Month: March 2005

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Back to the Stage (or: Peril from Beyond Space!)

I met Scott Watkins in 1999 at the Queen Street West cafe Tequila

Bookworm, where we were not just regulars, but friends with the staff

(in my case, very special friends with one of the staff. albeit disastrously).

A couple of years later, he invited me to play accordion to accompany

his improv troupe on days when the regular musical director couldn’t

make it. I performed at a handful of shows and had a blast doing it. I

got to perform and still have the best seat in the house at the same

time, and it’s always great to see Scott perform (you should see his

“Beat Poetry of Ricardo Montalban” routine).

Scott recently contacted me and asked if I’d do some music for his upcoming show, Peril From Beyond Space:

Photo: 'Peril from Beyond Space' poster.

The synopsis:

The year is 1947. The forces of democracy have triumphed. Millions of

Americans are raising families, buying refrigerators, and wearing

nearly identical suits. Now that fascism has been eradicated, Mr. and

Mrs. Average Homeowner can look forward to a bright new era of peace

and prosperity. Or can they? Little do they realize that a malevolent

alien race has targeted the planet earth – a race of demon monsters

that threatens every single person in the entire world…a Peril – from

Beyond Space!

Peril From Beyond Space is a

“comedy sci-fi cliffhanger in four parts” taking place for the next

four Fridays at 10 p.m.: March 11, 18, 25 and April 1 at the Bad Dog Theatre, 138 Danforth Avenue

(at Broadview). Four different musical/comedy acts will open each show,

with Yours Truly opening for the March 11th opening show! Tickets are

$8 at the door. I should be entertaining, and Scott and Company should

be even more so.

I suppose that means I should go work on my routine.

Categories
Uncategorized

"Call Now! Shemales are Standing By!"

Some prankster has edited an image on the web site (look at the customer service rep in the lower right-hand corner) for Neato, the disc labelling company:

Photo: Doctored customer service rep photo from the Neato site.

Thanks to drauh for the link!

Categories
Music

You’ve Got to Watch "Scent of a Robot"

Check out this excellent video for an excellent hip-hop number: Pete Miser’s Scent of a Robot,

in which the narrator acciedentally discovers that he’s not human, but

a prototype robot soon to be mass-produced. I love it when hip-hop and

science fiction collide; one gets tired of “ghetto this”, “drive-by

that” and “bling bling”.

The rap is clever and expertly delivered by Pete, who navigates the territory that lies between Del tha Funkee Homosapien and MC Paul Barman.

I’ve got to give mad props to whoever did the backing track for tossing

in a nice synth-accordion descending line; I’d call it the best

one-chord jam since Beck’s Loser. The video itself is a nice gene-splice of computer animation and live-action video.

When I first stumbled across the video, I watched it about half a dozen times. I’m hooked! Check the video to find out why.

Categories
Geek

Browser Stats

Boss Ross pointed in Tucows’ internal “Research and Innovation” mailing list to this Jason Kottke article on the stats for browsers used to visit his site in February. Jason reports that the breakdown looks like this:

  • Mozilla: 45%
  • Internet Explorer: 31%
  • Everything else: 24%

In an update, Jason noted that he may have accidentally lumped in

Apple’s Safari browser with the Mozilla ones. For those of you who are

familiar with all that hoo-hah about user-agent strings, he forgot to

note that Safari’s user-agent string has “Apple WebKit” and “KHTML”

while Mozilla -based browser strings have “Gecko”.

Jason points to the stats of Boing Boing, one of the 800-pound gorillas of the blogosphere, which break down as follows:

  • Internet Explorer: 36.8%
  • Firefox: 36.7%
  • Safari: 8.4%
  • Unknown: 7.7%
  • Mozilla: 4.3%
  • Netscape: 1.6%

My gut feeling is that the less technically-oriented sites are visited

by less technically-oriented people, who would tend to use the default

browser on the dominant operatin system: Internet Explorer. I also

suspect that more technically-oriented people would tend to visit more

technically-oriented sites and would tend to use a Mozilla-based

browser like Firefox.

