Following Mickey Acorn's endorsement of Daniel Lanois' album Shine on Acts of Volition, I went out and purchased it from Amazon. Nice suggestion Mickey. I just finished listening to it all the way through for the first time and it's fantastic. The opening song with Emmylou Harris and the title track are especially good.
It's particularly clear when listening to Lanois' solo albums how much his style has affected U2's recordings. The rich background textures are so classic U2 that some parts of the album sound familiar already with the first listen.
Daniel Lanois, Shine, 2003
A few years ago I took a history course at university on twentieth-century Britain. Among all that we studied one particular tidbit of knowledge was especially valuable. I learned what a Rude Boy (abbreviated Rudie) is.
I've sung or hummed along countless times to the Clash's "Rudie Can't Fail", the Specials' "A Message to You Rudie", and Lionrock's "Rude Boy Rock", yet I never had a clue what they were talking about. Well, as it turns out, Rudie is a Jamaican term for "a sharp dressed gangster in a stingy-brimmed pork pie hat without any obvious means to affording such fancy dress." There you have it.
I ran across this excerpt from Roald Dahl's notebook earlier today. It's interesting how organized he was to record an extensive vocabulary for quick reference.
When I began my career as a writer, I started collecting words in an old school notebook. Half of the pages in this book have nothing but lists of words — mostly adjectives and adverbs. When you're describing something or someone, you can't just choose dull words like "beautiful," "pretty," or "nice." You must search for more meaty imaginative words. Keeping lists, which I can easily refer to, when I'm writing helps me to find the exact word I'm searching for.
On a related note, about a year ago I nostalgically began rereading some of my favourite childhood books. Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Twits, and especially The BFG were as much fun as I remembered.
When I got out to my car last night around one in the morning, the windows were thickly coated with ice and it was about -20°C outside. Amazingly, I've made it this far into the winter without an ice scraper in my car, but last night my procrastination finally caught up to me. I didn't even have my wallet with me, so I couldn't resort to the trusty credit card approach.
So, I started my car to get it warming up a bit and then searched the interior for any object that might suffice as a scraper. Ah, the trusty old tape deck caught my eye. But, which tape to use? My choices were: The Lemonheads It's a Shame About Ray; Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson Highwayman; a homemade Bob Dylan mix; and The Beatles Help!. Well, it was a hard decision, but the task fell to The Beatles.
For future reference, cassette tapes make great window scrapers. Big enough to hold with a mitten-covered hand and hard enough to remove tough ice.
Help!, The Beatles, 1965
Some people have truly fantastic names. I'm stuck being called Daniel (sorry mom and dad) while there are people out there with names that exude power and intrigue. It would seem that naming one's child is a fundamental element to ensure their future success or infamy while avoiding mediocrity. And clearly, as a certain member of the following list proves, having a great name isn't all you need for success.
- Moses Znaimer
- Stockwell Day
- Ogden Edsel
- Ruben Sierra
- Jurgen Gothe
So, who are these people? Moses Znaimer is the Canadian media mogul behind CityTV, MuchMusic, and many other radio and television stations. Stockwell Day was the ill-fated leader of Canada's very conservative Alliance party. Great name, terrible leader and politician. Ogden Edsel is the musician behind the strangely entertaining song Dead Puppies. Ruben Sierra is a retired baseball player. I'm not even a baseball fan, but that's a great name. And, Jurgen Gothe is the CBC radio host of DiscDrive. It seems that a fun unusual name is a prerequisite for working at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
If you can put up with the annoyingly cool Flash interface¹, CBC Radio 3 is a fantastic source for listening to new music. Will Pate directed me there this morning to listen to a jazz group called Baron Samedi ESQ and I found a lot more. It looks like they have a regularly updated playlist you can open with twenty songs in it. Just click on the double-page icon next to the media player when the site opens to launch it.
Just this morning I discovered six great songs from six different bands I've never heard of. The bands are listed in the order they appeared in the playlist:
(Warning: annoyingly detailed nit-picking ahead)
When a number of us at silverorange purchased IBM Thinkpad laptops last year, we all instinctively complained about the functionality of the audio controls built into the keyboard. At the top of the keyboard on the ThinkPad T30 laptops there are three handy buttons for increasing, decreasing, and muting the volume (plus the utterly useless ThinkPad button). The up and down controls work just like you'd expect. However, the mute button does indeed mute the volume, but when you push it again it does not restore your volume. Instead, you have the hit the increase or decrease volume buttons to hear sounds again.
At first glance, I thought that this was a flaw in the planning. Why doesn't the volume go on and off in sequence like you might expect? After a year's worth of use, I think the IBM designers got it right. When you're in a public place and you're booting your computer, it's great that you can just hit the mute button and know that Windows will open silently. Even when you're not sure if the system has loaded enough to understand you've hit the button, you can hit the button multiple times and be assured it will be muted. Nice work ThinkPad design team.
I was just looking for a piece of illustration to use for a project when I came across the work of Hiroshi Yoshii. Some of his drawings are fabulous. I also discovered that he illustrated the glum pear I've always liked on Mena Trott's weblog Not a Dollar Short. There is a whole collection of images by Yoshii at Getty Images.
Illustration by Hiroshi Yoshii, 1995
I'm a fairly regular customer at the wonderful Formosa Tea House on University Avenue in Charlottetown. Since hearing they planned to expand into a new space this coming spring, many excited rumours have been flying around our fair city. Well, last weekend my girlfriend, my father, and I happened to see the lovely owners working on renovations on the new building and were invited in for a tour. Here's the scoop...
The new location is on Prince Street in the building that was formerly Big Momma's bar. They plan to open just the bottom floor with about 7-8 booths and 5-6 tables. It looks really nice already but there is much work to do. A kickin' sound system is already installed to play traditional Taiwanese music (we got to hear a sample). The owners also plan to alter the front steps to allow for a medium-sized porch with outdoor seating in the summer. They'll be living in a nice space on the second floor and will be using the top floor as a Tai Chi room.
Don't fear, the Formosa Tea House on University Avenue will remain open. The new place will be serving full meals while the tea house serves snacks. Hopefully things will be ready to open in March/April. I'm really looking forward to it.