Vancouver Sun, Ex-MLA queries Christy Clark’s cleavage. This is the stupidest “controversy” I’ve seen or heard about in eons — it’s light-years beyond the whole Obama birth certificate nonsense — but the single worst part about it, in my mind, is the part where David Schrek, after picking on a woman’s outfit, decided to run and blame his wife for raising the issue in the first place.
“I’m not sexist! My wife said the sexist thing first, so it’s not sexist at all!”
Yeah. Nice.
When I first got off the train in Paris at Gare de Lyon five years ago, I felt like I was home. It was the sort of place that was immediately familiar, even though I’d never been there before. I’m firmly convinced this was the product of a childhood steeped in French culture. It was like that in London, too, and for the same reasons: when you have these great cities as the touchstones of your literature and your movies, the sheer volume of media makes the geography real. New York was exactly the same way, except that it might have been even more real, in the sense that for my entire life I’ve been watching TV shows and movies set in New York City, and so much of what happens in those shows somehow seeps out into the wider culture — I think I knew, on an academic level, how much this was true, but I didn’t really understand it until I was riding up the approach to the Queens Midtown tunnel on a Friday night, looking out over the East River, and I realized that I wasn’t really going to encounter anything that was truly strange or dislocating.
“Who?”
This guy:
I first encountered Oliver Swain this past summer. Stephen Quinn was talking about CBC Vancouver’s series of lunchtime concerts — at which Swain played sometime in July — and played this track by way of introducing his music. Driving in the car when this came on, I had to sit through the entire thing, even though I ended up in the parking lot at Wal-Mart with no recollection of why I was there or where I’d been going in the first place.
This is the best version of “Big Machine” I can find on YouTube; unfortunately, most of the other copies are home video shot at concerts with less-than-perfect acoustics. Having said that, I strongly encourage you to run out and buy his album on iTunes right now, because it’s the kind of music Mumford & Sons wish they made.
At the bottom of the Nav Canada NOTAM query page is a box with red text that I’ve been curious about for as long as I can remember:
Note: Under certain conditions being familiar with this section only, before commencing a flight, doesn’t meet CAR 602.71 and AIM-RAC 3.3 requirements. Please review all NOTAM files above for complete information.
I have read through 602.71 and RAC3.3. They offer no clues as to what the “certain conditions” might be, so I’ve always just ignored that phraseology and pulled all the applicable NOTAM files, slowly picking and choosing my way between stuff I care about and stuff I don’t. But I remain curious about that language: this is aviation. Nothing is a part of any process Just Because. There had to be a reason.
The answer, it turns out, is available right here. And it’s my own damn fault for not reading the manual in the first place, because the explanation is actually quite obvious when you stop and think about it. The fact that I had never actually encountered the described phenomenon is a function more of luck, or circumstance.
Interesting, eh?
The title track from the latest studio album (2006). One of the things I love dearly about Colvin is that she’s only inclined to record when she actually feels like she has something to say. This can be frustrating sometimes because you’re forever waiting for something new and interesting — Sarah McLachlan, I’m looking at you — but when the results sound like this it’s oh-so-worth the wait.
Or, my tabdump for 18 September 2011, potentially of interest to some people I know read this blog:
So it turns out we’re going to do a pair of tracks from “A Few Small Repairs.” This one’s been in my mind since last week, when we went out to Alberta (my first time back in two years) for a day and a bit, and I found myself driving down the arrow-straight highways we never see in this part of the world. And for some reason, this was the song that was playing in my head the entire weekend. It’s not about the prairies, and Kansas is a long way from southern Alberta, but for some reason I think about life in small towns and the yearning for escape and, sometimes, the utter futility of the whole thing.
I wished hard enough to hurt
Drove fast enough to catch the moon
But I must have been dreaming again
’cause there’s nothing around the bend
Except for that flat, fine line
Of the Wichita skyline
It turns out there’s no video for this song. You don’t need one.
I recently stumbled upon a (very small) poem by the Jodo Shinshu poet Asahara Saichi:
84,000 delusions
84,000 lights
84,000 joys abounding
I have no idea if Shawn Colvin knew about this poem when she wrote this song. My understanding is that “84,000″ is a number used in Buddhism — not just Jodo Shinshu teachings — as a shorthand for “a lot”, so it isn’t unreasonable to think the song drew some level of inspiration from either the saying or the poem. In this case, Saichi is talking about the great ecstasy that comes with the enlightenment of a severely deluded mind.
Which makes the context for “84,000 Different Delusions” interesting: “A Few Small Repairs” is sometimes described as a concept album exploring the emotions that come in the wake of a divorce, and if you were to think of the idea of divorce (or the ending of a fundamentally flawed and unhappy relationship) as a kind of enlightenment, well, it’s not much of a stretch to see how one could find abounding joy once one sees the light.
Herewith, a collection of links to articles that either helped shape or closely mirror the way I think about what happened a decade ago:
Are you sensing a theme? Then perhaps you’d like to read the ACLU’s new report on the loss of civil liberties in the past decade. It… isn’t pretty.
This is what 11,921 miles and six weeks looks like:
Once again, I have a staggering number of PNRs floating around in my iPhone and one hell of a lot of ground to cover over the next month and a half. And yet, I find this deeply soothing.
