If I have been a little quiet on BifSniff recently it’s for a number of reasons, one of them being that I have been working on my new baby FestivalShirts, which sells t-shirts for festivals - obviously!

I’ve been working with John and Joe on getting FestivalShirts to a stage where I could let you know about it and persuade you to buy gazillions of t-shirts and turn me into a bazillionaire.

FestivalShirts sells colourful t-shirts, with a hand drawn slogan set on a happy yellow splash!

There are an incredible amount of music events and festivals going on this Summer in Ireland, and it looks like we might get the t-shirt wearing weather too, so these happy fellows are the perfect attire for the coming months.

A lot of the shirts are specifically geared toward summer music festivals like Electric Picnic or Oxegen, such as the one pictured above - ‘If this is your t-shirt I slept in your tent‘ But we have a few more general ones too, such as my personal favourite ‘I’m fucking brilliant.‘

Currently we have ten designs in the shop, each design available on a range of colourful t-shirts for men and women.

The t-shirts vary in price, but the standard t-shirt is €19.90 + P&P which I think is pretty damn reasonable… but then I would say that!

The ten designs we have in the shop currently are listed below - click on any of the slogans to see the t-shirts:

• I’m fucking brilliant.
• If this is your t-shirt I slept in your tent
• Mucho Dancing Mucho Agua
• Don’t take drugs. that’s stealing.
• No point asking me I’m wasted.
• Hard Partying. It’s no picnic.
• Talk me down.
• I wish Arcade Fire were playing
• If you can read this I haven’t thrown up on myself yet
• What Music?

More designs following very soon, and the shop has an RSS feed so you can watch for a slogan that suits you.

Or email us your suggestion for a slogan you’d like to see!

Hope you like it!

Can’t say much at the moment, but exciting things are happening. I met up last week with my good friend John McCarthy of Hammergrin Theatre Company - I know John for a long while now, can’t even remember from where at this point.

John is a multi talented fellow - he’s a teacher, he’s an actor - so we meet sometimes at the Theatre Makers Working Actors Workshop (worth checking out if you’re a Cork based actor), he’s a musician/singer (also known as Red Hot Steve), he has a wonderful comic sensibility, and he’s a writer.

I probably haven’t covered everything there but you’ve probably already guessed that it’s his writing talents that will come into play in this new project…

I’m not letting the cat out of the bag yet, but expect developments very soon!

Other undercover beck post…

A lot of hoo-ha goes on about Beck being a scientologist, when I heard it first it didn’t really add up. Beck’s work just seemed to clash with everything I had heard about scientology. As a matter of interest, has anyone ever heard anyone who isn’t a scientologist say anything good about scientology? South Park is my main education on Scientology and it loks pretty nutsy to me.

I did see a documentary on TV which had first hand witnesses telling how they were used by the ‘religion’, but details are sketchy in my mind at this point.

Tom Cruise being a scientologist I can understand… but Beck? I thought he was super-smart. Then I realised. He’s working undercover.

More Undercover Beck.

‘Grim, it’s all just so utterly grim,’ Death stared out over the abyss of many furrowed brows. His long, bony fingers tangling and untangling themselves around the cold, gilded railings that bordered the great crevasse.

Those were the first two lines I wrote when, several months ago, myself and Frank first vaunted the idea of writing a children’s picture book inspired by the image above(which in turn was inspired by this cartoon). For a while we discussed the project, and Frank was very keen, but I know absolutely nothing about children’s books. I mean I doubt I even read one when I was a child.

Since then I’ve looked around and found some really nice looking ones - picking up a couple as Christmas presents (seeing as I had to do my own shopping this year). Now there are some really impressive ones, I was particularly taken by the works of Oliver Jeffers, but they are very much about the illustrations. The story is most often simple, a little surreal maybe, told in short easy sentences. That’s not a criticism but it’s just not how I write. Which begs the question (there might be few other issues that prompt this question)- is it really a good idea to write a children’s picture book about Death, the apocalypse, a corpse boy’s struggle to save the world and the life-affirming power of penguins? You just can’t tell that story without using a certain richness in your prose.

I’m thinking, of course, that maybe we’re moving slightly up the age-scale but I don’t want to go too far, it’s still first and foremost a picture book. I just wouldn’t write it as a novel, children’s or otherwise. I’m hoping there’s some sort of precedent because, well, it’s probably going to be difficult enough to sell people on the idea as it stands, without having to argue the toss over the prose style. For my mind, I believe it’s best to introduce children to as full a spectrum of the language as you can, while their minds are still at their most inqusitive. It won’t be too long before they’re too embarrassed to ask the meaning of a word.