Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey, unlike Tiny Tim who did NOT die, lay buried.

Of course, different circumstances would mean a very different version of the movie. There’s a mournful core to the Muppets Christmas Carol that is about grief and moving on with grief. I think that’s why it resonates so much in adulthood. But regardless!

So here’s a challenge: cast Rowlf in a version of the Muppets Christmas Carol that was made under different circumstances (i.e. not immediately following the death of Jim Henson). I think he’d have made a good Dickens: but it’d have been a very different Dickens to the Gonzo/Rizzo double act.

Exchanging curt nods with the other 40something men who have taken up position outside this supermarket before the doors open at 8am so the Big Christmas Shop can get done nice and early.

Not an expert opinion but my father was just telling me that Ireland was supposedly considerably less humid till around 2000 BCE, so the sun might have been a more reliable collaborator back in the day.

It was colder and a bit drier then, so most probably less cloudier. Given that one of the effects of a warming planet is more cloud as water vapor increases in the atmosphere (it's definitely cloudier here than even 30 years ago), its quite likely they had more clear days then.

Oh, Sun God, you tease. #NewgrangeSolstice

A great start to the weekend of the winter solstice! What a morning at Newgrange today. The livestream link now available - be sure tune in on the morning of 21 December at 8:40am. 🔗 gov.ie/solstice 👈save it, share it, join in! #ShareTheSolstice #NewgrangeSolstice #WinterSolstice 📸 OPW Guides

Me: “Ah, the RTE Sports Awards will be a good way of winding down after a hard week of marking”. Darragh Moloney: “Now, the All-Ireland hurling final between Cork & Tipp…”

Excellent piece by Professor Cathryn Costello @profccostello.bsky.social of @ucdschooloflaw.bsky.social in today’s Irish Times: Ireland should resist cheap and tough talk on migration…

Sound Cellar implies the existence of Lousy Cellar.

Avoid confirmation bias with this one neat trick.

We're delighted to share this Cork Public Museum event: the launch of the Cork Jewish Digital Archive on 12th February. This collection features memoirs and research on the history of Jewish families in Cork and diaspora compiled by Ruti Lachs. 🎟️RSVP required to [email protected] by 9th Feb

Absolutely thrilled to have this in my hands! What a joy working with Mary McGill on this & such an excellent group of contributors. Launch in Jan 2026! For more on Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Context, Space click here: www.routledge.com/Irish-Digita... #AcademicSky #SpeirGorm

A personal essay from Aoife Byrne, on being a recession-era emigrant and contemporary Irishness in London. Contains traces of me, speaking about the tension between personally felt and collectively performed identities.

Local media: “World famous açai bowl chain to open in Cork!” Me:

You should be able to respond to reviewer comments with memes to liven up the peer review process.

The @euroqualpsy.bsky.social online research seminar is happening today! 4pm UK; 5pm CET; 6pm EET @wiam.bsky.social will be presenting " How can we visually share findings from our qualitative analyses?" Details here: www.equipsy.org/agor%C3%A1/2... Link to join on teams here: tinyurl.com/vavhzn3w

If you're in ireland and have kids in primary school or soon to be, please fill out this survey on preferences re religious involvement in schools, and whether people prefer single-sex or co-ed. It takes < 1 minute and will inform future provision. #speirgorm www.gov.ie/en/departmen...

Writer Laura McDonagh on being 2nd gen Irish in Britain: 'My dad would phone his siblings on Sundays, when the rates were cheaper, to find out the important stuff: who was selling land; who was dead or dying. Going back to Sligo was always the plan “one day”.' https://ow.ly/jL1j50XJwG1

Oh, *very* interesting theme here.

I am somewhat morbidly curious to see what Britain’s version of “this is just young people wanting to see the world! Sure, we can’t all live on a small island” will turn out to be.

"The Standard was the first place we all saw our name written down that wasn’t a school register. It was the first time it clicked in our tiny little minds that we might exist in a world beyond the four walls of the house and the school on the hill." Evocative piece on childhood & local newspapers.

