Seeing as how I tired of seeing posters everywhere of Julia Roberts with an ice cream spoon in her mouth, here's a nice snarky review of Eat, Pray, Love here, and how bad people would think it is if was actually written by a guy.. link I'm glad to know the movie is as bad (or worse) than I imagined it would be.

Mostly for reasons of leg-room, I hate flying. So I'm disgusted, but not exactly surprised to see Qantas are taking their new, relatively roomy A380 planes and stuffing them with 100 extra economy seats. At least we're going back to Dublin in April with a different airline, one that won't stop twice along the way and hopefully with a little more room.

Seems like I'm referencing the NYTimes a lot recently but.. Pretty surprised to find my old neighbourhood featuring in their travel section. Smithfield was a real handy place to live for a while - by Dublin standards the apartment was great, nice supermarket downstairs, a tram stop and a ten minute walk to the city centre. Add to that a 10 minute walk to work and it was pretty sweet. However, the whole place was supposed to become a big cultural centre and tourist draw, but it just never materialised. Apart from those living in the apartments heading off to work the whole area always felt very empty. Lots of scangers at night time, the strange sight of the Traveller's monthly horse market, far too many empty shop and office units on street level; I knew the place was going nowhere after a dodgy Paddy Power opened. Still, the NYTimes seems more optimistic about the area, despite the recession.. link