John Keyes

The Kingdom Tower will be 173 metres taller than the Burj Khalifa.

To put that into an Irish context, Liberty Hall is 60 metres tall, and the spire is 120 metres tall.

Unsurprisingly, 50 of the 100 tallest buildings have been constructed since 2000, a tall legacy of the property boom.

YOU MIGHT FIND YOURSELF

If caterpillars emerged from their cocoons as butterflies with heavy, sagging testicles I’d imagine they’d feel the same as you might right now.

Same-sex marriage challenges freedom

We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought.

It comes as little surprise that this quote comes from the mouth of a catholic clergyman. I think he should be more worried about sorting out his own house, than doling out such pearls of wisdom.

In this wonderful piece Brian Phillips claims he is here to save your life. While that may be a stretch, he does speak bucket-loads of sense.

The modern football fan accepts their teams faults (in some cases they celebrate them), but reacts with “furious anger” to any slight from an opposing team (the depth of this anger grows exponentially when it’s their local rivals).

The problem is (and again, I’m not the first person to notice this) that for a lot of people, that rage-tap is getting harder and harder to shut off. Anger is increasingly becoming a default element in how people interact with the games they follow

We’ve probably all experienced this at some stage, whether we are the angry party, or merely in the same county as one. A knee-high foul goes unpunished — the referee is biased; a marginal offside call — the assistant is biased; a blatant dive wins a penalty — the perpetrator is more evil than unicorn hunters.

Rather than accepting these calls as part of the game, supporters go in search of evidence to support their beliefs that their team is being targeted. Soon, they are in conspiracy theory mode, a slip is dive, inches are miles, and two or three players becomes the entire team.

… soccer has devolved into a realm a little like politics, a realm where fans’ access to preconceived explanations that suit their emotional allegiances is drowning reality out of the discourse.

Rather than trying to apply any common sense, they react sub-consciously, fueled by the ever greedy media-machine, and leap to join their army of equally deluded peers.

The problem is that by doing so, you condemn yourself to a life of always being at least a little angry about a thing you supposedly love, a life of storing up slights and spinning them into bitter little stories, a life of basically hostile, suspicious, and un-fun commitment to a thing that only exists to give you joy.

Ask yourself, does football make you happy or angry? If it’s angry, maybe it’s you that needs to change and not the game.

The furore amongst the English media and supporters of English football teams (and Real Madrid) over Barcelona cheating amazes me. Cheating is part of the game. English players cheat. Players for the club you support cheat.

This piece by Andi Thomas covers the hypocrisy of the English media’s approach.

What’s interesting, however, is the persistent and constant elision of English deception from the English media’s presentation of the English game. While the amount of moralising that followed the clásico was due in no small part to the waves of hype that had preceded it, there nevertheless remains a stubborn refusal to admit that this might be something that is a problem with all football, not just other football. This attitude finds its nadir with Steven Gerrard (yes, alright, him again. But does any player so neatly encapsulate English football? None that I can think of), who once told the Daily Mail, apparently with a straight face, “I don’t think there’s anything worse than a player diving when no-one’s been anywhere near him. It does ruin the game”.