Hi, everyone. I feel bad that I'm blogging so little these days, but as usual there's so much happening that I don't have time to tell you about it. Right now I'm at work, on the last five minutes of my lunch hour, having just gotten back from a walk around the waterfront with Alison. There's a giant French battleship in the harbour that I guess has been called the "Swiss Army Knife of battleships," as it can be used for almost any purpose (hospital, aircraft carrier, destroyer). We could only see one end of it, but it was appropriately impressive.
The weather here has gotten all sunny and springlike. I had to buy a pair of sunglasses today. Why are they all so huge right now? Is it part of the ongoing 80s revivalism? When will that finally be over? Anyway, there's been barbecues, biking, and frisbee lately, in between yoga classes, band practices, and shows. Tonight all three of the latter and tomorrow night two out of three. I.e., time is hard to come by. The bikability definitely helps somewhat.
And eating up every minute that might be left over has been my ongoing recording of a cover version of the Inbreds song Whitecaps. I'm doing it for this guy in Ontario who's really into the 90s Halifax music scene and is starting up a record label. His first CD will be an Inbreds tribute album. This is a great song and my version should be pretty interesting when it's done, though I may have bitten off a bit more than can be chewed in five-minute intervals. If I had the original here, I'd post it for you to listen to, but you probably know how to find it anyway...
Gotta git back to work now. I hope I'll talk to you again soon. Enjoy whatever sunshine there happens to be in your particular corner of the world.
- Andrew
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Time is running rampant! Someone needs to set some boundaries.
I can't believe that was nine days! That kind of makes me mad. Anyway, here's a couple of things that happened during that time.
We went to see some standup comedy Friday night at a fundraiser for the Nova Scotia Community College. One guy was quite funny, some of it was amusingly bad, and the emcee was just awful. We were supposed to have seats reserved for us in the second row, but there was a mistake and we ended up at the very back. It was just as well, because I couldn't possibly have feigned amusement at the "jokes" that were coming out of this guy. The bit about an alleged serial killer who is still on trial was the low point, with not even a sympathy chuckle -- very uncomfortable. The weirdest part was that I had actually known the comedian in junior high school. Of the group of us who hung out in the computer lab at lunch every day, he was the one who was too nerdy.
Al Tuck arrived back in town, after touring in Ontario and Quebec for a few weeks, so I played the regular Saturday matinee with him at Gus' Pub. Alison, Johanna, Krista, and Matt all came out to see the show.
Matt left the next day. His internship at the Herald was over, and now he's off to visit Laura in France for a couple of weeks. Then I guess he'll be going back to Toronto to look for work. It's really too bad. I was sort of hoping the Herald would just ask him to stay on in a paid position. But unfortunately scenarios where cool people end up not leaving Halifax after all are the exception. There's a reason why "Farewell to Nova Scotia" is our theme song.
On Sunday morning we went out for brunch with Krista and Steve. After getting all hopped up on caffeine, we decided to check out the reptile exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. To be honest, it was not a great exhibit. I think there were more plastic models of reptiles than living ones. However, there were some pretty cool lizards, and it was worth sticking around for the "Roundup," wherein museum workers take a few of the animals out of their tanks and let the kids touch them and ask questions. Those kids were really entertaining with their mouth-breathing excitability and databases of half-truths. A show worth checking out.
Of course, the same old dioramas that have been there since I was a kid can still be seen, which is the only real reason I ever go there. The moose and deer one is always spectacular, but my favourite is the puffins and other sea birds on the rocks. This photo doesn't really do it justice, but there are a lot of different depths, scales, and types of rendering going on, with some pretty neat tricks of perspective. I always get a little thrill of vertigo looking at this one.
After that were the first ice cream cones of the year! The weather didn't REALLY warrant it, but it was close enough. I ate my single scoop of coffee in a waffle cone in about two minutes, including initial drooling.
- Andrew
We went to see some standup comedy Friday night at a fundraiser for the Nova Scotia Community College. One guy was quite funny, some of it was amusingly bad, and the emcee was just awful. We were supposed to have seats reserved for us in the second row, but there was a mistake and we ended up at the very back. It was just as well, because I couldn't possibly have feigned amusement at the "jokes" that were coming out of this guy. The bit about an alleged serial killer who is still on trial was the low point, with not even a sympathy chuckle -- very uncomfortable. The weirdest part was that I had actually known the comedian in junior high school. Of the group of us who hung out in the computer lab at lunch every day, he was the one who was too nerdy.
