How, you ask, did one of The White Stripes’ singles first become an Italian football chant — and then be omnipresent in games across the globe?

THE first thing people ask Simon Hutchinson is if he’s mad.

MANY of us this week may have at last broken a self-imposed winter training ban of our own after an extended Christmas period.

REMEMBER the end of When Harry Met Sally?

ON Sunday morning, many of us will be woken by electronic bleeps and whirrs as new computer-powered gadgets and toys are plugged in, charged up and used for the first time.

THEY say necessity is the mother of invention.

SITTING in the press box in the Aviva Stadium on Tuesday night behind a laptop and under a sky filled with paper planes, it was clear that travel — if not beautiful football — is what we do best.

I HEARD the great American sports writer Jerry Izenberg blow the dust of some great tales this week on Newstalk’s Off the Ball programme.

AS THEY say in political backrooms: you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.

BE careful, there’s no panic,” Sean Baldwin says as he places the rifle in my arms and I look through the sights at a target the size of a saucer, 10m down the hall at Morton Stadium last Tuesday morning.