A Tale of Two Cities

I know, I know, I haven't blogged for a long time, and there's probably lots of stuff I should be telling you, but I've taken so long in choosing and fixing up these vacation pictures that I have to dump them on here and hit the sack. All you really need to know for now is that we were in Maine for a week at a cottage with my family and got to visit with my grandparents in Montreal on the way back. As you can probably tell from the photos, everyone had a really great time.













The other bit of news is that the day before we arrived home, someone was murdered in broad daylight on the corner two doors down from our house. At four o'clock in the afternoon, a man was shot by one of the two people with whom he was walking, and they quickly fled the scene. I guess the whole place was covered in police tape and crawling with investigators all night long, and was only cleaned up half an hour before we got back. There are still yellow circles all over the sidewalk where the police marked any little thing that could possibly be a piece of evidence. It was quite shocking, as this block is very yuppie/family-oriented, though I suppose things do get pretty sketchy pretty fast in either direction. The whole neighbourhood is palpably upset.

Buster, meanwhile, is doing fine and very happy that we're home. Thanks, Sherry, for taking care of the little scaredy-cat.

- Andrew

My New Favourite Musician

This guy is truly omazing.

- Andrew

The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Since this is such a frequent posture to find Buster in, Alison and I thought he might like to try going out in the backyard with us. Only problem is, there are a lot of cats in this neighbourhood, most of whom (or which, depending on your views re. cats, consciousness, and grammar) are really really tough. Like one of them has an eyepatch and spits tobacco out the side of his mouth before he meows. We were worried that if something freaked our admittedly quite freakable little friend out, he might run away somewhere to hide and not come out for a few days. So Ali picked up a harness for him at Canadian Tire and we gave it a try last weekend.

Unfortunately, Buster was not too into the idea. Kind of like how horses are not too into the idea of firecrackers. After a lot of struggling and even some hissing and biting (I'm not naming any names), we got the harness on him and he slunk around the house backwards for awhile. When we decided he was used to it, we opened the door to the backyard and tried to coax Buster out, but he just looked at us like we were insane. So Ali kind of pushed him and I kind of pulled him and we got him a few inches out the door. It seemed like all he wanted to do was eat the grass immediately around him, so I tried to encourage him to explore the more interesting portion of the yard away from the door, and when the encouragement fell on deaf ears I started pulling him out into the open by the leash and that was when he slipped right out of the harness and ran back into the house. Not a nature lover, apparently.




In contrast to Buster, the humans of the house have been spending quite a bit of time in the backyard. Our electric lawnmower sort of blew up a few weeks ago and it started getting pretty wild back there while we waited for our landlady, who had completely forgotten about it as it turned out, to bring us a new one. This week she brought over a brand new push mower. I excitedly put it together and ran out into the yard with it, as I'd never actually used a push mower before. It's a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, though it does definitely take longer than an electric. Nice and quiet, though. I'm kind of into it. Keith from upstairs was also into it, and in fact took over and finished off the job after I'd only done about a third. Then when he went back upstairs, we found out Buster really doesn't like seeing people go up and down the back stairs. He (Buster) started making this crazy loud noise at him (Keith) that only got crazier and louder when I tried to show him (Buster again — I really should reconstruct this sentence instead of propping it up with distracting parenthetical pronoun identifiers. Oh well, it's not like this is spoken English or anything. I mean, you can just go back to the last open parenthesis if you lose track of where we were in the sentence. God! Don't be so lazy.) that there was nothing to worry about, by going up the stairs myself. Eventually it started sounding like he was saying, "I love you!" but in a tone of voice like a psychotic deaf woman who didn't speak English would use. It reminded us a lot of this dude.

Oh yeah, and in softball last weekend, the Bellies what are Painted Yellow slaughtered the Kelly Gruber Experience 13 - 8! In the second game, anyway. We actually lost the first game 12 - 6. But those guys are the best team in the league and completely humourless. They were the ones who went home in the middle of a game last year when an argument erupted between the two teams. So this win was incredibly satisfying. Meg forced a spectacular out at home plate, and Sarah had a record day with two outs made at home, one fly caught in right field, and a string of hits and walks at bat. She was pretty much levitating by the end of it. And the best part was that it was Tim, our founder and leader in absentia, 's birthday that day, so happy birthday to you, Tim.

- Andrew

Happy Birthday, Dana!

Call you soon.

