Oh, that's bad.

Flipping around the radio dial on my way home tonight, I happened upon HTZ-FM (97.7, from St. Catharines; they're alright sometimes). Seems as if they like playing songs from the new Our Lady Peace album.

I did not know Our Lady Peace had a new album.

Turns out, they do.

In case you haven't heard it yet — or, heard the first single from it, cringe-inducingly-titled* "All You Did Was Save My Life" — imagine this:

• Raine Maida's, ahem, "unique" voice
• even-more-emo lyrics
• suburban-emo-pop vocal harmonies and guitar "licks"

It truly is a marriage made in hell, this fusing of Raine's voice and the sort of music you get from bands like Fall Out Boy. Can you imagine that? Raine Maida fronting Fall Out Boy? If you can't, get Our Lady Peace's new album. It's ear-stabblingly good.
_____________________
* My old CFRC co-host and I used to look at new CDs we'd never heard before and, solely based on the band's name, the album's name and the track names, we'd guess what the music sounded like. Nine times out of ten, we were bang-on.

A word of advice.

I shared this with frequent blog-commentor ECB, but I think it warrants repeating.

I bought a bag of rice chips from Dollarama, labelled "salt and vinegar." They taste pretty much like you'd expect salt-and-vinegar rice chips to taste like... but they actually smell quite strongly of something ressembling latex paint.

So, take my advice: unless it's a chocolate bar or a soft drink, don't eat things you buy at Dollarama.

* * * * * * *

Special Bonus Thing: The Chinese government is a bunch of cocks.

* * * * * * *

Another Special Bonus Thing: George Strombolopoulos, host of The Hour, wearer of black clothing and all-around cool guy, used to have a syndicated show on the Corus Radio Network on Sundays from maybe 5-ish to 7-ish pm. But, seeing as how Corus (the owner of CFNY and others) didn't give two shits when his friend Martin Streek tragically took his own life earlier this year, Strombo ditched Corus, and he has a new show on CBC Radio 2 on Sunday evenings from 8 to midnight! Unfortunately the last two hours conflicts with Little Steven's Underground Garage here in Toronto on Q107 (which is as awesome as a radio show could be); looks like I'll listen to George live and stream Steven later in the week. Deets here.

Fun with rental-car companies.

The fourth annual "JTL Florida March Break Baseballfest Bonanza" needs a sweet set of wheels to hopscotch around the Sunshine State, so I decided to call up a rental car company which shall remain nameless (but I will tell you that their colours are the same as a bumblebee's).

Me: "Yeah, so, I was wondering if there's an extra charge to drop off a car at a different airport than I pick it up at."

Agent: "Well, there is no charge for an inter-city rental, but there is a charge for a one-way rental."

Me: (don't really catch the gist the true idiocy of what she said and proceed to give details about the days and cities I require for said rental)

Agent: (quotes me an astronomically-high price)

Me: "Whoa, that's really high. I thought there was no extra charge for an inter-city rental."

Agent: "That's correct, sir. But there is a charge for a one-way rental."

Me: "But, aren't inter-city rentals, by definition, one-way rentals?"

Agent: "That is correct, sir."

Me: (struck speechless by the stupidity on the other end of the phone)

In conclusion, the show "Community" is really, really funny.

One-Sentence Random Thought #11.

I wonder how flammable my marking-pile is.

Berlin Wall follies.

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall was danced-upon by East and West Berliners. (And yes, I remember that night.)

(You see, kids, there used to be this thing called "communism." Barack Obama is trying to bring it back, though. Godspeed, Comrade Obama!)

You'd think Mikhail Gorbachev would be an interesting person to ask about the Berlin Wall, and you'd be right. The CBC just had an interview with him, which contained this tasty (if paraphrased) nugget of insight into late-1980s geopolitics:

Interviewer: "In 1987, US president Ronald Reagan said, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' What was your reaction to that at the time?"

Gorbachev: "It didn't mean anything to us, really. It was nothing new. And, after all, he had been an actor."

Take that, Ghost of Ronald Reagan! You didn't do shit! (Plus, your movies were terrible.)

Stop the "Stop the TV Tax" commercials.

First off, it's not a tax.

Secondly, don't you want to slap that little d-bag who accosted those "random passers-by" on the street?

