I am very proud to announce that Village Magazine published a BifSniff cartoon in their current issue (Thursday, October 26, 2006).
They published one of our recent cartoons and it looks really well. It's just inside the back cover so it's easy to find if you pick up a copy.
Do pick up a copy, because I read that the magazine is in some financial trouble, and personally I think it's a great magazine. It seems to be a magazine that divides people into three categories though: a) Those that buy it and like it. b) Those that love to rant about how awful and lefty it is. c) Those that don't know it exists.
Category c seems the most prevalent in my experience, which seems a shame. I can't back up my opinion with hard fact or anything, but one example I seem to remember about Village Magazine is that it spoke realistically about the War in Iraq and wasn't afraid to make points that the other media in Ireland seemed only willing to publish when opinion had turned in America and it was safe to start asking pertinent questions.
I used to buy it a lot when it was launched, but that was back when I had decided to know what was going on around me. I have since decided that was a mistake. Ignorance is bliss.
This weekend was the Guinness Jazz Festival weekend in Cork, and I went to see Jimmy Scott play in the Everyman Palace last night.
I'm not a big Jazz music fan. It's an area of music I just never got into. I'm sure there's loads of jazz I would like, but I never really know where to start - and here's the real problem: a lot of jazz is instrumental.
I need a voice in music to keep me interested. And if any voice is going to keep you interested, Jimmy Scott's will.
The support were a group called Five Play, and they were great. The thing with jazz is I sit there knowing that the musicans are really talented and playing really well, but I'm bored. Until the vocalist starts up. The vocalist in Five Play (who are all women) is a Portugese singer Maria Anadon, and she has an incredible voice.
I am very grateful that she was such an amazing singer because, through no fault of the band, I would have fallen asleep otherwise. Apart from finding instrumental jazz boring, the heat on the balcony of the Everyman Palace is crazy. Something seriously needs to be done - air conditioning or at least some kind of fan system is badly needed. I love the balcony in the Everyman because it's a great vantage point and the sound is great up there, but having been to several plays and gigs on the balcony the heat is a real problem.
Anyway, on to Jimmy Scott. Scott's band came on first and expertly bored me with what was probably an excellent instrumental number. Then Jimmy Scott was helped on stage. Scott is 81, and seemed to have some difficulty walking - walking somewhat awkwardly with a wide limp but at the same time with an oddly sprightly gait.
When Scott began to sing his voice also is an odd contradiction - incredibly fragile and yet definite and strong.
A hormonal disorder, Kallmann's syndrome, is responsible for Scott's unique high pitched voice, often described as haunting, but it is not just the quality of Scott's voice that makes him unique - his timing and phrasing of songs and his obvious love for what he is doing also make his music irresistible.
The aforementioned article puts it like this: 'No one sings slower or farther behind the beat than Jimmy Scott; his long, melismatic flights freeze conventional time'
Jimmy Scott himself seems frozen in time, speaking unapologetically in the jazz-speak of a fifties hipster adds to the slightly surreal quality that lends itself to the cool of Jimmy Scott.
A lot of the jazz classics have fairly obvious (and well known) rhymes, and singing as slowly as Scott does and with such elongated pauses (often before the last word in a line) you might think that the song would become predictable and tedious. Not so - Scott's style means that you know what's coming and you are savouring the moment he sings a word or line before he ever gets to it, in the same way you might look forward to a planned holiday for weeks beforehand.
I was not overly familiar with Jimmy Scott before going to the gig, only knowing him from the Twin Peaks 'Fire Walk With Me' soundtrack (where he sang Sycamore Trees') and Lou Reed's 'Magic and Loss' album.
I was not disappointed - Jimmy Scott is a legend. You know it as soon as you see him - he emanates legendness.
Scott sang a handful of songs, classics such as 'Pennies from Heaven', 'Embraceable You', and his original hit from the fifties 'Everybody's Somebody's Fool' - all given the unique Jimmy Scott treatment. He then took a break and let his band bore me with some more instrumental before coming back to do another handful of incredible songs.
It was a short enough gig, one got the feeling that the legend was not up to singing for longer. Scott left the stage to massive applause and cheering which did not let up even when the house lights came up.
Scott's piano player came out and explained that while they were hugely grateful for this reception, they had to look out for 'the master' and there wouldn't be an encore, but on behalf of Jimmy Scott he thanked us.
There was an immediate standing ovation, which was incredible really considering there was to be no encore, but Jimmy Scott had completely captivated the audience and there was huge love for him in the applause. On hearing the response Jimmy Scott looked out from backstage and came on stage one last time to wave and bow.
If you get the opportunity to see Jimmy Scott live, grab it.
