I've been listening to local radio recently. A lot of local radio. The Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI) Radio Awards 2005 will be presented at a ceremony at the Burlington Hotel next month. I found myself nominated some time ago as a member of the adjudication panel for the current affairs entries and for the overall Station of the Year Award.

Stormy was testy. He had put aside the guitar and packed his slicker. The First Weatherman was working hard, man, harder than he had in years, even spending nights away from home – and Barney – in strange places.

MEDIA: Just as computers have revolutionised most other communication, they and the companies that drive them are about to enable free phone calls to anywhere in the world. Conor Brady reports

Last weekend the 'inaugural' meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative picked its way through the pieces from an acrimonious and inconclusive United Nations summit. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan took the time to address a jam-packed session of the conference and reviewed progress, or the lack of it, following the UN's consideration of proposals to reform that institution. That he did so is proof of the pulling power of former US President Bill Clinton.

I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth. Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St Rita's nursing home in the devastated St Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.

For Irish people this means that a million of us are the Sunday Independent, well once a week at least. Not surprisingly, the Sunday Independent far outsells all its indigenous and foreign competitors each week. Over the past decade there actually has been little to no change. A decade ago the Sunday Independent's circulation was 276,212 and now it sells 291,036. Over the period it has enjoyed highs of 342,000, but overall, compared to a decade ago, sales have only grown by 14,824. So everything has changed, but somehow remained the same.

Marlon Brando co wrote Fan-Tan in 1970. Fan-Tan, like Brando "is coarse, perverse, idiosyncratic, unapologetically behind the times". Joe Queenan reviews it and recommends it as
a good read

Shortlisted in this year's Booker
prize and now being compared to EM Forster,
Zadie Smith's latest novel, On Beauty, is described as 'not
beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that
took the place of both qualities – something best described as a
profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that
she encountered in her path through life'. By Frank Rich

Two travelled, politically-minded artists were left alone with four blank gallery walls for a month. Billy Leahy looks at the results

Marian Finucane, RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday and Sunday, 11.00 –12.53 am