Battle-ready

I took some comfort in the knowledge that an artist I greatly admired [Joni Mitchell] thought it worthwhile to do battle with an era of shrill sonic choices that I would characterize as the aural equivalent of being trapped in a Chinese restaurant that boasts of added MSG.

Ah, isn’t it good

While reading through the huge backlog of weblog posts in my aggregator I came across the 80-odd entries I’d left unread in Wil Wheaton’s weblog. (For those following along at home, that’s all the way back to October 2004 and part one of Viva Las Vegas.) Wil likes to use lyrics as post titles, and the eponymous song of December’s first post jumped right into my head when I read it: fixing a hole. Even though that’s three hours ago now, the song’s still fresh in my brain, and I don’t mind a bit.

It will hardly be unexpected to learn that I’m a Beatles fan. Strangely, though, I don’t own a single one of their records, which also explains the dearth of Fab Four in my MP3/Vorbis collection. (I still can’t decide if the resulting lack of Apple Records content on my Apple iPod is ironic or not.) What I do have, though, is a lot of covers of and homages to their songs, including George Martin’s celebritized In My Life, Eric Idle’s great mockumentary The Rutles (in: All You Need Is Cash) (and its inferior sequel The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch) and Peter Sellers’ readings of A Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love, Help! and all four versions of She Loves You, to say nothing of the references in songs like Lenni Jabour’s Closet. This winter I also had the pleasure of seeing a note for note, cut for cut version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in Windsor, which had the added bonus of featuring one Alex McMaster playing cello. A Day in the Life live? Wild.

Which all leads to Tim Bray’s recent disturbing sentiment:

Which Sixties band is more important: the Beatles, Cream, or Black Sabbath? The answer: Black Sabbath. Go anywhere and visit the rock & roll bars or scan the FM dial, and you’ll hear a lot of music that sounds like Sabbath. There’s nobody working these days that sounds much like Cream or the Beatles.

It’s sad but true, and it’s why I try to seek out and support great, unique musicians: Lenni, Allison, Brenda, Bruce Cockburn, David Byrne, Dayna, Emm (who, ironically, has covered Crazy Train), John, everyone else mentioned here, and all the others who don’t get the exposure and attention they deserve.

I have a bad feeling about this

Perhaps I’ve forgotten just how bad Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2 were, but for my money Revenge of the Sith is the worst of them all. Wooden acting, incredibly terrible dialog (even for a Star Wars movie), inexplicable plot events (it’s impossible to refer to them as developments)… they’re all there, in spades. For me, one line sums the whole second trilogy up: How does this keep on happening? We’re smarter than this!

Weird 304s

WordPress seems to be returning 304 Not Modified for my feeds even when it should be sending the content. Weird.

It seems to have something to do with not having posted for several days. It’s not really WordPress bug 1275, since after creating this post the feeds work again, but that’s the closest I’ve found so far. (And by the way, requiring cookies just to do searches sucks.)

Buffy

On Monday evening I went to the Aeolian Hall to see Buffy Sainte-Marie. I was surprised to discover earlier in the day that people at work had never heard of her: those of similar age I figured would at least be familiar with Universal Soldier and Starwalker, and the youngsters for her six-year stint on Sesame Street. Oh well… confirms again that my musical tastes are substantially different from just about everyone else I know, and in the end it didn’t affect the amount of fun I had at Buffy’s show one iota.

Other stuff

As well as working on what I’ve started calling REx I’ve been messing around with syndication, both in Atom and iCalendar forms.

Not quite satisfied with Dave Jacoby’s RSS feed for Roger Ebert’s movie reviews, I decided to roll my own that also includes the summaries from the website. It’s the first thing I’ve written from scratch in Python—that is, with the help of Steve Jenson’s atomfeed.py and the built-in SGML, URL and regex libraries—and while it’s not pretty, it suits my purposes. If I thought it would be anything less than extremely fragile (mainly due to the wonky markup on Ebert’s site than anything inherent in the code) I’d probably post it… still might so people can point and laugh.

Also took some time on the weekend to write an iCalendar translator for Allison Brown’s performance calendar. It’s a simple little bit of Perl but took a lot longer to write than it probably should have; the RFC isn’t the easiest thing to read and there doesn’t appear to be a validator anywhere. The converted file appears to work in Mozilla Calendar, though, and that’s good enough for me.

Finally, I’m considering converting the Sirens’ tour calendar to hCalendar format. I’d probably still generate the RSS and iCal feeds, since the XSLT is there already, but I’d love to deprecate them in favour of a single human- and machine-readable page.