Stuff I Really Like

This is my favourite song right now. At this moment. Not that I've ever disliked it, but I dunno, right now it's doing something extra special for me. The frenetic but precise guitar work, the obtrusively melodic bass, and Robert Smith's delightful disgust as he spits his old-lady venom at some poor poseur or other, all building to that super-exciting train sound that may very well be the victim leaving town in a hurry, because the train and the song quickly fade out thereafter, realizing that they're not gonna top that: it all adds up to 2:57 of sonic perfection.

And these are some of my favourite cartoons right now. They're by the American cartoonist, B. Kliban.






I discovered Kliban in my early teens and immediately loved his expressive drawing style and absurdist sense of humour. It took me a long time to warm up to that ripoff artist Gary Larson, though I did eventually have to admit he was pretty funny too. Lately, Alison and I discovered and swiftly purchased a couple of Kliban books that we didn't already have. In one of those I read the sad piece of information that he died in 1990. It's a shame, because I'd just gotten all excited about his work again and was considering trying to contact him and express my admiration. I guess he was never exactly unknown, what with his cultily popular cat drawings and calendars, but he certainly never achieved the recognition of Gary Larson, who not only stole his fragment-of-a-third-person-narrative captioning style, but even published his single-panel cartoons in books the same size and shape. Anyway, it seems from my poking around on the internet that Kliban is weirdly floating around in the zeitgeist right now, and I'm happy to do whatever I can to keep him there.

Let's see... what else? This short book I recently bought and read was pretty fantastic: In the City: Random Acts of Awareness by Colette Brooks. I picked it up because it was on sale, sounded vaguely interesting, and had a Fassbender photo on the cover. It turned out to be a sort of memoir-like collection of ruminations on cities, mostly New York, and the people who live in them. Sounds kind of dull, I guess, but it's incredibly insightful and mysterious and thought-provoking and sad. Quick read, too, at a mere 108 pp. And it makes a great companion piece for Italo Calvino's not really similar but at the same time kind of similar Invisible Cities, which I'm still reading on and off, even though I think it's an even shorter work.

So that's my current opinions, but what have I actually been DOING? Oh, this and that; y'know. Did some yoga, got a haircut, experienced some Being, illustrated some lies. Softball's really the only interesting thing I can think of right now. We've played three evenings = six games so far this season, won only two of the games but I still say we're looking pretty damn good. Here are some photos Alison took on Sunday.





(Pre-haircut.)

Talk to you soon, I hope. Maybe next time I'll have done more stuff.

- Andrew

Sudden Burst of Relatively Current News

Wow, this must be the longest interval I've spent outside of the blogosphere yet. My achin' lungs! Let's see if I can figure out what important or at least interesting or at the very least factual things have happened in the past three weeks or so:

• Alison had a birthday. That was just a couple of days ago, so a pretty easy one to remember. I seem to recall people came over and said things like, "Happy Birthday, Alison," and I believe there was a barbecue involved. Seriously, it was a really fun time — perfect evening for it and the mind-boggling amount of assembly required to operate the brand new mini-barbecue didn't even phase me.





• The night before the party, which was Ali's real birthday, I took her out for a walk in the park after work, followed by a nice dinner at our favourite Indian restaurant and a movie.



Knocked Up, if you really want to know. Yes, it was fantastically funny. And incredibly raunchy, probably even more so than The Forty Year Old Virgin. The usual Freaks & Geeks suspects are in it, and a lot of Office alumni, too.

• Speaking of incredibly rauncy, there was also a birthday party for our friend Jill the week before, where the theme was "Trailer Park" and everyone was supposed to dress as trashy as possible. I was not really into the idea of making fun of the poor and uneducated as a theme for someone's birthday, so we went in our normal, only somewhat trashy attire. I had to admit, though, that it was pretty fun seeing everyone all "trashed up". Brought me back to my good ol' junior high school days.



• In further party news, we had one after our last yoga class with Michi, who is moving back to Japan with her new husband. This frees up my Tuesday nights, but at the expense of a really great yoga teacher and wonderful human being. We're sure going to miss her a lot — she made a huge difference in our lives.

The party was fun. People from other classes came too, everyone brought food, and we gave Michi some going-away money we'd collected. I'll miss seeing this gang on Tuesday nights.




• The decision not to continue the Tuesday yoga class with the new teacher is part of my new, paring-down-the-activities-to-keep-them-fun-and-make-sure-I-have-a-modicum-of-free-time strategy. This no time thing has really gotten out of control, and it's time I did something about it. Another phase of this strategy has been to back out of The Got to Get Got. I think I told you that they were a nine-piece band I was in, and it just seemed that every time they wanted to practise, it conflicted with something else. There were some shows coming up, which would have been really fun, but I just didn't have the time to devote to not stinking, which would have made them not so fun, for me or the other people in the band. Or the audience.

