WE’RE the most observed, studied and measured society ever. Ireland can’t get through a week without a new study or survey, measuring something about us.

THIS Monday morning, trying to explain Ireland to a visiting Martian would be quite a challenge. Any alien from another planet would ask you to start with sport, since he wouldn’t have been able to get away from it this weekend.

All sorts of verbal blunders swim through our sentences like bubbles in champagne.

THE most obvious difference was the hats. Or lack of them. In pictures of the 1929 collapse in the United States, every investor queuing at the closed doors of financial institutions wore a neat fedora, whereas the men queuing outside the 78 branches of Northern Rock on Friday were hatless and — mostly — grey-haired.

IN THIS newspaper last Thursday, Diarmaid Ferriter’s column excoriated the late Fr Michael Cleary. On Saturday, in the same slot, Ryle Dwyer also discussed Fr Cleary, rejecting what he described as the week-long pillorying of the dead priest.

If Hillary doesn’t make it back to the White House, the argument that America wasn’t ready for a woman president will at least be a consolation prize.

‘The current myth that fame, in the past, was dependent on talent, hard work and positive achievement, is just that: a myth.

One of the reasons we have a silly season is because media decides we’re going to have it. They send the angry brigade on vacation. If Joe Duffy and Eamon Dunphy go on holiday, what are you left with? Complaints about the weather and a safety zone for Steve Staunton.

Most of the time, rude gestures like mooning are done for no good reason other than the realisation by the owner that he is in possession of a bottom and can show it to create shock and awe in passersby. Mostly shock. Not many bottoms create awe.

Sustainability as a tourist attraction requires that a building must be ancient and hold dead people (the pyramids), bendy (the Tower of Pisa) or linked with imprisonment, torture and execution (the Tower of London).