Michael Fassbender plays a robot in "Prometheus" - Video goes viral

 Michael Fassbender

Irish actor Michael Fassbender plays a robot (but the humanoid kind with emotions) called David in the forthcoming sci-fi film of the summer Prometheus.

Watch him revel in the opportunity to play a man-machine. Squeel over those breathy pauses.

This is what a word class actor having fun looks like.

We reckon there's more than a little disturbing foreshadowing going on in this viral clip. How much do you want to bet he's going to malfunction?

A look at books - Irish cooking, history and fiction

Irish Traditional Cooking
By Darina Allen

Can you call yourself Irish if you don’t own at least two Irish cookery books by Darina Allen? Simply put no one else has ever assembled the classic Irish dishes with the range and scope and appreciation for Irish tradition that she has.

In Irish Traditional Cooking Allen has assembled over 300 recipes that are as wholesome and unpretentious and the books title. Allen is a seasonal cook, which means she lists dishes that are in tune with the produce on offer year round, which makes this book an especially worthwhile purchase for discerning cooks.

This is magical food, prepared and presented in simple step-by-step measures that won’t intimidate. It’s made simple because Allen’s knowledge is authoritative, and she knows Irish cuisine inside out.

What’s especially fascinating is her knowledge not just of the recipes but also of the Irish cooking and baking traditions that produced them and her passion to preserve them is infectious.

Food can be a powerful gateway into the past and Allen knows this, and her chapter on making Barm Brack will probably take you back to your own childhood days in Ireland if you were lucky enough to experience it. If you weren’t this book is as close as you are ever likely to come. It can not be recommended highly enough.

Kyle Books, $35.00

Pure Cork
By Michael Lenihane

The garb changes from generation to generation, but the faces in the photographs in Michael Lenihane’s new book clearly belong to our tribe. From its origins as a medieval walled town to its status now as one of the top ten cities on the Lonely Planet’s Guide, Lenihane’s book Pure Cork traces the illustrious history of this mold-breaking city and the vivid people who make their homes there.

In a way never seen before Lenihane’s new book visually captures the city’s rapid evolution through a series of judiciously chosen photographs, post cards, maps, sketches and drawings, bringing to life the sights and sounds of the of the rebel city in the process.

Two hundred years of Irish history is contained within its pages and it’ll be a gift best appreciated by those who know what it means to be pure Cork, boy!

Dufour, $39.95.

Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails
Edited by Phillip O’Ceallaigh

The Irish are the world’s acknowledged masters of the short story form. In this punchy new collection from the innovative Irish publishing group The Stinging Fly Press we’re introduced to a new generation of Irish writers, this time edited by the award winning short story writer Phillip O’Ceallaigh.

This is a discerning new collection of emerging and established Irish voices that at times achieves startling originality and surprise with tales that involve murder, mayhem, love, confrontation and even sedate pastimes like taking Italian lessons taking unexpected turns.

The Irish short story form (and its writers) are looking further than the four green fields to Europe and in acknowledgement the editor has for the first time included European writers in the mix, adding an extra dimension to the already rich layers of metaphor and cultural exchange that already underscore the Irish experience.

Dufour, $21.95.

Citizen Dwyer
By Sean McCarthy

Authors often have to issue a caveat when it come to writing about Irish history, as if to explain the at times blatantly contradictory attitudes of the people themselves. This is as it should be. Everything is always being contested in Ireland; from the name of a child to the boundary of a property, you can be certain that someone somewhere is going to take a different view, and most likely at the worst possible moment.

Meet Wicklow Chieftain Michael Dwyer, the hero of McCarthy’s novel. Composed of delightfully contrasting characteristics, he’s a revolutionary idealist, and inspirational guerilla leader and a violent alcoholic. Hey, you have to take the bad with the good, after all.

In McCarthy’s sprawling new tale we follow McCarthy and his family as they are deported to a penal colony in Australia. In case you’re wondering it’s a fictional tale based on real characters, and it tells a sobering tale about the ravages of an uncontrollable addiction. Booze can make a meal of even the most accomplished men and so it proves in McCarthy’s moral fable.