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I hate cable companies, because they screw people over for fun and profit. I'll give you an example.

For years, I subscribed to the "basic cable plus a few extra channels" package — you know the deal, I get Discovery and Comedy and the rest, but not the fancy-pants movie networks — and didn't mind paying a few extra bucks. But, I started to think about how little TV I watch, and how most of what I watch can either be found on a free over-the-air channel (e.g. Stewart/Colbert on CTV instead of Comedy) or on basic cable (CBC Newsworld, CP24 and its assorted sexy personalities (seriously, CityTV must be reading my mind these days), and of course CPAC), and... well, it didn't make much sense anymore to pay for all those extra channels when, at most, I'd watch two or three.

And now, the kicker. A friend of my parents, who lives out in the suburbs of Calgary, told me that their cable provider lets them subscribe, if they want, to the other out-of-area Rogers Sportsnet channels for $5 a month. (I live in the Ontario region; there are also East, West and Pacific channels as well.) This confirms something I'd suspected all along: cable companies can let you have single channels, but they would rather make you pay for shit you would never watch, call it a "package," and rake in the bucks.

Meanwhile, of course, local TV stations in Brandon, Red Deer, Wingham and (almost) Windsor have shut down because they don't have enough revenue coming in. Now, as uneventful and uninteresting as a small-city TV news broadcast might seem to some of you city-slickers, this sort of thing is important if you're in Brandon and all you can now get is news from Winnipeg; same goes for Red Deer and either Edmonton or Calgary.

What the annoying d-bag in the commercials doesn't talk about is how smaller cities can easily get overlooked if they don't have a local voice telling the stories that matter to them. As much as I always thought the local-yokel Sarnia radio station news was boring... well, maybe there was a reason my parents would always listen to it. Mind you, we also watched the evening news from Detroit (where single-murders rarely got a mention; triple-murders on the east side of town seemed to really get top billing), so we got a mix. But, if you live in a more remote community, and you don't have a local TV or radio station, how are you going to hear about stuff happening around you? You won't.

Oh, and we didn't have cable growing up — not because my parents were cheap or anything, but we were in such a small town that cable just wasn't available. If it wasn't for the TV stations in London and Kitchener, we would've only had Detroit and Toronto.

Anyway, the point of all this is that local TV does matter. You may not realize it if you've always lived in a big city, but if you don't, it does. Stop the Stop the TV "Tax" people, and fuck Ted Rogers.

I wish I had more to tell you.

I think the title of this post pretty much says it all.

The lack of any sort of day off in the stretch between Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays has really been playing tricks on my mind lately. The reason this all seems ridiculous to me is because, well, I'm usually pretty resilient when it comes to my mood.

Hours of daylight getting shorter? Who cares!
Clouds aplenty instead of sun? Big deal!
H1N1 killing tens of millions worldwide? No sweat!*

* except the sweat from the fever that eventually turns you into a useless, wasted bowl of jelly

I realize that nine straight 5-day weeks in a row with nothing in the middle to break it up is pretty routine in a lot of jobs; people work some pretty crappy gigs, to be sure, and the fact that I really love my job puts me squarely in the minority — as a straight white male of pseudo-quasi-Christian-ish-y background, hey, there's a first time for everything. But what my job has that others lack is an absolute, down-to-the-second rigidity in terms of time and schedule. It just isn't flexible at all, and there's no getting around that; part of the gig, though.

A friend of mine was regaling a few of us around the dinner table last week about a recent company outing to the U2 concert at the SkyDome a few weeks ago... limos to the show, booze everywhere, kickass corporate tickets, and the next day everyone rolled in around noon. As a member of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, and hence part of the group who is the majority owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs (unfortunately), I think it's high time we got a similar kickback:

• every year, all the teachers in one school get shipped to a Leafs game
  
• we get rinkside seats and free booze
• we get drunk as skunks, get boorish, and maybe get ourselves thrown out of the joint
• we go out for more drinks afterwards to really get the ol' team-building thing down pat
• we fall into bed nice and late
• classes start at 1 the next day!

Ooooooh, I think I'm on to something here.

Good riddance.

