I hate St. Patrick's Day. I always have.
Please don't think because you have turned up to work in a green sweater that I will be happy for me.
I am happy for you.
I am homesick also.
I am also embarrassed that the most Irish of days is about drinking.
I am also annoyed that it's about him.
That guy who ruined a perfectly good matriarchy.
Still, I only ranted at one person today.
I guess after six of them (St Patrick's Day in Nova Scotia), I am mellowing slightly.
If you really care about me on Paddy's Day, just give me the friggin' day off.
'Night.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Thursday, July 29, 2010
On Reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello
I have been reading Coetzee again.
Elizabeth Costello this time.
As usual, I have only the faintest idea what the novel is about.
It takes me a while with Coetzee usually.
In this case, he introduces the story, such as it is, with an attempt to distance the reader from the story a la the deconstructionist trends of the eighties and nineties. After doing that, he then presents a massive novel of ideas. Then he rips a massive shredding rent between the world of literary ideas (as represented by the novel) and the other world of philosophical ideas (as represented by rights) by depicting an elderly Australian novelist -- who achieved fame with her novel of the real 'Marion Bloom' -- midway through her swan song tour of the world. Dipping in and out of the lecture circuit, she insists on talking about vegetarianism and animal rights instead of literature.
In this case, he introduces the story, such as it is, with an attempt to distance the reader from the story a la the deconstructionist trends of the eighties and nineties. After doing that, he then presents a massive novel of ideas. Then he rips a massive shredding rent between the world of literary ideas (as represented by the novel) and the other world of philosophical ideas (as represented by rights) by depicting an elderly Australian novelist -- who achieved fame with her novel of the real 'Marion Bloom' -- midway through her swan song tour of the world. Dipping in and out of the lecture circuit, she insists on talking about vegetarianism and animal rights instead of literature.
She is accompanied by her increasingly bemused physicist son. (Coetzee is a mathematician by trade). Who presumably represents the poor reader.
Because it's Coetzee, it's all very readable and spellbinding, but it is also very annoying to be sitting on the Portland Hills 159 commuter bus at seven in the morning, not very awake, having your mind blown apart by a six page atom bomb of a treatise on how chicken farms are the new Holocaust, and wondering what in the jaysus name is this man trying to tell me right now.
I have decided that Coetzee is getting older (he was in his sixties when he wrote this) and thinking about whether or not there was any point in him having been a writer. I hope I am not wrong, because I will have wasted my time (and more importantly, his) otherwise.
Anyone with an opinion on this novel is invited to share it. Of course, I will have sent it back to the library at that point so it will probably be moot.
This is what the Telegraph (Andrew Marr) said about it:
"In the end, as his heroine confronts death, he has been able to raise the deepest questions through some fictional safeguards - without settling on answers, or defending all the arguments as his. But this is fine, because the attentive reader will have been badly jolted. It is why Coetzee is famous: Elizabeth Costello is no cheap shock. It is a serious one.
The New York Times says this:
Old age is for Coetzee what nausea was for Sartre: our defining condition, the necessary horror that grants us access to a moral existence....... Coetzee's unflinching exploration of this desolate and strangely beautiful terrain represents the cruelest and best use to which literature can be put.
So I guess I am on the right track.
But that is just the purpose of his depiction of the writer Elizabeth Costello. As usual, his protagonist is someone past the height of their powers. However, the ideas she puts forward in a series of lectures are mostly about animals and man's relationship to them. And the suffering that ensues. Usually his books are about the suffering we inflict on one another (humans) through totalitarianism and ideology.
Coetzee is felt by some to be the African Kafka (in a third subsection of the whole compendium of ideas that are not ideas, he has a section in the book which rips the idea of an African writer to shreds, which almost broke my heart... with a final plea to please read Okri who is the only African writer... and throughout the book he gets Costello to talk about Kafka at length).
Coetzee is felt by some to be the African Kafka (in a third subsection of the whole compendium of ideas that are not ideas, he has a section in the book which rips the idea of an African writer to shreds, which almost broke my heart... with a final plea to please read Okri who is the only African writer... and throughout the book he gets Costello to talk about Kafka at length).
Is he trying to write the definitive treatise on himself?
At one point, Coetzee tries to put the two completely disparate themes of the novel together in a lecture by having Costello speak at an Ivy League college and tell them that if she can imagine herself dead, then she can imagine what it's like to be a bat. Or a chimp. Or a chicken. Or a beef steer.
Understanding our own mortality will guide us towards a deeper compassion for life in all its guises kind of thing.
Understanding our own mortality will guide us towards a deeper compassion for life in all its guises kind of thing.
I don't know. I haven't finished and because it is so fantastic, I will probably slow right down to make the most of his artistry and pleasure in tormenting us with ideas.
I also have the distinct sense that he is taking the piss out of Margaret Atwood the whole way through the novel, there's something about Costello that really reminds me of the worst of her....
Whatever. JM Coetzee is probably the greatest writer to have lived while I did. If you haven't read this book, you should, but you should read his earlier stuff first, so you understand where he is coming from. I particularly recommend:
- The Life and Times of Michael K
- The Master of Petersburg
- Disgrace
in that order.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Bitter sweet Sundays
Somebody mentioned on Facebook today that Sundays are so bitter sweet.
True.
I love waking up on a Sunday knowing I don't have to go to work. But round about 4.30pm on a Sunday, I always get a really sad feeling.
I think most people do.
Sundays are such a strange day. They've changed so much over the years (well, if you're a lapsed Catholic living in a country where religion is not part of the DNA they have).
When I was young, Sundays meant you had to go to Mass. Then you had roast beef dinner and listened to the radio. Which meant listening to people drone on about Northern Ireland.
Then you went for a walk. Sometimes we went for a walk with the Queen Parents. Which involved a long walk in Portumna forest park, or somewhere like that (long for a kid, obviously) and then you went to the hotel for a mineral (pop) and a bag of crisps (chips).
Sundays we didn't go walking with the parents, we went to visit Paddy. That also involved a walk. A very very very long walk. And then sometimes a secret trip to the lemonade shop.
Also known as Kellys pub.
But that's a different story.
Then when we got a little older, I went to boarding school. Sundays meant you were getting a visit or not. If you were getting a visit, Sundays were FANTASTIC, until about 4.30pm, when you were sitting in the grimy hotel in Dungarven, having a mineral and a bag of crisps, and you remembered you had to go back to boarding school for another four weeks of misery before you saw your parents again.
I think that's why I get so sad on Sundays.
The brother went to boarding school for six years, and on Sundays he got to come home, bolt his roast beef down, and see his friends, before making a loaf of sandwiches and buying a bag of Pot Noodles and heading back to prison for another week. Four-thirty was round about the time of day he would start on the Queen Mum, wondering whether he could just stay home this time, and not go back to school.
I don't know who was more upset...
As for me, I got to go to secondary school at home, and Mass had been scheduled for Saturdays as well now, so Sunday was a big long teenage lie-in, followed by roast beef of course, then sitting in the playroom watching MTV USA, hosted by FAB Vinnie. Three hours of music videos and desultory conversation with Eileen or whoever else was around.
Then back to school on Monday.
When I went to college, weekends were often spent at home. Get the bus down on a Friday night. Spend Saturday doing laundry or catching up with people. Out Saturday night.
Sundays were when you had to get the bus back to Dublin. If you hadn't cadged a lift with Willie Burns on Saturday night in the pub. Or you couldn't persuade mum to drive you to the train in Tullamore.
Long, wet, boring trips through the midlands (before the motorway was built) in a smokey bus. Then trying to get a bus home to wherever you lived. Culchies roaming the streets of the capital with bags full of lasagne dinners and bags of spuds. Trying to fit into a pub stuffed with bags of clean folded laundry sent with love from Cork and Galway and Portlaoise and Donegal.
If I stayed in Dublin for the weekend, Sundays were a long, boring day of trying to stay warm in whatever hovel I was living in; writing an essay or just trying to find enough money to buy a packet of cigarettes to have something to do.
It was only when I started working that Sundays became a little more interesting. Long brunches in Odessa or somewhere trendy, with all kinds of people popping in and out and enough money to buy the paper and read it with a latte or a pint.
Now we have every second Sunday. This is a second Sunday, which means Kitty and Little 'Un were here for two days of chaos and noise and loud telly and cooking and feeding and whatever activities are on the menu. Then around 4.30pm the doors slam for the last time and the car heads off back to Truro and the dog lies abject at the gate hoping against hope that they're not gone and I pace around the house for an hour trying to find things to do to make the bitter sweet feeling go away.
But it appears on the other Sundays too.
5.33pm. Suddenly, completely dark. Shannon won't come in from the gate. I will go find some nice raw meat to bribe her with.
Even puppies find Sundays bitter sweet...
At least we don't live somewhere where you have to sit quietly and read the bible all day.
True.
I love waking up on a Sunday knowing I don't have to go to work. But round about 4.30pm on a Sunday, I always get a really sad feeling.
I think most people do.
Sundays are such a strange day. They've changed so much over the years (well, if you're a lapsed Catholic living in a country where religion is not part of the DNA they have).
When I was young, Sundays meant you had to go to Mass. Then you had roast beef dinner and listened to the radio. Which meant listening to people drone on about Northern Ireland.
Then you went for a walk. Sometimes we went for a walk with the Queen Parents. Which involved a long walk in Portumna forest park, or somewhere like that (long for a kid, obviously) and then you went to the hotel for a mineral (pop) and a bag of crisps (chips).
Sundays we didn't go walking with the parents, we went to visit Paddy. That also involved a walk. A very very very long walk. And then sometimes a secret trip to the lemonade shop.
Also known as Kellys pub.
But that's a different story.
Then when we got a little older, I went to boarding school. Sundays meant you were getting a visit or not. If you were getting a visit, Sundays were FANTASTIC, until about 4.30pm, when you were sitting in the grimy hotel in Dungarven, having a mineral and a bag of crisps, and you remembered you had to go back to boarding school for another four weeks of misery before you saw your parents again.
I think that's why I get so sad on Sundays.
The brother went to boarding school for six years, and on Sundays he got to come home, bolt his roast beef down, and see his friends, before making a loaf of sandwiches and buying a bag of Pot Noodles and heading back to prison for another week. Four-thirty was round about the time of day he would start on the Queen Mum, wondering whether he could just stay home this time, and not go back to school.
I don't know who was more upset...
As for me, I got to go to secondary school at home, and Mass had been scheduled for Saturdays as well now, so Sunday was a big long teenage lie-in, followed by roast beef of course, then sitting in the playroom watching MTV USA, hosted by FAB Vinnie. Three hours of music videos and desultory conversation with Eileen or whoever else was around.
Then back to school on Monday.
When I went to college, weekends were often spent at home. Get the bus down on a Friday night. Spend Saturday doing laundry or catching up with people. Out Saturday night.
Sundays were when you had to get the bus back to Dublin. If you hadn't cadged a lift with Willie Burns on Saturday night in the pub. Or you couldn't persuade mum to drive you to the train in Tullamore.
Long, wet, boring trips through the midlands (before the motorway was built) in a smokey bus. Then trying to get a bus home to wherever you lived. Culchies roaming the streets of the capital with bags full of lasagne dinners and bags of spuds. Trying to fit into a pub stuffed with bags of clean folded laundry sent with love from Cork and Galway and Portlaoise and Donegal.
If I stayed in Dublin for the weekend, Sundays were a long, boring day of trying to stay warm in whatever hovel I was living in; writing an essay or just trying to find enough money to buy a packet of cigarettes to have something to do.
It was only when I started working that Sundays became a little more interesting. Long brunches in Odessa or somewhere trendy, with all kinds of people popping in and out and enough money to buy the paper and read it with a latte or a pint.
Now we have every second Sunday. This is a second Sunday, which means Kitty and Little 'Un were here for two days of chaos and noise and loud telly and cooking and feeding and whatever activities are on the menu. Then around 4.30pm the doors slam for the last time and the car heads off back to Truro and the dog lies abject at the gate hoping against hope that they're not gone and I pace around the house for an hour trying to find things to do to make the bitter sweet feeling go away.
But it appears on the other Sundays too.
5.33pm. Suddenly, completely dark. Shannon won't come in from the gate. I will go find some nice raw meat to bribe her with.
Even puppies find Sundays bitter sweet...