• Hopefully, with a little extra free time, I'll be able to spend some more time reading. Once again I've got a huge pile of books that I'm in the middle of. The ones I'm enjoying the most these days are I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter and Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd. The latter is a new book by a "quantum computer scientist" who tries to make the case that the universe can be seen as a a giant computer, computing its own evolution, with subatomic particles and their binary states as its "bits". Apparently a quantum computer is the next big thing computer scientists are working on, which will be much faster than our current, electronic computers, because its bits, being quantum phenomena, will have the ability to be both on and off at once. Huh? Don't ask me, man. Kooky! But the guy's quite entertaining and so far has been making sense.

The other use of my free time I'm looking forward to, besides more frequently addressing you, dear reader, on this very weblog, is hanging out in the back yard and doing some gardening with Alison. It's looking really nice now, and we're hoping to make it even nicer. It's great to have such an idyllic setting just outside our back door. Buster really likes looking at it too.





• Etceterally, I've done some more recording with Al Tuck; the softball season started last weekend and we won both games then, lost both today; I designed an identity and some pieces for Yoga for You, a new set of classes our other yoga teacher, Angie, is starting up with a friend of hers, and Alison took all the photographs they needed; Alison found out to her disappointment that her boss at the government has not been giving her shooting assignments because she believes Alison can't handle the pressure and is some kind of incompetent boob; I'm working on some songs to become the soundtrack of our friend, Silöen's, short film; and the as-yet-unnamed band is still looking for a name. Current contenders: The Lodge, Field (or possibly Zone) of Entanglement, and Chromakey Eye.

- Andrew

Happy Birthday, Bennett!

Sorry we missed the fun times! Can't wait to see you in all your two-ness! We love you lots!

-Andrew and Ali xoxo

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Hope you're having a great one! I'm sure I'll read all about it on the various blogs. Talk to you tonight.

Love,
Andrew

The Productivity of Headless Chickens

This may surprise no one who regularly reads our blogloo (as far as such a thing is possible), but things have been super busy around here. A little too busy, to be honest. But most of the stuff that's been keeping us occupied is fun stuff, so I really shouldn't complain. It's just that little things like blogs, dishes, and sleep seem to keep getting pushed to the wayside.

This last week, I spent three nights recording with the inimitable Al Tuck at Charles Austin's Studio, The Echo Chamber. We went in each night immediately after work and stayed until all hours, getting down about 10 or 11 songs live off the floor. Charles got a fantastic representation of Al's voice, and in general I think we made some pretty solid recordings. I guess Al and Charles will now have to sift through the hours and gigas of bytes to pan gold out of the bitstream.

What with that and this long weekend we are now into, work has been mostly if not entirely exhausting. This may be a pretty controversial opinion, and I might get kicked out of the Society of Complaining Office Workers and Layabouts (SCOWL) for expressing it, but I kind of don't like long weekends. They always mean getting so much more work done in less time that the extra day is usually spent either catching up on lost sleep or drinking oneself into oblivion in a misguided attempt to chase away the stress demons before they start persuasively suggesting you throttle your boss or replace your co-worker's screensaver with a compromising picture of her from last year's Christmas party while she is in the washroom. My own as yet unthrottled boss has decided that we should only work a half day on the Friday before each long weekend this summer, which is awfully decent of him, but when noon had come and gone and everyone was still hunched over their computers trying to finish off all the projects that absolutely had to be finished before they could even think about leaving, the resentment was palpable. In the end, I left most of the job that I usually take all Monday and Tuesday to complete — and which I'd thought I might get a decent start on to avoid the otherwise unavoidable freakout on Tuesday when four o'clock hits and it's inexplicably only half done — undone in order to come home and nap for most of the afternoon.

I did manage to produce something I was somewhat proud of this week: an ad for a used car sale based on the concept of the sales people's boss ordering them to sell off all the cars. That was the client's direction, and I captured it in what I thought was a pretty amusing way, but unfortunately the negative boss stereotype did not go over well. Instead, I was forced to make the majority of the ad a memo from the fictional boss, using bosslike but non-negative language. Not nearly as visually interesting, but I guess it gets the point across. Anyway, here's my original design.