Al Tuck arrived back in town, after touring in Ontario and Quebec for a few weeks, so I played the regular Saturday matinee with him at Gus' Pub. Alison, Johanna, Krista, and Matt all came out to see the show.
Matt left the next day. His internship at the Herald was over, and now he's off to visit Laura in France for a couple of weeks. Then I guess he'll be going back to Toronto to look for work. It's really too bad. I was sort of hoping the Herald would just ask him to stay on in a paid position. But unfortunately scenarios where cool people end up not leaving Halifax after all are the exception. There's a reason why "Farewell to Nova Scotia" is our theme song.
On Sunday morning we went out for brunch with Krista and Steve. After getting all hopped up on caffeine, we decided to check out the reptile exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. To be honest, it was not a great exhibit. I think there were more plastic models of reptiles than living ones. However, there were some pretty cool lizards, and it was worth sticking around for the "Roundup," wherein museum workers take a few of the animals out of their tanks and let the kids touch them and ask questions. Those kids were really entertaining with their mouth-breathing excitability and databases of half-truths. A show worth checking out.
Of course, the same old dioramas that have been there since I was a kid can still be seen, which is the only real reason I ever go there. The moose and deer one is always spectacular, but my favourite is the puffins and other sea birds on the rocks. This photo doesn't really do it justice, but there are a lot of different depths, scales, and types of rendering going on, with some pretty neat tricks of perspective. I always get a little thrill of vertigo looking at this one.
After that were the first ice cream cones of the year! The weather didn't REALLY warrant it, but it was close enough. I ate my single scoop of coffee in a waffle cone in about two minutes, including initial drooling.
- Andrew
Sunday, April 08, 2007
4 More Things
After rambling on about shopping yeterday, I remembered some other news I forgot to tell you:
1. We've been watching the BBC/Discovery Channel series The Blue Planet, all about the ecosystems of the oceans, on DVD. Man, is it ever gorgeous and fascinating! Check it out if you ever have a bunch of time or feel like making a bunch of time to devote to it; it's eight 50-minute episodes. The last episode we watched was all about the deep sea, only about 1% of which has actually been explored. You wouldn't believe the fantastic and creepy creatures living down where no sunlight ever penetrates. Like this one. Blah!
2. I've been recording some with local pianist/singer/songwriter, Erin Costelo. We did a couple of tracks at her place and some stuff at the Echo Chamber. Her songs are fantastic and it's been a lot of fun. I can't wait to hear the finished product.
3. I was asked the other day to join a really great local band called The Got to Get Got, so I guess I'll be playing electric piano with them now. It's Mark Mullane's latest ensemble, and I know a bunch of the other people in the band. Catchy songs played with gusto by a wild and energetic eight-piece, or now nine-piece, I guess. Two drummers. Two or three guitars. Cello and violin. They have a lot of fun on stage and don't practise very much. Sounds pretty perfect.
4. Finally, the slow-blooming but enticingly colourful musical collaboration with Charles has a name: Sea Takes Castle. We decided Poifectly Poiple was just too high-brow. We're getting together tomorrow night to rehearse and trade new ideas. I have some lyrics, melodies, and bass lines to bring to the table. This bird, to mix metaphors, will eventually fly.
Oh yeah, and happy Easter, I suppose.
- Andrew
1. We've been watching the BBC/Discovery Channel series The Blue Planet, all about the ecosystems of the oceans, on DVD. Man, is it ever gorgeous and fascinating! Check it out if you ever have a bunch of time or feel like making a bunch of time to devote to it; it's eight 50-minute episodes. The last episode we watched was all about the deep sea, only about 1% of which has actually been explored. You wouldn't believe the fantastic and creepy creatures living down where no sunlight ever penetrates. Like this one. Blah!2. I've been recording some with local pianist/singer/songwriter, Erin Costelo. We did a couple of tracks at her place and some stuff at the Echo Chamber. Her songs are fantastic and it's been a lot of fun. I can't wait to hear the finished product.
3. I was asked the other day to join a really great local band called The Got to Get Got, so I guess I'll be playing electric piano with them now. It's Mark Mullane's latest ensemble, and I know a bunch of the other people in the band. Catchy songs played with gusto by a wild and energetic eight-piece, or now nine-piece, I guess. Two drummers. Two or three guitars. Cello and violin. They have a lot of fun on stage and don't practise very much. Sounds pretty perfect.
4. Finally, the slow-blooming but enticingly colourful musical collaboration with Charles has a name: Sea Takes Castle. We decided Poifectly Poiple was just too high-brow. We're getting together tomorrow night to rehearse and trade new ideas. I have some lyrics, melodies, and bass lines to bring to the table. This bird, to mix metaphors, will eventually fly.
