Pop Culture Blog: Music, Movie and Humor

Leveraging low-hanging synergies outside the vertical fruit box since 1999.

A New Radio Pye? Maybe.


in Pye in the Face

Last FM is extraordinarily cool. If you’re not familiar with it, sign up now. I have added a chart in the left hand nav where you can see, and listen to, the last few songs I have played for myself. It tracks all my preferences and creates an on-the-fly radio station which has no boundaries in terms of artist catalogues, bandwidth or diskspace. The only problem is it looks like crap.

Do you really care at what time of the day I listened to one of these songs? You probably don’t care that I’ve listened to them at all. If I can figure out a way to get the box narrower, it will be staying. If not, I’ll keep looking for another musical solution for PITF. In the meantime, you’ll have more Pixies, Happy Mondays and Tragically Hip than you can shake a stick at. Just walk away.

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Shut Up, Annie Lennox.


in Musical

Here comes the rain again. Have you looked at the forecast? Looks like the sun may make a brief appearance Saturday afternoon, but other than that as of tonight we’re going back to Waterworld. This is actually good, because I have people coming to fix my roof Thursday and they’ll be able to spot leaks while they’re doing the diagnostic. And by ‘spot leaks while they’re doing the diagnostic’, I of course mean cancel the appointment because they don’t work in the rain.

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Stronger Than A Pot of Tim Horton’s.


in Consumables

“Three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, thrice the amount used by Timothy McVeigh to demolish a government building in Oklahoma City. Cellphone detonators. Switches. Computer hard drive. A 9-mm pistol. Soldering gun. Camouflage gear.” – Toronto Star

This weekend’s terrorist arrests (read this) in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) will hopefully bring a renewed – or first-time to be more specific – sense of urgency to Canadians, and are incidentally of absolutely no surprise to me. Thank God this new awareness of the realistic domesestic threat level is going to stem from this news – and not an actual flattening of the ACC, Rogers Center (Skydome) or CN Tower. I have long maintained, and you can ask multiple people who’ve been bored to tears by my theories, that Canada will be the next Western country hit by a major terrorist attack. The new government was a welcome power-shift for me, and Harper’s era is probably just in time. Harper, from yesterday:

“The raid that netted 17 Toronto-area youth and men proves Canada is not immune to violent attacks. Canada is a target because we value freedom, democracy and the rule of law.” I’m going to take a stab at another translation here, and it’s not because he was speaking French – Canadians are perceived as infidels by extremists, just as surely as Americans are. We’re all North Americans, and we’re all fair game. A flag-on-the-knapsack works well on rude German waiters, but it might as well be a bullseye to the radicals, mon ami.

I will never forget walking back to my Boston apartment on September 11, 2001, watching people crying into their cellphones as they tried to reach or get news on their loved ones in New York City. I worked near a bonafide potential target, so was sent home around noon on that day. At the time, I had a pretty devious analog cable descrambling method, and was able to get a live feed from MuchMusic which is the equivalent of Canadian MTV (except they actually play music videos). They filled a room with high school students and passed a mike around – the opinions expressed were painful, and resonate with me to this day.

To paraphrase: “Yeah, well… like… maybe now the States will wake up and see that they can’t, like, push the rest of the world around anymore or nuthin’.” This distancing sort of opinion has only gotten worse over the last five years, and Iraq – regardless of how you feel about the motivations – is the first American-involved conflict that Canada has not contributed forces to in over a hundred years.

I am not going to pretend to have any special insight into world affairs. But I do read the news every day, from multiple sources, and consider myself reasonably informed. I was worried at the dialogue coming out of my home country, and I am exstatic that these bastards were nabbed by the CSIS before they could do anyone any harm. I take a great comfort in the new awareness that will likely stem from this incident. That was a close one, and there’s a silver lining.

“This isn’t just slumming with jihad. For the benighted who claim that the war on terrorism is terrorism: Here is your war.”

UPDATE: A great editorial from the Globe and Mail.

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July Sublet Sought.


in

Two friends of mine are coming to Boston this summer for a month in order to make a documentary. They are based in Sweden and are just looking for an apartment for the month of July. As I know many of my readers are Boston-based, some of whom even like me, I thought I would throw that out there. Drop me a line if you have an, albeit brief, opening. They are a couple and would need one room. God forbid they should stay with me. This place is already like a bus terminal.

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