At least we don't live somewhere where you have to sit quietly and read the bible all day.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Inmytunes 2009: a cornucopia of Canadiana, brought to you by Queenie (and Rich Terfry)
Every year-end for the last few years, people who are members of the mailing list inmyday (of which I am a member, obviously) can put together a playlist of their favourite music of the preceeding year. Then share it with everyone else on the list.
Bingo!!
You start off the new year with a load of new music.
Of course, it being the inmyday Inmytunes compilation, there are rules, and of course it being Inmyday you are allowed to bend them. The original rule was that you had to make a compilation of the top 15 or so songs on your iTunes 'most played' list.
That turned out to be a little embarrassing if you had had a tough year emotionally.
So that quickly morphed into 'most played if I had a hyper-critical audience sitting with me at all times' list. Then as is normal on inmyday everyone just went off and did their own thing anyway.
By that I mean that I understand that sticking to the rules is some people's idea of doing their own thing.
Anyways, I have gotten to hear a lot of music that I would never have heard otherwise, seeing as I don't spend a lot of time buying music or reading about it anymore.
This year I was totally screwed. I think I bought two albums all year. And I gave them away before I ripped them. But I was saved by Buck 65.
Buck, or Rich Terfry as he was named by his mammy and daddy, who live near Enfield which is near here of course, DJs the Drive show on CBC radio 2. The show is for me and people like me.
People who don't like advertising.
People who like to listen to Rich shite on about baseball while they sit in traffic.
People who like the feel of the show, which feels like Rich is bringing in his own records to play for you.
People who want to know what's going on in the Canadian music scene, but who don't have the energy to go to gigs anymore because they don't start till ten pm, which is bedtime chez nous.
So, I cheated on the Inmytunes this year. Basically, anytime Rich and I agreed that a certain tune was a great tune, I made a note of it on a piece of paper I had stuck in the sun vizor (difficult on the highway trips). When I heard him spin it a few more times and we were still agreed that it was a TRULY GREAT tune, I put a circle round it.
Tonight I sat down and bought everything with a circle round it on iTunes.
Note to music promoters.... Rich Terfry moves downloads ... ohmylord he does... every song I bought was a massive spike of downloads, way ahead of everything else on the album.
So thanks, Rich. I really enjoyed this year's compiling.
If you're interested, on the Euro front, he plays Wilco and David Gray and the Waterboys to DEATH. And he's very excited about some woman singer from Dublin right now, whose name keeps escaping me, because he talks really fast when he's excited. But you should send him records. Because he sure sells them if he likes them.
I'm just going to take a moment to flip the playlist back to front. I had started with the electronica-type stuff and then got progressively folkier, but it's not working for me so I'm flipping it round.
Which is incidentally the order in which I downloaded them... I should've been a dj.
Inmytunes 2009
1. The Deep Dark Woods, All the Money I had is Gone (Winter Hours).
This is a very simple little song from a great folk band from Saskatoon. I thought it was pertinent for the year that was in it.
Rich and I dedicate it to all the capitalists out there who are hurtin'...
CBC Radio 2 had the strangest competition this year. The Great Canadian Song Quest. They got people to vote for 13 places (one in each province/ territory) and 13 bands (the same), who then had to write about said place in their province. DDW won the vote in Saskatchewan and wrote a song about Charlie's Bar, which sounds a bit like a Canadian Whelans and is being torn down.
Generally, the songs are a bit meh.... except for Quebec, which was won by...
2. Martha Wainwright, Four Black Sheep in the Snow (CBC Radio 2 Great Canadian Song Quest)
I think Martha missed the memo from Rich that said 'these songs are meant to be cheery for to cheer up Canadians who have lost all their money'. Anyways, I thought PFI would like to hear it, as Martha is 'known to us'.
Isn't it funny the way the guards say that about people. The Mounties don't say that. They just say 'he had a criminal record, that's probably why he got shot'. The guards say 'we don't know why he was shot, but he was 'known to us''.
Weird song. From a weird songstress.
3. David Myles, When it comes my turn (Things have Changed)
I think I am heading into my middle agedness, judging by the first three songs on the list. Or, maybe me and Rich are just feeling a little old arsey this year, what with getting to be married and all.
Not to each other of course.
I hate baseball.
I was about a month ahead of him I think.
Anyway, David is from New Brunswick I think, and he is just back from recording his new album on the SAME CONSOLE in some famous studio in Arizona as was used when Radiohead were there and recorded The Bends.
Which is my least favourite Radiohead album.
I'm shocked an album that miserable was made in the sunshine...
4. The Wooden Sky, The Late King Henry (If I don't come home you'll know I'm gone)
I just like the name of this song. And the tempo is kinda rollicking, maybe nice for kiddies.
Note to parents: Not only did I not put the song I really liked with the swear words on the playlist this year, I put on this song the kiddies might like.
Learning I am...
5. The Duhks, Mighty Storm (Fast Paced World)
I love the Duhks (ducks), who are from Winnipeg, Manitoba and so know a thing or two about weather. This is dedicated to all the Irish weather you`ve been having lately.
Bless.
6. Kathleen Edwards, Sure as Shit (Asking for Flowers)
This was our wedding song. So it goes on the list.
7. Bahamas, Southern Drawl (Pink Strat)
Man of mystery. Very difficult to find out anything about this guy. Apparently he's on tour with Amy Millan, so maybe he will turn up here some night and I won't go. Nice song though. Very smart.
Speaking of...
8. Amy Millan, Baby I (Honey from the Tombs)
Amy, the queen of Canadian pop. The homecoming queen for the nerdy boys. She pops up again later with The Stills. As she says herself: 'together, my own songs and these covers create a bed where the lonely can rest for a little bit, where little hopes, little deaths, and big loves are flammable but fallow'
Amy's fab. We are big fans, me and Rich. He nearly passes out when he talks to her.
9. Jenn Grant, Dreamer (Orchestra for the Moon)
Jenn has a voice like hot chocolate. Which is apt, because this song mentions her having a date at Chocolate Lake, where Queenie and Himself used to live (and dream), so it had to be included.
10. Cuff the Duke, Long Road (Sidelines of the City)
Okay, last of the alt: country, Canadiana type songs.
Onto more inmyday-ish type music.
11. The New Pornographers, My Rights versus Yours (Challengers)
According to the blog metatag, The New Pornographers are AC Newman and a group of ridiculously talented people uniquely equipped to realize his musical ambitions. You may know their album, Mass Romantic. It was considered the best indie album in Canada until Arcade Fire released Neon Bible. This song is from another album called Challengers. Either of them are worth a listen if you dont know these guys.
12. Metric, Sick Muse (Fantasies)
Emily Haines and James Shaw, the singer and guitarist in Metric also play with Broken Social Scene. Emily is one of those effortlessly cool blonde rockstars that make me feel completely inadequate, but despite that, I love this song.
13. Stars, This Charming Man (Nightsongs)
A lush retake of a Smiths classic, by the people who also bring you Broken Social Scene.
14. Stars, Your ex-Lover is dead (Set yourself on fire)
When there`s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
`Xactly.
Plus there are cellos. I do like a bit of cello in my eloquent, Montreal-based pop music. Even if they did support Coldplay recently.
... ah, the almighty dollar does strange things to us all. But these are the best lyrics on the compilation:
I`m not sorry I met you.
I`m not sorry it`s over.
I`m not sorry there`s nothing to say.
15. Holy Fuck, Lovely Allen (LP)
From the boys who are known as the Toronto evil super group, who brought you the Cowboy Cat t-shirt. Anyone who wants to buy me one is very welcome to do so!!!
Reminds me of God is an Astronaut a bit.
Anyways, folks, that`s it for another year. Hope you like them.
Bingo!!
You start off the new year with a load of new music.
Of course, it being the inmyday Inmytunes compilation, there are rules, and of course it being Inmyday you are allowed to bend them. The original rule was that you had to make a compilation of the top 15 or so songs on your iTunes 'most played' list.
That turned out to be a little embarrassing if you had had a tough year emotionally.
So that quickly morphed into 'most played if I had a hyper-critical audience sitting with me at all times' list. Then as is normal on inmyday everyone just went off and did their own thing anyway.
By that I mean that I understand that sticking to the rules is some people's idea of doing their own thing.
Anyways, I have gotten to hear a lot of music that I would never have heard otherwise, seeing as I don't spend a lot of time buying music or reading about it anymore.
This year I was totally screwed. I think I bought two albums all year. And I gave them away before I ripped them. But I was saved by Buck 65.
Buck, or Rich Terfry as he was named by his mammy and daddy, who live near Enfield which is near here of course, DJs the Drive show on CBC radio 2. The show is for me and people like me.
People who don't like advertising.
People who like to listen to Rich shite on about baseball while they sit in traffic.
People who like the feel of the show, which feels like Rich is bringing in his own records to play for you.
People who want to know what's going on in the Canadian music scene, but who don't have the energy to go to gigs anymore because they don't start till ten pm, which is bedtime chez nous.
So, I cheated on the Inmytunes this year. Basically, anytime Rich and I agreed that a certain tune was a great tune, I made a note of it on a piece of paper I had stuck in the sun vizor (difficult on the highway trips). When I heard him spin it a few more times and we were still agreed that it was a TRULY GREAT tune, I put a circle round it.
Tonight I sat down and bought everything with a circle round it on iTunes.
Note to music promoters.... Rich Terfry moves downloads ... ohmylord he does... every song I bought was a massive spike of downloads, way ahead of everything else on the album.
So thanks, Rich. I really enjoyed this year's compiling.
If you're interested, on the Euro front, he plays Wilco and David Gray and the Waterboys to DEATH. And he's very excited about some woman singer from Dublin right now, whose name keeps escaping me, because he talks really fast when he's excited. But you should send him records. Because he sure sells them if he likes them.
I'm just going to take a moment to flip the playlist back to front. I had started with the electronica-type stuff and then got progressively folkier, but it's not working for me so I'm flipping it round.
Which is incidentally the order in which I downloaded them... I should've been a dj.
Inmytunes 2009
1. The Deep Dark Woods, All the Money I had is Gone (Winter Hours).
This is a very simple little song from a great folk band from Saskatoon. I thought it was pertinent for the year that was in it.
Rich and I dedicate it to all the capitalists out there who are hurtin'...
CBC Radio 2 had the strangest competition this year. The Great Canadian Song Quest. They got people to vote for 13 places (one in each province/ territory) and 13 bands (the same), who then had to write about said place in their province. DDW won the vote in Saskatchewan and wrote a song about Charlie's Bar, which sounds a bit like a Canadian Whelans and is being torn down.
Generally, the songs are a bit meh.... except for Quebec, which was won by...
2. Martha Wainwright, Four Black Sheep in the Snow (CBC Radio 2 Great Canadian Song Quest)
I think Martha missed the memo from Rich that said 'these songs are meant to be cheery for to cheer up Canadians who have lost all their money'. Anyways, I thought PFI would like to hear it, as Martha is 'known to us'.
Isn't it funny the way the guards say that about people. The Mounties don't say that. They just say 'he had a criminal record, that's probably why he got shot'. The guards say 'we don't know why he was shot, but he was 'known to us''.
Weird song. From a weird songstress.
3. David Myles, When it comes my turn (Things have Changed)
I think I am heading into my middle agedness, judging by the first three songs on the list. Or, maybe me and Rich are just feeling a little old arsey this year, what with getting to be married and all.
Not to each other of course.
I hate baseball.
I was about a month ahead of him I think.
Anyway, David is from New Brunswick I think, and he is just back from recording his new album on the SAME CONSOLE in some famous studio in Arizona as was used when Radiohead were there and recorded The Bends.
Which is my least favourite Radiohead album.
I'm shocked an album that miserable was made in the sunshine...
4. The Wooden Sky, The Late King Henry (If I don't come home you'll know I'm gone)
I just like the name of this song. And the tempo is kinda rollicking, maybe nice for kiddies.
Note to parents: Not only did I not put the song I really liked with the swear words on the playlist this year, I put on this song the kiddies might like.
Learning I am...
5. The Duhks, Mighty Storm (Fast Paced World)
I love the Duhks (ducks), who are from Winnipeg, Manitoba and so know a thing or two about weather. This is dedicated to all the Irish weather you`ve been having lately.
Bless.
6. Kathleen Edwards, Sure as Shit (Asking for Flowers)
This was our wedding song. So it goes on the list.