Let's see... what else? There were a couple of practice sessions with Charles, Cliff, and Mike on Monday and last night. That's really coming along well and the addition of Mike on vocal duties has been a stroke of genius. Now we just need a name. I can't remember whether I told you this, but we'd settled after a lot of debate on Sea Takes Castle. However, it was never an entirely popular choice, and now we've decided it sounds too much like The Sea and Cake. So it's back to the drawing board. Suggestions are welcome, but will probably be shot down. Just so you're warned.

Oh yeah, some updates to the last post: it turns out the name of the dish is actually General Tso's chicken, not General Gao's. I don't know anything about either of those presumably venerable military figures, but apparently this is a common mistake. Also, the Beauty Queens did not win the Amazing Race, as you may have seen. We were quite disappointed, especially as the team that ended up winning were a couple of misanthropic jerks. The Beauty Queens always had such a refreshingly positive attitude, we were convinced they were a shoe-in, and then on the final episode they actually got in an argument and said some hurtful things to each other. That's the problem with those reality shows — you can't expect the plot to follow any kind of coherent structure or even resolve satisfyingly. Reality needs some new writers.

There've been some other art projects going on that I can't really talk about yet, and the next bit of business is to learn the songs of The Got to Get Got, as it seems we have some shows booked over the next couple of months. Their four song EP, which was made before I joined the band, just came out and it sounds great. That'll help me figure out those ones at least. I was supposed to practice with those guys last night, but it conflicted with my other band practice so I had to bail. I also had to skip yoga class this week. Priorities, priorities. At least we have another one this afternoon.

And finally, in among all the crazy hecticity, Ali and I have been listening to an audio book called Practising the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. He's one of these metaphysical, spiritual guys who tells you the best way to live. It's a very popular subject these days. But this guy is pretty down to earth and not completely kooky and new-agey. OK, he's a little bit kooky. He has a very interesting German/English accent, for instance. And he's kind of ugly. His writing is mostly about recognizing the ego in all its guises and trying to watch it detachedly, rather than getting suckered into identifying with it and its foolish desires. Very buddhist, but this guy's more into cultivating awareness at all times, rather than using meditation as a temporary/temporal practice of awareness cultivation. Plus, he seems to advocate my long-held view that the best way to think of the world is as a giant insane asylum wherein we are all both patients and doctors. If you already think of everyone, yourself included, as completely insane, then it's not so upsetting when you witness insane behaviour in yourself or others. I recommend you check it out. But don't blame me if you don't like it — I'm loony as a cuckoo bird.

- Andrew

Been Gone Too Long

All right, let's just skip the obligatory apologies and get straight to what we've been up to that's been keeping us so occupied we can't even type a few sentences about it, for Pete's sake. Well, we've both had colds for one thing, not that that's any kind of excuse. Everyone I work with got it, then Alison got it, then I felt like I was getting it so I took tons of Cold FX and vitamin C and echinacea and successfully fought it off, then I got it. I missed a day of work and an Al Tuck practice, and contributed my fair share to Kimberley-Clark's Boreal deforestation agenda, but other than that it hasn't been too debilitating.

There've been a lot of musical projects going on, not the least time-consuming of which has been my cover of this song for the Inbreds tribute album being put together by Scott Grimbleby of Ingersoll, Ontario as the first release on his brand new Gooseberry Records label. I finally finished it a few days ago after a couple of weeks straight working on it, and I think it sounds pretty good even though I never want to hear it again. I'm sure everyone working on the project felt this, but it's quite daunting to record a new version of an already impeccable song. Especially the vocals.

Speaking of which, I don't want to jinx it or anything, but it looks like the songwriter/vocalist in question, Mike O'Neill, is going to be joining the band Charles and Cliff and I have been slowly but surely putting together, taking over the singin' duties. I'm really really REALLY excited about it. Really. It'll allow Charles and me to concentrate purely on playing our respective instruments, and it'll sound ten times better than if I had to do the singing and maybe one and a half times better than if Charles did it. We're getting together with him tomorrow night to see how it goes.

The other two bands I play in, Al Tuck & No Action and The Got to Get Got, are also progressing semi-regularly, so there's been plenty of music to keep me busy. I designed this handbill yesterday for the regular Saturday afternoon gig with Al.


Oh man, there's plenty more stuff going on to tell you about, but Alison just finished making a veggie version of General Gao's Chicken with tofu instead of chicken and it smells FANTASTIC! I'll have to catch you on the flipside. See Spiderman 3 while you're waiting for me to return, because it's awesome, and don't forget to watch the finale of The Amazing Race tonight. Go, beauty queens!

- Andrew

Good Times, and Plenty of 'em

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

Happy 4/20!

... to all my stoner friends.

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

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

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

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