Dufour, $27.95

Looks at Books - New books reviewed for your consideration

Fighting Tuesdays
Edited By Emily Firetog and Declan Meade

FOURTH year, or transition year as its also known, is the much beloved year bookended by two fearful exams in the Irish school system. For students it’s the year when you can relax a bit and begin to discover your teenage identity finally. If you’re lucky it’ll be one of the happiest of your life too.
In Fighting Tuesdays the Stinging Fly Press invited students in that age bracket to submit original short stories, 24 of which have been selected for this book.
What makes this one worth your time is the remarkable sophistication in evidence in these pages. These stories aren’t just powerful; they’re a timely portrait of modern Ireland.
Spanning the great themes of friendship, love, bullying, drugs, alcohol, football and finding yourself, the humor and the dialogue crackle with the fierce urgency of youth itself.
Dufour, $15.95.

Setting the Truth On Fire: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Campaign
By Julieann Campbell

IT took 18 years and 28 families to uncover the truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday, that lamentable day that changed the course of history in the North, but the sheer injustice of those 14 shocking killings would provide their inspiration in years to come.
United by their grief and outrage over the killings these families, who were in the beginning mostly strangers to each other, met and started a campaign for a new investigation into the shootings and for the exoneration of the victims.
Derry woman Julieann Campbell is the niece of the youngest victim, Jackie Duddy. A journalist and award winning poet, she was press officer for the Bloody Sunday families and saw their struggle from the inside, resulting in one of the most illuminating portraits of the campaign yet written.
It took almost two decades, but that determined campaign ended with Lord Saville’s historic report that found the British Army’s actions on the day “unjustified” and “unjustifiable.” Campbell’s book is a testament to their unflagging courage, but it reminds us too that what motivated them most was love.
Dufour, $24.95.

The Chosen
By Arlene Hunt

Irish writer Arlene Hunt makes the business of crafting a terrific new thriller look easy. Her latest introduces us to Jessie Conway, a hard working teacher at a local high school who unwittingly becomes the target of a serial killer.
Brilliantly crafted from the beginning, Hunt makes her heroine likeable and tough, which makes what happens next all the more involving. Psychotic killers are no match for the power of love and hope and so Hunt sets the stage for a showdown that is as riveting as it is believable.
There’s a cinematic sweep to Hunt’s work that suggests a bidding war may be in her future, but in the meantime you should acquaint yourself with one of the most interesting new voices to have emerged in thrillers in recent years.
Dufour, $21.95.

Just Follow the Floodlights: The Complete Guide to League of Ireland Football
By Brian Kennedy

IN 1921 the Irish weren’t just founding the Republic they were founding a national football team. Ninety-one years on that league is still going strong.
Forty-seven teams have comprised the League, and each has produced its own storied history. Ireland has always produced a surplus of eccentric characters, local color and victories against all the odds and this handsomely illustrated book is a time capsule that brings the fondest hopes of generations of players and fans back to life.
Dufour, $29.95.

1798: Tomorrow The Barrow’s We’ll Cross
By Joe Murphy

WHAT could be more Irish than the tale of a family shattered by divided loyalties? In this case it’s the tragic generation of 1798 when that all out and disastrous rebellion tears at the national fabric, with consequences that will be felt for centuries.
Joe Murphy’s enthusiasm for the period and for the men and women who lived and died during it leaps off every page of his new novel, a swashbuckling romance filled with last stands and epic battles.
Tragically the fight against the rapidly growing British Empire is as nothing against the internal squabbles that erupt between the United Irishmen and the Loyalists and Murphy reminds us that the enemies within are often the bitterest we will ever encounter.
Dufour, $22.95.

Look at books - Oscar Wilde, Irish history, and savage NYC fiction

More Lives Than One: The Remarkable Wilde Family Through the Generations
By Gerard Hanberry

Sometimes your fate arrives in the form of a lover. When Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 his wife Constance noticed that many of their friends stopped speaking to them after it was published.

Then one day a young man turned up at the invitation of a friend, and Wilde discovered he had read the book nine times. Flattered by his attentions, Wilde fell hard for Lord Alfred Douglas, the blond haired son of the Marquis of Queensbury.

