As I mentioned earlier, we at Tucows whipped up the Blogrolling Hot 500 in response to a challenge by Jason “Weblogs, Inc.” Calacanis to create a “top 500 blogs” list to usurp the Technorati Top 100.
This blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, does not appear in this list.
However, I do appear on another “top 500” list that was also cobbled together in response to the Calacanis challenge: Feedster’s Top 500…
…in which I appear at number 334 with 1,094 links.
From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s site, Ready.gov:
Click the graphic to find out more about National Preparedness Month.
A couple of weeks ago, in an entry titled The Soundtrack to My Personal Coming-Of-Age Film, I lamented that the Billboard Top 100 wasn’t representative of the sort of stuff I listened to. I was a regular listener of CFNY (better known these days as 102.1 The Edge) back then. I looked around for some CFNY charts, which led me to the Spirit of Radio site, which publishes CFNY’s old charts.
Here’s the chart from the year I graduated from high school — 1987 — with the ones I particularly liked in bold, and the ones I particularly disliked in strikeout text. Note how much this chart differs from the 1987 Billboard chart.
This was one of the instigators of that false notion a lot of late 80s musicians had: “slower” means “deeper”. This is similar to another false notion that got its start in the early 90s and still plagues indie rock today: “angry and bitter” means “honest and sincere”.
The Cure went all over the stylistic map with this one and made an album packed with gems. It brings me back to dancing with the death-bunnies at Montreal’s “Thunderdome” club.
My roommate Mark used to play this quite often, so hearing Learning to Fly always takes me back to hanging out in Crazy Go Nuts University’s Leonard Hall, room 313.
Before he became Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook was in this happy Britpop band.
“Don’t call me sweetheart, just call me Joe…” Before she went bonkers, she made some pretty good music.
Want a good 80s goth collection? Get Fad Gadget’s Collapsing New People, some Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, a little Alien Sex Fiend, the Batastrophe EP by Specimen and of course, this album, which features the original pre-Ofra Haza version of “This Corrosion”.
“Now and Again” was by far the better Grapes of Wrath album.
Another must-have if you’re trying to put together a definitive 80s alt-rock collection.
The Dead are forever associated in my mind with a lack of volition and hygiene.
I could never get into Simply Red, either.
One of the best eighties albums you never heard.
Much better than their previous attempt, Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti, but still no Argybargy.
A violin player rocks out and gets interesting results. Notable track on this album: Rules Were Made to be Broken, a primer on Nazi Germany’s hatred of jazz. They called it “Judeo-Negroid music”.
“This is stuff by a guy who used to be in Images in Vogue?” I asked when I first heard it.
“Ohhhhhhhhh yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhh (chicka-chickahhhh!)” How many movie soundtracks did that song end up on, anyway?
Brian Eno for the Doc Martens and spiky-hair set!
George and I played this a lot back in Leonard Hall.
I was seeing a rather wacky girl at the time and I associate the big single on this album, Beautiful Imbalance, along with the entire Singles: 45 and Under album by Squeeze with her.
My friend Yann and I used to have this favourite Cockburn joke: If a tree fell on Bruce Cockburn, would anybody care? He’s just too damned earnest, even for me.
Everybody remembers Elvis is Everywhere, but Don’t Want No Foo-Foo Haircut on My Head/cite> was also pretty good.
Marc Canter, in a roundabout way, has played an important role in my career. He was behind the multimedia authoring tool Director, the first development tool I ever used after graduating from school.
Although my computer science degree and strong marks in my database courses meant that I could’ve landed a job at a bank or insurance firm, I wanted slightly more offbeat work. I ended up working for an interactive multimedia company, Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, where I used Director. Thanks to Director and Mackerel, I’ve been doing “road less travelled” techie work ever since.
(Cory Doctorow wrote a piece about Mackerel for Wired titled Burying the Fish. Although commissioned, it was never published.)
Canter’s in Accordion City this week, and sent Boss Ross some email inviting him for lunch. The most notable line in the email, which was cc’d to me:
OK dude - so how 'bout lunch on the 8th?We’re staying at the Four Seasons – wanna do dim sum or something like that?
Bring Accordian Boy.
That’s Accordion MAN, dude!
Coming along with me and Boss Ross is Tucows’ new VP of Product Development, Alain Chesnais, who in former lives worked at ATI and Alias, partially because this is the sort of meetup that he should be attending and partially as a “welcome to the herd!” activity.
It should be a fun lunch — dim sum — and I’m sure photos and a blog entry will follow.
On pathetically incompetent FEMA director Michael’s former position as
commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association: “Most Bush appointees are beholden to Arabian people.”
On the administration’s new favourite talking point — “everyone is playing the blame game”: “Those who complain about the blame game? They’re usually to blame.”
A little perspective on the President and Sean Penn (who really is on the verge of turning into his puppet from Team America) “[Bush] took four days, and then he visited Trent Lott’s house, while [Penn] actually got in the sludge and rescued people.”
(I still think that Penn’s bringing along a photographer was a bit much.)
I find it interesting that for “V”, they went with “Voldemort” and not “Vader, Darth”.
I like the form factor of my Nikon Coolpix SQ, but its sluggish
response time and the graphical “noise” it adds to images is beginning
to drive me bonkers. Since I have an upcoming wedding and plan to take
lots of photos of what’s supposed to be a major day in my life, I’m
giving some serious thought to purchasing a new camera and giving my
old one to my sister so she can always shoot pictures of the kids.
I’m still looking for a compact 3-or-more megapixel
mostly-point-and-shoot camera in the CDN$300 – $500 range that also shoots
movies with sound. It would be nice if the camera had a decent reaction
time. I might be willing to overlook a little compactness if it takes
standard AA batteries (I’d use rechargables, but it’s nice to be able
to buy fresh ones from the corner store in a pinch. I’d also like it if
it can shoot movies with sound.
I’ll be cruising a number of digital photography review sites as well as the Henry’s catalogue
to see what’s out there. If you have any suggestions that you’d like to
share with me and the rest of the web, please let me know in the
comments!