EVERY SATURDAY MORNING we like to take a look at all the best comments left on the site by you lot over the past week.

The news over the past seven days has been a mixture of the very serious – the conflict over the inquiry into the death of Savita Halappanavar, the stand-off at a Limerick school in a dispute about payment and the robbery of an ambulance in a Dublin estate – to the er, not-to-serious: including the 9 chat-up lines guaranteed to get you a date (possibly) and 7 things you maybe think are Irish… but aren’t.

So here, in no particular order, are the standout comments from the week that was.

Richard Branson’s musings about how he was brought to court in Ireland in 1990 for allowing condoms to be sold in the Virgin Megastore in Dublin inspired lots of readers to share their stories about that strange time in Ireland’s history when contraceptives were illegal. First up: Mandie Young:

Came over to Ireland on holiday with my (English) husband in 1988: I was on the pill, prescribed by my GP. Customs officers confiscated them! My kids fell about laughing when I told them the story, especially when one of them was conceived on the trip! Used a cap after that. Don’t think customs officers knew what it was: didn’t confiscate it when they saw it the following year!

Next up: Fiach MacAodha:

My dad was a pharmacist. At his funeral in 1989, one of the mourners whispered to me “Your dad was a great man, first to sell Johnnies in Carlow!” Good man Sam McHugh!

And here’s some analysis from Continent Simian:

It is important to put this in perspective: Before 1993, sex was a functional process carried out by married male/female pairs to create new Irish people.

Selling condoms to facilitate sex-without-babies made as much sense as selling shovels to facilitate digging-without-a-hole.

It was only with the invention of the orgasm in 1994 that condoms found their niche.

If you’re a heavy metal or thrash metal fan, you may appreciate these strange Slayer Christmas jumpers, which mix all the jollity of Christmas with all the er, despair of Slayer. Solid pun from Padraig Stapleton:

Will there be a jumper created by Slipknit?

Alan Cantell is leaving TV3 after 14 years. But don’t worry, says John Thomas. We’ll get through this:

Ah we’ll, we cantwell on it.

Green Day paid tribute to one of their fans – 17-year-old Dublin secondary school student Kaelem Hainsworth – who died tragically this week. Cormac Mc shared this memory of Kaelem:

Kaelem was in the year below me in Oatlands College. I didn’t know him personally but he was a face like any other that you’d recognise in the halls and at lunch time and the sort. It’s pretty incredible to see what his friends have managed to pull off in memory of him in just two days. Fair play to them.

How often do you change your bed sheets? Every week? Whenever it all gets too much? Here’s Katie Does with her dream of a world free from having to change sheets:

Hate changing bed linen (hate all housework tbh), so go with about once a fortnight or so. No special day, just when I’m guilted into it.

But there is nothing like a bed with fresh clean linen and I can see the appeal of daily changes, provided I don’t have to do them. When I win the lotto I’ll have my staff make up my bed daily with crisp brand new sheets, pillowcases and duvet covers straight from the pack. Egyptian cotton, close weave. The rest of the family can rotate the used ones between them, no sense in unnecessary waste and they obviously don’t care since if I didn’t change their beds for them they’d sleep in them unchanged for months.

Think you’re having a bad day? Kaja Farrell can probably beat your puny complaints:

I remember a day when I got eye infection and couldn’t see anything, caught a cold and a high fever, got lost in a city I’ve never been to before, had my wallet stolen, got pissed on by a chichuahua and broke a tooth, would that count ?

Karen Mulred got more than 210 thumbs up for this comment about the unsolicited phone calls about abortion which many people across the country received this week:

This is just vile. Imagine being a woman who has recently lost a baby and picking up the phone to this? Or someone who has just discovered an unplanned pregnancy? Or someone who has had an abortion?There has been plenty of talk on the radio and television and the newspapers and Internet lately about abortion, but people can choose to turn that off, not to read or not to listen, to protect themselves. They can choose to discuss it only with loved ones.

But to bring this into someone’s home, directly into their ear when they answer the phone is a gross invasion of privacy.

Fiona Apple wrote this very sad letter to fans this week explaining that she was postponing her tour because her dog is dying. David Walsh empathised:

Ahh I dont blame her, my old pal Wilson (named after the ball in the movie Castaway, because we thought it would be gas to call Wilson out loud when in the park) is just after celebrating his 10th birthday last month.its sad to see him slow down and find it hard to climb out of his bed in the morning but he’s had a grand old life and I know the day will come when i’ll have to make the hardest decision for us both one day.But hopefully not for a long while yet .

Aw.

(Image: Petr Jilek via Shutterstock)

Spot any good comments? Let us know! Mail christine@thejournal.ie