7. Bahamas, Southern Drawl (Pink Strat)
Man of mystery. Very difficult to find out anything about this guy. Apparently he's on tour with Amy Millan, so maybe he will turn up here some night and I won't go. Nice song though. Very smart.
Speaking of...
8. Amy Millan, Baby I (Honey from the Tombs)
Amy, the queen of Canadian pop. The homecoming queen for the nerdy boys. She pops up again later with The Stills. As she says herself: 'together, my own songs and these covers create a bed where the lonely can rest for a little bit, where little hopes, little deaths, and big loves are flammable but fallow'
Amy's fab. We are big fans, me and Rich. He nearly passes out when he talks to her.
9. Jenn Grant, Dreamer (Orchestra for the Moon)
Jenn has a voice like hot chocolate. Which is apt, because this song mentions her having a date at Chocolate Lake, where Queenie and Himself used to live (and dream), so it had to be included.
10. Cuff the Duke, Long Road (Sidelines of the City)
Okay, last of the alt: country, Canadiana type songs.
Onto more inmyday-ish type music.
11. The New Pornographers, My Rights versus Yours (Challengers)
According to the blog metatag, The New Pornographers are AC Newman and a group of ridiculously talented people uniquely equipped to realize his musical ambitions. You may know their album, Mass Romantic. It was considered the best indie album in Canada until Arcade Fire released Neon Bible. This song is from another album called Challengers. Either of them are worth a listen if you dont know these guys.
12. Metric, Sick Muse (Fantasies)
Emily Haines and James Shaw, the singer and guitarist in Metric also play with Broken Social Scene. Emily is one of those effortlessly cool blonde rockstars that make me feel completely inadequate, but despite that, I love this song.
13. Stars, This Charming Man (Nightsongs)
A lush retake of a Smiths classic, by the people who also bring you Broken Social Scene.
14. Stars, Your ex-Lover is dead (Set yourself on fire)
When there`s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
`Xactly.
Plus there are cellos. I do like a bit of cello in my eloquent, Montreal-based pop music. Even if they did support Coldplay recently.
... ah, the almighty dollar does strange things to us all. But these are the best lyrics on the compilation:
I`m not sorry I met you.
I`m not sorry it`s over.
I`m not sorry there`s nothing to say.
15. Holy Fuck, Lovely Allen (LP)
From the boys who are known as the Toronto evil super group, who brought you the Cowboy Cat t-shirt. Anyone who wants to buy me one is very welcome to do so!!!
Reminds me of God is an Astronaut a bit.
Anyways, folks, that`s it for another year. Hope you like them.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
I guess the memories are in my head anyways.
I just hate when i break my stuff.
I don't have many things, and they are all very precious, because they are all steeped in memories.
But I guess the memories are in my head anyways...
So I just broke the beautiful dusky purple and blue, square pottery plate I hauled all the way from the Dingle peninsula back to Dublin in 1996, and then to Birr in 2005, and then to Canada in 2007 in a suitcase (worrying about it the whole way across the Atlantic).
The one I had Himself build me a tall tall bookshelf with a special shelf to display it on in 2008. Because it is so precious to me.
The one made by the potter who had studied glazing techniques in Japan and is now living in the shadow of Mount Brandon.
Not Louis Mulcahy. Not his pottery factory.
The one with the glaze on it that looks like Mount Brandon.
The one I looked at every day.
Reason?
I was rearranging my books and picking out ones to sell so I can buy some more, because I am already running out of things to read, despite getting four books for Christmas.
And I took one too many off that shelf they were sharing with my plate, and the rest slid down and knocked it off its stand.
I knew I shouldn't be selling my books.
GODDAMN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ah well, it could be worse.
It is the only thing left of Kerry that I had but.
I guess I will just have to make a pilgrimage back there.
Of course, I can't find the potter....
I don't have many things, and they are all very precious, because they are all steeped in memories.
But I guess the memories are in my head anyways...
So I just broke the beautiful dusky purple and blue, square pottery plate I hauled all the way from the Dingle peninsula back to Dublin in 1996, and then to Birr in 2005, and then to Canada in 2007 in a suitcase (worrying about it the whole way across the Atlantic).
The one I had Himself build me a tall tall bookshelf with a special shelf to display it on in 2008. Because it is so precious to me.
The one made by the potter who had studied glazing techniques in Japan and is now living in the shadow of Mount Brandon.
Not Louis Mulcahy. Not his pottery factory.
The one with the glaze on it that looks like Mount Brandon.
The one I looked at every day.
Reason?
I was rearranging my books and picking out ones to sell so I can buy some more, because I am already running out of things to read, despite getting four books for Christmas.
And I took one too many off that shelf they were sharing with my plate, and the rest slid down and knocked it off its stand.
I knew I shouldn't be selling my books.
GODDAMN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ah well, it could be worse.
It is the only thing left of Kerry that I had but.
I guess I will just have to make a pilgrimage back there.
Of course, I can't find the potter....
Sunday, December 20, 2009
The weekend before Christmas is really the Christmas
Big snowfall tonight.
Maybe two thirds the way up the ruler.
Standard ruler... 30 cm jobbie. Like in school.
OK. Mathematics starting.
Mathematics in the sense of one of Mr. Hensey's classes (fifth year honours) ... I am hanging out with my friends talking about the weekend, but I am also supposed to be doing maths.
The driveway is 100 metres long and four metres wide.
A little wider at either end.
The snow shovel is 45 cm wide.
I think.
Why am I writing a math post? This is not good.
Side to side. From lawn to woodland.
Over and back.
Over and back.
Pick up the spill.
Then over and back.
By my calculations (which are usually wrong and need John Brown to fix), that's 222 shovel swipes across the driveway.
Over and back.
And then scooping up spill.
Say, another 150.
That's 372 shovel swipes.
I'm pretty sure it was more than that.
Put the shovel into the snow with the blade aligned to the edge of what's left, and push along the line to the far side. Turn on your heel, and clean up the spill on the way back.
Then put the shovel back down against the clean line of the snow.
Scraaaape.
In early November snows it's mostly rain with some ice in it, so when you shovel it's like pushing water up a hill.
Heavy and wet and no fun at all.
After January, it's all ice pellets and misery. The shovel stops up on the ice and pushes into your sternum and it's hard and miserable to move it.
After I finished doing it seven times last year I found out all the men on my road used to watch me shovel ice off the driveway, and wonder at how Himself got himself such a hardcore woman...
But there's a couple of weeks in December when it's light and fluffy and perfect if it snows.
And shovelling is a meditation.
That was tonight.
I think about a lot of stuff when I shovel the driveway in December.
I feel so lucky that I get to do it. I need to think about a lot of stuff.
Today I was thinking about Ireland, because I was very lucky this Sunday; people from Ireland were all home suffering from pre-Christmas hangovers, so they were vulnerable and I got to talk to a few of them for quite the chat.
Well, I have to admit that during the section of the driveway from the road to the garbage box (about 20 side to sides), I thought about how difficult it is to build and maintain a mature and loving relationship with stepchildren who are the powerless pawns in a ridiculous battle of control freakery being waged by their mother against their father and me.
But I think about that a lot and if I write about it she uses it in court proceedings, so we'll just move on, shall we.
From the garbage box to the rhododendron bush, which is not very far, the rhododendron bush being near the garbage box for a reason, I thought about Ireland.
The lights on Grafton St.
Winking against the wet paving.
The weekend that was.
What a weekend that must have been. Everyone finally had time to go out and chew down on a few things.
I'm sorry I missed that weekend.
I would like to fly home for that weekend and then leave before Christmas. Would that be so awful?
How well everyone is doing!
Everyone I love has survived.
The recession. The revelations. The floods. The everything.
For my New Year's wish, I would like everyone I know in Ireland to be in charge of Ireland now.
It's the fact that you're not that's making your teeth ache boys and girls.
The demography is on your side, guys...
I was halfway up the section from the rhodo bush to the back of the car (the long, difficult, middle section), when I had to put the shovel down and go get the dog.
Neighbours again, not approving of the dog being allowed to wander about in what is ostensibly a wilderness backyard area...
She's half wolf for fuck's sake... what do you think she's going to do in the snow.
I got feedback on the blog tonight and was told the dog bits were boring, which I knew, but dog bits = life right now, so maybe up the ante in the life is a priority for soon.
After Christmas, as Himself would say.
Anyways, got the dog, got back in the rhythm, over and back, over and back, pick up the spills, over and back, when I noticed it was blowing snow, like it said in the warning.
Your late thirties and early forties are all about 'blowing snow' aren't they.
You shovel and shovel and shovel.
And then you get up the next morning and all the snow is drifted up against the car again.
There you go, metaphor for next year.
I'm going to post this without a resolution because I am drunk and blind (dog ate my glasses)..
I will amend if something comes to me.
Oh yeah.... make Christmas about the kids for once eh?!
Maybe two thirds the way up the ruler.
Standard ruler... 30 cm jobbie. Like in school.
OK. Mathematics starting.
Mathematics in the sense of one of Mr. Hensey's classes (fifth year honours) ... I am hanging out with my friends talking about the weekend, but I am also supposed to be doing maths.
The driveway is 100 metres long and four metres wide.
A little wider at either end.
The snow shovel is 45 cm wide.
I think.
Why am I writing a math post? This is not good.
Side to side. From lawn to woodland.
Over and back.
Over and back.
Pick up the spill.
Then over and back.
By my calculations (which are usually wrong and need John Brown to fix), that's 222 shovel swipes across the driveway.
Over and back.
And then scooping up spill.
Say, another 150.
That's 372 shovel swipes.
I'm pretty sure it was more than that.
Put the shovel into the snow with the blade aligned to the edge of what's left, and push along the line to the far side. Turn on your heel, and clean up the spill on the way back.
Then put the shovel back down against the clean line of the snow.
Scraaaape.
In early November snows it's mostly rain with some ice in it, so when you shovel it's like pushing water up a hill.
Heavy and wet and no fun at all.
After January, it's all ice pellets and misery. The shovel stops up on the ice and pushes into your sternum and it's hard and miserable to move it.
After I finished doing it seven times last year I found out all the men on my road used to watch me shovel ice off the driveway, and wonder at how Himself got himself such a hardcore woman...
But there's a couple of weeks in December when it's light and fluffy and perfect if it snows.
And shovelling is a meditation.
That was tonight.
I think about a lot of stuff when I shovel the driveway in December.
I feel so lucky that I get to do it. I need to think about a lot of stuff.
Today I was thinking about Ireland, because I was very lucky this Sunday; people from Ireland were all home suffering from pre-Christmas hangovers, so they were vulnerable and I got to talk to a few of them for quite the chat.
Well, I have to admit that during the section of the driveway from the road to the garbage box (about 20 side to sides), I thought about how difficult it is to build and maintain a mature and loving relationship with stepchildren who are the powerless pawns in a ridiculous battle of control freakery being waged by their mother against their father and me.
But I think about that a lot and if I write about it she uses it in court proceedings, so we'll just move on, shall we.
From the garbage box to the rhododendron bush, which is not very far, the rhododendron bush being near the garbage box for a reason, I thought about Ireland.
The lights on Grafton St.
Winking against the wet paving.
The weekend that was.
What a weekend that must have been. Everyone finally had time to go out and chew down on a few things.
I'm sorry I missed that weekend.
I would like to fly home for that weekend and then leave before Christmas. Would that be so awful?
How well everyone is doing!
Everyone I love has survived.
The recession. The revelations. The floods. The everything.
For my New Year's wish, I would like everyone I know in Ireland to be in charge of Ireland now.
It's the fact that you're not that's making your teeth ache boys and girls.
The demography is on your side, guys...
I was halfway up the section from the rhodo bush to the back of the car (the long, difficult, middle section), when I had to put the shovel down and go get the dog.
Neighbours again, not approving of the dog being allowed to wander about in what is ostensibly a wilderness backyard area...
She's half wolf for fuck's sake... what do you think she's going to do in the snow.
I got feedback on the blog tonight and was told the dog bits were boring, which I knew, but dog bits = life right now, so maybe up the ante in the life is a priority for soon.
After Christmas, as Himself would say.
Anyways, got the dog, got back in the rhythm, over and back, over and back, pick up the spills, over and back, when I noticed it was blowing snow, like it said in the warning.
