The Music Quiz: What is Sam Smith's middle name?
Girl in Red
King Princess
Mykko Blano
Arlo Parks
What is Sam Smith's middle name?
Francis
Frederick
Fergal
Fintan
Complete the title of Janelle Monáe's 2022 cyberpunk short story collection, The ______ _____: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer.
Bookish Librarian
Literary Librarian
Memory Librarian
Sensory Librarian
A tattoo of which musician/songwriter is on Boy George's left arm?
David Bowie
Elton John
Syd Barrett
Marc Bolan
Complete the full birth name of second-generation Irish soul/pop singer Dusty Springfield: Mary ______ Catherine Bernadette O'Brien.
Amelia
Charlotte
Audrey
Isobel
How many Shakespeare sonnets did Rufus Wainwright adapt in his 2016 album, Take All My Loves?
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
At an early point in her career, Canada's k.d. lang formed a tribute band to which female country singer?
Patsy Cline
Kitty Wells
Brenda Lee
Loretta Lynn
On which UK Top 5 hit single from Robbie Williams' 1998 number one album I've Been Expecting You did Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant provide backing vocals?
Strong
Millennium
She's the One
No Regrets
Which US pop singer is nicknamed 'Lesbian Jesus' by her fans?
Brandi Carlile
Hayley Kiyoko
Melissa Etheridge
Chappell Roan
What is the colour in the title of Frank Ocean's 2012 debut album, Channel _______?
Red
Green
Orange
Blue
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Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Lana Del Rey in Dublin review: By far the strangest performance the Aviva has hosted
Lana Del Rey Aviva Stadium, Dublin ★★★☆☆ Lana Del Rey's Aviva Stadium show is a blockbusting love letter to following your muse and playing by your own rules – even when those rules include reciting an Allen Ginsberg poem offstage while a hologram entertains the 50,000-capacity audience. Which is what happens three-quarters of the way through this bizarre set. A southern gothic rhapsody featuring burning houses and dancers who look as if they've just escaped from a cult, plus Del Rey's new husband, the alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene, waving from the wings, it is by far the strangest performance the Aviva has hosted. I stagger away as if emerging from a weird dream I can't shake. But if this is a strikingly capricious concert, it has to be asked whether it is value for money. Of the 14 songs performed, five are from Del Rey's unreleased new country album (title to be revealed) and another two are covers. Which would be fine if Del Rey were playing an intimate venue, as she did when she made her Irish debut, at Vicar Street, in 2013. But given the effort involved in getting to the Aviva and the ticket prices – you won't get in the door for less than €100 – the gig, at a trim 80 minutes or so, raises the question of where artistic expression ends and doing right by your fans begins. READ MORE Because whatever else this bizarre and often brilliant performance is, it never tickles the punters under the chin. There are crowd-pleasers, for sure. Nobody could quibble with Del Rey's fantastic renditions of Summertime Sadness and Born to Die. Here are hazy bangers as all-American as a cheerleader's pyramid yet shot through with David Lynch -style glimmerings of menace, like razor blades in a pompom. Yet the singer signals from the start that this is not going to be a ramble through her hit parade, as she opens with Stars Fell on Alabama, a baroque number from that forthcoming LP, which namechecks Tennessee Williams and Clint Eastwood . It also doubles as an address to her new spouse, explaining why a prenup would kill the romance ('Husband of mine / don't let them put all this paper between us'). She's only warming up. Another new track, Quiet in the South, features Del Rey singing from the porch of a shack that bursts into flame (which is to say dry ice and video projection). It is followed by Del Rey reciting all of Ginsberg's Howl off camera as that hologram mouths the words. Lana Del Rey performing at Aviva Stadium, Dublin. Photograph: Debbie Hickey Lana Del Rey performing at Aviva Stadium, Dublin. Photograph: Debbie Hickey If her production values are out there, the banter at least is sincere. 'My sister, my dad and my family, we've had a good couple of days here, really feeling the magic. All of the beautiful greenery, everything Ireland is about,' Del Rey says at the end (just after 10pm). 'I'm so grateful.' She then embarks on a wafting take on John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, a tune surely not heard echoing around an Irish amphitheatre since Denver played Páirc Uí Chaoimh , as part of the Siamsa Cois Laoí festival, in Cork in 1986. Stadium pop is full of slick, soulless soundalikes, and you have to applaud Del Rey for trying something different. That said, time and money have never been more precious, and you do have to wonder about the wisdom of such an eccentric set. Good on Del Rey for chasing her creative impulses down the rabbit hole. But maybe next time she might consider charging a bit less for the privilege.
Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
The dream of new forms of digital storytelling died. Could it be revived?
One of the more surprising – and faintly depressing – aspects of the great technological upheaval in news media over the last two decades has been how little genuine innovation it has produced in narrative form. Yes, we've had disruption. We've had job cuts, strategic pivots and more than our share of breathless declarations of brave new visions. But when it comes to the actual ways stories are told, the revolution feels a bit thin. Consider the liveblog, probably the only truly digital-native journalistic form to gain widespread acceptance. Born as a scrappy real-time update format for sports events, it has evolved into the standard operating procedure for covering breaking news, elections and natural disasters. It's useful, flexible and well-suited to how we consume information online. But it's also, let's be honest, hardly the radical reimagining of narrative we were once promised. There was a time – a moment in the early 2010s – when it seemed we might be on the cusp of something more substantial. Some of us entertained optimistic visions of immersive multimedia storytelling: text, video, audio, graphics and interactivity all woven together seamlessly in a new digital tapestry. Journalism would transcend the old print and broadcast silos. News stories would not just inform but envelop too. READ MORE This brave new world never really materialised. It wasn't for lack of trying. Media companies have made valiant – sometimes ingenious – attempts to adapt to the platforms that increasingly dominate attention. Podcasts are now an essential part of many outlets' offerings. Short-form vertical video, designed to slide smoothly into your thumb's flick through TikTok or Instagram , is ubiquitous. There's been steady, incremental progress in integrating social media posts, YouTube clips, photo galleries and links to related stories. But the dream of rich, interactive, multi-modal storytelling remains just that – a dream. The reasons aren't hard to divine: it turns out that developing those seamless experiences is expensive, labour-intensive and difficult to standardise. When budgets tighten – as they almost always do in this industry – experimentation is the first casualty. Newsrooms learned that it's one thing to build a bespoke multimedia feature, but it's another to do it every day. Perhaps the greatest disappointment, however, lies not in format but in philosophy. Specifically, the early 2010s saw a genuine – and, in retrospect, touching – optimism about transforming journalism from a one-way lecture into a conversation with the audience. 'Engagement' was the buzzword. User comments were no longer to be tolerated but embraced. The Guardian , always fond of a lofty ideal, built much of its global liberal brand on Comment is Free, its opinion vertical explicitly designed to foster a digital 'agora' or public open space. Journalists, it was suggested, would not simply report the news, they would debate it with their readers. Others eagerly followed, encouraging columnists in particular to jump into the fray. There was a widespread, if now faintly embarrassing, belief that we were on the verge of a more democratic media era, one in which audiences would be not only informed but empowered. Of course, there were commercial considerations too. With the social media giants siphoning off so much reader attention and discussion, bringing that conversation back 'home' to our own websites seemed a sensible defensive strategy. A reader who's commenting is a reader who's sticking around – or so the theory went. The reality was messier. Instead of becoming digital marketplaces of ideas, comment sections all too often devolved into toxic bear pits where anonymous users traded insults with ferocious energy and diminishing relevance to the articles at hand. Journalists, understandably, grew weary of their employers facilitating (and sometimes monetising) sustained personal attacks against them. Moderation proved resource-heavy and legally fraught – particularly in a country such as Ireland with its draconian defamation laws. So the grand experiment quietly collapsed. Comments were switched off. Or hidden. Or shuffled into barely noticeable tabs. The Guardian still has them, technically, but they're harder to find. The Irish Times, like many others, walked away entirely. And yet, last week, a faint echo of those idealistic days could be heard from an unexpected quarter: the Washington Post . The paper, which has endured a bruising year of internal strife, declining subscriptions and strategic confusion, announced a pilot scheme allowing individuals quoted in some of its articles to annotate them with their own perspectives. It's part of a broader package of initiatives, including a more flexible subscription model and 'The Post AI' – an artificial intelligence tool designed to answer reader questions based on the paper's own archive. One might be tempted to scoff. The Washington Post's recent troubles are not minor. Its owner, Jeff Bezos , is widely perceived to have altered its editorial positions to curry favour with Donald Trump . Executive reshuffles, plummeting readership and high-profile editorial departures have bruised the brand. That its answer now includes a chatbot and a digital margin note feels, at first glance, like a Band-Aid over a bullet hole. But perhaps there's something worth watching here. Allowing subjects of stories to comment directly – and visibly – within the text itself is a small but intriguing step towards rebalancing the relationship between journalists and their audiences. Done right, it could lend transparency, add nuance and even build trust in an age of mounting scepticism. Done wrong, of course, it could become another unwieldy experiment abandoned at the first sign of cost overruns or bad PR. Still, in a media landscape where most digital innovation has boiled down to new ways of selling old formats, any genuine attempt to rethink how stories are told – and how readers interact with them – is welcome. The dreams of the early 2010s may not have come to pass. But they're not quite dead yet.
Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
The loss of never becoming a grandparent: ‘You always assume it's going to happen to you'
The reward for parenthood is grandchildren, it's alleged. The chance to love and spoil your children's children, but without having to take on the same level of responsibility or sleep deprivation. For many parents, becoming a grandparent, one day, is presumed. But what about when it isn't likely to happen? Whether by choice or circumstance, recognising that you may never know the joy of having grandchildren can be a difficult thing for some people to accept. And an even harder thing for others to admit. Sorcha is deeply saddened by the knowledge she will never be a grandmother. 'I always assumed I'd have kids, and by extension grandkids. You always assume it's going to happen to you. READ MORE 'I have only one child and she is severely physically and intellectually disabled. She wouldn't understand pregnancy. I don't know how her body would cope with a pregnancy. And also she could never consent to sex.' Her husband was married before and has other children from his previous marriage, and she admits to finding it difficult that he now has grandchildren and she doesn't. 'It was really hard. The worst day was when his eldest [child] rang him to say, 'You're going to be a grandad.' While she and her husband always knew they would never have grandchildren together, it was an 'abstract' thing, she explains, until the day of that call. 'I was delighted for them, and I was thrilled for my husband. But at the same time I was absolutely heartbroken for myself ... In that minute I just thought, I'm never going to get that call telling me, 'You're going to be a granny.' I remember being very, very tearful and I know it took a while for my husband to twig.' Sorcha has a big interest in history, and family history, and knowing that her 'chain' stops with her daughter makes her feel sad. 'Quite a number of my friends now have grandchildren of varying ages. This is something my husband doesn't experience and can't really share with me. While he listens to me, ad nauseam at times, he doesn't have that experience because they are his grandbabies.' [ Regretting working outside the home: 'We're told to parent like we don't work. And work like we don't parent' Opens in new window ] Sorcha says she's very conscious that her husband's grandchildren already have a grandmother: 'What am I, a step-grandmother? That's not really something that rolls off the tongue. Every time a friend announces, 'Well there's now a grandbaby coming,' and I'm like, 'That's fabulous, that's wonderful' – but I have to take those few minutes to just go, 'That's not going to be my reality. That's never going to happen to me.'' Sorcha remembers seeing a plaque for sale in a shop that really upset her. It read, ''Only the best mums get promoted to grannies,' and I actually burst into tears,' she says. 'One of the things that hit me was, do they think that being a mum wasn't fun, or being a parent isn't nice?' Lisa says sadly of one adult child who has already stated that she doesn't want any children. Her other adult child, she explains, is likely to encounter fertility problems due to a health condition. 'A lot of my friends are becoming grandparents for the first time. My cousins are already grandparents. And I'm the oldest,' she says. Knowing she is unlikely to become a grandmother has left her feeling stunned. It's a feeling 'I never thought I'd be feeling', she continues. Motherhood 'is the best thing I ever did. So I couldn't imagine someone skipping it'. Part of a series about issues related to parenting that are not generally discussed. Lisa fears she'll miss out on 'the family and togetherness' that she believes having grandchildren would bring. 'My kids' relationships with their grandparents has been good,' she says, explaining how, even though they're adults now, they continue to stay in regular contact. She worries too about impending loneliness as her friends become busy and more involved with their grandchildren. A loneliness that she says is reminiscent of when children finish at school and many of the 'mum friends' friendships fall away. Emily says she is certain her daughter will never have children as she lives with the trauma of a sexual assault. 'She doesn't go into crowds. She doesn't go out at night on her own. You will never see her wear a skirt above her knee,' she says, explaining some of the lingering effects the assault has had on her daughter. 'She's had a few relationships ... they don't normally last.' Although her daughter has a partner at the moment, Emily reiterates that she doesn't see her ever having kids. 