The Music Quiz: The Cranberries song Yeats' Grave quotes from which of the great man's poems?
Carole King
Lou Reed
Fiona Apple
Neil Diamond
Scottish rockers Travis took their name from...?
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) of Taxi Driver
Rough Trade Records founder Geoff Travis
Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) of Paris, Texas
Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker
What is the number in the title of the third album by US band Dandy Warhols, [Blank] Tales of Urban Bohemia?
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
What was the original name of Kilkenny alt-metal band Kerbdog?
Riot
Rocket
Ricochet
Rollercoaster
Which Gary Numan song did Foo Fighters cover on the 1996 compilation album, Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files?
Cars
Are 'Friends' Electric?
This Wreckage
Down in the Park
Garbage's 1996 song Stupid Girl features a musical arrangement pivoting on a drum sample from The Clash's...?
Tommy Gun
Train in Vain
Straight to Hell
Lost in the Supermarket
On The Help Album, a 1995 charity compilation, Suede covers which Elvis Costello song?
Pump It Up
Shipbuilding
High Fidelity
Accidents Will Happen
Which country inspired the name of post-Britpop outfit Kula Shaker?
Japan
Indonesia
China
India
Which number completes the title of Mundy's 2002 album, [Blank] Star Hotel?
4
5
24
25
Yeats' Grave, The Cranberries' 1994 song on their second studio album (No Need to Argue), quotes lines from which of WB's poems?
Adam's Curse
No Second Troy
September 1913
The Second Coming
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Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Belfast Bride - Frank McNally on the Irish wife of man who dropped US atomic bomb on Nagasaki
The name of Kermit Beahan might sound comical to modern ears, or at least to those of us raised on the Muppets. But his role in history was far from funny. Eighty years ago this week, he was the bombardier who dropped the device known as 'Fat Man' on Nagasaki , killing 70,000 people then and later. He was nicknamed 'The Great Artiste' by colleagues in the US air-force, for his accuracy. They even had a plane so called in his honour which, with him in the crew, had also been part of the back-up at Hiroshima. It was said that he could 'hit a pickle barrel … from 30,000 feet'. His name may have been doubly Celtic. Kermit is a Manx version of MacDermot. As for Beahan, that looks like a variant of the surname more usually anglicised as Behan. READ MORE But his wife, Teresa (aka Tess) Lavery was certainly Irish. And via both her husbands (Beahan was the second) - she became a footnote to history, literally or otherwise. Belfast-born of a dynasty that included the well-known publicans and the painter Sir John, Tess Lavery first wed the future historian Shelby Foote (1916 – 2005). They met when he was stationed at Kilkeel, Co Down, in the later years of the war. In 1944, he borrowed an official vehicle without clearance to visit her in Belfast. That earned him a court martial and dismissal from the army, before he had seen any action. The pair married in New York soon afterwards, despite mutual misgivings. On the way to the church, according to his biographer C Stuart Chapman, Foote began whistling Cole Porter's hit, Don't Fence Me In. The couple's obvious worries about each other led the priest to comment: 'I have never seen two people getting married look so solemn'. For the bride, this only made things worse: 'On two separate occasions, the service had to be stopped because she cried so violently'. A replica of the atomic bomb code-named Fat Man, dropped over Nagasaki, 9 August 1945. Photograph: History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images It need hardly be added that the marriage didn't last long. Anxious to get back to the war, Foote soon afterwards enlisted for the Marine Corps, who was desperate enough for recruits to ignore his previous misdemeanours. In the event, he never saw combat with them either. But he was a man who didn't want to be married, really. The condition 'galled' him, he later admitted. Lavery filed for divorce in early 1946. Her husband didn't contest. And as Stewart Chapman notes: 'If Foote lost a wife, he gained a vocation'. Having reluctantly given up on war, he became a journalist and wrote a first novel, published in 1946, earning enough from it to make him a full-time writer. A few years later again, he embarked on a 20-year project that became a three-volume, 3,000-page history of the American Civil War. Its narrative style drew praise and criticism and established him as one of the best-known historians of the 20th century, although he continued to see himself primarily as a novelist. Lavery's marriage to Beahan is less well documented but lasted until his death in 1989 and produced two children, Kermit Jnr and Patrick. Her new husband was lucky to have survived the war. [ Atomic bombings anniversary: Japanese politicians consider a once-unthinkable question Opens in new window ] Survivors moving along the road after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. Photograph: EPA/US national archives In 1942 alone, planes in which he was a crew member were shot down or forced to crash-land four times. But for good or bad, Beahan would be forever defined by his role in the two atomic bomb missions of August 1945 . He was part of a support team for the first. For the second, he was the man charged with dropping the bomb on the city of Kokura, the original intended target. In a bleak irony, Kokura was saved by smoke and dust from an earlier, conventional US air-bombing, which prevented Beahan from recognising a target. The crew settled instead for Nagasaki, although that too presented problems. It was at first clouded over and the crew were reluctant to rely on radar, which could be notoriously inaccurate. The plane's fuel was running dangerously low, meanwhile. It looked for as if they might have to ditch the bomb at sea. [ 'As survivors of these weapons, we all agree that they can never be used again' Opens in new window ] Then Beahan spotted a sports stadium through a gap in the cloud cover. Moments later, according to Stephen Walker's book Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima: 'he yelled, 'Bombs away' – then corrected himself: 'Bomb away'." He and the others had no idea where exactly it had fallen until later. 'In fact,' writes Walker, 'in one of the most bizarre coincidences of the war, Fat Man had detonated almost directly over the factory that once made the torpedoes used in the attack on Pearl Harbor'. It also killed 40,000 people, with many more to follow. Beahan had mixed feelings in later years about his involvement in the missions. He was neither proud nor inclined to apologise, believing the bombs had saved lives in the long run. Japan's surrender followed within days, and a minor side effect was to end the hopes of Teresa Lavery's first husband that he would ever see military action. According to Stuart Chapman: 'Foote was devastated that World War II was over'.
Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
Humourless raging against Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle jeans ad is pointless
Sydney Sweeney , a young hot blonde Hollywood starlet, is in an advertisement for clothing brand American Eagle. She writhes around the floor trying to do up a pair of denim jeans, with an almost inhumanly good body and doe eyes. 'Genes', she says, 'are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.' The tagline of the entire campaign: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. I think it's clever, it might even be funny. Enter the advertising hall of fame, with the Budweiser Clydesdales, Coca-Cola Christmas Truck, Guinness Toucans, and now Sydney Sweeney's jeans. It is also what Hollywood is for: beautiful people, selling us things. The amateur bores among us have tried to argue about celebrities and body positivity and responsible, inclusive marketing for years, even decades now. They argued that corporations possessed some abstract ethical duty to turn their desire to make a profit into a progressive political argument. This particular constituency was never going to win the case. It's just too worthy, finger-waggy and po-faced. The movement – call it woke, call it social justice, whatever – spiralled into total decline by 2023. Their moralising decadence was revealed as not part of the grand arc of history, but instead a sociological blip. We know all of this to be true by now. So, I was full of admiration for the last remaining hangers-on as they came out in full force to condemn Sweeney and American Eagle, their howls of rage wrapped up in some illiterate rhetoric about late-stage capitalism. I think it is brave to come out swinging knowing that you lost the argument a long time ago. My version of the instinct is my continued, visceral defence of James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar . What were they so mad about? First, the obvious: don't sexualise women. Second, the insane: the play on words between jeans and genes is not innocent fun but instead promoting a white supremacist project of eugenics. Sweeney is blonde with blue eyes… and we are celebrating her DNA? 'We all know where this one goes,' they say, with straight faces and encumbered intellects. My one regret about the entire charade is that American Eagle deleted the videos from their feeds. They didn't need to capitulate – the cohort raging against them is small, culturally disenfranchised, and too humourless to worry about. READ MORE And then, plot twist: Sweeney was revealed to be a registered Republican . Donald Trump was thrilled and delivered a cheering speech. 'You'd be surprised at how many people are Republicans… If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.' Later, he turned his pen to the subject, and wrote on Truth Social: 'Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there… Go get 'em Sydney.' I'm not on these guys sides' either, but at least they have a sense of fun. Of course everyone is quick to declare victory: 'Woke is dead in advertising' one Telegraph columnist declared, Telegraph - ically, on a podcast. 'The vibe shift, she lives' goes the chorus. This is the final nail in the coffin for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and all those painting-defacing lunatics. Finally, the inevitable cultural victory for the right is here, as it was always meant to be. So runs the argument, anyway. (I wonder if these people have also failed to observe the ambient politics of the year: DEI policies still exist pretty much everywhere; universities are still under the cosh of activist students; we are still entertaining discussions about whether Ireland needs a dedicated woman's museum.) So, I think they are wrong too. The most frustrating thing for the disenfranchised social-progressives of the 2010s is not that they lost the culture war to a huge Conservative Machine, typified now by Sweeney's genetic hegemony, but instead that they lost to something far more benign entirely: the centre. Because none of this episode is actually mainstream vindication for the worst political impulses of a Trump administration – trying to make that case is ludicrous. It's just a light social correction to the moral excesses of the past decade; a hand held out in the dark to say 'it's okay, you're allowed to have fun'; it is a victory for aesthetic liberation more than it has anything to do with politics. [ Sydney Sweeney is selling her bathwater. What has become of us? Opens in new window ] We should always return to the original text; look at the advert itself. Is the genes thing a bit right wing? Sure, whatever. But really this is Norman Rockwell's sentimental realism; Taylor Swift's 'screeching tires of true love'; Bruce Springsteen's stadia; hamburgers and milkshakes; corn silos in a flyover state; shanty towns in Appalachia; multi-lane highways; and clacking boardwalks of Coney Island. It's just Americana, in all of its cliches and superlatives. The company is literally called American Eagle, what did you expect it to do? In the great pendulum swing of politics, Sweeney in 2025 marks something: not a stake in the ground for Conservative values; but just a general and gentle loosening of cultural shibboleths. That really is a victory.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Wednesday season two review: Jenna Ortega's charisma could power 1,000 hearses