Your late thirties and early forties are all about 'blowing snow' aren't they.
You shovel and shovel and shovel.
And then you get up the next morning and all the snow is drifted up against the car again.
There you go, metaphor for next year.
I'm going to post this without a resolution because I am drunk and blind (dog ate my glasses)..
I will amend if something comes to me.
Oh yeah.... make Christmas about the kids for once eh?!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
December temperatures going up and down like the proverbial's knickers
Plus 5. Then minus 6. Then plus 2 and sleet. Then minus 12 with the windchill. Then plus 6 and rain. Then back down to minus 6 with no precipitation this time.
Suede coat and shiny boots. Then winter parka and snow boots. Then raincoat and wellies. Then back to the suede coat. With a shawl wrapped round it.
This morning I walked the dog in the suede coat and shiny boots and about 5 minutes out the heavens opened (I didn't notice it was cloudy because it was pitch-black dark) and poured on me, and then I had no time to change and had to drive to work in wet suede and damp patent boots, which didn't dry out properly at work because I am in the office of crazy air, so they froze (with my feet in them, and they are very pointy) when the temperature dropped to minus 15 this evening and I couldn't get the car to heat up before I actually arrived home in it.
FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
So now I am sitting at the computer (in a heated house) wearing my polar socks and my polar fleece with a hot water bottle pressed up against my internal organs, and I AM STILL COLD.
I wish it was March 31st, I said to Himself.
I wish it was May 31st, Himself said back.
'Xactly.
And it's to be colder tomorrow, apparently.
And the work Christmas do is on.
Although it being the Canadian work do, I can wear my polar fleece and snow boots if I want, and it will be all over by 6.30pm anyways. None of your Irish wear a nice dress and stay out late rubbish over here in the North Pole.
It could be worse. I could have said yes when Himself wanted to move to Alberta and I could be dealing with minus 40.
Yes, that is a feasible temperature for human existence.
No, I don't know how they do it.
So I guess I should just suck it up.
I'm all in a heap because it's coming up to Christmas and I should be in Ireland and I'm not nor will I be and I'm very sad and I keep trying to push it out of my head and it keeps pushing its way back in.
Persistently. Like Shannon when she knows the reason you want her on the deck is because there's steak on the grill.
And of course Christmas in the 'new' house is not very exciting when it's just two people and no presents to open.
We bought a new water system instead. I guess I'll just tie a ribbon round a glass and hydrate all day.
Still, I shouldn't moan. We had lots of excitement and fun with the wedding and our trip to Cuba.
It's just that was THEN.
And this is NOW.
And Himself just came back from the postbox with a key that means there's a parcel (although I think it's presents for someone else) in the parcel box but he didn't know what it was so now someone has to go back down there.
IN THE COLD!!!!!!
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Maybe I'll feel better at the weekend. When it gets closer to Christmas.
Suede coat and shiny boots. Then winter parka and snow boots. Then raincoat and wellies. Then back to the suede coat. With a shawl wrapped round it.
This morning I walked the dog in the suede coat and shiny boots and about 5 minutes out the heavens opened (I didn't notice it was cloudy because it was pitch-black dark) and poured on me, and then I had no time to change and had to drive to work in wet suede and damp patent boots, which didn't dry out properly at work because I am in the office of crazy air, so they froze (with my feet in them, and they are very pointy) when the temperature dropped to minus 15 this evening and I couldn't get the car to heat up before I actually arrived home in it.
FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
So now I am sitting at the computer (in a heated house) wearing my polar socks and my polar fleece with a hot water bottle pressed up against my internal organs, and I AM STILL COLD.
I wish it was March 31st, I said to Himself.
I wish it was May 31st, Himself said back.
'Xactly.
And it's to be colder tomorrow, apparently.
And the work Christmas do is on.
Although it being the Canadian work do, I can wear my polar fleece and snow boots if I want, and it will be all over by 6.30pm anyways. None of your Irish wear a nice dress and stay out late rubbish over here in the North Pole.
It could be worse. I could have said yes when Himself wanted to move to Alberta and I could be dealing with minus 40.
Yes, that is a feasible temperature for human existence.
No, I don't know how they do it.
So I guess I should just suck it up.
I'm all in a heap because it's coming up to Christmas and I should be in Ireland and I'm not nor will I be and I'm very sad and I keep trying to push it out of my head and it keeps pushing its way back in.
Persistently. Like Shannon when she knows the reason you want her on the deck is because there's steak on the grill.
And of course Christmas in the 'new' house is not very exciting when it's just two people and no presents to open.
We bought a new water system instead. I guess I'll just tie a ribbon round a glass and hydrate all day.
Still, I shouldn't moan. We had lots of excitement and fun with the wedding and our trip to Cuba.
It's just that was THEN.
And this is NOW.
And Himself just came back from the postbox with a key that means there's a parcel (although I think it's presents for someone else) in the parcel box but he didn't know what it was so now someone has to go back down there.
IN THE COLD!!!!!!
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Maybe I'll feel better at the weekend. When it gets closer to Christmas.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
The eye of the storm is quiet... maybe too quiet.
Sunday evening. Six thirty. Fed. Tidy kitchen. Very tidy house for reasons that are not good.
If this was the spring or summer I would be outside pottering around, but it's the winter so it's dark and cold and I am stuck inside with four hours to kill before I can go to bed with the only book in the house I haven't read which is a Patrick White, which is of course depressing the hell out of me. Which only a Patrick White novel can do.
Did he have a terrible mother?
All his novels (well not so much The Tree of Man, which is great) are about beastly women who struggle against the boredom of 1950s Sydney/ some beautiful-sounding outback station. Their children hate them. Their husbands are gauche hillbillies who get most of the sympathy.
And they take forever to die.
The current one is The Eye of the Storm. I'm not complaining about the writing, mind. it's beautiful...
... I just don't understand his obsession with the subject matter.
I'm reading an online essay about him now... apparently I am looking at the book through the wrong end of the analytical telescope... it's about Elizabeth Hunter reconciling living and dying and trying to find that 'eye of the storm', inner peace and a touch of the divine.
I had decided that the eye of the storm was the peace her family had at the beginning of the end... as in when you get to the eye of the storm, even though there is the rest of the storm to get through, it's usually not as bad as the first bit...
No wonder I didn't get a first in college!
As well as not being able to 'see', I cannot see right now, because Shannon ate my glasses the other morning.
Despite having searched the house (and tidied it on the way and having found lots of things I thought I had lost forever, including a 'congratulations on your engagement' card I should have mailed in September) I cannot find my old glasses so I am blind for the foreseeable.
I have to wait till January to get a new pair on the health insurance... major pain in the ass.
Why on earth would a dog eat a pair of glasses?
We have managed to spend another weekend without setting foot in a mall, which is one of the things I try to do coming up to Christmas, and we got our new water system installed, the dog spayed, and quite a few odds and ends done, so we are feeling pretty good about things.
And my online campaign against the crapness of the company that we bought Little 'Un's present from seems to have worked because they emailed us today and said they were express shipping it to us in time for Christmas.
So thanks to them for that.
While I was outside trying to find chores to do to get some of the sunshine into me, Himself spent some of the afternoon looking at land online.
The reason he did this (I think) is because when we checked MLS the other day to see the sale price of the house next door (which is for sale again), we noticed that an acre of swampy land down the road by the lake was for sale (for $180,000, FFS!). Then we noticed that a beautiful swathe of land by the seashore, that we walk on regularly is for sale (for $600,000 FFS!!) and that got us thinking and talking about how ludicrous the price of land is around here.
So today, Himself started looking at land in other parts of the province, and found 100 acres in Victoria County, Cape Breton, for $29,000.
Remote woodland now, not Cabot Trail picturesque.
But still.
Good price.
I hope he doesn't want it for Christmas!
I'm kinda broke right now.
But he reckons this will be the land for the compound.
Those of you who know us know about the compound.
The compound started out as a game, round about the time I read Cormac MacCarthy's The Road, which scared the bejaysus out of me.
The compound was an ongoing project we discussed while having a beer in the yard in the summer. The compound is where we'll go when the world starts to go pear-shaped.
We'd need some land. Build an off-grid housing complex. Invite some friends to come along if things ever got tough for them/ they could get there.
Some of our Irish friends got to thinking about solar-powered sailing ships... to get to the compound (although they'd probably end up sailing around a lot).
It got popular, so we decided that everyone had to have a skill.
People got really into this... we had beekeepers, librarians, flax-spinners, (hunters, gatherers, gardeners, cooks, etc).
What would we put there?
Fuel, food, weapons (yes dear).
You can while away a number of hours quite pleasantly talking about the compound.
In the summer.
When everything's good in the world.
When the winter comes, Himself gets bored and starts scouting for land.
At least this year, it's Cape Breton.
Last year, it was Northern New Brunswick.
Anyways, applications for residency at the compound if the times get too bad can be submitted to us on the back of a renewable energy source diagrammatic.
Just mail it to Eagle.
We're looking for engineers.
Specifically electrical engineers.
And, yes, I'm still in charge.
Somebody has to be and it was my idea.
That's why.
Apart from issues regarding perimeter security, of course.
And so the winter begins... a long, long drawn-out effort to not get too bored in the evening and end up gnawing my own arm off for something to do.
I need a hobby.
Any suggestions?
Nothing too expensive, I'm really broke right now.
And knitting I think is beyond me.
And nothing chewable of course.
For obvious reasons.
If this was the spring or summer I would be outside pottering around, but it's the winter so it's dark and cold and I am stuck inside with four hours to kill before I can go to bed with the only book in the house I haven't read which is a Patrick White, which is of course depressing the hell out of me. Which only a Patrick White novel can do.
Did he have a terrible mother?
All his novels (well not so much The Tree of Man, which is great) are about beastly women who struggle against the boredom of 1950s Sydney/ some beautiful-sounding outback station. Their children hate them. Their husbands are gauche hillbillies who get most of the sympathy.
And they take forever to die.
The current one is The Eye of the Storm. I'm not complaining about the writing, mind. it's beautiful...
... I just don't understand his obsession with the subject matter.
I'm reading an online essay about him now... apparently I am looking at the book through the wrong end of the analytical telescope... it's about Elizabeth Hunter reconciling living and dying and trying to find that 'eye of the storm', inner peace and a touch of the divine.
I had decided that the eye of the storm was the peace her family had at the beginning of the end... as in when you get to the eye of the storm, even though there is the rest of the storm to get through, it's usually not as bad as the first bit...
No wonder I didn't get a first in college!
As well as not being able to 'see', I cannot see right now, because Shannon ate my glasses the other morning.
Despite having searched the house (and tidied it on the way and having found lots of things I thought I had lost forever, including a 'congratulations on your engagement' card I should have mailed in September) I cannot find my old glasses so I am blind for the foreseeable.
I have to wait till January to get a new pair on the health insurance... major pain in the ass.
Why on earth would a dog eat a pair of glasses?
We have managed to spend another weekend without setting foot in a mall, which is one of the things I try to do coming up to Christmas, and we got our new water system installed, the dog spayed, and quite a few odds and ends done, so we are feeling pretty good about things.
And my online campaign against the crapness of the company that we bought Little 'Un's present from seems to have worked because they emailed us today and said they were express shipping it to us in time for Christmas.
So thanks to them for that.
While I was outside trying to find chores to do to get some of the sunshine into me, Himself spent some of the afternoon looking at land online.
The reason he did this (I think) is because when we checked MLS the other day to see the sale price of the house next door (which is for sale again), we noticed that an acre of swampy land down the road by the lake was for sale (for $180,000, FFS!). Then we noticed that a beautiful swathe of land by the seashore, that we walk on regularly is for sale (for $600,000 FFS!!) and that got us thinking and talking about how ludicrous the price of land is around here.
So today, Himself started looking at land in other parts of the province, and found 100 acres in Victoria County, Cape Breton, for $29,000.
Remote woodland now, not Cabot Trail picturesque.
But still.
Good price.
I hope he doesn't want it for Christmas!
I'm kinda broke right now.
But he reckons this will be the land for the compound.
Those of you who know us know about the compound.
The compound started out as a game, round about the time I read Cormac MacCarthy's The Road, which scared the bejaysus out of me.
The compound was an ongoing project we discussed while having a beer in the yard in the summer. The compound is where we'll go when the world starts to go pear-shaped.
