My parents live near a champion arm wrestler. A few years ago, I found out that he was training a guy I went to high school with in how to be a competitive arm wrestler. When I found out that he was headed to the world championships after a few successful national runs, I went to find out what it takes to be one of Canada’s top arm wrestlers.
Prince George’s Best Arm Wrestler
It was a fascinating interview, learning about all the strategy involved and how it’s treated differently in different countries (you can make a living at it in Europe, the prizes are bigger in the United States, in Canada it’s treated as something of a joke). Plus, the fact that speed is such a huge factor and that if a match lasts more than a few seconds, you’re pretty much out of the tournament because it’s so exhausting was interesting to me.
Some technical notes: the sound was a bit off since we were moving around during the interview. I had to abandon one of my favourite lines about why he liked arm wrestling (to the effect that you go on stage, try to rip a guy’s arm off, and then go for a beer with him).
In order to combat the echoey effects and to add some space to the track, I decided to add a musical bed underneath. I wanted something like “Rocky” but I didn’t want to use “Rocky”, so I did a creative commons search on Soundcloud for tags found on the “Rocky” theme on last.fm. If you’re interested, it’s a remix of the Duranandal theme by a talented artist out of Nevada (where the world championships are being held!) going by the moniker of “Stormcat.”
This piece wound up being syndicated nationally.
This morning, I upgraded to the new Facebook profile. I immediately didn’t like it. I know: ultimately, Facebook’s gonna do what Facebook’s gonna do and none of us our going to quit over it. Customize those privacy settings and don’t post anything you don’t expect to be public and be done with it on that level. It’s the internet, nothing’s really private, anyways.
But just because it’s not private doesn’t mean it has to be ugly, and that’s where I don’t get the new photo aspect. In Facebook’s words, this new image-centric header “begins with a quick summary of who you are, giving friends an easy way to see where you live now, where you’re working and more. A collection of recently tagged photos also shows what you’ve been up to lately.” In reality, this amounts to “a bunch of photos with you in the background at some party a few months ago and a cartoon someone uploaded that they tagged you in so you would read it will now take a prominent place alongside your self-chosen profile picture.”
The profile is where you get to introduce you. You choose to say where you work, you choose to say where you’re from, and you choose the picture that is associated with your online identity. But now, Facebook is basically allowing the most prominent and eye-grabbing portion of your profile to be crowd-sourced to your other contacts, based on who tags you in what. That is, unless you do this:
1. Harmonize your photo privacy settings.
It’s great that Facebook has all these customizable privacy settings for photos. It means that close friends and family can see photos that distant acquaintances can’t (bearing in mind that you still shouldn’t have anything you couldn’t handle being completely public). But if you have a whole bunch of customized settings based around different groups, it means every group is going to see a different set of photos. You might be happy with the five you see, but if one or more of them is invisible to somebody else looking at the page, they’re going to see a different photo in its place.
There’s two easy solutions here. One is to make every photo, even ones other people took and tagged you in, completely public across all your friends, or the whole internet. That way, everything you see is the same thing everyone else can see. Another is to make everything completely private. Nobody can see any photos.
Or, you might be like me and want people to be able to see photos, but only ones that you curate. This is still pretty easy, but not immediately apparent.
First, go to the privacy settings. Click down where there’s a pencil that says “customize settings.” There’s a section there called “Things others share” and the first option is “Photos and videos I’m tagged in.” Hit “edit settings,” choose “custom” and hit “only me.” This de-links any tagged photos that other people took from your profile for everyone except yourself, so when Facebook is choosing “a collection of recently tagged photos [that] also shows what you’ve been up to lately” the only place it has to look is your own album of profile pictures– photos that you’ve chosen to highlight.
2. Drag and drop to the top
By default, the photos displayed will be the five most ones you’ve used as your profile picture, aside from the one you’re currently using. You can change which ones will display by heading into your profile picture album and dragging and dropping them into order– top left to bottom right. If you want to add photos you haven’t used as your profile picture, you’ll have to make it your profile picture for a brief moment, but you can always change it back right away– and then it’s right there in your album.
