ON September 5, 2008, Brian Cowen appeared on the Late Late Show to give his first big interview as Taoiseach to Pat Kenny.

THE sunshine made the photographs of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s prison look better than it was.

IT WAS one of those panels studded with the famous, lucid and loquacious.

NOW that women’s boxing is to feature in the Olympics, if the girls with the padded gloves are short of equipment, they should ring Batt O’Keeffe. He has the punchbag thing down pat.

ABOUT a year ago, in the middle of a TV sports report in Florida watched by the man in my life, up popped the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart.

ACCORDING to Laver’s Law, I’m dowdy, and you hold the evidence in your hand.

ISN’T it strange that we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but neither a Sister’s Day nor a day devoted to appreciation of brothers?

I WAS so perturbed about the Pope’s broken wrist, I destroyed the bedroom and set fire to my underpants. You may think this an excessive response to His Holiness’s injury, but at least I wasn’t in the underwear when it ignited.

Whether it was his proposed bill on blasphemy or his gangland crime bill, the Minister for Justice’s actions in recent times have proved our national capacity to rush to personal judgment, rather than address the ideas involved

JUST when we thought the summer breezes would blow away some of our recession worries and cheer us all up, another lump of bad news rolls in.