Oh yeah, and happy Easter, I suppose.
- Andrew
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Productive Consumption
We just got back from a very successful shopping trip in Dartmouth with Krista, wherein I got a bunch of new (to me) clothes and a couple of books I've been itching to read for months. Value Village was playing all new wave hits, which made the whole experience about 40 times better than it usually is. I'm not much of a shopper, I'll admit. I'd kind of rather stick my hand into a blender set to "puree" than try on clothes most days. But today was painless and actually kind of fun, and at least a quarter of the things I'd picked out actually fit and didn't have holes or permanent stains. And there was an old guy outside my changing booth having fun telling his wife whether the clothes she was trying on were any good.
"... why don't they/ do what they say/ say what they mean..."
"Yup, fits great. Next."
"...me on/ I'll be gone/ in a day or..."
"How much? Four bucks? Put it back."
"...just like a poem/out of synch..."
"Wow. Get two of those."
He went a little overboard when he told Alison that the jeans she'd worn into the store fit her perfectly, but I couldn't really blame him. It was pretty exciting to be having a good time in a clothing store.
After Old VaVi we headed over to Chapters for Starbuck's (boo!) coffee (yay!) and literary browsing. There was a table set up in the middle of the store with a DJ spinning loud rock music. Seemed like kind of a strange choice for a bookstore that encourages people to sit and read, but I found out the Trailer Park Boys were going to be arriving any minute to sign copies of "their" new book about the TV show. Whatever keeps people reading, I guess.
I looked for Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, which I'd heard was coming out around now, and lo and behold, there it was in the Science section (which is a subsection of the larger Arts section, puzzlingly). Hofstadter's been my intellectual hero since I was about fourteen years old, and his 1979 magnum opus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, has probably been the most character-influencing book of my life thus far (unless you count the Bible's inverse influence), and I just have one appendix left to read in his buddy Daniel Dennet's rear-end-kicker, Breaking the Spell, so I'm pretty psyched to sit down and devour this new one. It's about the seeming incompatibility of consciousness and materialism. Yum.
Of course, I would have been happy to leave with just that, but on a whim I decided to check whether Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, ever came out. I'd read a more than glowing review of it by Nick Hornby in The Believer about a year ago now, and have been wanting to read it ever since. It's about people working in an ad agency and is told entirely in the first person plural, so that the agency itself is more the main character than any of its particular employees. Sounds pretty interesting, right? Plus, it's apparently gut-bustingly hilarious. Unfortunately, the review, which I read on the plane to Cuba (and I'm still embarassingly less than a quarter of the way through Infinite Jest), turned out to be an advance one and the book has taken its time actually seeing the fluorescent light of Chapters' ceiling. But slap my cranium and toss me in a tar pit if it wasn't in too. I swear the shopping gods were watching out for me today. So now I've got two brand new, expensive, hard cover books to drool over, fondle, and maybe even read if I get some time.
Sweeeeet!
- Andrew
"... why don't they/ do what they say/ say what they mean..."
"Yup, fits great. Next."
"...me on/ I'll be gone/ in a day or..."
"How much? Four bucks? Put it back."
"...just like a poem/out of synch..."
"Wow. Get two of those."
He went a little overboard when he told Alison that the jeans she'd worn into the store fit her perfectly, but I couldn't really blame him. It was pretty exciting to be having a good time in a clothing store.
After Old VaVi we headed over to Chapters for Starbuck's (boo!) coffee (yay!) and literary browsing. There was a table set up in the middle of the store with a DJ spinning loud rock music. Seemed like kind of a strange choice for a bookstore that encourages people to sit and read, but I found out the Trailer Park Boys were going to be arriving any minute to sign copies of "their" new book about the TV show. Whatever keeps people reading, I guess.
I looked for Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, which I'd heard was coming out around now, and lo and behold, there it was in the Science section (which is a subsection of the larger Arts section, puzzlingly). Hofstadter's been my intellectual hero since I was about fourteen years old, and his 1979 magnum opus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, has probably been the most character-influencing book of my life thus far (unless you count the Bible's inverse influence), and I just have one appendix left to read in his buddy Daniel Dennet's rear-end-kicker, Breaking the Spell, so I'm pretty psyched to sit down and devour this new one. It's about the seeming incompatibility of consciousness and materialism. Yum.