3. Make sure it’s worked
Of course, doing this won’t let you see what others see– after all, you’re still able to view photos you’ve been tagged in, even if no one else can. So to make sure you’ve got the display you want, head into the privacy settings again. This time after you hit “customize” click on the top-right button that says “preview my profile.” Here, you’ll get a display of your profile as it “looks to most people on Facebook.” You can start typing in different friends names in order to get a better idea of what’s on display to individual people or groups. It’s a good thing to check once in a while, but you already knew that, didn’t you?
Afterthought (or futile complaints about a service I use for free)
I get what Facebook’s doing here. The new “projects” section under employment puts them into the same space as LinkedIn, while the more visually-oriented “interests,” “employment” and “activities” sections encourages people to pledge their allegiance to different brands to be used by the social web (all day, my news feed was full of people updating their birthplace, favourite TV shows, and employers– I wound up deleting sections). And I appreciate the ability to display more photos– look at my header on this page, it pulls in pictures from my Flickr page. But they missed the ball in one respect: they crowdsourced the profile. As social as these social networks are, people still want to control what their page says about them, at least when it comes to first impressions. My Flickr photos are ones I upload, and I can customize what goes up top here. The photos (and the tagging of coworkers or shared activities) in your Facebook profile is wikifying that process. And if Facebook is full of narcissists, I don’t think that’s what their user base wants.
After-afterthought
What’s up with the “friends list” feature? Is Facebook attempting to draw users from MySpace by making their own version of the “top friends“?
In addition to noting, you can now post songs directly to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It’s the simplest way to share the songs you love with your existing friends and followers. When you visit these sites, all songs posted by the people you follow will be playable right there on the page. They will also be added directly to your library and appear in you new Music Activity Feed.
– from ex.fm’s first ever newsletter, sent to me today
I use a number of music services, but I’m actually rather judicious in the ones I stick with. That is, even though I’m active on four different music sites1, I’ve tried about three times that, but abandoned the others because they just didn’t offer me much that I couldn’t get elsewhere. Today, I’m officially adding a fifth: ex.fm.
Ex.fm started out as a fairly cool concept in its own right. It’s a Google Chrome extension that scans web pages for mp3s, and then allows you to add them to a library that you can listen to as you browse the web, or queue up for future listening. I’ve been using it as a sort of “listen later” for music blogs, and it’s been a happy addition to my playlist management. The one drawback I’ve had with it is it’s Chrome-only functionality. The thing is, a lot of the time I’ll find a song and then want to share it. While “hearting” a song is a good way of doing that, if I want to add context or comment to the audio, I like to do that in the form of a blog post. And my favourite blogging service for doing this is Tumblr, because of it’s “audio post” function and it’s compatibility with Streampad (Streampad is the service that let’s you play all the songs on a Tumblr-powered blog as a continuous playlist, as I’ve done here).
Now, the reason the Chrome-only capability for ex.fm have been a drawback is that the I’ve yet to find a good way to extract the exact location of embedded mp3s using this browser, whereas Firefox has a couple of good ones. What this has meant is that I’ve been using Chrome to find music, but Firefox to actually share it. This has changed with ex.fm 2.0. While the new iteration has a lot of cool social features (including profiles, the ability to follow people from other networks, and static pages for mp3s including shortlinks), the thing that prompted me to write this post is it’s “share to Tumblr feature.”
Pretty much every website this days has some form of “Tweet this” and “recommend on Facebook” buttons, but for whatever reason, the “add to Tumblr” feature hasn’t been catching on, even though Tumblr is fast becoming the third pillar of social networking, and is definitely the cool kid on the block. Fortunately, the “share on Tumblr” bookmarklet has pretty much got you covered— except when it comes to audio posts.
