Miscellany

It's a quiet Monday here, but not of course elsewhere, so just a couple of quick links and notes. RTE's Carole Coleman has written a book about her time as Washington correspondent. We didn't think a whole lot of her predecessor's book, which we think was called Turn Left at Greenland, and had way too much of a tone of, I, world traveller, will explain America to the benighted Irish public. But Carole's book is guaranteed to have one good story, her famous combative interview with Dubya. The Sunday Times of London has the relevant excerpt, and Free Stater and Atrios have pulled out some of the highlights.

One of the funnier bits concerns the attempts of Dubya's handlers to suggest slow-pitch questions she could ask:

Colby suggested that I ask the president about the yellow suit the taoiseach [Bertie Ahern] had worn the previous week at the G8 Summit on Sea Island in Georgia. I laughed loudly and then stopped to study his face for signs that he was joking — but he didn’t appear to be. "The president has a good comment on that," he said.

The taoiseach’s suit had been a shade of cream, according to the Irish embassy. But alongside the other more conservatively dressed leaders, it had appeared as a bright yellow, leaving our Bertie looking more like the lead singer in a band than the official representative of the European Union.

This incident was widely noted at the time, including, it now appears, by Dubya's team who would usually profess to be too involved with the nation's business to bother with fashion critics. Anyway Coleman's account of jumping on a plane to Clare right after the interview is a reminder that this period really marked a good streak for the country -- her tough performance followed soon by the camera that caught The Exalted One in his white undershirt, and the protests that delayed the hacks for the inevitable meaningless news conference following the EU-US Summit.

One other unrelated thing. Blogging has now well and truly arrived. BBC Radio 4 has a drama about a 73 year old retiree who discovers blogging as an outlet for her frustrations with her marriage. Part I left us all on tenterhooks when her blog gets its first reader. God bless public broadcasting.

UPDATE: More links and commentary on the Coleman interview from Dan Froomkin.