If you’ve been on the Secret Swing in Accordion City, you can put this button on your blog:
It was created by David “This Boy is Toast” Petite of the GTABloggers.
Start swingin’!
Month: August 2004
Categories
Where the action is
The Clarke Axiom — named after the guy who coined it, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke — is well-known to geeks:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
You may remember seeing the Clarke Axiom mentioned on this blog before. I quoted Maciej Ceglowski, who remixed it to become:
Any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from Canada.
(I can already hear the whining coming from the bloggers at the Western Standard. All I can say to those folks is: if you take your meds, the voices will stop.)
I don’t know how I ended up looking at a page in Everything2 (imagine a less academic Wikipedia written by LiveJournalers), but someone has come up with a geek lament treatment of the Clarke Axiom:
Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you.
Bonus bragging point: This blog is currently the number one Google result for the phrase “Clarke Axiom”.
I bring my lunch to work most days, but once a week I like to go out
for it. One of the lunch spots in Liberty Village (the former stomping grounds of a reasonably well-known blogger, internet/copyright freedom agitator and science fiction author) the neighbourhood
where Tucows is located, is the Warehouse Grill. The food’s quite good
(they make a really mean calamari) and on Thursdays, they have live
jazz on the patio. Here’s a movie [1.8MB QuickTime] that I shot a couple of Thursdays ago, featuring my co-workers Scott and Darryl at the beginning.
Categories
“Must-Know” Canadian Tunes?
The two weddings that I’ve attended with Wendy have both been for
Canadians of my generation, which meant that the DJ played Spirit of the West’s Home for a Rest (a song where they managed to beat The Pogues on their own turf) and a couple of
big hits that she didn’t recognize. I’ve decided to give her a hand by
making her a mixed CD of the essential Canadian rock and pop tunes for
people out age (specifically people who went to high school in the
mid-to-late eighties and university in the late eighties to
mid-nineties).
So far, I’ve come up with:
- Spirit of the West: Home for a Rest
- Sons of Freedom: Mona Lisa
- Sloan: Underwhelmed
I need more songs! If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments. Some guidelines:
- The
songs should have been hits only within the borders of Canada, or even
my area of Canada (Ontario/Quebec). There’s no point in putting Tom
Cochrane’s Life is a Highway or Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69 on this CD;
the point is to give her music that’s new to her. - The term
“hit” is relative. It the song had a cult following in my neck of the
woods (say, a hit in the Ontario/Quebec university zone in the early
90s but unknown in New England), it counts. - More than one song by the same artist is okay.
Oh, and could someone tell me if the Dream Warriors‘ My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style was or wasn’t a hit in the Excited States? It did well here in Ontario and was also a minor club hit in the UK.
Your suggestions, please…
- Jerry
- Jesse
- Eddie
- Jim
- Jamie
- Johnny
- Jason
- Jimmy
- Jerome
I don’t blame her. She leads the BodyPump
class (bench presses to Alien Ant Farm and sit-ups to Avril Lavigne!)
for 300 people a week; I have to memorize only 10 gym staffers’ names.
I’m sure that my predilection for vintage work shorts with tags
bearing names that are not mine (save the “Hagerstown Ford” shirt,
which has a name tag that reads “Joe”) isn’t helping matters any.
She does know me as “that guy who plays the accordion”, however.
Jim Munroe, author of many great reads including Flyboy Action Hero Comes With Gasmask, Angry Young Spaceman, Everyone in Silico and now An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, poses for Rannie on the Secret Swing, Accordion City’s hippest photo shoot location.
(By the bye, Rannie hits the big three-oh this Wednesday at C’est What.)