See, Tumblr has seven types of posts you can make: text, photo, quote, link, chat (conversation), audio, and video. The bookmarklets has six options— every one except audio. If I’m on a YouTube page and I hit the bookmarklet, Tumblr makes a video post. If I’m on a Flickr page, it’s a photo. But if I’m on an audio blog, I have to link to the page if I want people to actually, you know, hear the song I’m blogging about. Ex.fm changes that.
Now, if you link your Tumblr account to your ex.fm profile, you can share any mp3 on any page into Tumblr— not as a link, but as an audio post. I just did it.
This is awesome. The reason Tumblr has been catching on with so many people is how easy it makes blogging. See something you like? Click “share”, and there it is. The only thing that was dead simple to share was audio. Now it is.
I predict this will be good for both ex.fm and Tumblr. Ex.fm because this, combined with all the other cool new features (seriously, check it out) definitely makes it a contender in the social-music sphere. Let’s not forget, it’s hooked into Facebook and Twitter, too— the Tumblr thing just gives it a leg up over everyone else. And for Tumblr, because not only does this add new “dead-simple” functionality to their blogging, but because I imagine this opens up capabilities for other services to add an “share to Tumblr” function as well. And it’s good for me because, well, music blogging just got simpler.
PS. Soundcloud announced some new features today, as well. Very interesting day for those of us interested in the convergence of the internet with recorded audio.
Hey.
In case you are one of the two or three people who read this blog and yet don’t know me, last week I successfully applied for the permanent researcher position at CBC. I’ve been doing that job since September in a contract role, and I’d been backfilling it on a pretty regular basis since summer (prior to that I was a backfill associate producer). A few notes on the job:
So, yeah, pretty cool. My work week is staying pretty much the same. I’m still up at CFUR, but since I’ve got a permanent CBC role I’ll be bringing a couple of the volunteers into roles closer to those of employees. I think this will be positive, as well, since they’ll be able to expand their roles and bring new ideas and energy into what goes on up there. I’m pretty happy, considering a year ago I was still looking for work and had zero professional radio experience. And I’ll be heading down to Vancouver in December for what I expect to be some pretty hardcore training at the provincial headquarters.
Getting the job made me realize I’ve been doing a pretty poor job of archiving my work, so I went back and grabbed some audio highlights, which I’ve put on my Soundcloud account. I’ve put a player below, and you can click on individual track titles to read context and titles.
CBC Daybreak North Highlight Reel by akurjata
Dropped family off at the airport, picked up a package from Greyhound, got groceries, walk in the park, shopped downtown, then out to the box stores for a new doormat and pet supplies.
I am a big fan of Hootsuite. Alongside xmarks and Instapaper, it’s one of those tools that I was so happy with that I was willing to recommend it, and recommend it enthusiastically. It’s even in my about page.
What Hootsuite does it takes all your social networks and puts them in one place. You can post to and read the streams of multiple accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Facebook fan pages, Foursquare and MySpace. You can post the same status to all, one, or just a few accounts at once. So if I’m hosting the CFUR Top 30, I can say so via my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as the official CFUR ones, all in one go. I use it for my personal accounts, the not-for-profit Coldsnap Music Festival accounts, the not-for-profit CFUR Radio accounts, the Mr. PG Facebook page, and the PG Transit alerts tool that I created in my free time. It has made managing those so much easier that when other organizations were setting up or fine-tuning their social networking, I strongly, strongly recommended Hootsuite. The City of Prince George, CBC Daybreak North, and the University of Northern British Columbia are among those who now use it. It’s such a great tool that I wouldn’t recommend anything else.
That’s what I would have said yesterday. But now I’m actively looking for alternatives.
Why? Because yesterday, Hootsuite told me I had to choose a pricing plan. They still offer a free service, but for certain other services you have to pay. Fair enough. I’ve been willing to do this for Instapaper and xMarks, plus other subscription based services. But their pricing model is completely askew.
