This week we were

. . . downloading
Liam Geraghty and Craig O'Connor's Comic Cast, one of the jolliest and most consistently entertaining Irish podcasts: thecomiccast.com.

“I naively assumed that I had the songs, that I would play them and that it would work. That is fundamentally wrong. I was approaching it completely wrong — to think that an audience who had little or no idea who I was would get the music

. . . booking

Mark Thomas at Vicar Street on March 10th and 11th. The political comedian’s latest show is based on a walk along the full length of the Israeli Separation Barrier.

 . . . curious about changes at Dublin Contemporary

Dublin Contemporary’s announcement on Thursday of the appointment of a new two-person curatorial team was a sign the city’s fledgling international exhibition of contemporary art, launched last July and scheduled to open on September 6th, was reinventing itself from the ground up. It is essentially starting again. Gone, as of three weeks ago, was not only the artistic director, Rachael Thomas, but also the event’s theme, silence, and whatever negotiations had gone on with potential exhibitors.

Now the new duo, described as lead curators rather than artistic directors, will put together a series of exhibitions and events under the title Terrible Beauty: Art, Crisis, Change and the Office of Non-Compliance. As if to underline the curatorial volte-face, previous references to James Joyce have been supplanted by the reference to WB Yeats, although using the Yeatsian umbrella to cover what sounds like a piece of throwaway bureaucratic satire seems incongruous.

The idea is to “highlight art’s potential for commenting on current events in Irish life”. The lead curators are Christian Viveros-Fauné and Jota Castro. Viveros-Fauné is a US-based former art dealer, curator and writer on contemporary art, who was for a time director of the Volta art fair in New York and Next in Chicago. Castro is a Franco-Peruvian artist who makes installations dealing with social issues; he is also a curator and a former lawyer. They have collaborated previously, as the Visceralists, to curate a show in Liverpool.

The list of what we don't know about Dublin Contemporary is growing. Why, for example, after several abortive launches, it is being launched yet again. Why it has discarded its artistic director and how it chose its two new curators . How the project's earlier commitments will carry over, for example in terms of the involvement of Irish artists. Perhaps all will become clear when the promised programme – which has been lacking from the beginning – appears in March. Aidan Dunne

 . . .craning our necks

To see Upstart’s creative election posters, with slogans such as “Thank God O’Leary’s dead or this would have killed him.”

 . . . saying farewell to

Film composer John Barry, who will always be best remembered for his Bond work (although Monty Norman wrote the famous theme) but also wrote great music for The Persuadersand Dance with Wolves.Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

. . . reading

Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair piece on Ireland’s woes – as if we haven’t had enough of it yet. It is fascinating nonetheless. It also brought us back to his book The Big Short, a forensic, readable, engaging account of how the banking mess started in the first place.

. . . lamenting

The closure of Waterstone’s Dublin shops, on Dawson Street and Jervis Street. The former, the site of a bookshop before the British chain got there, once formed a literary hub. Now just Hodges Figgis remains, although many will have only this week realised that both shops are owned by HMV’s parent company, so there were no plucky independents in this tale.

. . . listening to

Space Is Only Noise, an album of sweet, ambient, atmospheric sounds from the Chilean-American electronic producer Nicolas Jaar.

Dead Can Dances Into The Labyrinth. A good soundtrack for the times we live in – big washes of noise with a foreboding undertow. Eerily enough, the album was recorded in Co Cavan.

. . . watching

Total Wipeout (BBC1, Saturday) in which contestants negotiate oversized comedy obstacle courses. Hosted by Richard Hammond and Amanda Byram, it’s the smartest dumb show on TV and has become a Saturday night staple because children, their parents and the faceplant generation all love it.