celticman's blog

The cover of this book reminds readers that Daniel Handler is the author of the Lemony Snicket series that’s why I gave it a chance. I’ve not read Lemony Snicket, but I did see a film starring Jim Carey playing a goofball Jim Carey character, which I quite liked. This I imagine is the jump to an adult version of children’s books. I got to page sixty of Flannery Culp’s diary. We immediately know she is in prison and she and her seven school...

There is little point in thinking about tenements and New York and putting the two together and imaging you have some kind of understanding as I did. Like me, you’ll probably be on the wrong continent. To make comparisons you need to think of other continents like the slums of Calcutta or pre-Communist Peking. 330 000 audited tenants per square mile in New York tenements of the 1890s. In The Bend between Broadway and the Bowery for example, were...

This story has two intertwining narratives and reads like a screenplay. It’s 392 pages and it can be read in one go, or two—as I did—it goes down smooth as Guinness. I only spotted one cliché, ‘it was like herding cats’ but that was 200 odd pages in and is forgivable because it was qualified by another image. McDermid was a journalist that lived in Fife. She has a visceral understanding of the what the miner’s strike of 1984/5 did to that...

The film opens with a clunky voice over with Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in a Roman Catholic Church having an extempore debate about the nature of hell and eternal suffering. He holds his fingers over a candle and tries not to flinch. Charlie’s idea of redemption is to try and save his younger cousin Johnny Boy (a young Robert de Niro) from the loan sharks he borrows money from. Charlie’s also having an affair with Johnny Boy’s cousin Teresa (Amy...

Last week Celtic were 10/1 with Paddy Power to win in the San Siro stadium. On paper this seems one of those stick-on, home-win, results. But it brought to mind the old days when we used to outplay Rangers, have most of the ball, miss most of the chances and then Laudrup would gallop up the park and score a goal for them. Job done. Celtic had more of the ball against Milan. They had the better of the chances, but they did not overly trouble...

I quite fancied Peaky Blinder on BBC 2 or even Sound of the Cinema on BBC 4 but I wanted real drama and who could resist Teenage Exorcists -- Brynne Larson and her two best friends Savannah and Tess Scherkenback? As Brynne’s good old dad Bob tells every new audience he meets, he is the world’s best exorcist. To prove his point he can sell his audience DVDs of his top ten exorcisms, his no nonsense books of how to hook the devil out of your life...

This is a play on words and the way the working-class soldier pronounced Ypres during the First World War. BBC 2 seems our best bet for this kind of costume drama, with Channel 4 hitting the futuristic buttons with drama such as Blackout-pronounced black---out. I didn’t black – out I stuck with the new dystopian drama, Blackout, to the first ad break. Good man I can hear you say in that Standard English accent used for voice overs and British...

I had to drink a Christmas bottle of Baileys because I’ve had a bad stomach for about five days to keep me interested. It’s not a real drink, but I usually don’t bother with Internationals. Next Wednesday. A.C. Milan v Celtic. Home win. The real deal. Wish we had Anya and not James Forrest. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m blind. Maybe I’m drunk (but hey, it is Bailley’s, so think again.). The games were fifteen minutes apart so I could watch both. I...

Some books you don’t want to finish and this is one of them. Hugo Hamilton’s memoir is a prize worth keeping. It's a shame it's a library book. Pre-adolescent Hugo tells the story of his father and mother and his growing family in words that bite. His father is a nationalist that refuses to let the children speak English or play with children that speak English or have anything to do with the English even though there are few people in Dublin in...

I’m not going to tell you who the original writer was, but I can tell you some of his themes involve the fading power of old men, gender swapping, love at first sight and a plot that he’s picked up from crumpled bits of folio that have been lying around his garret. This is no different in that Prospero started off in the original folio and was definitely a man. Helen Mirren is definitely a woman. Her Morgana all those years ago in Excalibur...