Open Comments Day

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• /me sings "Shock the Monkey"

  I just told a whole lot of people not to whine. I might be in trouble.

• My beef today: Apparently the TTC commissioners voted to proceed with the video display screens that show tons of ads and a tiny tiny clock time.

  I'm disappointed at this choice, in that represents yet another selling off of public space to private interests.

• Ahh, the simple joys of a monkey knife fight.

• I see you've discovered the new FOX News slogan.

• From BoingBoing. He has a PayPal link for donations to his defense fund. That's great, but wouldn't it also be nice to have a convenient way to heap scorn and shame on the town.

  Big Story

• Don't forget to check out this week's eYe magazine, featuring red-hot accordion action on the cover with Luca "I make sausages" Maoloni in a sombrero!

• Ok, I am glad someone else started the 'a day without accordions is like a day without sunshine' thread. To add to it:

  from BC, Belinda Bruce and the tawny stars

  from PQ, Arcade Fire

  from the Rock, Great Big Sea

  Can anyone cover the other provinces and territories to complete the accordions across Canada thread?

  and another piece of trivia, Sheryl Crow plays accordion on Scott Weiland's 12 Bar Blues album, on the track Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down

• On January 6, 1998, I was waiting for a connecting flight at the Los Angeles International Airport when I struck up a conversation with a nervous and unsettled-looking man sitting next to me. He said he was headed to some small island near New Guinea to begin a new life, but eventually, he spoke about his past life as an American expatriate. I told him that I found his story interesting and that it captivated my imagination but he said he only wanted to forget his past. In fact, he said he yearned so much to forget the story he was telling me that he was ready to throw away his diary.

  Before he got on his departing flight to the South Pacific, he walked down the terminal and threw a thick notebook in the trash. Curiosity got the best of me and with a slight feeling of humiliation, I reached down into the garbage can and grabbed the notebook which was wet with spilled cola. It turned out to be the man's diary, and later, as I turned its pages, I found myself carried away into another person's strange world.

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  I don't know how I got myself into this jam, but I think it somehow relates to the time when my father beat my mother in our kitchen. I didn't witness the actual blows to my mother's face, but from an adjacent room, I could hear her screams. At the time, I was only eleven years old and her desperate hollering frightened me to death. After my father stormed out of the kitchen, I could hear my mother whimpering in pain. I tiptoed into the room to help her. She was lying on her back and bleeding from her right eye.

  �

  'Jack, my baby,' my mother said to me with outstretched arms.

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  She hugged me, pulling me close to her body. I can remember this being the first time when I really learned what a woman's breasts felt like. Maybe it was because my mother was in need. She kissed my cheek and rubbed her face next to mine. The blood from her eye dripped down to the left corner of my mouth. It tasted sweet. I felt excited and got an erection, but I didn't understand what this erotic feeling was all about at such a young age.

  �

  My father left my mother forever on that day. I often wished he would come back, but not because I missed him. He wasn't always kind to me and I feared him, but I sometimes wished that he would hit my mother again so I could hold her in that same way. Today, I realize that my thoughts weren't healthy, but as I said, I think this incident relates to the problems I am having now.

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  I spent the last year living in South Korea, a place where people eat dog meat. The Koreans believe that the meat gives a man sexual power, but I wasn't interested in this custom until I stumbled upon the dog market one day where I watched the slaughtering process. The dogs are hung up by the neck, then beat to death with baseball bats. Blood goes flying everywhere, and some of it landed on the left corner of my mouth when I first saw all of this. Of course, I couldn't help but think of my mother which confused me because the dog meat was said to increase sexual power, and some blood had landed on my mouth. I came to believe that this was my destiny of some sort, and I ended up working as a butcher at that dog market. To make everything more confusing, I found a Korean girlfriend who used to kiss the dried dog blood of off my face after I finished work, and she usually did this while we made love.

  Most of this is past me now. I stopped working at the dog market and I broke up with that Korean girl. I'm even moving to a different country, but like someone once said to me, 'You carry your garbage with you wherever you go.'

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• From Alberta: Wendy McNeill (whom I mentioned in this entry).

  More Sheryl Crow accordion trivia -- she once said to a room full of stunned teenage girls: "If you want to turn on your boyfriend, get naked and strap on an accordion".

• I have some news!

  The CMJ Music Fest is June 8-11 in Cleveland. This is where breaking bands are seen first. There will be over 100 bands, including the Misfits, the Pixies, the Futureheads, and Digable Planets.

  Download free music from some of the bands playing at CMJ at http://travelcleveland.com/