According to Dante, I’m going to the sixth level of Hell. Sounds about right… I’m a good Canadian boy, even if I do place too much emphasis on civil liberties
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At least there will be another blogger around… even if he is English. He does post good links, though.
Somehow, in the last several weeks, I’ve become Mr. Folk Music.
Friday night, May 2, I was back at The Ugly Mug Café to see the first performance of a new group, Cartwheels. Of the five performers, I’d seen three in other groups or situations: guitarist and singer Brenda McMorrow in solo performance and with ex-Julia Propeller-bandmate Samantha Wells at the former StudiOK location on Richmond Street; singer/guitarist Eric Uren (aka Eric James) playing Celtic music with a fiddler (whose name I can’t remember) at the now-vanished Dick O’Dow’s pub (coincidentally across the street from StudiOK); and ubiquitous keyboard player Dean Harrison just about everywhere else in the city. Rounding out the group were James Cummins on mandolin and Colin Couch on (believe it or not) washtub bass.
One of the nice things about the Ugly Mug is that it’s a very relaxed atmosphere, ideal for a casual show like this one. (Other nice things about the Mug: the staff, enthusiastic owner Peter Dennett, the Italian sodas and other beverages, and the desserts that I can’t savour long enough before they’re gone. I’m told they make mean coffees too, but that’s one addiction I don’t suffer from.) The first thing Eric did was to introduce the band… not only to the packed house but to each other as well! The group quickly got into full folk mode with familiar songs; Eric sang lead on something like eight in a row, then passed the baton to Brenda for quite a few of her own. Early standouts were Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg’s Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key (words by Guthrie, music by Bragg), the Beatles’ Dear Prudence, and JJ Cale’s Old Blue.
Most of the later tunes I made notes on were those I want to get copies of: John Prine’s Spanish Pipedream/Blow Up Your TV, the traditional Dreadful Wind and Rain (famously recorded by The Grateful Dead), and Lucinda Williams‘/Randy Weeks’ Can’t Let Go, which Brenda’s performed for a while and gets better each time I hear it.
Before finishing up their second of two hour-long sets with Alfred Brumley’s I’ll Fly Away (Brenda and James’ version of which was played earlier in the week on For the Folk) the Cartwheels experimented a bit with a decidedly non-folky song: the Talking Heads‘ Road to Nowhere. I hope they keep it in the repertoire, even though it was a little rough, because it translates quite well to the different style; proves once again my theory that defining musical genres is meaningless.
Need it be said that I’m looking forward to hearing Cartwheels again? I just hope it won’t take until their Home County Folk Festival performance in July.
Tonight’s playlist, subject to my quick scribbling.
Upcoming concerts, same disclaimer as above.
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.
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.
Hi Kasia. It’s just as much fun on the other side…
[signed] …your friendly neighbourhood QA-Man
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.
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!
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.
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]
