The Sigla Blog

Richard Ashcroft
Keys To The World **
One of the biggest truisms about The Verve was that despite their public profile and not immodest record sales, they only really had one decent song. And ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ . with its wonderful sweeping string hook - was pilfered from The Rolling Stones. Post-Verve Richard Ashcroft struggled to define himself […]

Munich ****
The last time Steven Spielberg examined a key aspect of Jewish history, he was universally applauded and scooped the Best Director Oscar so long denied him. With Munich, he has irked everyone from Palestinians and Black September survivors to George Jonas, the man whose book ‘Vengeance’ the film is based on. The opening credits […]

This Sunday, January 29th, is the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Dog. I recently wrote this article for Capital magazine about the Chinese community in Ireland and interaction between the two communities and have reproduced it here.
Almost a year ago, in the space of one week, I had two very different encounters […]

As if scientists aren’t busy enough with Bird Flu epidemics and breeding green pigs, they have also concluded findings that reveal today to be the saddest day of the year.
That’s right, forget disembarking from bed on the wrong side, murderous PMT, mild irratation, lack of sunlight, or cartoon rainclouds over your head: today your […]

The first Irish Book Awards shortlist has been revealed and features a clutch of well-known authors like John Banville, John McGahern, David McWilliams and Fergal Keane. The awards will be made in three categories - fiction, non-fiction and children’s books - and will be announced at a ceremony on March 1st.
Irish booksellers Hughes & […]

Wonder how this weary traveller ended up so far from home? Apparently one of the first people to sight it this morning (a man on a train) rang the authorities to say that he might have been hallucinating, but he had “just seen a whale in the Thames”.

Damien has been salivating about food blogs and all this culinary talk got me thinking. Blogging is synonymous with opinion . be it soap-boxing rants or informed analysis and yet this seems to be absent from many food blogs. Or perhaps, it’s just the food blogs I’ve visited. Many seem to focus on reviews, recipes, […]

Since switching blogs I’ve been having some trouble with images. They upload fine, but I can’t seem to right align them so that the text is beside the pic. The old blog was also WordPress, and all I had to do was insert ‘class=border’ into the image link to push it to the right and […]

Beautiful New Born Children
Hey People! **
Beautiful New Born Children have discovered one of music’s holy grails . how to sound insanely energetic. All you do is co-opt members who play in other bands and get them to play instruments they don’t usually play. The result is an amphetamine velocity debut that zooms past in about […]

An artist friend sent me this from Net Art News and figured I’d like it.

Reblogging Blues
More than a curated series of links, ‘Abe & Mo Sing the Blogs’ is part reblog and part… drinking game, maybe? Net artists Marisa Olson and Abe Linkoln’s new project, now featured on the Whitney Museum’s Artport, is presented […]

Inspired by the news that Chile has just voted in its first woman President, I came across an interesting essay about another part of South America with democracy issues.
Pure Function responds to some recent posts on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez over at Backseat Drivers. He also takes issue with Richard Gott’s reportage of Venezuela […]

My dad has just called in to drop in number 16 in the Independent’s Great Irish Writers series. Yesterday, it was