Always nice when someone picks up one of your less-cited interdisciplinary articles, understands what you & your co-author were trying to do with it, and uses it in a way that demonstrates it was helpful to them.

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.

The logic that “polarisation increased after 2008: it must be the phones” appears as a reasonable assumption if, and only if, you have a model of politics as something that largely happens inside people’s heads. Unfortunately, many social & political psychologists do seem to work from this model.

Huh I wonder if there were any other global events happening in in 2008. Guess we’ll never know.

Great headline

Ouch.

American pop culture depictions of unions that aren't police unions: there's The Irishman, The Simpsons S4E17, The Wire season 2 and Kramer's bagel strike; what else

I was glad to receive a copy of Dermot Murphy's new poetry collection "The Drift of Memory" today. It was inspired by the experience of his mother's generation: women who moved from Ireland to Britain in the mid-20th Century.

Really interesting looking European Doctoral Network on Migration & Time, with 15 funded PhD positions, two in @ucc.ie : www.migrationtime.eu

Cailín as an tSeanchoill sa chraobh, freisin. www.echolive.ie/corknews/ari...

Netflix limited series about the tortured genius artist who created old VHS covers

Please fill this in Irish parents! For reference, the two schools closest to us are single-sex and Catholic ethos. If you prefer co-ed, or are at all unexcited about the prospect of separating a load of 4- and 5-year-olds from half their peers, do say so...

Closing next Tuesday! Again, if you have primary school aged children or younger and you haven’t filled this in yet, it only takes 3 minutes. (Beyond the initial news reports on the day the survey was launched, I haven’t exactly seen a publicity push around this…)

Why not just turn this tendency up to 11 and publish articles saying “I asked chatGPT if my hypothesis is correct and it said yes so we conclude it is”

I am not anti LLM across the board. But if your use case starts with the necessary assumption that the model is a vessel of all human knowledge, then you are consulting an oracle not doing scientific research.

In our new @gpir-sage.bsky.social paper w/ @storunczykruiz.bsky.social & @anetapiekut.bsky.social, we examine national & local identification, as well as their interplay, as determinants of attitudes to international & internal migration. We found that … 1/ doi.org/10.1177/13684302251391155

A new publication from esteemed departmental colleagues Chloé & Suzanne on the effects of different forms of screen-time in early childhood using data from the Growing Up in Ireland study : journals.sagepub.com/doi/reader/1...

Great to have this concrete example from Dave for the next time we have to give a "you never know where your Psychology degree @micireland.bsky.social is going to take you" talk!

So here’s a challenge: cast Rowlf in a version of the Muppets Christmas Carol that was made under different circumstances (i.e. not immediately following the death of Jim Henson). I think he’d have made a good Dickens: but it’d have been a very different Dickens to the Gonzo/Rizzo double act.

Really interesting CFP for #IrishinBritain scholars here from @museumofthehome.bsky.social . museumofthehome.org.uk/our-work/res...

Also, "research involving self-reports often leads to fundamentally different results than research focusing on actual behavior in incentivized settings" 2/3

Has anyone done something about how we, as children, learn the conventions of any genre? Where do we learn what to expect when a certain kind of music plays in a film, say?

Enjoyable evening bringing my two boys (who are peak Panto age) to the opening night of Red Riding Hood at @limetreetheatre.bsky.social last night: even allowing for all the anti-Cork jokes.

“USA 1994 was a grim, unloved tournament for everyone apart from the triumphant Brazilians - and, for a week or so, the Irish”. Is that the historical consensus on USA 94? I seem to remember that at the time, it was regarded as an improvement on 1990 in terms of the quality of football, final aside

I just asked my girlfriend if she knew anyone who was on the #LateLateToyShow and she said: "Yes, my colleague's son was on it and we still talk about it years later" This is very impressive to me, though mostly because I don't think many Germans know if their colleagues have any children or not.

Big stress test coming up tonight for my "The RTE Player has gone back to being really bad for live events over the last month or so" observation. #latelatetoyshow