We'd need some land. Build an off-grid housing complex. Invite some friends to come along if things ever got tough for them/ they could get there.
Some of our Irish friends got to thinking about solar-powered sailing ships... to get to the compound (although they'd probably end up sailing around a lot).
It got popular, so we decided that everyone had to have a skill.
People got really into this... we had beekeepers, librarians, flax-spinners, (hunters, gatherers, gardeners, cooks, etc).
What would we put there?
Fuel, food, weapons (yes dear).
You can while away a number of hours quite pleasantly talking about the compound.
In the summer.
When everything's good in the world.
When the winter comes, Himself gets bored and starts scouting for land.
At least this year, it's Cape Breton.
Last year, it was Northern New Brunswick.
Anyways, applications for residency at the compound if the times get too bad can be submitted to us on the back of a renewable energy source diagrammatic.
Just mail it to Eagle.
We're looking for engineers.
Specifically electrical engineers.
And, yes, I'm still in charge.
Somebody has to be and it was my idea.
That's why.
Apart from issues regarding perimeter security, of course.
And so the winter begins... a long, long drawn-out effort to not get too bored in the evening and end up gnawing my own arm off for something to do.
I need a hobby.
Any suggestions?
Nothing too expensive, I'm really broke right now.
And knitting I think is beyond me.
And nothing chewable of course.
For obvious reasons.
Friday, October 30, 2009
The day before the day the gate opens
So tomorrow is Hallowe'en.
First one in the forever house.
Hopefully, tomorrow I'll get to hand out treats to a generation of kids that we will watch grow up. There are a lot of kids in our area, and they're mostly very small yet, so we will have at least twelve years of them before they grow up and leave.
I say I because I'm home alone again, Himself is in New Brunswick decontaminating a pulp mill or some equally necessary but truly gross activity. I am never quite sure.
It's kind of annoying because we had a date for Hallowe'en.
We don't have many dates.
Also, I've pointed out that we are going on our honeymoon in seven days so to make sure to come home before next Friday to get a ride to the airport.
Several times.
It's not that I think he'll forget, he's as excited about our first 'doing nothing' vacation in four years as I am. (As opposed to Ireland/ camping which are 'doing too much' vacations).
I just feel that pointing it out twice a day on the phone while they're all listening makes it easier for him to stand up to the company if/ when they decide he needs to stay in NB.
"She'll kill all of us."
They all know me.
So it works.
My codename is Grumpy, apparently.
Which is good.
Better than Pushover, anyways.
So tonight is three nights before the full moon. The moon is bright and the sky is clear. The temperature dropped twelve degrees when the sun went down and the omens are good for the gates opening tomorrow night.
We shall find out if the house is haunted.
We..
I mean me..
Whoooooooo...
First one in the forever house.
Hopefully, tomorrow I'll get to hand out treats to a generation of kids that we will watch grow up. There are a lot of kids in our area, and they're mostly very small yet, so we will have at least twelve years of them before they grow up and leave.
I say I because I'm home alone again, Himself is in New Brunswick decontaminating a pulp mill or some equally necessary but truly gross activity. I am never quite sure.
It's kind of annoying because we had a date for Hallowe'en.
We don't have many dates.
Also, I've pointed out that we are going on our honeymoon in seven days so to make sure to come home before next Friday to get a ride to the airport.
Several times.
It's not that I think he'll forget, he's as excited about our first 'doing nothing' vacation in four years as I am. (As opposed to Ireland/ camping which are 'doing too much' vacations).
I just feel that pointing it out twice a day on the phone while they're all listening makes it easier for him to stand up to the company if/ when they decide he needs to stay in NB.
"She'll kill all of us."
They all know me.
So it works.
My codename is Grumpy, apparently.
Which is good.
Better than Pushover, anyways.
So tonight is three nights before the full moon. The moon is bright and the sky is clear. The temperature dropped twelve degrees when the sun went down and the omens are good for the gates opening tomorrow night.
We shall find out if the house is haunted.
We..
I mean me..
Whoooooooo...
Friday, July 24, 2009
Is my secret Knuckelrock shame really shameful? Or should I give myself up to Twitter?
While playing my nine new iTunes songs, the iTunes made me listen to Nickelback's If today was your last day?
Although I note there isn't a question mark in the song title.
Which kinda sums it all up for me.
I am the kind of person who thinks that you should put a friggin' question mark at the end of a question.
Therefore, Nickelback OFFENDS ME.
Because they are the worst kind of kock rock.
I am a girl who knows her Killers from her Kings of Leon; her Cary Brothers from her Kathleen; her K'naan from her Kaos.
But still, when I listen to a Nickelback song, my body escapes from me and sort of twists around like a teenager at his first disco.
Which further OFFENDS ME.
Because I am being marketed.
And I friggin' hate being marketed.
On a sidebar, I also noticed that the song is edging towards that christian rock crap that's going on in Canada right now, a Nickelback finds god kinda thing which I was really hoping NB would ignore.... but no... they've crunched the numbers and moved slightly to the righteous.
But anyways, I have a secret Nickelback shame. Which I can indulge because I am pledged to a man who thinks NB is great. And ToaD. Which is also a secret shame of mine - Santa Monica being the Chocolate Lake anthem of course.
And 3 Doors Down.
But I really hate 3DD.
And Snow Patrol.
Retch...
So here's the rub.
I have a Twitter account.
I would die rather than tweet @Queenie_NS Nickelback playing while Queenie blogs her latest intellectual thoughts.
Why?
Because Twitter is a haiku-type format. That calls for irony or outrage or one of the other pithy emotions.
And NB is a personal, unexplainable vice that needs context in order to set up the necessary irony.
Which is not possible in a haiku.
Well not for my brain anyway.... submissions welcome btw....
I'm reading a great book at the moment, about the social history of Europe from 1648 - 1815.
It's so heavy I have to steal one of Himself's pillows to prop it up to read in bed.
The chapter I read last night was about manufacturing, and it extolled the invention of the cotton ginny/ jenny as the pivotal moment in wealth creation.
I can understand something like that.
Holy fuck... Mozart's Requiem just ended and faded into Nickelback. Waaagh!! Although nice to see iTunes is still as ironic as ever.
Apart from the fact that this fact was beaten into me in school by Jim Loftus (figuratively beaten of course), it's obvious. It created cheap clothes. It increased the role of the state in the affairs of the individual because manufacturers needed workers. It created opportunities for home-based work, which helped break not only the power of some of the guilds (thus unleashing innovation), but the concept of serfdom and the seigneur, and consequently helped ease the plight of European peasants.
Of course when you think about it, as Jim Loftus made us do back in the eighties, it was the reason for the huge spike in slave traffic as well.
So, it changed the way the world operated. It improved things for some poor people and disimproved things for others and ruined the lives of still others completely.
Nowadays, people talk about social media like it's the new cotton jinny.
I wish someone would write a book and explain why being able to talk to everyone all the time on a number of platforms is good for me. And bad for others. And devastating for another group.
Or vice versa.
Or just recommend the book if it's already written.
So I won't feel like I'm being marketed.
Which I have felt since 2001.
I suppose this is how you feel when you are living through a seismic shift in something or other.
I guess I better just live every day like it's my last... like a good littel knuckeldragger!
Although I note there isn't a question mark in the song title.
Which kinda sums it all up for me.
I am the kind of person who thinks that you should put a friggin' question mark at the end of a question.
Therefore, Nickelback OFFENDS ME.
Because they are the worst kind of kock rock.
I am a girl who knows her Killers from her Kings of Leon; her Cary Brothers from her Kathleen; her K'naan from her Kaos.
But still, when I listen to a Nickelback song, my body escapes from me and sort of twists around like a teenager at his first disco.
Which further OFFENDS ME.
Because I am being marketed.
And I friggin' hate being marketed.
On a sidebar, I also noticed that the song is edging towards that christian rock crap that's going on in Canada right now, a Nickelback finds god kinda thing which I was really hoping NB would ignore.... but no... they've crunched the numbers and moved slightly to the righteous.
But anyways, I have a secret Nickelback shame. Which I can indulge because I am pledged to a man who thinks NB is great. And ToaD. Which is also a secret shame of mine - Santa Monica being the Chocolate Lake anthem of course.
And 3 Doors Down.
But I really hate 3DD.
And Snow Patrol.
Retch...
So here's the rub.
I have a Twitter account.
I would die rather than tweet @Queenie_NS Nickelback playing while Queenie blogs her latest intellectual thoughts.
Why?
Because Twitter is a haiku-type format. That calls for irony or outrage or one of the other pithy emotions.
And NB is a personal, unexplainable vice that needs context in order to set up the necessary irony.
Which is not possible in a haiku.
Well not for my brain anyway.... submissions welcome btw....
I'm reading a great book at the moment, about the social history of Europe from 1648 - 1815.
It's so heavy I have to steal one of Himself's pillows to prop it up to read in bed.
The chapter I read last night was about manufacturing, and it extolled the invention of the cotton ginny/ jenny as the pivotal moment in wealth creation.
I can understand something like that.
Holy fuck... Mozart's Requiem just ended and faded into Nickelback. Waaagh!! Although nice to see iTunes is still as ironic as ever.
Apart from the fact that this fact was beaten into me in school by Jim Loftus (figuratively beaten of course), it's obvious. It created cheap clothes. It increased the role of the state in the affairs of the individual because manufacturers needed workers. It created opportunities for home-based work, which helped break not only the power of some of the guilds (thus unleashing innovation), but the concept of serfdom and the seigneur, and consequently helped ease the plight of European peasants.
Of course when you think about it, as Jim Loftus made us do back in the eighties, it was the reason for the huge spike in slave traffic as well.
So, it changed the way the world operated. It improved things for some poor people and disimproved things for others and ruined the lives of still others completely.
Nowadays, people talk about social media like it's the new cotton jinny.
I wish someone would write a book and explain why being able to talk to everyone all the time on a number of platforms is good for me. And bad for others. And devastating for another group.
Or vice versa.
Or just recommend the book if it's already written.
So I won't feel like I'm being marketed.
Which I have felt since 2001.
I suppose this is how you feel when you are living through a seismic shift in something or other.
I guess I better just live every day like it's my last... like a good littel knuckeldragger!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Despite using the word extraordinary too much, Queenie is pleased
Something extraordinary happened to me today.
I only use the word extraordinary because on reflection I used it a little too much in the experience I am talking about.
A woman I know and deeply respect agreed to my request, nay demand, that she interview me for a podcast series she's doing for the Mount (MSVU - Halifax) about political communication.
She had mentioned the series during a phone call about something else.
I hopped on it immediately, which is unlike me. Usually I wait to be asked.
But now I am 39 probably indefinitely, and the askings aren't getting any thicker (unlike the effing mosquitoes in our yard), so along with my youth I am losing my shame about these things.
Anyway, she agreed and I sent her some ideas, and then she came along the other day with her laptop and her headphones and after we had had a long conversation about current political events, I had to arrange myself and speak into the middle distance about my time with the Rainbow Coalition (Irish government 1995 - 97), and I was having a bad day and all the prep I had planned hadn't got done, so I explained that I was going to have to wing it.
Some day I will do something that I don't pull out of my ass at the very last second.
Some day.
Anyway, it was extraordinary. Instead of silence, the words just poured out of me.... except for the bits where I was supposed to point out my learnings. I struggled with them. I used the word extraordinary too much and I lost my train of though trying to describe the internecine bullshit of the post-ceasefire handshake ballet....
But she urged me on with her eyes.
First learning is, I am a media whore like everyone else. I didn't want to stop talking. In fact, if I hadn't had to go pick up Little 'Un from his art class I would be still talking.
She sent me the podcast tonight. I listened to it twice.
It was extraordinary.
It was coherent. The nuances of some of the issues are conspicuous by their absence, but I was speaking to an audience who knows nothing of coalition. Unlike us Irish.
Second learning, I cannot believe how much I remember of those days. They must be seared on my brain.
Third learning, I got a strange feeling about myself when I listened back.
Normally when I talk about that time I am careful to point out how junior I was, how irrelevant I was. This time, there wasn't time to explain all that, so I chose my words carefully to try to get the message across and I did to a certain extent, but I also heard myself describe situations where I think now I probably did help out in the sticking together of the various bits of that communications experience.
It strikes me as extraordinary that it took a woman teacher from that great woman's university to record the unrecorded work of a woman who didn't even realise she was doing something useful back in 1996.