Well, apparently the National Post is one day away from going tits-up. It's lost money from day one, and since CanWest is on shaky financial ground already, it's time for Izzy Asper's Dream Paper to go the way of the dodo.

Back when I was an undergraduate at UW and the Post was new, they would dump off stacks and stacks of these papers for us to read — and, presumably, once we graduated and got real jobs with real money, we'd subscribe to this newspaper we all got hooked on reading.

The first thing that jumped out at me, though, was the stupefyingly large number of spelling and grammatical mistakes; I figured that if I, a lowly physics student, could pick out grammatical mistakes in an ostensibly professional publication, what kind of quality could the thing be? Mind you, this was before I got interested in politics and the like, and didn't realize that the Post had a rightward slant that would make Ayn Rand blush.

So, in summary, the Post is (was?) a shitty right-wing rag, and I'm not the least bit sad to see it go. Guess you'll have to find a new mouthpiece, Fraser Institute!

Selling out.

I don't use the above epithet too often when describing an artist; after all, if you're a professional artist, isn't it better to sell your work (paintings, music, poetry, sculpture) than to not sell it?

However, when an artist clearly alters what they do for the specific purpose of selling more of their work, that is a clear example of selling out. Consider Nathan Followill, drummer from Kings of Leon, in response to their song "Use Somebody," from their latest (and most commercially-successful) album, Only by the Night, hitting Number One on pop radio:

Some people say we sold out, some people say we're taking the easy road. We don't get caught up in that. We're more interested in gaining new fans.

What an interesting quote: Followill doesn't deny actively changing the band's sound (as opposed to letting it evolve naturally). But hey, when your first album (Youth and Young Manhood) is somewhat critically-acknowledged, and your second album (Aha Shake Heartbreak) gave those same critics boners and sold just enough to give you a little taste of the good life (women, booze, fame)... it's hard not to want to shift into a different gear — now that the critics know who you are and are salivating in anticipation of your next release, you're going to get a lot of press — so why not rake in a lot more bucks by appealing to the masses?

Problem is, they did so by actively changing the type of music they play. Aha was a fantasic record precisely because it didn't buy into all those mainstream verse-chorus-verse conventions; whenever I listen to it, I can't help but be reminded of Songs from Big Pink, which is as offbeat an album as you'd ever get from a group which was within spitting-distance of mainstream success. Their next album, Because of the Times, sounded very different and received an extremely mixed critical reaction: some called it mature, some called it misogynist, and others plain-ol' didn't know what to think. At any rate, it sold a lot of copies, topped three overseas charts, and got them a lot of press for their next album, the aforementioned Only by the Night.

Now, it would be easy to paint me as one of those, "Oh, you only like stuff if it's obscure" music-snobs... and yeah, that's somewhat true, insofar as I like a lot of bands that are a bit, well, out-there. But my CD collection is well-stocked with tons of Beatles, Hendrix, Zeppelin, every David Lee Roth-era Van Halen album, and even a Tragically Hip album (Trouble at the Henhouse), so I hope that shoots a hole in that caricaturization.

But, like Sloan and Treble Charger and doubtless countless others before (and after) them, Kings of Leon changed their art to sell more albums. I liked them before the change, and I don't like them after.

They have sold out, and they are probably never coming back.

An open letter to my gendermates.

Gentlemen:

I write to you on behalf of a friend of mine — a chick, a broad, a dame — who has recently been jerked-around by one of us.

Listen up, guys. Let's say you get set-up with a girl, on a surprise double-date of sorts. You chat, you flirt, you touch her arm to show her you're interested — they love that shit, as you know — and, when the first bar you're at closes down, you ask her to accompany you to a second. Then, when you drop her off at the end of the night, ask for her phone number, obtain it, enter it into your d-bag cell phone...

CALL HER, ASSHOLE.

You see, all the stuff I mentioned above gives women the impression you like them romantically. If you actually don't like them romantically, either (a.) don't do all that stuff in the first place or, assuming you don't like them romantically but you kinda like hanging out with them all the same, (b.) man-up, call them fairly soon, get together again, but don't do all the douchey flirty stuff; you may also wish to come out and say, "Hey, I really like hanging out with you, but in a 'pants-on' kind of way." Make a joke out of it, you poor-man's Don Rickles you.

