You know the way certain songs don’t end but instead just fade out slowly? Well that just bugs me greatly. To me a song is, or should be, a narrative, a story almost. It has to start somewhere, obviously, and by the same token should end somewhere but very often they don’t they just fade out. It’s either lazy songwriting or lazy production but either way it’s lazy. Many great songwriters and recording artists are guilty of it. There’s just too many to list unfortunately. In fact I’d say it’s been happening since the dawn of recorded music. Maybe it’s dictated by a higher power, i.e. the record company, but still I feel cheated. Almost like I’ve been brought on a journey that trailed off to nowhere. It’s the equivalent of a movie just slowly fading to black in the middle of the third act as the projectionist slowly dims … There’s more →

If you haven’t heard about this by now well you should have. It’s the online searchable version of the 1911 census. http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/ Over a year ago they started by putting online the census records for Dublin and just recently they finished all 32 counties so there’s a full record for you to find your grandparents or greatgrandparents and learn a bit more about them. Apart from names, dates, ages and locations, it gives you careers, religion, language, education, physical and mental defects and relationships between house dwellers. And apart from your family, there are a whole load of famous people there too. If you spend a short while dipping in and out of different census sheets you get a great insight into what life was like back then. Look up a random name and you might find a labourer, a sailor on a docked ship, a Lord of the manor, … There’s more →