And so it joins the canon of the quiet work that women do everywhere that is never celebrated.
The second part of my recent media whoredom is my imminent guest appearance on another Halifax blog tomorrow. I had to write a letter to my home town... Dublin.
It's a little mawkish. But I love the piece.
I'm dying to see what the reaction is.
I hope I am busy in work tomorrow or else I will spend all day fretting over comments/ lack of comments.
MEDIA WHORE!!!
I'm thinking though... maybe now I am nearly forty I can finally find the confidence to like my voice. I don't mean my actual voice. I like my voice, even though it is a little lispy on air, which it isn't in my head.
Is it lispy?
I mean my opinions.
stop laughing, people from Ireland...
and people from Nova Scotia...
No, that's not right. Yous are all laughing too much.
I mean my reflections on my experiences. Which are legion, and pretty interesting in a boring kind of way.
I think I heard something in that podcast.
I think I wrote something in that piece.
I think I might have something useful to say.
Finally.
I only use the word extraordinary because on reflection I used it a little too much in the experience I am talking about.
A woman I know and deeply respect agreed to my request, nay demand, that she interview me for a podcast series she's doing for the Mount (MSVU - Halifax) about political communication.
She had mentioned the series during a phone call about something else.
I hopped on it immediately, which is unlike me. Usually I wait to be asked.
But now I am 39 probably indefinitely, and the askings aren't getting any thicker (unlike the effing mosquitoes in our yard), so along with my youth I am losing my shame about these things.
Anyway, she agreed and I sent her some ideas, and then she came along the other day with her laptop and her headphones and after we had had a long conversation about current political events, I had to arrange myself and speak into the middle distance about my time with the Rainbow Coalition (Irish government 1995 - 97), and I was having a bad day and all the prep I had planned hadn't got done, so I explained that I was going to have to wing it.
Some day I will do something that I don't pull out of my ass at the very last second.
Some day.
Anyway, it was extraordinary. Instead of silence, the words just poured out of me.... except for the bits where I was supposed to point out my learnings. I struggled with them. I used the word extraordinary too much and I lost my train of though trying to describe the internecine bullshit of the post-ceasefire handshake ballet....
But she urged me on with her eyes.
First learning is, I am a media whore like everyone else. I didn't want to stop talking. In fact, if I hadn't had to go pick up Little 'Un from his art class I would be still talking.
She sent me the podcast tonight. I listened to it twice.
It was extraordinary.
It was coherent. The nuances of some of the issues are conspicuous by their absence, but I was speaking to an audience who knows nothing of coalition. Unlike us Irish.
Second learning, I cannot believe how much I remember of those days. They must be seared on my brain.
Third learning, I got a strange feeling about myself when I listened back.
Normally when I talk about that time I am careful to point out how junior I was, how irrelevant I was. This time, there wasn't time to explain all that, so I chose my words carefully to try to get the message across and I did to a certain extent, but I also heard myself describe situations where I think now I probably did help out in the sticking together of the various bits of that communications experience.
It strikes me as extraordinary that it took a woman teacher from that great woman's university to record the unrecorded work of a woman who didn't even realise she was doing something useful back in 1996.
And so it joins the canon of the quiet work that women do everywhere that is never celebrated.
The second part of my recent media whoredom is my imminent guest appearance on another Halifax blog tomorrow. I had to write a letter to my home town... Dublin.
It's a little mawkish. But I love the piece.
I'm dying to see what the reaction is.
I hope I am busy in work tomorrow or else I will spend all day fretting over comments/ lack of comments.
MEDIA WHORE!!!
I'm thinking though... maybe now I am nearly forty I can finally find the confidence to like my voice. I don't mean my actual voice. I like my voice, even though it is a little lispy on air, which it isn't in my head.
Is it lispy?
I mean my opinions.
stop laughing, people from Ireland...
and people from Nova Scotia...
No, that's not right. Yous are all laughing too much.
I mean my reflections on my experiences. Which are legion, and pretty interesting in a boring kind of way.
I think I heard something in that podcast.
I think I wrote something in that piece.
I think I might have something useful to say.
Finally.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Being Dave Gorman-ish
Dave Gorman is a British comedian who made a name for himself by finding all (well, enough for a tv show) the other Dave Gormans in the world and then going to meet them.
I thought of him the other day when I googled myself (not out of vanity, it was a work thing..... no really it was...), and I was not only not the only person with my name in the googliverse, but the other one (who is a healthcare worker in Saskatchewan apparently) topped me in the results.
Queenie lost the top spot in her own SEO project... doesn't bode well for her future in deh world of deh online ...
But actually, after the shock, I was really thrilled. I have a very unusual name, so finding an exact namesake was pretty cool after about eight years of intermittent searching.
So then this evening I thought... Twitter has a search function...
And I'm able to blog because Himself and Little 'Un have gone fishing without me. Not that I wasn't invited. But it was that kind of invitation you get after they've spent four hours in the shed getting two rods ready and preparing the worms for trout and the thingummies for mackarel just in case, and discussed possible spots for both possibilities and packed the car and put on their fishing boots and are heading out the door sort of pretending I am welcome to come along.
So I said no.
Because if I were to go there would be delays because there would have to be blankets and chairs and thermos', and strawberry shortcake and all kinds of shenanigans. Which is why I don't get invited in the first place.
So it's all good.
I went mackarel fishing once and caught about fifty and it truly was the coolest thing I've ever done apart from taking the hooks out of their poor mouths and killing them.
Anyways, back to Twitter... where nobody dies... unless they're tweeting from Iran.
First of all I put my surname in the search engine and came up with someone who loved my brother's online tennis commentary from Wimbledon so much they posted it to Twitter.
Tennis?
Tennis!!!!!!!!!!!
D'ya have strahwbrees widdat, Baz?
So then I got myself orientated and typed my surname into the Find People engine which is what I meant to do (although it is always nice to see my brother online).
Aaron from Dallas, known as GoPearl, is an artist and writer who works hard saving companies money on their telecommunications. And only tweets about that. He sounds like a typical corporate dick, which is a pity because he's probably miserable (well I would be if I was an artist that had to spend all my time being a corporate dick).
Aaron, what you need to do dude, is to engage in the family tradition of sarcasm loaded with irony in your tweeting, in order to survive. Probably wouldn't save the companies that much money though.
300 followers.
Such a waste of a perfectly good following...
Benjamin from Arizona, otherwise known as Skulljammer is a comic book writer and has been up for 54 hours meeting deadlines.
120 followers. (plus me now so 121).
Dave won't say where he's from but he's moaning about the absence of UK adapters and he sounds like a Brit. He's here for a good time, not a long time.
34 followers.
Probably should vote for mr cameron next time then dave, if you're so fucking jingoistic you can't buy a universal adapter, yet so embarrased you can't put BRIT on your profile.
Matt from Phillie State doesn't like to use his full 140 chtrs. 'chillin'. 'summer'. 'witness'. etc. Having said that, he mourns the passing of Harry Kalas, the celebrated Phillie sports commentator who passed away during a commentary recently.
34 followers too.
A man of few words.
Must be from the Queen Dad branch of our surname tree.
Scott, also known as Mr. Blur, who is from a phone number rather than a place, is an avid cyclist who is tired of people thinking the world is their ashtray.
31 followers.
Well, guess what, Scott, me and my big fuck-off SUV, we're tired of people thinking the world is their velodrome.
Shannon, otherwise known as Supergrrrl, from Toronto is funny. And the first girl on the list.
30 followers. One of which is The Onion.
Attagirl!!!
John is my personal favourite. He appears to be in Iran, and he has the mullet to blend in well. But he's no Persian so far as I can see.
Give me liberty or give me death.
28 followers.
Here's a thought. You could actually pretend you were somewhere you weren't and tweet about it and get away with it, couldn't you... or am I missing some major Twitter honesty protocol.
This is my problem with Twitter.
That and the fact that the person from The Coast who is tweeting from the virgin mudfest is either really stressed or getting really drunk and incomprehensible, so even if I wanted to memorise the tweets and pretend I was at the concert I might make a big faux pas.... but then I could just pretend I was drunk....
which really is the key issue I have with twitter.
there is no truth protocol when you are dealing with 140 characters or less.
Having said that, look at all the nice people with whom I share DNA whom I have tracked down in just one hour.
There are pages and pages and pages of people with my surname on Twitter.
Follow one. Just for the hell of it.
Me, I'd go for the BeachBandito, otherwise known as Bruce.
That's me when I'm old.
Without the beard obviously.
I thought of him the other day when I googled myself (not out of vanity, it was a work thing..... no really it was...), and I was not only not the only person with my name in the googliverse, but the other one (who is a healthcare worker in Saskatchewan apparently) topped me in the results.
Queenie lost the top spot in her own SEO project... doesn't bode well for her future in deh world of deh online ...
But actually, after the shock, I was really thrilled. I have a very unusual name, so finding an exact namesake was pretty cool after about eight years of intermittent searching.
So then this evening I thought... Twitter has a search function...
And I'm able to blog because Himself and Little 'Un have gone fishing without me. Not that I wasn't invited. But it was that kind of invitation you get after they've spent four hours in the shed getting two rods ready and preparing the worms for trout and the thingummies for mackarel just in case, and discussed possible spots for both possibilities and packed the car and put on their fishing boots and are heading out the door sort of pretending I am welcome to come along.
So I said no.
Because if I were to go there would be delays because there would have to be blankets and chairs and thermos', and strawberry shortcake and all kinds of shenanigans. Which is why I don't get invited in the first place.
So it's all good.
I went mackarel fishing once and caught about fifty and it truly was the coolest thing I've ever done apart from taking the hooks out of their poor mouths and killing them.
Anyways, back to Twitter... where nobody dies... unless they're tweeting from Iran.
First of all I put my surname in the search engine and came up with someone who loved my brother's online tennis commentary from Wimbledon so much they posted it to Twitter.
Tennis?
Tennis!!!!!!!!!!!
D'ya have strahwbrees widdat, Baz?
So then I got myself orientated and typed my surname into the Find People engine which is what I meant to do (although it is always nice to see my brother online).
Aaron from Dallas, known as GoPearl, is an artist and writer who works hard saving companies money on their telecommunications. And only tweets about that. He sounds like a typical corporate dick, which is a pity because he's probably miserable (well I would be if I was an artist that had to spend all my time being a corporate dick).
Aaron, what you need to do dude, is to engage in the family tradition of sarcasm loaded with irony in your tweeting, in order to survive. Probably wouldn't save the companies that much money though.
300 followers.
Such a waste of a perfectly good following...
Benjamin from Arizona, otherwise known as Skulljammer is a comic book writer and has been up for 54 hours meeting deadlines.
120 followers. (plus me now so 121).
Dave won't say where he's from but he's moaning about the absence of UK adapters and he sounds like a Brit. He's here for a good time, not a long time.
34 followers.
Probably should vote for mr cameron next time then dave, if you're so fucking jingoistic you can't buy a universal adapter, yet so embarrased you can't put BRIT on your profile.
Matt from Phillie State doesn't like to use his full 140 chtrs. 'chillin'. 'summer'. 'witness'. etc. Having said that, he mourns the passing of Harry Kalas, the celebrated Phillie sports commentator who passed away during a commentary recently.
34 followers too.
A man of few words.
Must be from the Queen Dad branch of our surname tree.
Scott, also known as Mr. Blur, who is from a phone number rather than a place, is an avid cyclist who is tired of people thinking the world is their ashtray.
31 followers.
Well, guess what, Scott, me and my big fuck-off SUV, we're tired of people thinking the world is their velodrome.
Shannon, otherwise known as Supergrrrl, from Toronto is funny. And the first girl on the list.
30 followers. One of which is The Onion.
Attagirl!!!
John is my personal favourite. He appears to be in Iran, and he has the mullet to blend in well. But he's no Persian so far as I can see.
Give me liberty or give me death.
28 followers.
Here's a thought. You could actually pretend you were somewhere you weren't and tweet about it and get away with it, couldn't you... or am I missing some major Twitter honesty protocol.
This is my problem with Twitter.
That and the fact that the person from The Coast who is tweeting from the virgin mudfest is either really stressed or getting really drunk and incomprehensible, so even if I wanted to memorise the tweets and pretend I was at the concert I might make a big faux pas.... but then I could just pretend I was drunk....
which really is the key issue I have with twitter.
there is no truth protocol when you are dealing with 140 characters or less.