Here’s the browser breakdown for The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century for February 2005. These numbers are based on the first page of results reported by the tool I use to create this blog, Blogware.

The majority of my readers use Internet Explorer, which has an over

2-to-1 lead over the next browser, Firefox. I suspect that these stats

may be reversed in The Farm, the programmer weblog that I write for Tucows.

Browser Percentage
Microsoft Internet Explorer

 57%

(678601 hits)
Mozilla Firefox 25%

(303033 hits)
Apple Safari

 5%

(61560 hits)
Yahoo Slurp

(The bot that feeds data to Yahoo’s search engine)

 5%

(58312 hits)
Googlebot

(The bot that feeds data to Google)

 4%

(46665 hits)
Konqueror

(Linux browser)

 3%

(36443 hits)
Pluck

(Web aggregation service)

 1%

(14529 hits)
Categories
Uncategorized

"My Eyes are Nailed, But Still I See"

My friend, writer-of-creepy-tales and ghoulie-rocker Brett Alexander Savory, has a new novella which he co-authored: My Eyes are Nailed But Still I See, published by Delirium Books. Here’s the blurb from its page:

Johnson Milhone’s mind is a world unto

itself—maybe several worlds. Therapy doesn’t penetrate, but nails do.

Leather doesn’t sew easily, and pigs don’t talk—but don’t tell Johnson.

Enter a world where spiders stalk sentient stuffed animals that may or

may not be carved from the flesh of family members who may or may not

be psychotic killers, slaves, and sadistic torturers. Find new uses for

lime green Jell-O and lose it as a viable dessert. Find new darkness in

Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum

and dine at the best table at the Fear Factory. Learn why you should only keep toothpicks

in the drawer if you really trust your mother, or your brother, and never—ever—fish in Scotland at Midnight. My

Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See is the culmination of an odyssey through a warped young

mind that leads one way, and then another, through gruesome imagery and psychotic

delusion to an ultimate truth you will never see coming.

(Hey, Brett! I think you should make “Never fish in Scotland at midnight” T-shirts!)

Brett has a deal with Delirium Press: if 200 or more copies get sold,

they’ll do a trade paperback run next year, which means the book will

stay in print. Since I like supporting my friends’ creative efforts and

enjoy a good creepy read to boot, I’m placing an order and also

plugging it here.

If you’d like a closer look at the book, the authors have provided an excerpt that you can download [PDF, 40K].

Categories
Uncategorized

Talibell Canada [Updated]

Update: Be sure to read the comments after reading the article, especially this one! — Joey

Joan at FreakGirlSpew (the blog also known as Freak Girl’s Pew) got an ad in her snail mail from Bell Canada. The ad, shown below, showcases the parental content filtering for Bell’s DSL service:

Photo: Bell Canada content-filtering ad.

(For the moment, let’s ignore the argument about whether it’s a good

idea to filter the internet to protect your kids.)

The text of the ad reads “You’ll do anything to protect your kids from

inappropriate content”, beside a photo showing a book with the

inappropriate content x-acto’d out. As you can see, the book isn’t

anything along the lines of The Hustler Anthology: Three Decades of Crotch or even Madonna’s Sex, but a biology

textbook.

Who’s Bell Canada’s ad agency, Ashcroft and Associates? Taliban Promotions?

If knowledge about the human body is to be considered “inappropriate”,

we’re all in deep trouble. If you’re a parent who freaks out over some

anatomy pictures in textbooks, I can say with reasonable certainty that

your kid will grow up to be one screwed-up puppy — I dated such people.

If you care to send Bell Canada an opinion, here are the email addresses to hit:

Remember, you’re more likely to get some kind of response if you spellcheck and use good grammar and etiquette.

Categories
Uncategorized

In "The Farm" and "IndieGameDev"

And now, some links to entries in the blogs I’m paid to write:

In IndieGameDev:

  • Chicks and Joysticks: a white paper on women and gaming written by the Electronic and Leisure Software Producers’ Association.
  • Valil.Chess: an implementation of chess using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Beta.
  • I Want NPCs in my Chili: How non-player characters add spice to a game.

In The Farm: