We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • Goodbye, Star Wars Tree

    burnt-out mini mall, Kennedy & Eglinton
    The mini-mall burned last night. Looks like the centre of the fire was the gift shop in the middle of the block. The rest of the block is pretty badly damaged, though. It looks like the place will have to be rebuilt — or replaced with a condo block, which seems to be the fate of shops in Scarborough.

    I hope that noone was hurt.

    So, goodbye Yoga’s, with your selection of teas and Sri Lankan groceries. Goodbye Star Milk, the mom, pop and smiley baby store with your VLT in back and dodgy videos over the drinks cooler. Goodbye Poondy Bread, purveyors of that which has paneity. Goodbye Amma, ace Sri Lankan takeout food shop, the place where I developed a taste for really spicy food.

    But most of all, goodbye to the gift shop. Even though I never went in there, I’ll miss the sun-yellowed unsold toys in the window; the almost-Transformers and plastic racing cars.

    One toy, unsold through two summers, perplexed me most. It was a cardboard tube wrapped in tinsel. Cardboard tags with pictures of Star Wars characters were attached to it with those nylon annoyances you get on new clothes. It resembled more a christmas decoration than a space weapon, which I think it was supposed to be. We called it the Star Wars Tree, and I’m guessing it wasn’t officially licensed from Lucasfilm.

    It’s all gone now, washed away by the fire hoses.

  • music of 2005

    It’s getting towards the end of the year, so I’m thinking about what albums I enjoyed most. These are the 2005 albums I have in my collection:

    • A Hawk And A Hacksaw — Darkness At Noon
    • Aimee Mann — The Forgotten Arm
    • Animal Collective — Feels
    • Beck — Guero
    • Bettye Lavette — I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise
    • Bright Eyes — Digital Ash In a Digital Urn
    • Bright Eyes — I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
    • Calexico / Iron & Wine — In the Reins
    • Caribou — Marino Audio
    • Dan Jones — Get Sounds Now
    • The Decemberists — Picaresque
    • Deerhoof — The Runners Four
    • Devendra Banhart — Cripple Crow
    • Dressy Bessy — Electrified
    • The Duhks — The Duhks
    • Eels — Blinking Lights And Other Revelations
    • Fiona Apple — Extraordinary Machine
    • Gorillaz — Demon Days
    • Grandaddy — Excerpts From The Diary Of Todd Zilla
    • Jennifer Gentle — Valende
    • John Parish — Once Upon a Little Time
    • Kate Bush — Aerial
    • Kate Rusby — The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly
    • Kimberley Rew — Essex Hideaway
    • Lazerlove5 — Flicker Mask
    • Lemon Jelly — ‘64–‘95
    • The Lollipop People — We Need a New F-Word
    • Malcolm Middleton — Into The Woods
    • Marbles — Expo
    • The Mountain Goats — The Sunset Tree
    • My Morning Jacket — Z
    • Of Montreal — The Sunlandic Twins
    • Sigur Rós — Takk …
    • Sleater-Kinney — The Woods
    • Sufjan Stevens — Illinois
    • The Vanity Project
    • Wolf Parade — Apologies to the Queen Mary

    I know there are some that won’t make my list (Aerial, for one) but the rest of them all have their moments.

  • caribou

    remind me to listen to more caribou. I got a sampler at Wild East at the weekend, and it’s extremely compelling.

  • new, improved brunswick

    I was supposed to go to New Brunswick tomorrow, but the trip was cancelled. Bah.

  • Ontario RFP II

    Ontario RFP II Winners are announced. Congratulations to all the successful parties.

  • http://holymodalrounders.com/

    Congratulations to Steve, Judith and Kathryn for getting holymodalrounders.com together.

  • O turbine thou art sick

    We had a component failure on the WindShare turbine today. Just when the winds have got really good, too. We know how to fix it, it’s just a matter of getting the people and the parts together.

  • get yer avant-cabaret on

    yay! A new album from Friendly Rich & The Lollipop People. Such quality, and so inexpensive for members of the Leprechaun Club …

  • you can’t hear the join

    Further to Doug’s comment, I installed Rockbox on my iRiver. While it may not be very pretty, it adds so many handy features to the thing. Most immediately noticeable of these is (almost) gapless MP3 playback. With LAME-encoded MP3s, there’s no apparent gap between tracks at all. I love it!

