The Sigla Blog

Previously flagged a couple of weeks back, the most excellent Cougar are playing Whelan’s on November 30th. News reached me last night that they’re playing a second date, December 1st. In Kilcoole. In County Wicklow. In a Scout Hall.
Apart from seeing Momus play a cinema (the Scala in London, where he nipped back to […]

From an email I received yesterday:

The 6th Digital Media Awards is now accepting entries into the category Best in Blogging. Entries are submitted online at www.digitalmedia.ie , and entry into this category is free.
The Digital Media Awards strive to evolve with the changing digital media sector, and to reflect the most up-to-date technologies in our […]

Only last week I was talking about Ministry, one of the last bands that Paul Raven played with. Raven, best known for his time spent playing with Killing Joke (including on their best single, ‘Love Like Blood’), died at the weekend aged 46, from a suspected heart attack. Raven was also a member variously of […]

Two days since her Booker win, there are still some people not happy with Anne Enright’s win. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but then another kind of backlash concerning the writer has emerged.
Eleanor Birne has an excellent evaluation of The Gathering (be warned of spoilers if you haven’t […]

Right, wrist agony is not going away so the blog has to go on the backburner for a few days. It’s not getting better and one-handed typing is driving me mad. Better listen to the doc and rest for a few days…
While there’s nothing doing around here, there are lots of new blogs I’ve discovered […]

For Father’s Day this year, I presented my dad with a three-day-old grandchild and a book called The A to Z of All Old Dublin Cinemas by George Kearns and Patrick Maguire. It’s self-published and as far as I know Hughes & Hughes have some sort of exclusive deal with the authors to stock the […]

If The Observer Woman magazine has been going downhill, the Music Magazine has also seen a wobble in quality, as I’ve mentioned on Niall’s blog, but it redeemed itself at the weekend with an extract from Slash’s forthcoming autobiography (man, my post-op painkillers are in the ha’penny place compared to his drug use) and an […]

Anne Enright has just been (deservedly) announced as this year’s Booker Prize winner. Am delighted! She’s the first Irish woman in nearly three decades to win the prize, and her win will certainly heightens the profile of Irish women writing literature. Hopefully it will also inspire the next generation of female authors to strive for […]

Ahead of tonight’s Booker announcement and in the Blue Peter spirit of here’s-one-I-made-earlier (my one hand would completely malfunction typing out 1,000 words), here’s my recent interview with Anne Enright about her nominated novel, The Gathering. Tonight, Shane’s cash is on Mister Pip, and Dove Grey Reader will probably plump for that or Enright. […]

Usually when I’m up at this ridiculous hour, it’s because there’s still plenty of life left in the party (old life) or because of the tiny little person asleep upstairs (new life). Six days post-wrist op, and I’m still in lots of pain and bandaged up. The painkillers don’t work, oh, except to make […]

What I thought was pregnancy-related Carpel Tunnel Syndrome in my wrist has turned out to be something far fancier: De Quervain’s Disease (June Caldwell, a fellow facebooker, thinks it sounds like a Medieval French village) and an operation is required to fix it. Luckily, I have nabbed a cancellation for tomorrow, but will be out […]

After listening to and loving the new Cadence Weapon album (the best thing to happen to hip hop in a long time), I poked around my old vinyl and found lots of stomping stuff I’d forgotten about. I LOVED