrilling stuff

Fundamentally unserious that we as a country have a social norm where children get to stay up late one day a year to watch advertainment for toys. However, in a twist, it's also fine.

I am sympathetic to elder residents but mushy leaves on footpaths is basically the central unifying theme of Dublin 15. My entire childhood took place against a backdrop of partly stomped leafslop. Canute-esque to ask the council to eradicate it. www.dublininquirer.com/in-dublin-15...

Music end of year thing no use to me for looking cool online any more, but at least it is a reminder of the various single songs I spent a month listening to 15 times a day.

Man, the Bluesky Wrapped 2025 is pretty brutal

Classy cover though. First edition coded.

In a very loose sense what she is accused of here is of calling herself world champion for winning the FIFA World Club Cup rather than the actual World Cup, which is innately a bit annoying to football fans. But I don't think her bona fides as a competitive teenage chess player are in doubt.

A scene from American Canto. Olivia Nuzzi tries to visit the WWE Hall of Fame, only to discover that it is not a physical building.

Your annual reminder that the most revealing difference between Irish and Scottish Gaelic is definitely in the words for December: Mí na Nollag (Month of Christmas) in Ireland, and An Dubhlachd (the Blackness) in Scotland. So once again may I wish you all a lovely Blackness.

Ana has made the perplexing decision to begin a jigsaw and then leave it overnight on the table where, mere hours later, the cats are in the process of individually knocking every piece down, following to the ground, batting it around a bit, then getting another one in case it's better.

Also I don't know if this is Dublin privilege or what but there are still bookshops, you can still go to the bookshop. You can just look at what they have under the letter P in fiction. Pamuk to Pynchon. If you give them like 15 euro they will even let you bring one home.

Immediately read this banner on Chess com as the launch of Chess 2

You might assume cats would like to have come-all-yes sung in their praise, but in fact they seem cautious, beating a tentative retreat.

they're auctioning Blake's Tyger next week seems impossible, like selling a comet or a shooting star www.christies.com/en/stories/t...

tom nook this is madness. I am not letting you do it again

The cash ISA allowance is not a state of nature - if the government is paying you to do something and then realises it would rather you do something else, then I feel like you just have to adapt. Invest if you "like investing", consume more patterned shirts and Gails sausage rolls if not.

France has all the best heists at the moment

This is the type of AI I like. Dreamlike nonsense, obviously wrong, doing its best. clocks.brianmoore.com?ICID=ref_fark

new favourite New York Times term for a British thing just dropped

Will any of the prediction markets currently in existence exist long enough for me to win a bet on Doireann Ní Ghríofa winning the Nobel Prize for Literature

Yeah we can tell Terry cheers

Enjoyable that the New Yorker has decided to leave in the incredibly Japanese space-then-question mark here. A publication that still writes "coöperate" showing some orthographic flexibility, who knew www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

To whom it may concern, Live results from the sharpener/parer/topper debate can be found here: finaldraft.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboa... What the feck is going on in Kerry?! I want to credit the map-maker/survey owner, but alas they are an anonymous Redditor so I cannot. #speirgorm ✏️✏️✏️

Just kind of did it from age about 15 on. Didn't study it or anything, or even really form the idea "I would like to do that and work towards it" at any stage because by the time I was midway through college I was already doing it freelance and it was easier to continue than try do something else.

Funny that "velocipede", a word that sounds like a portmanteau of velociraptor and centipede, and therefore very scary, is in fact a word for a bicycle.

Donna Tartt - The Secret History (Alfred A Knopf, 1992)

An interesting consequence of the success of the EU that even France - home of gloire, home of élan, home of esprit de corps, formerly obsessed with their own army to a degree that makes some of their 19th century novels slightly incoherent today - cannot tolerate the idea of fighting and dying

MCENNEDY driving me mad. Irish Kennedys are Ó Cinnéides, not Mac Cinnéides. Scottish Kennedys or McKennedys are Macs but have the K. In fact I think by analogy you'd have McEnnedy probably pronounced "Mac En-ay-dy" and derived from something like Mac Con Aodha (?)... If Germans hadn't made it up

Been compulsively reading panicked tweets about the Bitcoin price for a few days now and I must say a large proportion of them do seem to believe there is some kind of organised institutional hostility to their revolutionary computer money for political/fiduciary reasons.

Dead in the middle of Tolkien's Middle Earth, a 150m pile of illegally flytipped rubbish www.bbc.com/news/article...

Saw someone use the term "monkery" to describe a place where monks congregate. Reopen the abbeys.

One of the weirder quirks of history that a failed Magic the Gathering website holds so much Bitcoin that what it does with it could have not insignificant impact on markets.

Accidentally invented the best stew in the world. Onion carrot celery pepper garlic cooked down. Thyme, coriander. Tomato paste, harissa, white wine vinegar. Beef stock, simmer. Meanwhile sear fillet steak and cut it up. Add cabbage for 5 mins, add fillet steak, finish with Killeen and peanut rayu.

I think if I ever see Troy Parrott on the street for the rest of my life I will just start giving him all my possessions and babbling gratitude

Frankenstein stupid in almost exactly the same way as Nosferatu. Tolerable movies though.

Atilla the Hun. Bela Lugosi. Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Zsa Zsa Gabor. Harry Houdini. Ferenc Puskas. YOUR BOYS

Just staved off the feeling of loneliness by putting on RTÉ Radio 1. I wonder whether Ireland could tackle its burgeoning inverse loneliness curve, where the young are lonelier than the old, by distributing free physical radios with only one channel and no off-switch, as our ancestors had.

RTÉ News interviewing a teenager with a ronnie on what he thinks about Ireland beating Portugal, 24 hours on. Excellent television.

I cannot see any constituency agreeing with this but: Ireland should build a new big impressive hall for ceremonies etc. St Patrick's Hall is inherited and is basically a secret society meeting room. Cathedrals not secular enough. The Convention Centre is a convention centre.

Venezuela is more than twice the size of Iraq, for the record.

She can't be stopped

Missed the football because of chess but I will say winning at chess, finding out the rest of the team has won at chess, checking my phone to see it's 2-0, getting a push notification in real time that Ronaldo has been sent off, and all the WhatsApp groups screaming at once: pretty good 3 min period

- His father's cousin is his aunt - History of pro-Palestinian activism - Rejection of justification by faith alone Gathering evidence for the theory that Zohran Mamdani is an Irishman

Someone is going to check on Bluesky in 30 years and there will be Starmerite dead enders who never surrendered still camped out here.

Is this Combat Jack's son??? What a time to be alive

Limited options in this Audible sale. Considered "A History of Bees" for a while before I saw "A Novel" in smaller font.

Not a big fan of this fella but having done a terminal-to-terminal transfer in Heathrow recently - it is terrible, unclear, people you ask won't tell you, it involves waiting like 20 minutes for a bus, doesn't feel like a service that has been designed at all. onemileatatime.com/news/economi...