  • look ma, no wires!

    I’ve finally got rid of the ethernet cable that snaked across the kitchen floor to this linux box. A cheapo wireless PCI card (TRENDnet TEW-423PI, from CWO) plus ndiswrapper, and we’re laughing.

  • An evening with Mr Gosse

    I’ve just been listening to BBC Radio 4‘s dramatisation of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. It’s rather good.

    I think I can safely say that this household knows more about Edmund Gosse than any other in Scarborough. Catherine‘s PhD was based on on the Gosse family, and I’ve read the book and proof-read the thesis. I suspect we’re also the only household in Scarborough that relates episodes from the young life of Edmund Gosse as if they were family anecdotes.

    I know, we must get a life …

  • Ivor Cutler: Glasgow Dreamer

    I’ve archived an MP3 copy of Arnold Brown’s Radio 4 programme here: Ivor Cutler: Glasgow Dreamer. It’s a good introduction to Ivor Cutler’s work, and it’s a bit more accessible than the RealAudio format I had to convert it from.

  • completely not feeling the love for the iPod Shuffle

    Shuffle mode on the iPod Shuffle isn’t random. It seems to play the same tracks in the same random order every time you restart the device. It only seems to get a new randomization when you sync with iTunes.

    Oh yeah, and it’s too wide to fit alongside a standard USB plug on an iBook. I’ll check the BestBuy returns policy, ‘cos this thing just ain’t doing it for me.

  • no, I don’t get this, either

    BBC NEWS | Scotland | Crews face bonfire night attacks:

    Firefighters and police faced a series of attacks from gangs as they attended bonfire night call-outs in the Strathclyde area.

    When I read this, I’m glad I left the Land of Ned.

  • aargh, why’d ya do it

    yes, it is windows
    Because the Mini-ITX box was sitting doing nothing all these months while there was much bickering amongst the driver developers. At least this will work, for smallish values of ‘work’.

  • What’s with the Council of Canadians, eh?

    Every couple of months, the Council of Canadians sends me a large and visually unappealing (1986 called; they want their typewriter font back) mailing, ranting about how those pesky Americans keep stealing our water.

    Close reading of the mailing (which is hard, given the woeful typography) shows that the initiatives being railed at are either:

    1. run by Canadian companies, or
    2. are part of legislation voted for by Canadians.

    Like most environmental things, Canada has an appalling record of looking after its abundant water. I think we think that the rest of the world thinks better of us than they do, or maybe even frankly cares about Canada.

    I’m a bit worried by the CoC’s use of the n-word — nationalist — since it has unpleasant connotations, like the BNP and SNLA. Also, at least half of the mailing could be summed up as The Maude Barlow Fanzine, with only slightly lower production quality than the average zine.

    And anyway, pesky Americans haven’t been stealing our water. Catherine hasn’t been sneaking any more out of the house than usual …

  • iPod Shuffle: meh

    There’ve been a couple of times that my 256MB USB key wasn’t quite big enough, so I was in the market for a 1GB unit. Since the iPod Shuffle was only slightly more expensive than a plain memory key, I thought it would be a good purchase.

    Um, wrong. While it’s undoubtedly a decent (if slightly portly) USB key, it has huge deficiencies as a music player:

    • you can’t skip to the next album in the play list.
    • shuffle mode seems more like ‘play a few songs out of order from the same album until you manually skip to something different’.
    • why is my music hidden away in weirdly-named files?
    • iTunes doesn’t always sync all of the tunes in the playlist, leaving you with missing albums.

    For me, I think the most the Shuffle will be is a way of listening to the couple of albums I’ve bought on the weekend. It is small, light, and sounds pretty reasonable, but it won’t replace my iRiver H120 for musical goodness.

  • … but he is about to use an angle grinder

    Paul is Mr Safety

  • the Wawa Plume – it’s pollutionalicious!

    the wawa plume, courtesy google maps

    The Wawa Plume (Google maps link) — a 24km trail of environmental destruction left by smelters — is clearly visible from space. You don’t need a weatherman to say that the wind blows from the southwest in Wawa.

    Thanks to Evan o’ the Wildlands League for finding this.

  • halloween fallout

    One forgets how quickly — and how extravagantly — a carved pumpkin goes mouldy. It’s positively fluffy.