That didn’t come out right

During the commercial breaks for the CBC mini-series dishing the dirt on the life of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, a voice-over announced: “This show has been brought to you by Canadian cheese.”

And while I’m on the Trudeau mini-series…

…could we please revoke the law that says that uber-nebbish Don McKellar

has to appear in every TV series and movie made in Anglophone Canada?

His range of expression seems to run the gamut from A

to…A-and-a-half. As a guy with interesting things to say, he’s pretty

cool, but as an actor, he is less interesting that most trout I have

eaten.

Now if we can only get the majorettes to wear these big red codpieces…

I found this pretty cool version of Word Up [1.5MB MP3] that was performed by a high school marching band.

I don’t know what’s been happening over at Blogger (the Web service I use to make entries in and maintain this weblog), but the trouble seems to have passed. Unfortunately, it’s time for me to hit the gym and run some errands, so today’s posting will be somewhat delayed.

In the meantime, here’s some interesting reading:

• Let’s Eat Rice! I get kind of twitchy if I don’t have at least one meal with rice per fortnight. Dad can hold out for about three days, I think.
• I always give the street kids a cut of my busking money, but someone’s done one better and set up an interesting charity site called ModestNeeds.com.
• Remember the big story about the Microsoft/Unisys Anti-Unix site being hosted on a Unix server? They’ve very quickly moved it to a Windows server. So quickly, in fact, that the following ports on it are open: 21 (FTP), 25 (SMTP), 80 (HTTP), 110 (POP3), 443 (HTTPS), 1433 (SQL Server), 1755, 1801, 1972, 1975, 2103, 2105, 2107, 3306, 3372 and 5900 (VNC). This is the high-tech equivalent of locking your front door with a deadbolt, but leaving a few windows and a doggie-door wide open.
• My friend Adina’s sister Lisa, who lives in Israel, has this little writeup about what it’s like there right now — not from the point-of-view of a military analyst or a news reporter, but just an ordinary civilian, like me, and (presumably) most of you. I’m very thankful that the worst of my problems seem to be hunting down a job, finding a new roomate to help absorb some of the rent, my “club” accordion needing some minor repairs and the fact that this cute girl didn’t show up at my gig last Saturday.
• Bringing karaoke to everyone: Taito, the company that revolutionized the videogame world with Space Invaders, is now going to revolutionize karaoke. Using the CSound programming language, they’ve developed technology that will enable a karaoke machine to adjust the pitch of the music to match the user. Supposedly even the most tone-deaf person will now seem to have perfect pitch.
• Hey mister, I really like your free concert…Custom — yeah, the guy who does the song Hey Mister is playing at the next New Music Tuesday (April 9th) at the Horseshoe Tavern, which is conveniently located right around the corner from my house. And yes, as with all New Music Tuesdays, there’s no cover.
• Lindy vs. Lindi: When homophones collide! Yup, this Saturday at C’est What (SE corner of Front Street East and Church), you can see both Lindy, the gentle giant of folk rock and Lindi, the sweet-voiced, skimpy-dressin’ cabaret singer with the firefighter cute accordion player.

And now, I’m off to the gym to make myself Toronto’s most buff accordion player, although I suspect that’s not saying much.

Because I can’t wait for that Jesus artist to get around to doing one with an accordion player…

…I decided to take matters into my own hands. The Lord helps those who help themselves, right?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, perhaps you should see the original artwork.