$15 per team member means I can’t recommend it to new users
I’m completely on board with the $5.99 rate for unlimited social networks, analytics, ad free, etc. A completely reasonable price for what it offers. In fact, I would pay $5.99 and still deal with ads, limited analytics, and limited social media accounts if it gave me one more thing: extra team members.
Seriously, two team members and then you’re looking at an extra $15 per person/per month? I shared the CFUR account with three other people, and the CBC account with one other, and that put me to over $60 a month. That is no longer the price of a good cup of coffee. That’s a utilities bill.
I’ve been slowly converting people in these other organizations to Hootsuite by having them share these accounts. These are potential Hootsuite customers that may be willing to pay that $6 a month for their own unlimited social networks. But now I can’t recommend it to them, because if I do, I have to a) pay $15 a month to give them access to one of my accounts, b) ask them to pay all or part of the $15, or c) give up ownership of the account so they can do it. None of these are good options.
Let’s take an actual scenario. I have a volunteer at CFUR who is starting their own show and would like to promote it using Facebook and Twitter show pages, and they would also like to cross-promote it using the official CFUR accounts, plus their personal networks. That’s six accounts. What do I recommend to them in order to make that task easier?
In the past when this happened, the answer was easy: Hootsuite. But now I can’t– not without putting someone out $15 a month in order to give them access to the CFUR account. Bear in mind, this person might be very willing to pay $5.99 a month to have access to six social networks, no ads, and all the other options. But now I’m going to be showing them Tweetdeck, Seesmic desktop, or Ping.fm. I don’t like any of these as much as Hootsuite, but at least more than one person can use them.
Conclusion
I’m currently paying the $5.99 for unlimited social networks. But I’m no longer going to be bringing new users to Hootsuite, simply because I can’t. DJs at CFUR– no dice, because I’m not paying $15/person out of pocket and we don’t have that budget– we’re a volunteer-run, not-for-profit radio station. Other Coldsnap volunteers– again, no. I was working on getting others involved via Hootsuite, but now I can’t.
It’s likely a reasonable cost if you’re an advertising firm that has multiple corporate clients paying you to manage their online presence. But it prices out small business and non-profits altogether. I guess this might not matter to Hootsuite much. After all, every $5.99 customer they lose is gained back two-fold with every new team member some large corporation adds.
But it might matter. A lot of this stuff is word-of-mouth. I started using Hootsuite after I saw another not-for-profit using it in order to have multiple team members posting to both Facebook and Twitter. They probably wouldn’t have been using it if they were having to pay the $60 a month it now costs to have them. Then I wouldn’t be using it. Then the city might not be using, and the university might not be using it, and I know at least three other people who wouldn’t be using it. That’s at least twelve new users they might never have received. It’s probably similar throughout the web. Twelve users who may be willing to pay $6 a month, but aren’t able to afford the $15+ for extra team members. So they’ll use something else. And then other people will see that something else– including corporations– and check it out instead.
And like I said, I’m paying the $6– for now. But I’m looking at alternatives, when I wasn’t before. And as soon as I find something else that lets me share these accounts for less than $20 a month, I’ll probably be switching.
Today is Remembrance Day. It’s sort of an awkward day, because it’s like a holiday, except solemn rather than celebratory. It’s weird to see stores open and people staying out late the night before and treating it like a weekend when it really is a day set aside to honour the dead and the battle-scarred. I mean, technically, we are at war.
And yet, the war is pretty removed from my life, and I don’t think I’m alone. I have an uncle who was in the military, and one friend from high school is now. That’s about it. Other than the fact that I read about it in newspapers, follow political debates, and listen to Afghanada, it may as well not be happening. It certainly doesn’t loom over my life the way I imagine it would have had I lived during World War I and II.
And I’m not alone. It seems as if more and more Canadians are feeling isolated from our military– and our military is becoming isolated from mainstream Canadian society. In the Walrus magazine last month, Karen Pinchin wrote about dwindling numbers at Legions across the country, even as more veterans are being produced. She writes about the controversy surrounding overtures to younger generations of veterans and civilians: big-screen TVs, rock music, karaoke. All of this in an attempt to make enough money from bar sales to help legions fight their skyrocketing debt.
Here in Prince George I visited the local legion, branch number 43. It was the first time I’d ever been inside, despite having walked past it countless times and waiting outside for a bus. Inside is almost exactly what I expected: country music, pool tables, darts, older clientele, framed portraits on the wall and various flags and military paraphenalia. I could actually see it turning into one of the hipper places in town if more people knew about it– good size, good food, etc. But, of course, it’s going under. Once at 2,500 members, it’s gone down to about 650, and they’re looking to sell and move out of the the tree-floor building that has been the Legion’s home since at least the 1950s.
I spoke with second vice-president John Scott about what the legion does and where it stands now. He explained that legions as a whole act as advocates for veterans. When government doesn’t give out what they view as fair compensation for active duty or doesn’t recognize this or that after-effect of the war, it’s the legions who advocate on their behalf. They’re an established voice, and without them, Scott worries about who will see that those who have fought for their country are treated properly. They’re trying to expand their membership, but there don’t seem to be a lot of people taking up the cause.
https://andrewkurjata.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Legion-FTR.mp3
His hypothesis that the current war is less social than previous wars is one I haven’t heard before (it’s worth noting that in the Walrus article a retired colonel notes that today’s soldier drink less than they used to). He says that while in the past, forty of fifty people from Prince George might sign up, serve, and come back together, today you’ll have just one or two people signing up alone and, upon coming back, not knowing anyone else who served with them. It’s a much more solitary affair. Add to that the fact that most people are barely aware the war is going on, and you have some isolated individuals who are dealing with some pretty heavy stuff.
It’s not as if I’m nostalgic for the whole country pulling together to go to war. It’s probably healthy that we don’t have dozens of people signing up in large groups. But we still need a military. And regardless of what you think of the current combat mission, these people are risking their lives to fulfill the wishes of a government that we, as a country, elected. That’s worth something. And it seems a shame that something that has served veterans for so long is now struggling, just as we probably need it more than we have in years.
Something worth remembering, anyways.
See also:
Lest We Forget, the Walrus: http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2010.11-field-note-lest-we-forget/
Reinventing the Legion: A Story of Survival, the Coast Reporter: http://www.coastreporter.net/article/20101110/SECHELT0101/311109977/-1/sechelt/re-inventing-the-legion-a-story-of-survival
Poor Economy Blamed on Tighter Poppy Donations, The Montreal Gazette: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada/Poor+economy+blamed+tighter+poppy+donations/3788380/story.html
About the Legion, The Royal Canadian Legion: http://legion.ca/About/background_e.cfm
Afghanada, CBC Radio: http://www.cbc.ca/afghanada/
A year ago today, we took possession of the first home either of us have ever owned. We did it after spending a few hours every Saturday mapping out open houses and then a few hours every Sunday actually seeing them for about two months. This was followed by finding a realtor and spending many hours more getting private showings all over town, making lists of pros and cons, and generally wracking over every possible detail of what implications this or that decision or this or that neighbourhood might have on our lives. It definitely ranks up there with one of the largest commitments I’ve ever made, and is certainly the largest financial purchase I’m likely to make for some time, so it seems appropriate to reflect on it 365 days on.
It’s a Home, Not a Financial Investment
First, there’s something incredibly settling about owning a house for the purpose of actually living in (rather than flipping or upgrading). If we were focused on the market value we’d be doing ok, but every little change in real estate prices would be unsettling because it could be potentially harmful. However, since we view the house as our home, and one that we could well be in for the rest of our lives, we’re not quite so concerned about what happens to the market. Yes, we’d like reasonable mortgage rates and taxes and the rest, but if prices on houses tank it’s not really as if we’re operating at a loss because we purchased it in order to put a roof over our heads, not sell in a couple of years at a net gain. I’m pretty sure that if more people took this approach, there wouldn’t be literal suburban wastelands throughout the United States and parts of Canada.