Hark! 'Tis the peal of baleful bells, for a new semester has befallen Nevermore Academy, and freshly minted celebrity Wednesday Addams ( Jenna Ortega ) is, naturally, having none of it. 'I liked it better when I was feared and hated,' she monotones as a flock of awestruck fellow students scrabbles around her ankles, autograph books a-flap. Alas, her newfound fame is inescapable. 'You're kind of a big deal now after the whole saving the school from the demon pilgrim thing,' 'It girl' Bianca (Joy Sunday) explains, as much to the viewer as to Wednesday, who is perhaps too busy administering icily efficient death-stares to her swooning fanbase to fully appreciate the ramifications of last season's finale. The demon pilgrim thing? Ah, yes. The demon pilgrim thing. This, you may recall, was the climactic first-series kerfuffle surrounding one Joseph Crackstone, a bloodthirsty 17th-century pilgrim resurrected by dastardly botany teacher/beastmaster Marilyn Thornhill ( Christina Ricci ). Having already manipulated barista/actual monster Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan) into killing a series of pupils, police and local therapists, Thornhill planned on using the reanimated Crackstone to help her snuff out everyone else. Anyway, thanks to Wednesday the evildoers are now either exploded (Crackstone) or banged up (Thornhill and Galpin) and Nevermore, finally, is safe. Let joy – or at least guarded relief – be unconfined. And now? Peace descends and the second series of this most deliciously macabre of smash-hit murder-mystery/high-school comedy dramas – or at least the four episodes available prior to the second half of the series being launched in September – can proceed in orderly fashion. Or not, as the case may be, because – ruh-roh – here comes another baddie! Specifically, here comes the Kansas City Scalper, a serial-killing, doll-collecting professional dog groomer in a velour tracksuit played, with much oleaginous glee, by Haley Joel Osment (of The Sixth Sense fame). READ MORE In a breakneck pre-title sequence, we learn that Wednesday has spent her summer vacation tracking down the Scalper, being tied up by the Scalper, turning the tables on the Scalper, relieving the Scalper of his scalp and, finally, delivering the Scalper to justice. The ultimate significance of all this is moot (certainly the incident is, at least in this first episode, not referred to again) although only a berk would bet against the scalpless sod popping up at a later date and putting everyone off their Weetos. Minor quibbles aside, the season opener is wonderfully skittish and dense with jokes and plot It is, all in all, a very Wednesday introduction to the new season of Wednesday. That is; a hugely elaborate and wildly entertaining thing that happens very quickly and at great budgetary expense only to be promptly buried under the demands of a more immediately pressing plot strand. Which is, in this instance, Wednesday's mystery stalker. Having emerged at the end of the last series , he/she/it has decided that our peerlessly nihilistic heroine must pay for something or other and has begun to leave her a series of increasingly shouty cryptic notes demanding she DO SOMETHING or other ABOUT THIS. Who is this irate foe? And what, precisely, is the nature of his/her/its beef? [ Wednesday: The Addams Family gets a Gen Z twist – and Tim Burton gets his mojo back Opens in new window ] Further unusualness abounds. A local private investigator is pecked to death by a distinctly murderous murder of crows. Wednesday has horrifying visions of ditzy roommate Enid (Emma Myers)'s imminent demise. Nevermore, meanwhile, has an enthusiastic new principal in the Ned Flanders-y form of Barry Dort ( Steve Buscemi , complete with statement knitwear and a moustache that follows you around the room). Dort is a Bruce Springsteen fan and is Not To Be Trusted. Also straddling the tantalising first-episode divide between 'seems quite nice, actually' and 'is almost certainly a shapeshifting necromancer' is wispy new music teacher Isadora Capri ( Billie Piper , clearly having a blast). [ Joanna Lumley: 'I love Ireland as much as you can if you're not an Irish person' Opens in new window ] Similar fun is to be had in the return of Catherine Zeta-Jones 's, woozy, pillowy Morticia Addams if not in Luis Guzmán's lumpy, grinning Gomez, whose character, as ever, seems oddly unfinished, as if he'd abandoned rehearsals halfway through, having been distracted, perhaps, by a scotch egg. Minor quibbles aside, the season opener is wonderfully skittish and dense with jokes and plot. Tim Burton 's brisk direction ensures any embryonic wibbles of seriousness or sentimentality are swiftly squished by a shot of a rotting corpse, say, or a scene in which a flotilla of CGI caterpillars assemble themselves, apropos nothing, into the legend 'BUG OFF'. In the middle of it all, meanwhile, is Ortega's Wednesday, whose charisma could power a thousand hearses. Not that she'd appreciate our enthusiasm. 'Do not put me on a pedestal,' she warns her besotted schoolmates during her guest of honour speech at the disastrous inaugural Nevermore gala. 'The only place I will lead you is off a cliff.' The sensible among us are already preparing our parachutes. – Guardian Wednesday season two is on Netflix