Of course, I would have been happy to leave with just that, but on a whim I decided to check whether Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, ever came out. I'd read a more than glowing review of it by Nick Hornby in The Believer about a year ago now, and have been wanting to read it ever since. It's about people working in an ad agency and is told entirely in the first person plural, so that the agency itself is more the main character than any of its particular employees. Sounds pretty interesting, right? Plus, it's apparently gut-bustingly hilarious. Unfortunately, the review, which I read on the plane to Cuba (and I'm still embarassingly less than a quarter of the way through Infinite Jest), turned out to be an advance one and the book has taken its time actually seeing the fluorescent light of Chapters' ceiling. But slap my cranium and toss me in a tar pit if it wasn't in too. I swear the shopping gods were watching out for me today. So now I've got two brand new, expensive, hard cover books to drool over, fondle, and maybe even read if I get some time.
Sweeeeet!
- Andrew
Sunday, April 01, 2007
The Weird and the Wonderful
I have a new favourite TV show. It's called Shut Up, with Stacy London. It's the new talk show starring the female host of What Not to Wear. She's pretty good on that show (witty, insightful), but this new one will be a lot less limiting. Instead of just making fun of one person who previously didn't care about fashion, she'll invite lots of different kinds of people on and tell them all to shut up. It's gonna be fantastic.
Speaking of fashion, Charles and I finally decided what to name the band. It will be called Poifectly Poiple, and we're debating whether to wear all purple whenever we play. Sounds like a great idea at first, I know, but on further reflection it could be a little misleading. It would look pretty cool, but it might make people think we're going to sound like Prince. I wish.
Hey, did anybody else hear about this big breakthrough in olfactory research? I guess they've finally discovered a funny smell. I always wondered if smells could be inherently funny, the way pictures or sounds can be (fat lady sitting on tack, boyoyoing). Sure, there are certain bodily odours associated with
funny situations, but the smells taken by themselves are not really funny, as such. In fact, they're usually kind of gross. But I guess this smell will actually cause people to start laughing uncontrollably, without reference to any other sensations (and, no, it's not laughing gas — that doesn't have an odour). Apparently it's something like a combination of bananas, Silly Putty, and, oddly enough, Daniel Day Lewis's beard.
Maybe that's what Buster smelled today, because he's been acting very weird. This morning we found him hanging out on top of the television, for no apparent reason. We shooed him off, turned our backs on him, and five minutes later he was on top of the bookshelves. Getting him off there required a chair; I'm not sure how he even got up there. But then the really weird thing was about an hour and a half after that we couldn't find him anywhere, until we heard some plaintive meowing coming from the ceiling. On a hunch, I went out into the back yard and looked up on the roof, and there he was, about to climb down into the chimney! We don't even let him outside, so don't ask me how the hell that happened. And I REALLY don't know where he got the miniature diving helmet he was wearing.
But this is definitely the weirdest thing I've seen all week. Paris Hilton coming out of a record store with a copy of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. What is going on? I know that the entire universe is made up of particles which act like waves and can't be located or measured except in a statistically probablistic way, interacting in an unimaginable variety of systems that are unpredictable because they are totally chaotic, but come on; this just doesn't even make any sense.
No joke.
- Andrew
Speaking of fashion, Charles and I finally decided what to name the band. It will be called Poifectly Poiple, and we're debating whether to wear all purple whenever we play. Sounds like a great idea at first, I know, but on further reflection it could be a little misleading. It would look pretty cool, but it might make people think we're going to sound like Prince. I wish.Hey, did anybody else hear about this big breakthrough in olfactory research? I guess they've finally discovered a funny smell. I always wondered if smells could be inherently funny, the way pictures or sounds can be (fat lady sitting on tack, boyoyoing). Sure, there are certain bodily odours associated with
funny situations, but the smells taken by themselves are not really funny, as such. In fact, they're usually kind of gross. But I guess this smell will actually cause people to start laughing uncontrollably, without reference to any other sensations (and, no, it's not laughing gas — that doesn't have an odour). Apparently it's something like a combination of bananas, Silly Putty, and, oddly enough, Daniel Day Lewis's beard.Maybe that's what Buster smelled today, because he's been acting very weird. This morning we found him hanging out on top of the television, for no apparent reason. We shooed him off, turned our backs on him, and five minutes later he was on top of the bookshelves. Getting him off there required a chair; I'm not sure how he even got up there. But then the really weird thing was about an hour and a half after that we couldn't find him anywhere, until we heard some plaintive meowing coming from the ceiling. On a hunch, I went out into the back yard and looked up on the roof, and there he was, about to climb down into the chimney! We don't even let him outside, so don't ask me how the hell that happened. And I REALLY don't know where he got the miniature diving helmet he was wearing.
No joke.
- Andrew
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