'She wouldn't even go for a smear test. She won't have anybody touch her that she doesn't know and trust.' Some years have passed since the assault, Emily says, explaining the passing of time makes her more certain she won't become a grandmother. It makes her sad because her daughter 'absolutely loves kids. And I know she'd love having small kids'. Emily says she would have loved to be a grandmother. She has another child who is unlikely to become a parent, either, because of additional needs. Emily has become acutely aware recently of the role she probably won't ever experience. 'I've noticed me spotting lovely cute [little] clothes in Dunnes or Penneys and thinking, 'I've nobody to buy them for.'' She struggles with the fact that the person who assaulted her daughter has 'forgotten he ever did it, and she's left with it. That's the hard thing and I'm quite bitter about the fact that [the person] got away with it'. Being a grandparent allows for a different source of connection and bond than we have with our own children — Cara Byrne, psychotherapist Kathleen is a bereaved mother. Her living child recently told her that he didn't want to have any children. He's still young, but the announcement floored Kathleen, who is very distressed at the thought she may never become a grandmother. 'I've been crying all day and all night,' she says, since she heard, and feels 'devastated'. 'He's it,' she says, describing how her son is her only chance to have a grandchild. 'I lay in bed last night thinking, 'When I die ... nobody is going to come to see our grave, to tell our story, to pass it down to the generations, like I have done when my mum died.'' She's sad at the idea of having no further family to pass heirlooms and family photos to. 'The connectedness of family and ancestors and ... the importance of the generations' matters hugely to her, she explains. She worries her son may not change his mind about having children, as his girlfriend is equally adamant that she doesn't want children either. Kathleen says she was looking forward to 'everything' about having grandchildren. 'The sense of ... him experiencing the love of being a father, being a parent, that I was blessed to experience.' Kathleen explains she had multiple miscarriages and had to have 'fertility treatments' to have her two children. 'Then I lost one. And one doesn't want to supposedly at this stage have kids. I want to be able to tell my grandkids stories about my parents, my great grandparents, where they came from, their heritage. Teach them things. Show them things. Nurture them. 'Love them,' she adds, sadly. 'Being a grandparent allows for a different source of connection and bond than we have with our own children, because when our kids are young we're so busy, especially if both parents are working, that we miss out on a huge amount of quality time,' says psychotherapist Cara Byrne. Byrne says it's normal for people to feel disappointed in the knowledge that they won't become grandparents. 'For the majority of people, when you have children you expect them to do the same. It's a life stage that if you don't get to experience you may feel a sense of loss. 'It's also very difficult if all your peers are grandparents because it's such a distinct identity and you may feel very disconnected in that, especially when it's the time of year that everyone's going to Communions or Confirmations and you're not going to these things because you don't have grandchildren to celebrate.' Continuing your 'genetic legacy' and wanting your name to be carried forward can be a 'huge factor', she says. 'So you would expect a sense of disappointment or loss associated with that also. 'Some people may take it as an indication that their children don't wish to repeat the life they experienced,' or, 'that them not having kids of their own represents their discontentment with their own childhood'. [ We used to vilify unwed mothers. Now we criticise women who don't want to be mothers Opens in new window ] In trying to deal with the upset that people may experience, Byrne recommends trying to 'understand where that deep disappointment is coming from' and 'what your unmet expectations are from this decision that your child has made, or has been forced to make'. Understanding the sense of loss means 'we can give ourselves the compassion to get over it', she says. It's important to recognise that 'you raise your children to make decisions for themselves, and that this is their decision and it isn't about you. It's about what's right for them in their life and that their ability to make those hard choices is because of the lessons you taught them. And that if you want them to be happy, it's important to respect their decisions even when you don't agree with them. 'If you're really struggling with it, then talk to a therapist about it. However you feel is absolutely fine and valid, but if you're going to get stuck on this idea of disappointment or it's going to change into a bitterness towards your child for feeling robbed of this experience, then it's really important to work through that.' Parenting taboos Gender disappointment Favourite child Regretting parenthood Stay-at-home parent Working outside the home
