EVERY WEEK HERE at TheJournal.ie, we take a look back at all the comments left on the site during the week and pick out the ones that most grabbed our attention.

It’s our way of highlighting the strongest, funniest and most-thought provoking things that you lot have said over the past few days. This week, there’s been a lot of talk about the government’s first year in office, the eviction of Occupy Dame Street, Tweetgate, the new iPad, redundancies at AIB, dolphins, turf-cutters, Joseph Kony and LulzSec hackers. It’s been a strange week.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here’s the standout comments from this week.

A study by researchers at the University of Limerick found that teenage girls spend 19 hours a day sitting or lying down. Commenters started discussing whether this had changed much from when they were teenagers, and Gerard Murphy had this Monty Python-inspired remembrance of tough times:

Back in my day;
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.

Wednesday saw the appointment of a new secretary-general for the Department of Finance after Kevin Cardiff left the post in rather controversial circumstances. Ged_star summed up a lot of the comments with this:

Lets hope he’s got a better calculator than his predecessor :)

A train driver was injured this week when detonators in the safety kit bag in his cabin exploded as the train was in Bray station. A lot of commenters were surprised that train drivers still carry detonators – which led Grigori Rasputin to relate this story:

My Grandfather was a train driver for GNR [Great Northern Railway], and lived right beside the viaduct in Drogheda. he was also in the Old IRA during the War of Independence. The British Army used to move troops and goods by train between Belfast And Dublin. in the middle of the night, he’d run out of his house up onto the rail tracks, put a load of these detonators onto the tracks, and run home. They wouldn’t do any damage (they’re little more than fireworks) – but they’d sound like gunfire. So the train would have to stop to check for damage further down the line, and patrols would be sent out to investigate the supposed shooting incident. Probably not the greatest military strategy, but it gave them the satisfaction of annoying the British Army without causing any damage.

Yesterday we ran this amazing video by an 18-year-old student who made a space shuttle out of Lego – and then sent in into space (see the photo above). Some people were unsure about how the video had been sent back to earth and why the shuttle didn’t become weightless – but Cags David Cagney gave this useful nugget about how it was possible:

Bodies are only weightless in space because of their orbital speed producing a centrifugal force equal and opposite to gravity. The ISS is weightless because it travels at 17,000 mph. If it was to stop, it would fall back to earth. If the moon, at 320,000 miles away was to stop, it would fall to earth also.

Our little hero’s video here it as outstanding as it is real – I’d say Lego are chuffed.

Yesterday was obviously a good day for videos. There was also this rather amazing one of 30 dolphins getting beached on a er, beach in Brazil – before people ran up and quickly pushed and pulled them back into deeper waters. Aw. Mark Andrew Salmon saw  a theme:

Not another “Occupy the Beach” protest!

… while on the same article, this one from Daniel R looked at the bigger picture:

Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you 

On Thursday Fine Gael hastily cancelled a planned event to celebrate one year in government when Pat Rabbitte called it 'silly'. A lot of people agreed with Louise Hannon's assessment:

Someone needs to sack the PR “adviser” to FG Time to celebrate when this country has positive growth again and 4% unemployment and when we are not exporting our best young talent.

The poll about whether people thought that the stereotype of the 'drunken Irish' was problematic sparked a big discussion. This succinct comment from Spud Murphy got a lot of support:

I don’t think the problem is the stereotype, it’s the relationship with alcohol itself.

Peter 66 had this to say in the discussion about whether the government was right to celebrate its first year in office:

I listened to a 61 yr old man cry on the radio yesterday as he explained why he was trying to get a job abroad, it was not self pity,I think when he heard himself say it out loud it really hit home. His mortgage is €180,000 & he must sell at a loss. Ex- politicians & ex-high ranking civil servants could pay this mans mortgage off with one years pension that they get from the tax payer. It does not matter what your politics are this is wrong on every level.

And finally... The EU was criticised by anti-racism groups this week for running this ad:

Brian Walsh obviously thought a lot about it:

The message seems clear to me, if the EU is ever attacked by kung fu terrorists with crouching tiger gravity defying abilities we the people, portrayed by the pigeons, will get the Hell out of there and leave it to our Uma Thurman ninja army. This army has EU super cloning abilities that will scare the crap out of our enemies and when we clone all our Uma’s and surround them in the midst of the EU they will put their weapons down to a theme that sounds a bit like the one from The Good the Bad and the Ugly and disappear.
The moral is our EU ninja Uma Thurman’s with super cloning abilities can kick the crap out of your kung fu crouch tiger terrorists. Are we seriously paying the EU billions for this crap, Steven Spielberg must be p***ing himself?

Spot a comment which you think should make the list next week? Mail it to christine@thejournal.ie