Chicks tend to take this stuff all personal. I know, us guys, we get rejected by a woman, we'll feel kinda crappy about it for little while, but then we'll fire up the goat-porn, crank one out to clear our heads, and go make ourselves a sandwich. Women, though... women are different. Get this through your thick skulls, fellas.

Rocking-out with his fiscally- and socially-conservative cock out.

More disturbing than you ever thought possible:

It was bad enough that he butchered a Beatles song... now this?!

Oh, Peter Criss, where are you, now that we need you?

I really thought I'd have my shit together by now.

Occasionally, I have a major crisis in confidence, and today finds me in one of them. I've definitely had them before, so this is nothing new. And, as the comments to that post will attest, I'm not alone — which helps mitigate the overall shittiness/uneasiness I'm feeling at the moment.

On the surface, the major parameters of "someone who's got their shit together" are all in place:

• Steady job from which it's nearly impossible to get fired: Check.
• Apartment in a quasi-swanky, yet fairly-boring, part of town: Check.
• Car which has newly-smuggled-into-the-country tires: Check.
• No bastard-children floating around, to my knowledge: Check.
  
• Financial advisor who owns a sailboat and wears suspenders: Check.
• Houseplant named Sparky who is between 7 and 8 years old: Check.

When I think about all this, I'm tempted to say to myself, "J, you whiny little bitch, you have the cushiest life in the god damn world. Shut the hell up and grow a pair; you might need them someday, if you can ever figure out how to eventually lure a woman into your lair."

Which is true. (Sadly.)

But, let's face it... I'm not getting any younger, and my general feelings of indecision really aren't going away. What am I going to do with my life? Am I going to be a classroom teacher forever, or move onto something else education-related? Will I ever club a woman and drag her back to my cave to have my babies as I protect her from the sabre-toothed tigers? Hell, is my cave going to remain in the 416, or will I move somewhere else, eventually? And, why does my apartment smell vaguely of cigarette smoke? Has Crazy Cat Lady downstairs just torn into a new carton of Marlboros? And, if so, how the hell is the smoke getting in here?

Ferris Bueller was right. Life does move pretty fast.

I'm a bigger music-nerd than you ever thought possible.

I couldn't persuade anyone I know to come with me, so I'm seeing Steely Dan at Massey Hall solo.

Come to think of it, that might be for the best. Because the Dan is so resolutely unpopular with my friends — some people even show an open and vigorous hatred for Becker and Fagen — I won't have to "drag" someone against their will. It'll just be me and my fellow nerds, nerding-out to the finest nerd-jazz-rock ever made.

A few samples are below. Now, before you go all crazy and say, "Dude, these guys sound like elevator music," I KNOW it sounds like elevator music, at first. I am fully aware of this. But, take a minute and take this music seriously. After the initial shock wears off, you'll realize these guys are absolute geniuses in terms of melody, the way they arrange their various instruments, and even the lyrics are worth a listen because they're not the typical "ooh ooh baby love love love" claptrap that pervades popular music. So, enjoy.

Hey Nineteen
Home At Last
My Old School
Do It Again (excellent live version here)
Razor Boy

And yes, the live version of Do It Again features Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, one of the best guitarists of the late 20th century, on bongos.

I wish this was a joke.

But, it's not a goofy mock-up. It's real.

This could be the greatest work of art ever created by mankind.

It sure beats the hell out of The Last Supper.

Seriously, go here.

I love the dancing during the solo. Perfect!

Another shameless plug.

Have 20 minutes to spare on Saturday night? Want to hear some kooky/fun/odd music? C'mon out to Everyone's a DJ at Disgraceland (Bloor, just west of Ossington), won't you? I'll be on from midnight to 12:20 am, and will likely be drinking both before and after that. The focus this time will be "fun music," and I can't guarantee that I won't play "Tits On The Radio" by Scissor Sisters, because that song is friggin' awesome.

Also, Matt (the guy who runs EaDJ) has suggested to me that I'm capable of DJing an entire night at a bar somewhere here in this fair burgh. He says it's about four hours, top to bottom... which, at this point in my DJing life, having played only little 20-minute sets in front of people (alright, once I had to do 30 minutes), that seems a little daunting. It'd probably end up going really quickly, though, right?

Anyway, stay tuned.