@wwaycorrigan «The world has never been better and very few of us know it.» That was the hook for a talk given by the ‘celebrity’ cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in Bogotá recently. It’s also the thrust of his latest book, Enlightenment Now. No one can...
@wwaycorrigan Bienvenidos a Medellín – ‘Bangkok light’. So ran the title of one of my earliest Google blog entries. I wrote it after spending a month in Colombia’s second city where I worked in the Greek-owned Arcadia hostel in the «gringo infested»...
@wwaycorrigan Back in mid-2009 during my few weeks travelling around South-East Asia a German I met, a guy who had been in the region for some time, introduced me to the initialism AFW. After seeing my relative excitement about the prospect of visiting another impressive Buddhist place of worship, he said he could take or […]
@wwaycorrigan I recently received a somewhat fitting, reassuring reminder from Twitter (see image below). It was a notification informing me that my report of ‘behaviour unbecoming’ from a particular user was deemed to be a rule violation under «hateful conduct»....
@wwaycorrigan A few weeks ago on CNÑ (CNN in Spanish that is), in a discussion about social media, an Argentinian expert on the subject predicted that in years to come we’ll view our use of Facebook and the like in the same way that most of us view smoking today. That is,...
@wwaycorrigan Picture the scene. You’re a checkout operator and you’ve just finished with one customer, a lady who left a small bag of vegetables at the cash register, something she decided she didn’t want. There’s only one other person to be served in a...
@wwaycorrigan Back in my early secondary school days, as a country lad heading off to mix it with the townies, it was common for the latter to mock us. We were farmer boys, or rednecks, as they say in some parts. It was generally a bit of innocent slagging but no doubt it had its […]
@wwaycorrigan Back in the heady days of the Republic of Ireland’s «glorious» run at Italia ’90 — fair enough, the team reached the last eight but did so without winning a single game in 90 minutes — it practically amounted to treason to question the side’s approach or not to be fully supportive of «the […]
@wwaycorrigan «You’re a posh boy now, a gomelo.» So go the jibes from my old barrio buddies now that I find myself living in a swankier part of Bogotá (gomelo, for the uninitiated, is the Colombian word for what you might call preppy types). Yes, it’s true, my move a few kilometres south of my […]
@wwaycorrigan I came across … … No, let’s use a different phrasal verb considering the subject matter here. I stumbled across — much better — a quote from John Bayley, the (long-suffering?!) husband of the late Irish-British novelist Iris Murdoch. Bayley...