It Limits Your Options, In A Good Way
Related to the above point, we bought a house that we felt we could be happy living out the rest of our lives in. This decision was made, of course, after settling on a city that we could be happy living out the rest of our lives in. Assuming things don’t completely tank, Prince George is that city for us. There’s a number of reasons behind this statement that are part of a different discussion, but I would like to go into a little bit here. I heard about a study somewhere where psychologists set up two jam booths. At one, you could buy only three types of jam. Another had over 21 flavours. People were asked to purchase jams from different booths and then asked to rate how happy they were with their decisions. As it turns out, the people who were given more options were actually less happy with their decisions, perhaps because they were thinking about all the flavours they didn’t try.
While I think choice is a good thing, I think part of being happy with where you are in your life is occasionally chopping out the other options. We bought the house while I was unemployed. Before making the decision to buy a house, I was casting a wide net in my job search. I was applying for jobs in Vancouver, Ottawa, and around the world. Every time I got an interview for one of these jobs there was a bit of a chill– could I be happy living overseas? What if it didn’t work out? What about my significant other? Once we settled on Prince George as the place we would be living, I no longer had to worry about these issues. If the job wasn’t one I could do while living here, then it wasn’t the right fit for me. I might be singing a different tune if I hadn’t been lucky enough to get two jobs I enjoy immensely, but then who knows if I would even have a job if we hadn’t made the decision to stick around?
It Costs Money…
We have a mortgage. We have gas, hydro and property taxes. If something goes wrong, we have to fix it. If we want to renovate, we have to pay for it. It adds up.
But…
Every mortgage payment is one step closer to being mortgage free. If we want to hang up pictures or paint the wall or rip up the carpet and put in hardwood we can. We don’t have to worry about pleasing anyone’s aesthetic values but our own. It’s cheaper than rent was in Victoria, and we have a lot more space.
Location Matters
When we were looking, we narrowed our decision down by key neighbourhoods we wanted to live in. Our neighbours are friendly. The street is quiet. We walk our neighbour’s dogs, our cats are safe outside, and the few times our ferrets have gotten out, we’ve actually managed to get them back. Kids play in front yards. We can walk in the nearby field, or go a bit further into the woods. I can bike to work in under twenty minutes, and there’s four different bus stops within a five-minute walk. This makes a difference.
This Is All the Space You’re Going to Have
When I was living out my parent’s or renting, getting stuff seemed OK because, inevitably, one day we would have a house with more space and it would all fit nicely. Now, I’ve realized that there’s never going to be a point when we have more places to put stuff, so I purchase things much less frivolously. This is a good thing.
There’s Always Stuff to Do
More space means more cleaning. More dusting, vacuuming, mopping. More places to let boxes pile up until you realize you really need to do something about that room full of boxes. We’ve done a lot in our first year, but not nearly as much as I had on my to-do list.
You’re Pretty Much An Adult Now
I remember when I was a kid, I would always zone out when parents would start talking about mortgage rates or kitchen design or furniture layouts. Buy a house, and these become some of the more fascinating topics of conversation. I don’t know how I feel about this.
Conclusion
We’ve been very lucky. We bought when the prices were lower than they’d been in years, and we bought just before they started going up again. We had a support system in place to help us secure a mortgage and make a larger down payment. We’ve managed to get decent-paying jobs in the same city. I recognize that not a lot of people have that option.
But still, I know quite a few people who could do this, but don’t. They have their reasons, and they may be good ones, but I’m happy with the route we’ve taken. Sure, we can’t up and leave anytime we want, but once you get a job you actually want to keep and accumulate a certain amount of stuff, that ceases being an option anyways. At least this way we have somewhere to keep all our stuff when we travel, and could potentially rent the place out if we decided to take an extended trip away. We’ve hosted Christmas dinner, AGMs, and friends and family. We operate a ferret rescue out of here. We’re able to plan for the future with a little bit more stability than if we had no idea where we would be a few months or years down the line. Yes, there’s a certain amount of risk involved, but there is in anything. One year in, I’m very happy with our house, and I hope this continues to be the case.
