Blow-in, indeed. If private citizen Bill Clinton should suddenly find himself indicted for perjury (and he might, reader, he might), he's one potential asylum-seeker who'd be more than welcome in Co Louth.
He might be asked to scale back the blow-oriented references to himself (in Belfast Wednesday, live on BBC Radio Live 5, we heard him refer to his capacity to "absorb blows"); but, then again, to judge by the ya-boy-ya cheers for the blowin in Dundalk, they could be part of his rogueish charm.
We shouldn't be unfair to Dundalk. At times this week it seemed all of Ireland, North and South, was on its knees, prepared to offer its services. The not-terribly-significant events in Dublin and Dundalk even forced RTE Radio 1, not notorious for its scheduling flexibility, to transform 5-7 Live into 5-9.17 Live. (It was a bit bizarre, then, when the marginally more important Belfast speech failed even to find a live radio slot; and when Ryan Tubridy subsequently reported on it, he blatantly editorialised about how awful it was that Clinton was heckled.)
Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) at least had the nerve to suggest that the Emperor might be ever-so-slightly unzipped. "If I were to say `May the road of peace rise before you, may the wind of prosperity be always at your back, and may the God of St Patrick hold you in the palm of his hand', they'd have me locked up," Finucane opined - before conceding limply that "it's the way he tells them".
Lucky for us, The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) was on hand to offer an alternative to all the cheerleading. On Wednesday, the Drunken Politician ventured into the streets of Dundalk - or El Paso, as he called it - and found a spittingly hilarious Dundalk Man to reflect on Bill's political prowess.
The Dundalk Man, "Frankie", however, became increasingly obsessed with praising the varieties of pizza available at Supermac's ("but not pineapple, that's unnatural"), and answered queries about his surname and possible sponsorship with an everlasting catchphrase: "I could tell ya, but I'd hafta kill ya."
Okay, there remains a you-had-to-be-there vibe about these Last Word sketches, as I found when I spluttered through a reprise of it to a friend (and as you can perhaps confirm even now). But that's no harm for a radio show, and it helps to leave the programme firmly in the Essential Listening column.
Further evidence of that status for The Last Word came on Wednesday evening when Eamon Dunphy brought us an extended interview with Alan Dershowitz, the controversial American lawyer who was present in striking soundbite form on the same day's Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). Dershowitz was insistent on characterising Tuesday's US Supreme Court decision as a deeply partisan one, and he enumerated the conflicts of interest of no fewer than four of the conservative justices: two have family members involved in one way or another with the Bush efforts and two more want to retire but have said they will only do so if there is a Republican president to name their replacements.
Lawyers, he said, have been struck through the legal battle of the last month by how "foolishly and transparently" partisan various judges have been. Why it should be lamentable when hidden biases are actually brought to light was not entirely clear, except for those with an interest in maintaining the system. (Gee, maybe lawyers fall into that category.)
Probably, in this airspace, the best reporter and commentator on the US electoral chaos and the divisions that will persist beyond this week has been the astringent James Naughtie on Today (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday). Nonetheless, the media here, despite Dershowitz, have been too quick to follow their US counterparts in assuming the basic honesty of the efforts to sort it all out. The US Supreme Court conveniently finds an "Oops, time's up" solution; another, less publicised, legal case finds that Republicans acted improperly in dealing with absentee-ballot applications in Florida but that nothing can now be done about it. Is it not time to dredge up the F-word again?
There was certainly no need to wait up late Wednesday night/Thursday morning for the God-soaked platitudes of Gore and Bush trading their concluding pieties. Even in mere transcript they were nauseainducing for this atheist - I'd imagine the symptoms would be considerably worse in a genuine believer - and the thought of aurally enduring so many blessings sets off an earache even as I write.
But late-night radio certainly had its pleasures this week, notably a series on BBC Radio 4 that threatened to lift me out of the bed and into the kitchen. Pleasures of the Table (Monday to Friday) went out in an ungodly slot - pace Gore/Bush - after 12.30 a.m. The Late Book is the last of several audio-literature programmes on the station's daily schedule, but this compendium of food writing was intended to be at least as literary as it was saliva-stimulating.
It started, as it would, with Elizabeth David, and a selection of prose and recipes from three of her classic books. In a short introduction, we heard about David from her editor at Vogue, Audrey Withers, who surprisingly likened the writer to a small, rare bird who had wandered into her garden and needed to be coaxed, with crumbs, to show her glories. Certainly the excerpts that followed were of a certain delicacy - "I had spent a number of years in the Middle East, followed by some time in the farther one" (!) - but the innocent reader would suspect, I think, a more robust character.
And robust certainly describes the wonderful reading of these excerpts by Maureen O'Brien, who discovered the writer's voice even in the recipes, loving every syllable of an oven time of "ap-proxi-mately . . . 45 minutes".
The selections from David's work were chosen perhaps more for their autobiographical import and literary merit than for what they told us about the publishing phenomenon David became. How did she come to convince middle-class Britain to "take the olive oil out of the medicine chest and into the kitchen", as the introduction put it? Her picturesque portrait of the French bourgeois family with which she lodged as a teenager offered some clues as to how an apparently insular Britain came to embrace her food tastes.
Madame, we're told, was virtually an obsessive-compulsive about her grub, a theme that runs through much gastronomic writing about allegedly food centred cultures, with their daily markets, early-morning trips to the bakery, cookers going all day long and constant colourful arguments about the merits of one dish over another. It's not a terribly flattering portrait. David, in a sensible English way, offers us a short-cut to the results of all that obsession, without having to go via the fanaticism.
Picturesque British food-writing in its mid-century heydey was not confined to parts foreign. On Tuesday night's programme, we heard Dorothy Hartley's extraordinary evocation of traditional English food, climaxing with a recipe that began (I swear): "Instruct the shepherd to keep the docked tails warm . . ."
Is there a Dundalk joke in there somewhere? I could tell ya, but I'd hafta kill ya.