But all the Wildes lived their lives as though making themselves the ideal subjects for a biographer. Wilde’s father was a brilliant surgeon and his mother was the flamboyant Lady Jane, who wrote stirring nationalist poetry under the nom de plume Speranza.

The Wildes were a pair of mold breakers and provided an ideal springboard for the brilliant career of their singular son. But Oscar didn’t leap fully formed from his college days in Dublin. Both of his brilliant parents had taught him well, and Gerard Hanberry’s book seeks to restore their influence and importance to one of the wittiest and most incisive writers who ever lived.

In setting out to conquer the literary world, Wilde was himself harpooned by a petulant, changeable upper class toff who was in many ways his antithesis. There’s a strange unsettling kind of doom that hovers over his sad fate that will ensure his love story lasts for all time, an outcome he would probably have enjoyed had it not consumed him.
Dufour, $44.95
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Places We Play
Mike Cronin and Roisin Higgins

Anyone who grew up in Ireland will remember their local pitches and golf courses with fondness, be they ever so humble, and the majority of them were.

In their new book, Mike Cronin and Roisin Higgins explore national stadiums to the most derelict former homes of sporting glory and in the process they unravel generations of Irish sporting history.

These were the places were hopes and dreams came to life for an hour, and the book recalls the kind of women and men who dreamed them, tracing the impact and reach of sport in modern Ireland along the way.

So many groups had a hand – and in consequence a say – in how that history unfolded. Local tradesmen, politicians, landed wealth, the military, and the clergy all helped shape the idea of a national sporting heritage and this evocative and handsomely illustrated book brings that heritage to life.
Dufour, $44.95

The Savage City
By T.J. English

Now available in paperback, celebrated Irish American author T.J. English’s The Savage City is a bracing reminder of the racial powder keg that was New York City in the sixties and seventies.

Despite what we might like to think, racial struggles didn’t just happen in the south, since there were major battles happening right here in New York. The gloves came off between a police department that thrived on corruption and a suddenly militant black underclass, which began to agitate for their rights, with explosive results.

English reminds us that the struggle for civil rights was exactly that, when it was not an all out war on the city streets. In this immensely readable book, which propels the reader forward through a catalogue of horrors, English confirms his reputation as a master of gritty social history.
William Morrow, $15.95

Window and Mirror: RTE Television 1961-2011
By John Bowman

Few Irish commentators are better placed to record the changes to Ireland’s national broadcasting channel than the station’s own distinguished veteran broadcaster John Bowman.

In Window and Mirror: RTE Television 1961- 2011 he reminds us that 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the station that reflected and sometimes led Irish opinion over five decades.

Bowman opens a window on Irish society over five decades, reminding us of the strong arming tactics employed by the clergy, politicians, and other competing strands of Irish society, including Gaelgeoirs.

What Bowman reminds us is how deeply the public sought to see the station as a forum to question prevailing attitudes and traditional values in a society that was discovering just how corrupt and cruel it had been under its apparently conservative surface.

The history of RTE turns out to be the history of an Irish people determined to shape its own future, Bowman argues. In his insightful and evocatively illustrated new book Bowman conjures decades of Irish social change in a compelling new book.
Dufour, $49.95
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How to pour a perfect pint of Guinness from a can

At some point almost everyone has wondered how to pour the perfect pint of Guinness from a can, and now thanks to the gourmet food site Chowhound.com your quest is at an end:

Gavin Friday - Irish pop genius - VIDEO

Gavin Friday

Gavin Friday, who is quite wonderfully sui generis, makes our list for one of the most singular pop talents Ireland has produced.

Here he reminds you why.

This track, titled "Able", is taken from his recent album "Catholic":

Saint Patrick's Day pants - your holiday sorted

Feeling like making a (loud) statement this Saint Patrick's Day? Why not wear your Irish pride right out in public where you can see it with help from these unmistakable 100% Cotton St. Patrick’s Day Chinos new from Bonobos.

Turn heads and maybe win some new admirers before or after the parade. You can pick 'em up by clicking here.