Via The Rittenhouse Review comes The Infant of Pague Blog. Brrrr. I (along with most Irish people, I think) know the guy as the Child of Prague. The Child of Prague could be very small (a few centimeters) or positively enormous. My grandfather had one I swear was about two feet tall. The thing about Child of Pragues was that the statue was so cheaply made that the head would inevitably break off, the neck being the weak point in the design. (Sometimes the thing in his left hand would go as well.) Irish kitchen drawers and garages are full of decapitated zombie Child of Pragues. Incidentally, most Irish people over age 25 cannot think see one of the things without thinking of Delerium Tremens, Christy Moore’s song about giving up the drink, which contains the lines “Suddenly it dawned on me I was getting the old D.T.s / When the Child of Prague began to dance around the mantlepiece.”

Meanwhile, via Mick Fealty comes this story about a proposed mosque in Portadown, which reminds me of that old joke that goes “But are you a Protestant Muslim or a Catholic Muslim?”, except it isn’t funny.