Having said that, look at all the nice people with whom I share DNA whom I have tracked down in just one hour.
There are pages and pages and pages of people with my surname on Twitter.
Follow one. Just for the hell of it.
Me, I'd go for the BeachBandito, otherwise known as Bruce.
That's me when I'm old.
Without the beard obviously.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Universal engager with the private
What a lovely occasion: Alice Munro celebrated in Trinity College Dublin (my alma mater of course... and the Queen Dad's.... and Gypsy's now too) for winning a prize awarded to her by a panel chaired by Jane Smiley, who was interviewed by Colm Toibin about that choice.
If I wasn't so delighted about the choice, I'd have Da Envee...
You can read about it here:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0626/1224249575138.html
If I wasn't so delighted about the choice, I'd have Da Envee...
You can read about it here:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0626/1224249575138.html
Friday, June 12, 2009
A Neck like a Jockey's B****x
As they would say at home.
GM has I mean.
General Motors, I'm talking about.
Or Government Motors as they call it now.
Here's their ad about the fact that they had to get a multi-billion dollar bailout from the taxpayers of the USA and Canada. I'm posting this mainly for the European readership - we have this advertisement inflicted on us approximately every twelve minutes if we are sad enough to be watching cable television.
The similarities with the all-American Budweiser beer commercials are obvious - they even have the thundering hooves of the American Mustang (which is a competing brand, no??) ... I wonder do they know they shoot mustangs nowadays.
Nice to see they're spending my money on getting down to business.... We're not going out of business, we're getting down to business.
Oh you are, are you? WTF were you doing up to now?
See, see, we have a photo of a solar panel in our ad, that means our cars don't use gas.
They just sold the Hummer brand to a Chinese company.
Roll on the resource wars...
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/06/02/new-gm-ad-breaks-online/
This ad makes me so mad I could spit. And its ubiquitousness means that it is being hard-wired into people who make their cultural decisions from televisual images..... which appears to be most people these days.
Terrifying manipulation of the people using their own money.
Can't we ban this stuff?
I mean, we ban drugs?
This is worse.
GM has I mean.
General Motors, I'm talking about.
Or Government Motors as they call it now.
Here's their ad about the fact that they had to get a multi-billion dollar bailout from the taxpayers of the USA and Canada. I'm posting this mainly for the European readership - we have this advertisement inflicted on us approximately every twelve minutes if we are sad enough to be watching cable television.
The similarities with the all-American Budweiser beer commercials are obvious - they even have the thundering hooves of the American Mustang (which is a competing brand, no??) ... I wonder do they know they shoot mustangs nowadays.
Nice to see they're spending my money on getting down to business.... We're not going out of business, we're getting down to business.
Oh you are, are you? WTF were you doing up to now?
See, see, we have a photo of a solar panel in our ad, that means our cars don't use gas.
They just sold the Hummer brand to a Chinese company.
Roll on the resource wars...
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/06/02/new-gm-ad-breaks-online/
This ad makes me so mad I could spit. And its ubiquitousness means that it is being hard-wired into people who make their cultural decisions from televisual images..... which appears to be most people these days.
Terrifying manipulation of the people using their own money.
Can't we ban this stuff?
I mean, we ban drugs?
This is worse.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Nevermind what I felt about Nevermind
One of the problems with writing a personal blog is that you generally aren't near a computer when you are having slightly better than shallow thoughts. And I do my thinking in the car, or when I can't sleep, which makes even scribbling things down on a piece of paper difficult.
So, even when I have managed to figure something out, by the time I get round to blogging about it, I've usually forgotten what it was.
Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't know if this post is going anywhere.
But it's the journey, boys and girls...
We were in the car on Sunday, driving through the radio wasteland that is the Annapolis Valley, so I put on Nevermind and we listened to it for the first time in a long time.
I think Nevermind is the only album I own whose opening track brings me right back to the moment I heard it for the first time.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It is November 1991. I am in my room in the GMB in Trinity. A friend up from Galway is raving about his newest tape. Accent Monkey is here and other people are coming and going as usual and we play it and it is fantastic so we play it six more times and then the girl upstairs (the one who has the enormously loud orgasms with someone called T-aaa-dddhhh--gggg-hhhh!!!!! twice a week) bangs on the floor so we stop.
Then the movie Singles came out a few months later. Set in Seattle, home of Nirvana, it made the twenty-something struggle to fit into the world of work and bills and adulthood hopelessly romantic, and we all thought we'd like to be Seattle grunge slacker green creatives who live in way cool co-op apartments and drink Starbucks coffee.
Well, I did.
While trying to find an adequate definition of the word 'slacker', I found this post from what could be described as a very early blog. It's called Barefoot Jim's Flat. Like Barefoot Jim, I've never considered the word slacker as describing someone who is 'workshy', unlike him I've always seen it as being in some way 'responsibility shy'.
It's hard to believe all that angst and hope and trepidation was swirling around my head nearly eighteen years ago.
It's also hard to believe I ever aspired to drinking Starbucks coffee, but there you go...
It's even harder to believe I'm still getting away with being a slacker. Even though it's not a word I can say outside my head anymore, and I had to move to Atlantic Canada (Capital of the Slacker Universe) to haul my ass back onto the slacker waggon train...
...because slacker's a dirty word these days...
Why, I don't know.
Look at the end result of all the running around and huffing and puffing and wheeling and dealing we did between 1996 - 2008.
What did we achieve that we could not have achieved in a more sustainable way and at a slightly slower pace?
I hope I never get taken in like that again.
I want to grow old and be a slacker Walmart greeter.
So, even when I have managed to figure something out, by the time I get round to blogging about it, I've usually forgotten what it was.
Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't know if this post is going anywhere.
But it's the journey, boys and girls...
We were in the car on Sunday, driving through the radio wasteland that is the Annapolis Valley, so I put on Nevermind and we listened to it for the first time in a long time.
I think Nevermind is the only album I own whose opening track brings me right back to the moment I heard it for the first time.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It is November 1991. I am in my room in the GMB in Trinity. A friend up from Galway is raving about his newest tape. Accent Monkey is here and other people are coming and going as usual and we play it and it is fantastic so we play it six more times and then the girl upstairs (the one who has the enormously loud orgasms with someone called T-aaa-dddhhh--gggg-hhhh!!!!! twice a week) bangs on the floor so we stop.
Then the movie Singles came out a few months later. Set in Seattle, home of Nirvana, it made the twenty-something struggle to fit into the world of work and bills and adulthood hopelessly romantic, and we all thought we'd like to be Seattle grunge slacker green creatives who live in way cool co-op apartments and drink Starbucks coffee.
Well, I did.
While trying to find an adequate definition of the word 'slacker', I found this post from what could be described as a very early blog. It's called Barefoot Jim's Flat. Like Barefoot Jim, I've never considered the word slacker as describing someone who is 'workshy', unlike him I've always seen it as being in some way 'responsibility shy'.
It's hard to believe all that angst and hope and trepidation was swirling around my head nearly eighteen years ago.
It's also hard to believe I ever aspired to drinking Starbucks coffee, but there you go...
It's even harder to believe I'm still getting away with being a slacker. Even though it's not a word I can say outside my head anymore, and I had to move to Atlantic Canada (Capital of the Slacker Universe) to haul my ass back onto the slacker waggon train...
...because slacker's a dirty word these days...
Why, I don't know.
Look at the end result of all the running around and huffing and puffing and wheeling and dealing we did between 1996 - 2008.
What did we achieve that we could not have achieved in a more sustainable way and at a slightly slower pace?
I hope I never get taken in like that again.
I want to grow old and be a slacker Walmart greeter.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Alice Munro wins Man Booker International Prize
Hooray!! The Man Booker International Committee has decided to honour Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer this year.
Here's a piece from The Chronicle Herald: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1124082.html
Everything I ever needed to know about being a woman I read in an Alice Munro story. Her writing has so much insight into femininity, being in a relationship, getting older, and just being a woman in today's world.
She is one of the greats.
And she's just the sweetest little old lady nowadays... when she's on the CBC news (as she is whenever she wins a prize) Peter Mansbridge just melts.
If you are near Trinity College on June 25th, when she gets her prize, give her a little wave from me and tell her I love her!!
And in other exciting female CanLit news, Anne Michaels has a new novel coming out this year, a long-awaited follow up to Fugitive Pieces.
Here's a piece from The Chronicle Herald: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1124082.html
Everything I ever needed to know about being a woman I read in an Alice Munro story. Her writing has so much insight into femininity, being in a relationship, getting older, and just being a woman in today's world.
She is one of the greats.
And she's just the sweetest little old lady nowadays... when she's on the CBC news (as she is whenever she wins a prize) Peter Mansbridge just melts.
If you are near Trinity College on June 25th, when she gets her prize, give her a little wave from me and tell her I love her!!
And in other exciting female CanLit news, Anne Michaels has a new novel coming out this year, a long-awaited follow up to Fugitive Pieces.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Wolfram Alpha know nahtink!
I tried Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine, that's apparently not a search engine. There's a great article in The Guardian about it today, which says (and I'll try not to do a Maureen Dowd on this) that asking Alpha something is like asking someone sitting in a room full of idiots savant. In other words, if you ask a question and one of the IS knows the subject you'll get the dish on it, but if the expert IS is not in the room, the answer is 'huh?'.
So I typed in my hometown and got Egyptian currency, the birr.
I typed in Halifax and found out that the city is 52m above sea level.
I typed in my date of birth and learned that I was born on the same day as Beck.
I don't care to learn any of those facts. If I did, I would've bothered remembering them the last time I heard them.
Still, it's very excellent for doing hard sums - you just type in the equation - so I added it to the Favourites list anyway. Check it out.
Competition is good.
Even for people who don't do evil.
So I typed in my hometown and got Egyptian currency, the birr.
I typed in Halifax and found out that the city is 52m above sea level.
I typed in my date of birth and learned that I was born on the same day as Beck.
I don't care to learn any of those facts. If I did, I would've bothered remembering them the last time I heard them.
Still, it's very excellent for doing hard sums - you just type in the equation - so I added it to the Favourites list anyway. Check it out.
Competition is good.
Even for people who don't do evil.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Goddamn Mercury... you devil you....
We have a joke in the office. The joke is Queenie knows about astrology, and when weird planetary alignments occur, she warns everyone in the office.
And they all laugh at the weird Irish woman in the office.
And then it all goes Peter Tong because the SHIT IS REAL!
It's kinda like a weird grown-up-lady version of telling zombie stories in the tent with just a flashlight at summer camp.
Before you go for that last trip to the toilet pits....
So, last week, I let the Office LayDeez know... mercury is going retrograde again.
Three times a year.
Six weeks a time.
Plus the turbulence four days fore and aft.
That's a lotta days a year.
Retrograde Mercury's like a poltergeist - cars, computers, electronics, contracts, job offers, all that kind of necessary shit... it all goes pear-shaped. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....psssssssssst... stuff breaks down, blows out, messes up... things you think are legally nailed suddenly take off and fly through the atmosphere.
You just avoid avoid avoid.
I've been pretty good at avoiding it, but the Universe has been gunning for me for a while as I have been floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee for far too long.
Today the little bastard got me.
Queenie had a day off.
Queenie's Day Off.
By Queenie.
5.40am. Get up. Shower. Put work clothes on.
6.10am. Drive Himself to work because Albert the Station Wagon is at the doctor with a potentially extremely expensive light on and a desire to stall constantly.
6.20am. Get to Himself's work 30 minutes early because Himself hates to be late.
Sit in carpark because it's raining and I still love him too much to make him stand in the rain despite the fact that I could still be in bed asleep.
6.47am. Leave carpark and drive 275km to Antigonish. Notice there are no other cars on the road because it's the Friday of a bank holiday weekend and everyone else is winding down, Nova Scotia-style.
9.18am. Get to Antigonish one hour early for meeting. Drive around Antigonish looking for nice alternative Fair Trade-type cafe for breakfast.
9.55am. Give up and order Tim Horton's Bacon Breakfast sandwich with no cheese.
10.05am. Eat THBBs with cheese.
10.06am. Gag on cheese.
10.10am. Try to pull out of Antigonish Main St. onto Hwy 104 at weird Yield Junction where speed limit is supposed to be 70kmh.
