Blog

  • moicy!

    The Holy Modal Rounders documentary DVD, Bound To Lose is now available for us international types. But the price? $28 in the US balloons to $40 elsewhere. At that price, I’d expect Peter and Steve to deliver it in person!

  • you’re a tube, Leo …

    I caved to the tone craving, and ended up buying a Fender Champion 600 all-tube combo amp. It’s nice; just the right volume level for the basement, and even dimed (or duodimed, since it goes up to 12) it’s unlikely to raise too many complaints.

    But filling in the registration card was a problem. Tell me what’s wrong with this question:

    fender.png

    Hint: it’s not the content …

  • soan papri frenzy

    I had this Indian sweet last night. It’s good; better than that, maybe. It’s an ultra-friable milk, sugar, flour and nut delicacy, with a strange layered consistency. If you thought that tablet melts in the mouth, this positively vanishes. Good stuff — I shall look out for it.
    Update: I found it. Two stores within five minutes of the house have it. When it’s in little squares, it’s soan papri. When it’s in little cakes, it’s soan cake. Either way, it’s good.

  • poem

    The Mower

    The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
    A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
    Killed. It had been in the long grass.

    I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
    Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
    Unmendably. Burial was no help:

    Next morning I got up and it did not.
    The first day after a death, the new absence
    Is always the same; we should be careful

    Of each other, we should be kind
    While there is still time.

    —  Philip Larkin

  • stuck inside of T.O. with those K.C. blues again

    With fresh memories of Arthur Bryant’s, I tried Phil’s Original BBQ (838 College, at Ossington). It does a very creditable BBQ brisket, and the got sauce has the right mix of vinegar and burn. Not so sure about the sweet sauce, which has enough sugar and cinnamon to make french toast happy.

    There’s blues on the sound system, and the service is quick and friendly. The bread’s maybe a bit too good – hey, if Wonderbread works for Bryant’s – but maybe it’s the closest you’ll get to KC BBQ without driving 1600 klicks.

  • tim hortons = thirst no mo’

    oh no, there’s a Tim’s opened right kittycorner to my office.

  • Jeremy = teh smrt!

    Jeremy Clarkson thought it would be a good idea to publish his bank details to show that the whole thing about identity theft was hooey. Not such a good idea.

  • my hero

    Machete-wielding grinch caught on tape deflating Christmas display

    … But their Christmas card to Calgary, as they call it, was ruined early Thursday when a man came up the hill at about 3:30 a.m. and began slashing the inflatable Santa, polar bear and Christmas train with a machete.He also dismantled a sound system playing Christmas music.

    Dude, if anyone was playing Christmas music in my neighbourhood at 3:30am, it’s probably just as well I don’t own a machete.

  • and many were the kilojoules

    A new Tim Hortons across the road from my office isn’t going to help a carefully-controlled diet. This is just as well, as I don’t have one.

  • nothing says Happy New Year …

    … like coming home to a brick through the kitchen window.

    xlx2-20080103-011952.jpg

    The place was a mess, but the police and the insurers are being helpful.

  • unhungry in lansing

    We went to Elderly Instruments in Lansing, MI yesterday on the way home. It was about lunchtime, so we asked the staff for recommendations. The nearby Mama Bear’s Café was closed, so we took up another recommendation: the Golden Harvest.

    Oo-aw, it was good. Where else can you munch on a perfect smoked turkey reuben while there’s Olivia Tremor Control cranked on the stereo? The Golden Harvest even has a MySpace page.

  • Well, it happened today …

    Feed Article | Business

    U.S. crude fell 44 cents to $99.18 a barrel by 2:30 p.m. EST (1930 GMT) after hitting a peak of $100.09 earlier in the day.

  • down home radio show » The End of the World Banjo Band

    down home radio show » Various Field Recordings
    Anthology Film Archives – New York City 12/8/07:

    This show was after a screening of the film “Bound to Lose” which is a GREAT documentary about The Holy Modal Rounders. “The End of the World Banjo Band” is a current project by Peter Stampfel of The Holy Modal Rounders. It’s an all banjo band featuring Peter Stampfel, John Cohen (of the New Lost City Ramblers), Jeannie Scofield, Walker Shepard and Down Home Radio’s own Eli Smith. Faced with the end of the world, seemingly the only option is actually to create an all-banjo-band. The band has 5-string banjos, banjo-mandolin, and 6-string banjo-guitar.

    The End of the World Banjo Band Live!

  • across the universe, or eula à gogo

    In the Holiday Inn Express in St Louis again. Their clickwrap EULA for wireless access from Zerowire Networks is hilarious. The whole text is quoted after the cut, but the highlights include:

    • anything you transmit over the network (like your credit card details, your login for legopr0n.com, or this blog posting) belongs to the hotel, and “may be processed, used, reproduced, modified, adapted, translated, used to create derivative works, shared, published and distributed by HOTEL in its sole and absolute discretion in any media and manner irrevocably in perpetuity in any location throughout the universe”. So I’m sure the murals at the first Holiday Inn Express on Mars will be decorated with credit card info.
    • Riddled with typos and random copy-and-pasted sections, you nonetheless “waive any right to claim ambiguity or error in this Agreement!” [yep, the exclamation mark’s part of it too]
    • About half way into it, it starts representing Hilton Hotels, rather than Holiday Inn. I suspect Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V here.
    • Gives up-to-the-minute advice for setting cookie preferences for IE4, a browser that became obsolete in 1998.

    As it’s such a mishmash, I think I’m pretty much exempted, ‘cos I crossed my fingers behind my back before clicking “Accept” …
    (more…)

  • wiggly

    Can I just say that the road from Busch to Eureka Springs, Arkansas is the most gratuitously wiggly route I’ve ever driven?

    Our route down from Kansas City was longer than I thought; place not blind trust in GPS routing, especially when you’re close to the edge of the maps you’ve uploaded. Due to one wrong turn on my part, we ended up in Overland Park, KS — rather than being on Hwy 71 all the way south. In future, I shall upload all the maps I need, plus all the states/provinces surrounding, so you don’t get that terra incognita/here be dragons feeling of falling off the edge of your wee scrolly map.

  • if you have to park, park artfully

    The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has done about as much as you can with the bare walls and gloomy spaces of an underground parking lot:

    parking lot, Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City MO

    parking lot, Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City MO