Despite so much focus on the centenary of World War One recently, it's the conflict that occurred 160 years ago that has been brought right up to date.
"There's not to reason why", so says Alfred Lord Tennyson in The Charge Of The Light Brigade. It's a phrase that sums up the increasingly headstrong Vladimir Putin quite nicely, as things in Ukraine get properly Mike Lowry. At least soldiers are trained for this sort of thing though, unlike, say, TV news anchors. Abby Martin of Russia Today may be in Crimea tomorrow, as her bosses have generously offered her the chance to see the conflict to which she's so opposed up close. You sort of wish Fox News had a similar policy. Meanwhile in Ireland I'm sure RTE would send some reporters over there if they didn't have all hands on deck trying to fix the same sentence going out live on air for a loop. For twenty, Dental-Plan-esque minutes.
Compare that to the Oscars, where everything went off without a hitch technically, and yet you found yourself watching the same 20 seconds over and over again. Enter, stage arseways, John Travolta, with an inexplicable syllable safari not seen since Joey Tribiani took up French. Oh, some people won some awards at that thing too. But not Leo Di Caprio. Never Leo Di Caprio.
No less glitzy an affair, if not nearly as well-covered, was an Ann Summers night in The Lough Inn, Dublin. Special guests were stripper troupe The Hunks Of Desire, a choice of entertainment that makes my use of adjective in the previous sentence inadvertently apt. Alas, things went awry when a woman sued the pub because she was knocked into a speaker by a woman hellbent on catching a prize thrown out on to the floor by an Ann Summers. The prize in question was, and I quote, "a ring that goes around a certain part of a man". It's an incredibly pleasing thing to consider that's not even the best quote in the whole article, that accolade going to "She denied drinking jagerbombs -- a form of cocktail --before the show", or perhaps even "I never did nothing to no curry,"
An altogether more agreeable night was had in Cambridge this week, when after a stag do got lost they came across Stephen Hawking and his son. Hawking, top bants that he has, had a photo taken with them and joked about joining them. Oh, did I mention the lads were all wearing Bananaman costumes?