Canadian Government Falls; Canadians “Mildly Annoyed”

The Canadian government fell the other day. (apologies for the Flash) By ‘fell’, I mean ‘collapsed’: the ruling party lost a ‘no confidence’ vote and everybody has to run for a snap re-election in January. No-one appears to have noticed this. THEIR GOVERNMENT HAS FALLEN. What are Canadians doing? Shopping for the holidays, mostly. When asked about it, the general consensus is that they’re kinda miffed the campaigning has to take place during the holiday season.

In America, some woman camps out on the president’s oil fields in a half-baked protest of some sort, and the whole country shuts down for two weeks while everybody screams at each other.

I find it thoroughly amusing that Canada is so stable politically and culturally that the implosion of their government doesn’t even rate the batting of an eye. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Canada Rules O.K.

In other Canadian election news, the Green Party of Canada got enough votes in the last election that they qualify as a major political party this time around. They’re running on the slogan “We ARE ‘None of the Above’!”

Evil Catgirls Ruin “Daddy’s Special Alone Time”

After the Dirtbombs got back from their last weekend jaunt through Central Canada, I bought a copy of “Sokora Refugees, mainly because I’m hot for Salome. I put it in the book queue and didn’t think about it again until it came up in rotation. Well. SOMEONE ripped about half a dozen pages out of it, and since it’s been over a month since I purchased it, I can’t take it back.

You giggly, bad-Japanese-speaking little hosebags. When the Revolution comes, I plan to head the committee that sees to it you get what’s coming to you.

Shows, Thanksgiving Weekend 2005

So The Dirtbombs played over the weekend, Detroit and Cleveland. The Beachland Ballroom has a clothing and record boutique inside it now. I bought a copy of the second LP from Redbone, and a sealed copy of the one 70s LP by Blue Magic I didn’t already own.
If it wasn’t for tabbed browsing, I couldn’t even DO this thing…

Whine, whine, whine.

That last post took like two hours to do, because I know doodly squat about html, and most of the links had to be re-found and retyped, because I’d done them incorrectly in a variety of humourously stupid ways.

Done Eating

TVOne, the apparent answer to Booty Entertainment Television, today showed ‘The Wiz‘ over and over, all day, and are STILL showing it as I write this, for another three and three-quarter hours.

I can’t believe there isn’t another movie that they could be showing. ‘The Wiz’ suffers from two things that doomed it from the start: 1. a fatally flawed premise, and 2.Diana Ross.

In the original Broadway play, Dorothy (played by Stephanie Mills) was the daughter of sharecroppers in rural Kansas, in the 1930s. Not too far from the original, yeah? This WORKS as a story premise, though. In the film, Dorothy (played by Ross) is a schoolteacher in New York City who desparately needs a life. I guess the idea is that she’s some sort of naive savant, having managed to become a schoolteacher in NYC without learning anything about the “real world”. According to the film, she’s ‘never been south of 125th Street’. A woman lives 30+ years in NEW YORK CITY and never gets below 125th Street? I hadn’t been in NYC two hours on my first visit before I was running through the Village like a crazy person, and I came in across the George Washington Bridge.

Anyway, this film is wack from the get-go. Not even Quincy Jones‘ soundtrack could save it, although the music is brilliant, and all the performances are entertaining, except for Ross, whose idea of a naive schoolteacher was apparently to stagger through the film like she was on Darvocet.
There HAS to be another Black film involving Thanksgiving we could be watching besides this. Wasn’t ‘Waiting To Exhale‘ about eating, somehow?

Time Shifting

I should note for the record that these posts are usually made between 10pm and 4am, so when I say ‘today’, I mean like twelve hours ago, your time.

Not Tonight Dear, I’m Hearing The Voices Again

I saw a story on CNN today about twin sisters, one of whom is a psychiatrist, the other of whom is a schizophrenic. They wrote a book about their lives, which sounds like it might be a good read.

The schizophrenic sister talked about how she HAD to obey when the voices told her to set herself on fire, and I recalled a night onstage when I experienced a sudden and irresistable urge to play in the key of E. We wound up playing a fun version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ so it was alright, but I’ve thought about that night a couple of times since then.

I guess, as a musician, what I hear all the time is music, rather than voices. The music that’s not by other artists is the stuff I try to get on tape, obviously. It occurred to me that it might be the same as the voices schizophrenics hear, only channeled differently.

Besides, it’s been years since I heard the voices that kept telling me to set my sister’s bed on fire again.

Okay, no it hasn’t.

So Now I Am Blogging

I now join the two billion other geeks, freaks, yahoos and yipyops lowering the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet.  Yay me.

I have, of course, no idea whatever how to use this software.  Expect to see much screwed-up formatting, and many failed links before I get the hang of it.  You have been warned.