Month: April 2003

For the Folk

Tonight’s playlist, subject to my quick scribbling.

  • Opening set
  • All Penny Lang
    • Penny Lang, The Laundromat Song
    • Penny Lang, Howl Ye Winds
    • Penny Lang, Living with the Blues (live)
    • Penny Lang, Lost and Found
    • Penny Lang, Simple Simon
    • Penny Lang, Walkin’ Down the Line (live)
  • All Tannis Slimmon
    • Tannis Slimmon, Falling Together
    • Bird Sisters, Play All Your Aces
    • Louis Melville, My Body Moves
  • All local artists
    • Wortley Road, The Start of Something Good (Ghosts of the CPR)
    • Heartstoppers, I’ll Fly Away
    • Michael Pickett, The Blues is My Friend
    • Bob Burchill, Black Creek
    • The Beguiled, ?
    • Ian Gifford, Angel With A Pistol
  • Last set

Upcoming concerts, same disclaimer as above.

Cartwheels
May 2, Ugly Mug Cafe, 8pm
Michael Pickett
May 4, Ugly Mug Cafe, 2pm, tickets $15 advance/$20 door
J.P. Cormier
May 8, Cuckoo’s Nest
Wortley Road
May 9, Aeolian Hall, 8pm, $10/$12
Allison Brown, Erin Gignac, Shane Cook opening
Fred Eaglesmith
May 9, Wolf Performance Hall
Tannis Slimmon and Mosaic
May 10, Aeolian Hall, 8pm
Penny Lang
July, Home County Folk Festival

Sirens on CD

It occurred this evening that I haven’t written nearly as much about Sirens as they deserve. The last two nights they’ve performed sold-out concerts at The Ugly Mug Cafe that were recorded for release in a few weeks. I’ve been privileged to attend both nights with friends (Donna, Jessie and Scott) and family (my parents), and I think (rather modestly) I may have made new Sirens fans of all of them. (Like I had anything to do with it other than picking up their tickets.)

This week has seen a blitz of promotion, more than I’ve seen for a London act in a long time–if ever. For the Folk, a program on the University of Western Ontario’s radio station CHRW 94.7, featured them live for better than 45 minutes on Wednesday night; alternate-week host Ian Gifford even allowed them to play out the last 20 minutes of the show without comment or interruption. The other host, Allison Brown, played a song from an earlier CD last week and announced this weekend’s concerts. (I’ve seen both Brown and Gifford at recent concerts, and Allison in concert based on a recommendation from Sirens… it goes both ways.) They got mention in James Reaney‘s column in the London Free Press, and performed on The New PL Friday morning. Getting that kind of exposure from London media is incredible.

Can’t say enough about the concerts themselves, so I won’t try–so much for writing more about them! See them live, check out their website, buy a CD or four, and judge for yourself.

Packrat

I just archived an aggregator page containing 13 items I’ve been meaning to follow up, some for more than two weeks. There are 47 feeds in my blogroll. My bookmarks file contains some 470 individual items, arranged into 65 separate folders (including 30 or 40 that are unfiled). My home directory contains 170 files and 63 directories–omitting the 69 dotfiles and 83 config directories; one directory contains a file I’ve faithfully transferred between nine versions of four operating systems and otherwise ignored since 1993. I have 20GB of .mp3 and .ogg files online, and 17 more burned on 27 CDs.

I’m sure all this is nothing compared to some of the hardcore geeks out there. The thing that disturbs me about this… let’s be charitable and call it a collection… is that I’ve only created a tiny fraction of it. It’s taken ten years to accumulate this much junk; there’s a lot more I could have done in those ten years than squirrel away data for some more opportune time when I get a round Tuit.

WMD and SARS

Sometimes you need to take a step back and look at oddities of the language. Two examples from the news have been bothering me recently.

The first is Weapons of Mass Destruction, particularly the mass part. Mass, according to the OED, is A body of coherent and (really or apparently) ponderous matter; in short, mass == matter. Any physicist will tell you that matter is a form of energy, and any good physicist will point out that the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. What does this mean? Not only do WMD not exist, the laws of physics say they cannot exist!

SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is the second odd phrase, because it’s redundant: severe and acute are synonyms. (The OED even uses severe in its definition of acute.) It’s also vague; SARS could refer to any number of bronchial diseases. Diseases like tuberculosis and leukemia and AIDS have meaningful names: tuberculosis is a disease characterized by the formation of tubercules, minute nodular lesions; leukemia is a formation from the Greek leukamie, meaning white blood; and AIDS is the descriptive Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

These examples won’t be shocking to anyone who’s at all familiar with the English language; I acknowledge that I’ve deliberately misread the adjective mass as the noun mass in the first and that no one understands the second well enough to name it more specifically (except perhaps researchers in British Columbia). The point is, we take a lot of these terms in stride without acknowledging that they’re sometimes ambiguous or unclear.

EmmBlog

Webmaster Steve hasn’t announced it yet, but the little XML icon at the bottom of today’s journal entry indicates that Emm Gryner‘s journal is now RSS-enabled. Items are simply entry titles and dates, but it’s better than nothing!

BNLBlog

More good stuff from The Shifted Librarian: Barenaked Ladies have a new blog. Though several of the band members have posted, they don’t have a lot to say from day to day. They’re working on a new album–that’s right, I called it an album and not a CD–and the pictures of BNL with producer Ron Aniello are a riot. I guess this is another example of the micro-marketing that got Terry McBride into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

Sadly, blog developer skeey interactive doesn’t seem to have added an RSS feed, archives, permalinks, semantic markup, or most of the other things expected from a modern weblog. I’m thankful for one omission, though: there’s no reader-comment functionality.

Linky linky

As Ben Stein says, Stick around, you might learn something.

Clever stuff: an animated version of Tom Lehrer’s The Elements. If you enjoy patter songs or Animaniacs or science made fun, check it out. [via The Shifted Librarian and dive into mark]

Good stuff: an interesting article on DRM and accessibility from Joe Clark. I don’t post much about work, but this one’s here as a reminder of its section on settop boxes. [via dive into mark and The Shifted Librarian]

Funny stuff: Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots. Listen to the flower. The flower is good. The flower knows all. [via dive into mark]

Spring thaw, part 2

To offset the final (I hope) blast of winter in southwestern Ontario, here are various highlights (and lowlights) from last week’s concertgoing, as promised.

The Good

  • There’s a reason I go to see Sirens so often, and it’s not simply because they perform at venues located within two blocks of my condo. There’s something special about this group that even the people of London are starting to figure out.
  • Friends, Sirens’ fourteen-part-harmony Bartlett-inspired madrigal-influenced impossible-to-sing-along singalong drinking song.
  • Donna’s enigmatic statement about my having lots of work to do in the near future.
  • Lenni Jabour and The Third Floor were wonderful as always. Gabe, which I praised before, is still a favourite; I must pick up Motor Motel Love Songs, Jason Collett‘s recent CD featuring the song Lenni performs so wonderfully.
  • Alex McMaster said hi, somehow recognizing me from a recent e-mail conversation.
  • Talking to my Lenni-friend Sarah in the cold outside C’est What? while waiting for the doors to open.

The Bad

  • The ridiculous speaker volume for Emm Gryner‘s set at Call the Office. Even Nigel Tufnel‘s amp only went to 11; Emm’s band’s must have been set to 27! I couldn’t stand it; I almost left during her set, which I never do. Wound up ditching in the break before Holly McNarland took the stage.
  • Dayna Manning‘s concert. Actually, I’m sure her solo performance was fantastic, but I can’t say from personal experience because it was sold out. Unfortunately I only discovered that rather salient fact after driving for an hour to Stratford; on a Saturday night in March at 8:00 there isn’t much left to do other than turn around and head home.
  • Ignoring Sarah and friends at C’est What during Lenni’s performance and the two teachers I sat with during Sirens’ Friday show, and dissing Alex (who’d only said about fifteen words to this blithering fanboy) when Lenni came out from backstage. It’s honestly nothing personal, I just get into performance mode to the exclusion of anything and anyone else.