I have to paste this, because I can't write it again:
I've just come off my favourite highway - the 104 highway of death - and some cnut in a tandem truck just veered over and put me out of my lane, and put me ahead of the path of an suv doing about 150 so I just put my foot down and closed my eyes and said goodbye to you all.
After a moment the suv started beeping like crazy so I reckon I got ahead of him and woke him up.
O joyous life!!
That is the third time this has happened to me on this stretch of road.
Anyways..... I have a mad adrenalin rush on now!!!!!!! Jibber jibber jibber.......
1030am. Facilitate meeting between ten engineering types who have no intention of ever fucking agreeing about anything.
Get them to agree on what they disagree on. Facilitation 101.
11.59am. The weekend starts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12.01am. The car won't start.
Thirty minutes, three sets of cable, and a conclave of engineers later, the car starts, but I have to drive to Halifax without stopping to strengthen the battery and I only have half a tank of gas.
3.38pm. Glide into the Ultramar on Victoria Rd. on fumes, fill the car, pee (oh bliss), get a coffee, get a water, get a bar of chocolate, pay $80 for the lot, start the car again.
3.39pm. It starts!!!!!!!!!!!
And I would remind you boys and girls, that I am alive at this point, having nearly died earlier.
4.00pm. Pick up Himself at work where I left him in the rain nine hours earlier. Albert the Station Waggon needs a new fuel pump. $1200. Minimum. Plus $300 for the spark plugs.
Goddamn Mercury... you devil you.. you got me this time.....
But I'm ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Happy Victoria Day everyone... it's not about her, it's about VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!
And they all laugh at the weird Irish woman in the office.
And then it all goes Peter Tong because the SHIT IS REAL!
It's kinda like a weird grown-up-lady version of telling zombie stories in the tent with just a flashlight at summer camp.
Before you go for that last trip to the toilet pits....
So, last week, I let the Office LayDeez know... mercury is going retrograde again.
Three times a year.
Six weeks a time.
Plus the turbulence four days fore and aft.
That's a lotta days a year.
Retrograde Mercury's like a poltergeist - cars, computers, electronics, contracts, job offers, all that kind of necessary shit... it all goes pear-shaped. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....psssssssssst... stuff breaks down, blows out, messes up... things you think are legally nailed suddenly take off and fly through the atmosphere.
You just avoid avoid avoid.
I've been pretty good at avoiding it, but the Universe has been gunning for me for a while as I have been floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee for far too long.
Today the little bastard got me.
Queenie had a day off.
Queenie's Day Off.
By Queenie.
5.40am. Get up. Shower. Put work clothes on.
6.10am. Drive Himself to work because Albert the Station Wagon is at the doctor with a potentially extremely expensive light on and a desire to stall constantly.
6.20am. Get to Himself's work 30 minutes early because Himself hates to be late.
Sit in carpark because it's raining and I still love him too much to make him stand in the rain despite the fact that I could still be in bed asleep.
6.47am. Leave carpark and drive 275km to Antigonish. Notice there are no other cars on the road because it's the Friday of a bank holiday weekend and everyone else is winding down, Nova Scotia-style.
9.18am. Get to Antigonish one hour early for meeting. Drive around Antigonish looking for nice alternative Fair Trade-type cafe for breakfast.
9.55am. Give up and order Tim Horton's Bacon Breakfast sandwich with no cheese.
10.05am. Eat THBBs with cheese.
10.06am. Gag on cheese.
10.10am. Try to pull out of Antigonish Main St. onto Hwy 104 at weird Yield Junction where speed limit is supposed to be 70kmh.
I have to paste this, because I can't write it again:
I've just come off my favourite highway - the 104 highway of death - and some cnut in a tandem truck just veered over and put me out of my lane, and put me ahead of the path of an suv doing about 150 so I just put my foot down and closed my eyes and said goodbye to you all.
After a moment the suv started beeping like crazy so I reckon I got ahead of him and woke him up.
O joyous life!!
That is the third time this has happened to me on this stretch of road.
Anyways..... I have a mad adrenalin rush on now!!!!!!! Jibber jibber jibber.......
1030am. Facilitate meeting between ten engineering types who have no intention of ever fucking agreeing about anything.
Get them to agree on what they disagree on. Facilitation 101.
11.59am. The weekend starts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12.01am. The car won't start.
Thirty minutes, three sets of cable, and a conclave of engineers later, the car starts, but I have to drive to Halifax without stopping to strengthen the battery and I only have half a tank of gas.
3.38pm. Glide into the Ultramar on Victoria Rd. on fumes, fill the car, pee (oh bliss), get a coffee, get a water, get a bar of chocolate, pay $80 for the lot, start the car again.
3.39pm. It starts!!!!!!!!!!!
And I would remind you boys and girls, that I am alive at this point, having nearly died earlier.
4.00pm. Pick up Himself at work where I left him in the rain nine hours earlier. Albert the Station Waggon needs a new fuel pump. $1200. Minimum. Plus $300 for the spark plugs.
Goddamn Mercury... you devil you.. you got me this time.....
But I'm ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Happy Victoria Day everyone... it's not about her, it's about VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!
Monday, May 04, 2009
The negative Greenhouse effect
From today's Guardian.... if I were to take this to its logical conclusion I would shut down my blog to save energy.
Hmmm ... not enough readers to make a damned difference.
Read on, boys and girls, read on!
But, just to be serious for a moment, as the Google rep quoted at the end states, the drain on resources is nowhere near transportation.... so now that we're all connected electronically, why do we all still have to go to the office everyday?
The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.
Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.
"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
Bapat said the network of web servers and data centres that store online information is becoming more expensive, while profits come under pressure as a result of the recession.
"We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more," he said. "If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm."
With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year. This leaves many internet companies caught in a bind: energy costs are escalating because of their increasing popularity, while at the same time their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.
One site under particular scrutiny is YouTube — now the world's third-biggest website, but one that requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner. Although the site's financial details are kept under wraps, a recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as $470m (£317m) this year, as it succumbs to the high price of delivering power-intensive videos over the internet.
And while the demand for electricity is a primary concern, a secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.
However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.
"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.
"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."
One study by Brown, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.
Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year.
"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."
Among the problems that could result from the internet's voracious hunger for electricity are website failures and communications disruption costing millions in lost business every hour – as well as power cuts and brownouts at plants which supply data centres with electricity.
To combat this, initiatives are taking place across the industry to cope with the problem, including new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.
Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are even turning to older technology in an attempt to turn the clock back – by replacing energy-hungry new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.
"It turns out that those processors have been designed to be very energy efficient, basically to make batteries last," said Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge.
"We found we can build more energy-efficient data centres with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."
Google was among the first internet companies to take action to reduce its footprint by developing its own data centres — but even though it pumped an estimated $2.3bn into infrastructure projects last year, it remains unclear whether it is winning the battle.
The company's vice-president of operations, Urs Hölzle, told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. "You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he said.
"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."
Despite mounting evidence that the internet's energy footprint is in danger of running out of control, however, Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the web as "overblown".
"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem."
Hmmm ... not enough readers to make a damned difference.
Read on, boys and girls, read on!
But, just to be serious for a moment, as the Google rep quoted at the end states, the drain on resources is nowhere near transportation.... so now that we're all connected electronically, why do we all still have to go to the office everyday?
The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.
Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.
"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
Bapat said the network of web servers and data centres that store online information is becoming more expensive, while profits come under pressure as a result of the recession.
"We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more," he said. "If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm."
With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year. This leaves many internet companies caught in a bind: energy costs are escalating because of their increasing popularity, while at the same time their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.
One site under particular scrutiny is YouTube — now the world's third-biggest website, but one that requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner. Although the site's financial details are kept under wraps, a recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as $470m (£317m) this year, as it succumbs to the high price of delivering power-intensive videos over the internet.
And while the demand for electricity is a primary concern, a secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.
However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.
"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.
"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."
One study by Brown, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.
Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year.
"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."
Among the problems that could result from the internet's voracious hunger for electricity are website failures and communications disruption costing millions in lost business every hour – as well as power cuts and brownouts at plants which supply data centres with electricity.
To combat this, initiatives are taking place across the industry to cope with the problem, including new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.
Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are even turning to older technology in an attempt to turn the clock back – by replacing energy-hungry new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.
"It turns out that those processors have been designed to be very energy efficient, basically to make batteries last," said Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge.
"We found we can build more energy-efficient data centres with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."
Google was among the first internet companies to take action to reduce its footprint by developing its own data centres — but even though it pumped an estimated $2.3bn into infrastructure projects last year, it remains unclear whether it is winning the battle.
The company's vice-president of operations, Urs Hölzle, told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. "You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he said.
"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."
Despite mounting evidence that the internet's energy footprint is in danger of running out of control, however, Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the web as "overblown".
"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem."
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The complexity of the world is giving me Deh Bloggin' Fear
Apologies for not posting sooner.
Although, as someone whose opinion creates a deep indifference in my soul said today: 'I hate blogs, it's just blah blah blah about me me me and it goes on and on and on. I prefer Twitter.'
So maybe I shouldn't bother.
I was going to point out that there was a device called a back button that you could use to rid yourself of the blah blah blah, but the depth of my indifference was insurmountable.
Me, I hate Twitter. Particularly today. I spent all day today at an Internet marketing conference being told how great Twitter is.
I'm sure it is. Haikus are great, and Twitter is just a Western form of Haiku (Western in that there are no rules, just individuality, which means it's just other people's condensed blah). And it's not that I don't like blah.
It's just that if I'm going to read blah, I like a bit of context.
Hence my love of the blah blah blah di blah blah of other people's thoughts.
Now if we had a Twitter that enforced the rigid forms of a haiku, I would be a fan. Corporations that think they can send messages to our phones and pretend they have a relationship with us would have to actually hire someone with some creativity to write their 'relationship building communications'.
The world of marketing would be populated by Leonard Cohen types who built special relationships with the owners of the phones (sorry, mobile devices) they were messaging.
Now, that would be a marketing-driven relationship I could live with.
Did you know that customer service is the new marketing?
I was surprised to hear that....
Ah no, I wasn't.
I remember the last recession and the marketing lecturer I was forced to listen to for three hours a week at the time (I was doing a business post-grad to outwit the recession) used to say that.
Then the economy swung back up and customer service took a back seat to gouging clients who wanted to gouge customers.
Marketing is truly the work of the devil. I said that in 1993 when I had to study it and I say it again today.
Anyways, the fear is subsiding. Let me eat my supper and see if I can sort out the swirl of thoughts in my brain.
blah blah blah blah blah............. di blah.............
Although, as someone whose opinion creates a deep indifference in my soul said today: 'I hate blogs, it's just blah blah blah about me me me and it goes on and on and on. I prefer Twitter.'
So maybe I shouldn't bother.
I was going to point out that there was a device called a back button that you could use to rid yourself of the blah blah blah, but the depth of my indifference was insurmountable.
Me, I hate Twitter. Particularly today. I spent all day today at an Internet marketing conference being told how great Twitter is.
I'm sure it is. Haikus are great, and Twitter is just a Western form of Haiku (Western in that there are no rules, just individuality, which means it's just other people's condensed blah). And it's not that I don't like blah.
It's just that if I'm going to read blah, I like a bit of context.
Hence my love of the blah blah blah di blah blah of other people's thoughts.
Now if we had a Twitter that enforced the rigid forms of a haiku, I would be a fan. Corporations that think they can send messages to our phones and pretend they have a relationship with us would have to actually hire someone with some creativity to write their 'relationship building communications'.
The world of marketing would be populated by Leonard Cohen types who built special relationships with the owners of the phones (sorry, mobile devices) they were messaging.
Now, that would be a marketing-driven relationship I could live with.
Did you know that customer service is the new marketing?
I was surprised to hear that....
Ah no, I wasn't.
I remember the last recession and the marketing lecturer I was forced to listen to for three hours a week at the time (I was doing a business post-grad to outwit the recession) used to say that.
Then the economy swung back up and customer service took a back seat to gouging clients who wanted to gouge customers.
Marketing is truly the work of the devil. I said that in 1993 when I had to study it and I say it again today.
Anyways, the fear is subsiding. Let me eat my supper and see if I can sort out the swirl of thoughts in my brain.
blah blah blah blah blah............. di blah.............
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