(possibly) too much candy for only 41 kids
While we did get double the amount of our only other Hallowe’en experience, we didn’t get as many as planned, as evidenced by the amount of candy leftover (we may have went overboard on this front, too, being confronted by so many choices). So, here is the Hallowe’en breakdown 2010. You can see more numbers, with lovely graphs and displays, thanks in part to a Daytum chart I made for the occassion.
Best costume
A robot. It had lights and buttons and everything.
Laziest costume
I’m usually fairly minimalist when it comes to dressing up, having worn outfits from garbage (just a few bits of paper glued to an old shirt) to a haunted house (which involved putting a cardboard house over my head). This year, I went all out and was a Jack-O-Lantern. This was after I pondered dressing as myself and saying I was my evil twin. But I did have two versions, the second and improvement on the first. I’m not completely lackadaisical.
mach 1
mach 2
As for me, I went the self-promotional route and created a CFUR-o-lantern.
Music
Hallowe’en music has been an interest of mine over the last few years. This year, I made a ghost mix for my radio show, after noticing that almost every album these days has at least one song with “ghost” in the title. Here are the songs I played:
“The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells (link)
“Walking With A Ghost” by Tegan and Sara (link)
“The Ghost of You Lingers” by Spoon (link)
“Ghosts of the Future” by Green Go (link)
“Ghost Town” by the Bicycles (link)
“Ghost Writer” by RJD2 (link)
“Ghost Train” by the Gorillaz (link)
“Hold On (Holy Ghost)” by A-Trak (a stretch, I wanted an instrumental for under my voice)
“Hunting Ghosts” by the Library Voices (link)
“The Ghost of Genova Heights” by Stars (link)
“Friendly Ghost” by Harlem (link)
“Every Ghost I Know” by Wisconsin Dream Guitar” (link)
“Ghosting” by Mother Mother (link)
“Ghost of a Chance” by Ron Sexsmith (link)
“Tuff Ghost” by the Unicorns (link)
“Moar Ghosts N Stuff” by Deadmau5 (link)
“Weighty Ghost” by Wintersleep (link)
Favourite Hallowe’en Songs:
Runner-up: In second place is “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah”, a parody of novelty hits from the minds of 30 Rock. The song was mentioned in a throwaway gag in the show, but I guess they actually recorded it and released it on the internet, just to take the joke further. Totally worth it, and a Hallowe’en classic.
[audio:http://www.kickinthepeanuts.com/music/30rockwerewolfbarmitzvah.mp3]
Number one: remains ‘Do They Know It’s Hallowee’en” by the North American Hallowe’en Prevention Initiative. Great parody, great song.
[audio:http://earbuds.popdose.com/will/Halloween/NAHPI%20-%20Do%20They%20Know%20It’s%20Halloween.mp3]
Rob For on CBC As It Happens, October 26, 2010
Rob Ford on CBC’s As It Happens, October 26, 2010
I’m sort of fascinated by this whole Rob Ford thing, even though I’ve never even been to Toronto. In the Globe a couple of weeks ago, Margaret Wente wrote a piece about the Tea Party movement in the United States and suggested that the same waves of discontent that are making Sarah Palin a popular figure were what might be sending Rob Ford to the mayor’s office. Now comes the news that he may have received more votes than any other politician in Canadian history. What does it all mean?
I’m inclined to agree with Chris Selley’s argument in the National Post. Reacting to other people’s reactions to the interview posted above, he writes:
“I somehow doubt the mayor-elect listens to As It Happens. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’d never heard of it — or if anyone else had never heard of it, for that matter. This may shock George Smitherman and Joe Pantalone voters, but in any given day, fewer Torontonians are exposed to Radio One than to The Edge, 680 News, CHFI, CHUM FM, Z103.5, Q107, boom 97.3, Virgin Radio and KISS 92.5…
If you find yourself particularly outraged that Mr. Ford blew off CBC — Of! All! Networks! — you probably haven’t even begun to come to terms with why Mr. Ford won the election in the first place, and might well win the next one.”
