I came across Rea Curran sucking a cigarette outside Sandino’s. “Shouldn’t you be inside getting your mind right for the gig?”, I inquired of the singer-songwriter, Duke Special keyboardist, actor, puppeteer and rock frontman.

“Ah, but first I have to marinate the vocal melange,” he explained.
Now there’s a phrase you don’t often hear from a rock musician.
In Mason’s for another mighty night of carnivalesque funk from Mantic, Tina McLaughlin murmurs into my good ear, “Do you think that fella on the bass enjoys his work?”
The reference is to Odhran, who, true enough, gives the impression that he might disappear into a whoosh of the mystic or spasm up through the rafters and into the night sky at any minute. I tell her I don’t think “enjoy” really covers it.
I am informed later that, contrary to my tricological speculation of a couple of issues ago, Odhran does not have ringlets. Instead, indeed, on closer inspection, he bears remarkable resemblance to Jesus Christ on a bad hair day. Which is different from ringlets.
I also picked up a handy hint on the night which I pass on to readers.
If, after a gig, you fall into conversation with the congas and bongos player, do not on any account refer to his instruments as “tom-toms.” This is seriously uncool and will do nothing for your standing in the community.
Caught up at last with The Republic of Loose on the last night of their Academy residency and they are everything Terry O’Neill assured me they’d be. Don’t get the business of them being “too American,” though. Whatever that means.
But neither ought they be described as “the future of rock’n’roll and the saviours of all mankind.” Humankind, people, humankind.

All Muslims are murderers. That’s the message from John Waters and Hillary Clinton.
John is, in my experience, a decent, intelligent fellow. But I fear he has been driven clean mad by religion. In as daft a piece as has taken ink in aeons (Irish Times, April 28) the Castlerea man advanced the proposition that “Benedict XVI, now three years into his papacy, has already confounded his enemies and delighted his admirers in a pontificate that glitters beyond all expectations... A supreme intellect mounted in a most animated humanity... with charisma and charm... a man of courage and grace... subtle and brilliant...”
And so on and on until he’d reached the bottom of the page. A schoolboy drooling over Nadine Coyle would have offered a more nuanced view.
What caused John to cream his calico kegs was the fact that, “During the Easter vigil at St Peter’s last month, Pope Benedict baptised Magdi Allam, a Muslim journalist who describes Islam as intrinsically violent and characterised by hate and intolerance.” John enthusiastically endorsed Allam’s declaration that, in embracing the religion – Christianity – which invented the notion that those who died in the act of slaughtering their enemies would earn instant transportation to paradise, he had joined “the authentic religion of truth, life and liberty” and discovered “for the first time the true and only God, who is the God of faith and reason” and was now “liberated from the obscurantism of an ideology which legitimises lies and dissimulation, which induces murder and suicide, and blind submission to tyranny.”
Tolerance of Islam, Allam suggested, and John agreed, risked “the suicide of our civilisation.”
This sectarian polemic cum love-letter to the pope is indicative of the grave danger posed by the organised superstition being pushed on our young people – even in classrooms! – by elements who affect to believe, and some of whom may actually believe, that Truth requires no evidence or sane rationale but can be apprehended by the ingestion of highfalutin nonsense.
Most sensible people will pass over John’s rant with a groan or a giggle. Hillary Clinton is a different proposition.
Clinton took time off last month from subtly (or not) drawing attention to Barak Obama’s blackness to make a pitch for the kill-crazy vote, declaring that if Iran attacked Israel she, as president, would “obliterate them.”
I suspected at first that the threat may have been directed at the Iranian leadership or military installations. Surely no-one would threaten in public to wipe out 71 million people? It turns out, though, somebody would. Clinton would. Obliterating the people of Iran was what, explicitly, she had in mind.
What made her remarks the more scary was reaction in the US media and political mainstream. Or rather, the lack of reaction. There was no appalled condemnation, no firestorm of controversy, no speculation that the remark might put paid to her presidential hopes. If there was an editorial in any US newspaper denouncing her threat of mass murder, I missed it.
The only “justification” appears to have to do with an alleged comparable threat to Israel by the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He said he’d “wipe Israel off the map,” did he not?
The speech in question, (made three years ago, which renders Clinton’s retaliatory outburst all the more suspicious) referred to Israel’s Zionist regime. The key sentence recalled and supported a remark by the Ayatollah Khomeini: “The Imam said: ‘This regime that is occupying Jerusalem must be eliminated from the pages of history’.”
This is a long way from a threat to obliterate a whole people.
Ahmadinejad made a point of citing examples of regimes which had been eliminated from the pages of history. He instanced the regime of the Shah in his own country, and the Soviet Union.
He is not an appealing figure. His expressed views on the rights of women and gays are repulsive. But in the matter of genocide, his views are more civilised and moral than the bloodlust brimming in Hillary Clinton.