I love this dog. And I love his owner for documenting her very own Peaceable Kingdom!

(Well, first one I've submitted. I kind of had to.)


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...does this little guy look REALLY PISSED OFF at the Academy's decision?


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There is a local message board I post to sometimes. It can be entertaining, it can be idiotic, it can be offensive.

At the moment, some of the female members are really offended by a thread in which male board members are discussing their crushes on female musicians. I have read the thread, and it is exceedingly mild stuff.

I have also participated on other discussion boards with similar threads, except in every other case the thread has been exclusively populated by women talking about their crushes on male rock stars. ALL of them.

The tones of both types of thread being mostly genuine admiration with a healthy dose of RAWR (and honestly, haven't we all arrived at the point where it's okay to admit that sometimes people are sexually attracted to other people?) I find it very difficult to see anything offensive about either.

Although in the interests of full disclosure, I have been a lively participant on the first type of thread, so maybe I'm just trying not to be a hypocrite.

Anyway. I have decided not to say anything on the current thread, but I truly do not see the problem.

...Ah, hell, it's funny.

Entry on Canada, found in the Uncyclopedia--the Content-Free Encyclopdeia.

I suspect the Uncyclopedia is a satire on Wikipedia, but the entry on Canada is a thing of beauty. (Confession: I stumbled upon it while Googling articles about the Cult--their entry is pretty good--and following a link in a reference about the bass player leaving the band to go live in Canada.) (Which he actually did for several years during the early-to-mid 1990s.) (You have to figure, if someone leaves a Los Angeles-based band and apparently willingly moves to Mississauga and stays there for an extended period... he was probably not well-suited to live in LA in the first place.)

Ahem. Check the map.

Also, there is a separate entry for Canadians, who according to the country entry are

known for their peacefulness and politeness in distressing situations, such as during a war or hockey playoffs. The world looks to Canada for international peace-keepers, since they possess no weapons other than snow shovels, and their jovial accent and flannel clothing are comforting[1].

I'm sorry, it's Friday afternoon and I seem to have succumbed to a fit of the giggles. I suspect the rest of the article will not live up to the brilliance of the introduction, but hell. The intro is worth it.

(Also--my userpic is the most patriotic one I have, and seems suitable for this entry.)

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I can't believe this is still happening on the Internet, but--

Footage of the athlete being killed on the luge run has been broadcast on TV. Someone on a pop-culture discussion board I'm on commented that they thought it was unnecessary and offensive.

And of course someone else replied with the ancient and infuriating Internet argument that, "Well, this other horrible thing happened and was broadcast on TV, but obviously you don't care about that, hypocrite!"

(1) It was a thread about the luge accident, fuckwit.

(2) How do you know your opponent wasn't upset by the other unrelated horrible thing when it happened? Way to make assumptions, fuckwit!

Seriously--I am astonished by the way people who spend a lot of time on the Internet continue to assume that one single isolated post on an Internet board represents everything about the person who posted it, rather than a single opinion of many held by that person.

Which I know is not the case, it's just a cheap, stupid, hateful way of trying to score points in an argument by putting the other person in the wrong. Morons.

In other words, some people are fuckwits. Yeah, I know: astonishing!

(Also: no, I was not the target of the fuckwittery. I just find it so infuriating that it bothers me whether I am the target or not!)

CBC just does sports better than most other channels, by thoroughly covering the sports. CTV is a little more focused on the Canadians-only, which is understandable but means you miss some of those cool Olympic moments where you fall madly in love with an athlete you've never heard of from a country you don't know much about in a sport you don't follow.

CBC is still following the Games, and yesterday they apparently loved everyone.

I actually really like the mental image of the entire US Olympic team standing arm-in-arm singing, "Good Morning, Starshine."

Bull terrier on a trampoline:



Looks like this is another breed specialty.

( Previously on Lost... )

That explains everything. Except why the girls want to make out with these two guys.

If I understand it correctly, this short video is from when the Cult was rehearsing for the Sonic Temple tour."

( Billy Duffy, our studio tour guide. )

I'm undecided as to whether he's actually as charming as I think he is, or if I only perceive him that way because of the accent. (I also, when I worked in Texas, used to find elderly country doctors charming too when they showed up in my library. In my own defense, they really were charming.)

... that everything bull terriers do is funny. At least, I find it funny.

Here is one drinking from a water bottle:

It is astonishing how many bull-terriers-jumping-on-the-bed videos you can find on Youtube.

Here is one of them:



I watched it with the sound off, but I still heard "Boing! Boing!"

Just so we're all clear, this is the version of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" that freaked out Vlad and Spike:



Because I am mean that way, I tested the song again about an hour after my initial post. This time the cats were on the other side of the room (rather than on my lap--I was accessing Youtube on the BlackBerry.)

Once again, somewhere around the 45-50 second mark, a sound kicked in that might have been distorted guitar. It wasn't loud, but the boys reacted as if it was the sound of big dogs coming to get them.

I stopped the video and hastily went to this one:



Vlad and Spike reacted with varying degrees of "Oh thank goodness" and calmed down. I have observed that none of my cats has ever been afraid of U2, no matter how loud I turn them up. (I consider that a point in U2's favour. Your mileage may vary.)

Anyway. Next time I try a stunt like this I guess I should use headphones.

I download a lot of songs, but almost exclusively from iTunes or similar, where I can pay for them. (I am prone to fits of guilty conscience, and anyway I am a grownup with a real job so I have no excuse for not buying tracks through legal sources.)

I have a few shady tracks on my iTunes account, like the Neil Young live tracks from the show in Halifax, which I couldn't resist since I was at that show. And a few demos sent to me by a friend, but they were his demos.

And now I've gone and downloaded five tracks by a band called the Ritual. Which I can't really bring myself to feel very bad about since they were recorded sometime between 1979 and about 1983, just before the drummer and the guitarist left to join the Death Cult. (Later renamed the Cult. Perhaps you have heard me speak of them.) (The Ritual guitarist became the Cult's bass player, and I am pretty sure you've heard me speak of him.)

Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is the only way I'll ever get to hear this stuff, but I promise, if I suddenly discover a way to pay for the tracks, I'll do it. In the meantime, this is more or less an exercise in musical archeology, which is always entertaining.

(I believe Shaq said that.)

Anyway. I've mentioned reading some online reviews/commentary about It Might Get Loud. It would be silly for me to argue with the ones I disagree with (except the one that suggested the Edge has pretty good blues chops after all, so he should play like that instead of the way that works for the band he is in) but I have to share this:

A lot of the discussions of the film boil down, at some point, to playing "who would you have cast?" Which, as long as the commenter isn't offended the film makers didn't ask them, is fun.

But I ran into a suggestion, as a substitute for one of the actual three (and I think it was a sub for the Edge):

Noel Gallagher.

Yeah, the guy from Oasis.

This one:

( Video behind the cut. Beware of language. The first minute and a half is quite funny. )

I read that suggestion and had to sit and imagine it for a minute. Early on in the movie, Jack White is asked what he thinks the guitar summit will turn into. "Probably a fistfight," opines Jack.

As we know, nothing of the sort happened. But if Noel Gallagher had been there? Particularly in the place of Edge?

Oh, yeah. There would have been a fistfight. Big time.

Video from Comic Relief a few years ago: Larry finally gets to talk. Well, yell.



You can never tell with the quiet ones...