For newcomers to BifSniff.com, I do most of the website maintenance around here. Which lately hasn't been much, to the chagrin of Bif. Recently I wondered if we should consider targeting 'Funny Pictures' as an SEO term - in other words when people search on Google for 'Funny Pictures' that they would find us.
I wrote about that on the 2nd of October - it is now the 20th and already, with just one post titled 'Funny Pictures' it is number 6 in our search terms charts!
Here's how it breaks down in our stats at the moment:
So you can see all the work we put into 'Free, Funny Cartoons' paid off, but then straight after that Funny Pictures is our next most popluar search term. Now, that's only 50 odd searches or so, but it's interesting nonetheless, especially considering that if you search Google for Funny Pictures we hold position 324! If we had a higher position we could grab a shed load of traffic I reckon.
Anyway, this post has two purposes, an update for those of you who are interested in these kinds of things, but also to say to those of you who came here looking for Funny Pictures that we provide a weekly cartoon... click here to see the cartoons.
In the meantime, here's the freshest toon, hot off the press as it were, I just got through drawing it.
Hope you enjoy. If you found us by searching for 'funny pictures', leave a comment!
Yeah, I'm afraid the cartoon is late again.. not certain of the ETA on it at the moment - I just have too much on at the minute, my head is going to explode.
Aimlessly browsing YouTube.com when I came across this. Does anyone else find it disturbing at about 4 and a half minutes in when you're watching the ex-president of the United States ranting about Osama Bin Laden 'I tried to kill him, I contracted people to kill him...' etc etc...
Wouldn't 'I tried to bring him to justice...' or 'I tried to bring him to a fair trial...' be nice to hear?
Anyway, the cartoon was late because I'm up the walls busy and IrishElection.com were having their election conference and we really wanted to launch the idea there.
So Cian and Bif put their heads together and came up with the text for the first six cards and I drew them up just in time to have them ready for the conference! But I had to abandon the BifSniff toon till now.
We intend to do these cards in lieu of cartoons for a while until we get a full deck together at which point we will have a few decks printed and hopefully they'll be available in time for Christmas!
Just got back from a whirlwind run up to Dublin's Point Theatre to go to the Leonard Cohen Tribute 'Came So Far For Beauty'. Left Cork yesterday afternoon just in time to get to the theatre - well nearly (Dublin. Traffic. I hate it.) we may have missed a couple of songs at the start, which was annoying at first but when we realised we were at a four hour concert we figured we could afford to skip a couple, even Nick Cave songs.
Great night. Some truly incredible moments - moments of incredible muical beauty, moments which were honestly moving. And then also some stuff which one friend of mine described as craptacular, which was more than generous to it.
In a four hour concert packed with musicians and singers, I won't remember everything that was good but here are the highlights for me:
Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) was superb. He made Leonard Cohen songs which generally have one note in them soar and swoop and flow and rise and fall and god knows what else. Beautiful.
Gavin Friday came on and whispered his way through 'Who By Fire' which I thought was going to be brilliant but it just never really took off - his next song was helped by having Antony on backing vocals and at some point Gavin came on with someone called Mary Margaret O'Hara and did 'Hallelujah'.
Wow. Gavin did a good job with Hallelujah, but it was Mary Margaret O'Hara's incredibley unique take on it that really made the song something special. It's near impossible to describe. Gavin began the song in his own throaty and dramatic style, and at first I thought some of the strange high pitched vocal stabs she was taking at the song were mistakes, until she suddenly took off, changing the rhythms and patterns, breaking in on Gavin's vocals in unexepected places, at times singing beautifully softly and at other times furiously screaming.
I think a lot of the audience weren't impressed, some didn't know what the hell to make of it but I thought it was genius.
Nick Cave did several impressive songs including his fabulous version of Suzanne with Perla Batalla & Julie Christensen (Leonard Cohen's backing singers) which is available on the I'm Your Man soundtrack.
Jarvis Cocker also really impressed, pretty much any time he came on stage, but particularly on his duet with Beth Orton, 'Death of a Ladies Man' which they both made an amazing job of.
It was a night for duets really, another highlight of the show, possibly THE highlight for me was the duet between Lou Reed and (I think) Julie Christensen. They sang Joan of Arc, a song I never really liked but they made sense of it. I'm a big Lou Reed fan, but I had to admit that earlier in the night his renditions of Cohen's stuff were good but not particualrly earth shattering. But this was. I hope there is a recording of this out there, I would love to have it.
They were the big moments for me, Laurie Anderson did some mad stuff (what else wouls she do), some people I never heard of did some woeful stuff, oh wait! I forgot - The Handsome Family did some great stuff, particularly their version of 'A Thousand Kisses Deep'.
