IT’S BEEN A lively week here at TheJournal.ie.

Every Saturday, we like to take a look back at all the comments left by you lot on the site over the week and pick out the ones that most grabbed our attention. It’s our way of highlighting the interesting, funny, and unexpected things said by our readers over the past few days.

This week, meetings with Denis O’Brien and Michael Lowry got a lot of you exercised, as did the plight of Irish pornstars, Dáil holidays, Good Friday licensing laws, the household charge (yes, still), turf cutters – and much much more.

In no particular order, here are the standout comments from the week…

Stephen Doyle had seen first hand the harsh reality of children with cheese addictions (ahem) in the comments under the poll about whether advertising cheddar cheese to kids should be restricted:

its so sad to see these kids with cheese addictions. I’ve often seen them as young as 4 or 5 rooting through bins to lick on empty laughing cow wrappers. In my town its escalated with the teenagers sniffing easisingles and some have even started to inject the hardcore stuff like Edam. Its horrifying so something needs to be done, thank god we have the BAI doing something to protect the young!

A couple of people nominated this comment by Kevin O’Connor on the piece about how a SF politician (no,  not Aengus Ó Snodaigh) had run up a large bill on printer toner cartridges. Don’t know how the octopus would feel about having to work so hard…

Get them a pet octopus each and get the ink from them. Problem solved.

And on the same article, this tweet came from @Kevnmur:

This story is a carbon copy. RT @thejournal_ie: #Inkgate is back: jrnl.to/HwZigD

Ok, this is a long one but it’s worth reading. Last Sunday we ran a story about a study which found people who eat fast food are more likely to develop depression compared to those who eat little or none. It kicked off a big debate – and this comment by Paul Mallon got a lot of recommends from other readers:

I’m a firm believer that preparing your own food from scratch goes a long, long way to a healthy lifestyle and a healthy mind. Learning to cook, making weekly dinner plans, building a nice little library of your favourite recipes and trying new recipes on a regular basis is great fun.A couple of years ago my wife and I decided to adopt this philosophy and it’s been great. We used to always rush through cooking the dinner so we could sit down and switch off in font of the telly. but then we decided what’s the point of that? mostly crap on anyway. Spend an hour or so preparing and cooking a decent dinner, then set a nice table, stick on some candles and have a relaxed dinner. Fuck all on telly most times anyway. Now we have a massive catalog of recipes from all over the world and  even I can cook quite a few of them from memory.

After about 6 months you get pretty efficient at it too. It keeps your mind active, helps you wind down, you cook healthier food and you learn a lot.

You get really good at budgeting for food too. I felt very proud when one day we were paying for our food at the check out in tescos and it was entirely fresh meats, fruits and veg, no processed stuff at all. It’s a great feeling.Highly recommend it.  Fish too, how the hell did I ever get buy in life only eating chipper cod???? can’t get enough fish these days.

The people behind Kony 2012 released a sequel video this week – and El Brujillo was not impressed:

Ok, I actually determined to watch the whole thing. But I couldn’t get past the ignorance of the first six minutes. Nit one real. local. voice. 90% of them US. These people obviously haven’t listened to any of the criticism… they don’t represent the real needs of the people there, that they are guilty of a ‘white man’s burden’ for the 21st century.But what made me switch off was the map they show of ‘the world’ at 6.03. It’s an old colonial map, in which the size of Africa is drastically reduced to make Europe and the US look bigger.

These idiots need to be stopped and educated in something called Participation Development.