Those reasons are, from what I can gather, exactly the same ones that are making the Tea Party so much more popular in the United States. In the Wente piece, a political pollster by the name of Scott Rasmussen
“argues that the major division in the country now is not between the Republicans and Democrats, but between the mainstream public and the political class – the small proportion of the population, perhaps 10 per cent, (including most people who work in mainstream media) that still believes that government tries to serve the public interest, rather than colluding with big business against ordinary people.”
This holds with Selley’s belief that the sort of people who elected Ford don’t listen to the CBC— as a publicly-funded broadcaster, it probably doesn’t rank very high in the list of priorities for people rallying behind a small-government platform.
As depressing as it might be to think that Ford represents an American-style populist politics (as unfair of a generalization as that might be) coming to Canada, it is worth remembering the headline-making election of Naheed Nenshi to mayor of Calgary just a few weeks earlier. A young, Muslim, policy wonk, his election purportedly represented the arrival of Calgary as a cosmopolitan center, rather than the redneck stereotype of “Texas north.” It, too, represented the changing face of Canada, in a different direction than Ford’s does.
There’s probably some underlying economic issues in here, as well: eastern Canada, which relies more on manufacturing and the knowledge economy, is experiencing the global recession in a way that the resource-rich western provinces aren’t— hence the revolt against taxes and government spending. The resource sector doing well works against those who create products, rather than just ship them away. If trends continue, I wonder if you’ll see a populist eastern Canadian bloc revolting against the power of the west.
Both of these elections are said to represent major shifts in the Canadian political system. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all plays out.
A couple of weeks back, when fall was still warm rather than frigid and wet, I was able to go out to the Hadih House in Prince George to gather some tape on canning sessions they were holding there. The day before they had done salmon and the next day they were doing moose, but on the day I went they were prepping the humble apple. Fortunately, it made for some great sound and that combined with the wonderful stories of the participants made for my first five-minute documentary piece for the CBC.
https://andrewkurjata.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Daybreak-Documentary-Hadih-House.mp3
This was a fun story to do, because it seemed pretty routine, but it taught me that with good sounds, even the most routine story can be rich. It’s the power of radio to take you somewhere that other forms can’t, because deprived of other senses, you rely on sound alone to paint a picture. I was introduced to a vibrant community in a part of town characterized by gangs and poverty, and became genuinely engaged in their stories. Plus, they were so nice they shared some of their goods afterwards.
A screenshot of my Daytum graph
UPDATE: Found it’s owner. Very happy to be reunited.
We found it wandering around near Moore’s Meadow (at 1st and Claxton) on Sunday, October 17. Contact me if you have any ideas. Thanks!
Ad nauseam
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December 13 2010 | ∞
Left Prince George…
Arrived in Vancouver (no rain yet)…
Tried out the Millennium Line (it’s pretty great– in at 8, downtown by 9)…
Found the CBC…
Got a little meta with my t-shirt…
Found the dungeon leading to our workspace (it’s actually a nice big studio, but the entrance is a bit ominous)…
Had a ridiculous burger for lunch…
And here’s my room with a view.
For context, after getting hired as a permanent employee at CBC, it makes sense for me to get some training in the medium of radio. So I’m in Vancouver for the week learning about what makes radio work. One day in and it’s already pretty great. I’m taking lots of notes and, as a big change, I actually want to review key points, particularly the importance of telling a story about a PERSON, rather than an issue (the people can illustrate an issue, but you need the human narrative to make it compelling). As someone who gets drawn into abstract, issue-based ideas, this is really important for me, to the point that I think I might put the words “PEOPLE, NOT ISSUES” right above my desk.
Filed under: CBC, personal | Discussion