At one point in the night, just as we were taking the interval a man stood in front of our seats. His face was oddly familiar. I couldn't place him but I had an instant dislike for him. I asked Jeremy if he knew him and he said it was Noel Dempsey. Right. That's why I know his face then.
Also, after the intermission I was able to navigate back to my seat by Glen Hansard who was sitting directly above us on the balcony. Handy.
Looking forward to seeing him play with the Frames on Friday night in the Everyman in Cork!
Thanks to Jeremy and Gemma for the excellent birthday present of tickets to Came So Far For Beauty, and for the lift up and down!!!
Here's me looking suitably serious as Jonathon Harker for Skylight Production's 'Dracula' in the Firkin Crane in Shandon, Cork... opening Friday the thirteenth... wooooh...
Yes, that beard is for the part... except I'll be shaving some kind of victorian moustache out of it when the show opens...
C'mon, you know you want to see that... Bookings & Information: 021 4507487
Odd question? Well, it's to do with findability and search engine optimisation and all that malarkey. See a while back we targetted 'Funny Cartoons' quite successfully, but I think we have outgrown that keyphrase and we need to think about other phrases that would help build our traffic.
If we look at last month, September 06, we get in or around 500 unique visitors a day - which is pretty good going considering we started this whole optimisation thing when we were getting about 25 a day!
But the search phrase Funny Cartoons just isn't going to deliver much more traffic than that as far as I can make out... we achieved what we set out to do, but the time has long since come when we need to be looking to the next step.
Also, that next step needs to be a small one, because this is still essentially a hobby site, with no revenue generation backing it and I have to prioritise those prjects that will make me some cash!
So I thought about targetting the phrase 'Funny Pictures'. Why? Well I did some research (mostly using Wordtracker.com) and it seemed to me that a lot of people were searching for 'Funny Pictures' and it also seemed like it would be easy to get a result on.
According to wordtracker just now, the predicted traffic if you were on page 1 of MSN for the phrase 'Funny Pictures' is: 1331 For 'Funny Cartoons' it's: 189 And you can be damn sure you can multiply that figure by god knows what for Google.
And on top of that, Wordtraker says 'The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. Which means you have a better chance of getting to the top.' The KEI for 'Funny Pictures' is: 129.013 The KEI for 'Funny Cartoons' is: 16.006
Which means, in theory, it should be easier for us to get a result for 'Funny Pictures' than it was for 'Funny Cartoons' - and hey - we're on page 1 in google for 'Funny Cartoons'. (mind you we're slipping slightly due to being a bit lax on the whole thing - warning to all bloggers, stay on your toes!!)
Anyway, it seemed to me that the phrase 'Funny Pictures' was low hanging fruit.
I mentioned it to Bif and he wasn't enthusiatic. He felt that people searching for 'Funny Pictures' weren't looking for what we produce. And maybe they're not. I mean, I understand his reservations, but I reckon get them in here and then try to convert a portion of them to die hard fans. Even if it's only a small percentage!
I mean, come on - Funny Pictures... our cartoons are pictures, and they're funny. Well, some of the are :D
So, this post serves several purposes. 1. A record of the figures mentioned above so I don't forget. 2. To try to convince Bif it's a good idea 3. To see if I get any traffic from all my mentions of Funny Pictures! ;) 4. Get some opinions on whether we should try it from you, our esteemed audience...
Skype video calling is great. But you know the way your own video window is tiny? See in the image here, the way the inset video is really small... well for the really vain ones among us who want a better idea of what we're broadcasting to the other parties how the hell do you increase the size of that window?
I can't find a way but it seems odd there wouldn't be a way.
MSN messenger has both video windows the same size - I think they have a better idea of how image conscious their audience is... :P
I still prefer Skype - don't ask me why, I just prefer the interface and everything but it would be nice to be able to properly see what you were sending.
I have Norton Internet Security running on my machine. One of the things it does is looks for instances of of my credit card number being sent from my machine.
It never pops up an alert when I order stuff on Amazon or Play.com or CDwow or pretty much anywhere vaguely reputable.
Then, today, I went to order something from a site and it popped up to say that my credit card number was being sent...
Does that mean the site I was ordering on was not secure?
Anyone know? Anyone have any tips for what I should do if it's not secure - ie should I contact the organisation in question and alert them in case they don't know?
Scott sang a handful of songs, classics such as 'Pennies from Heaven', 'Embraceable You', and his original hit from the fifties 'Everybody's Somebody's Fool' - all given the unique Jimmy Scott treatment. He then took a break and let his band bore me with some more instrumental before coming back to do another handful of incredible songs.
soundtrack. 
