Thanks, Tom!

BBC 6Music

If you have a broadband connection and RealPlayer, I recommend giving BBC’s Radio 6 — better known as 6Music — a listen. It’s simply amazing — a radio station built on both the BBC’s excellence in broadcasting (commercial-free, even!) and a stable of DJs who eat, sleep and breathe music unlike any other. For their heavy rock show, they got Eddie the Head’s best friend, Bruce Dickinson, from Iron Maiden! The Saturday lunch show (or Saturday morning show for us listeners in the Eastern Time Zone of North America) features ska and rocksteady hosted by a man who should be considered an expert in those areas: Suggs, lead vocalist of Madness! There’s a show by Bob Harris, the guy who founded Time Out magazine, Craig Charles (he’s “Lister” from Red Dwarf) hosting the funk show, and Andrew Collins, former editor of two very good magazines, Empire and Q.

The 6Music DJ I know best

Actually, the BBC doesn’t call them DJ’s, they call them presenters.

Anyhow, the BBC presenter I know best is musician Tom Robinson, who hosts the evening show (or afternoon show, in my case). Tom’s been in the business for over 25 years, starting with the founding of Rock Against Racism and the Tom Robinson Band (2-4-6-8 Motorway, War Baby, Power In The Darkness, Atmospherics, Glad To Be Gay). In addition to being an excellent musician who knows the scene backwards and forwards, Tom also has a great announcer’s voice and delivery, which along with his eclectic musical selection, makes his show a pleasure to listen to.

Tom and I have crossed paths in tangential and unusual ways. I had all his albums until they were stolen in a bizarre snow-cone-related mishap (yes, the snow-cone vendor stories return later this week); he very kindly replaced them for me as a gift for my programming the enhanced CD portion of his 20th album, Having It Both Ways

Tom has a regular segment on his show called Heroes or Zeroes, which “examines the cases for and against some of rock’s most controversial artists”. Today’s star-in-question was Madonna. At the end of the segment, Tom asked the listeners to e-mail comments on Madonna: was she an important influence on popular music? I fired off a message to him. It was really just an excuse to say “hi” (I haven’t had a chance to talk or write to him since his visit to Toronto last summer), but he announced that he just had to read my e-mail on the air:

Subject: On Madonna

Hi, Tom!

At the very least, she’s been a positive influence on me, because from her, I learned the value of shamelessness. Shamelessness is very important in rock and roll, doubly so if you play the accordion.

Thank you, Tom. My plan to dominate the Earth is one step closer, thanks to your help.

This smells like trouble

exso (as in “ex-significant-other”) is a site where you can rate and review ratings for ex-boyfriends or -girlfriends. Once you get past the disclaimer page that automatically appears when you visit the site, the main page shows three featured exes in a format not unlike product reviews in epinions. Each ex’s picture appears, followed by ratings of their looks, intelligence and bedroom skills on a scale of 1 to 10. These numerical ratings are followed by “pros and cons”, which are qualitative capsule reviews.

If the quick overviews aren’t cringeworthy enough for you, you can always read the detailed review, which gives you more biographical information (age, hometown, school, pet’s name and so on) as well as summaries by individual reviewers. A quick summary provides details such as how long the relationship lasted, who ended the relationship, whether the reviewer keeps contact with the ex, whteher they’re still friends and if there could be a reconcilation in the future. There’s also commentary, which seems to end up saying more about the reviewer than the ex being reviewed:

[Name deleted] is the perfect example of meeting someone at the wrong time and place. When we first met, in a bar, I told [she] some fabrications that would I later regret. After dating for a couple months I felt compelled to break up with her rather than own up to the truth. To this day I’m fairly certain that [she] is the sweetest woman alive. In the long run it would have never worked out because of our life paths. But things ended far too soon. Thanks for the smiles.

After reading a few reviews, you might want to check to see if you’ve been reviewed. Luckily, the main page has a handy search feature for just this purpose.

(I checked, and no, I’m not in the database. However, my track record — with the exception of that time where I dated these sisters simultaneously — is spotless. Hey, I was 19, and you’d have done it too. If you had any balls, that is.)

Sooner or later, someone who’s been reviewed in exso isn’t going to like what’s been written about them. exso allows an ex to protest a review. In order to assure you that this is a Very Serious Thing, the section of the site pertaining to these matters is called Arbitration, and each protest is given a case number. This must be serious — Judge Judy uses case numbers!

Let’s suppose I wrote a review of my worst ex ever, about whom I can truthfully say:

If there were a Million Bitch March, she could be counted as five people.

Naturally, since being a total bitch is like breathing to her, she is oblivious to her own bitchtasticosity and would file a protest. I would have five calendar days to respond to this challenge, and the possible outcomes are:

• I could not respond at all. My review would be deleted.
• I could respond and agree with her. “My dear sweet [bitch’s name deleted], your impassioned plea of ‘I am not a bitch’ has melted my heart and I do agree that you are not a bitch in the slightest.” Actually, the more likely scenario is “Hey, [bitch’s name deleted], I got the letter from your lawyer and feel that agreeing to withdraw my review is so much better than a costly and embarrassing lawsuit. Remind me to send you a card on Hitler’s birthday.” In either case, the review is deleted.
• I could respond and stand by my review. “She is too a bitch!” The simple act of standing by my review sends a message to exso that gee, I’m so steadfast that I must be right, which means that the review remains.

It’s not so much arbitration as it is a test to see how stubborn you are.

For those who don’t feel like submitting a review, exso also has an electronic greeting card service. The greeting cards fall under two categories. There are cards for exes you miss, with messages like “my heart still glows for you”, “I still reach out for thoughts of you” and for maximum grovelling (or stalking), “the voices can go their separate ways, but the souls will always touch”. If you’d rather be petty than pathetic, the other series of cards is for you; they have messages like “BITCH (you don’t deserve any more words)”, “You told me you were giving me the key to your heart. But I had no idea you had so many copies” and “…your personality is not the only thing that can make me vomit. But it’s the first”. This service is free for a limited time, after which it’ll cost you $2.75 to waste your time and bandwidth.

exso knows the mind of the online American — privacy-conscious enough to enter their credit card number only on secure Web pages, yet ready to dish the dirt on their past relationships. The only good I can see coming from this service is that a good Law and Order or Sex and the City episode might get written around it.

Welcome, Zooko, Amber, Irby and Jill!

This weekend, friends of mine from the peer-to-peer programming world are in town.

Bryce (a.k.a. “Zooko“), Amber and their charming little boy Irby are in town to check out the University of Toronto, one of the places where Amber’s been accepted for grad studies. Bryce was one of the programmers behind Mojo Nation, one of the cooler peer-to-peer applications that emerged during the salad days of P2P. He’s currently working on MNet, a project that utilizes the collective drive space of a network of computers to create a large secure file store. I think it’d be pretty cool if they chose to move here…here’s hoping!

Jill (a.k.a. “Jillium”, “Jillzilla”) is here to visit and participate in a Joey-style debauched weekend. Like Bryce, she also worked at Mojo Nation. Now, she runs the “crawl” at Google — the process where Google computers hoover Web content for indexing. Suffice to say, without Jill, Google doesn’t work. So if you run into us this weekend, get down on your knees and supplicate yourself before her in an appropriate fashion.

Jill arrives in the mid-afternoon today. I’ll hang out with her for a couple of hours, and then run off to Pickering for a rehearsal, then back into town to show Jill around and hang out, as we did in Mountain View and San Francisco back in February. I haven’t decided where we’ll go yet — perhaps the Queen Street West strip, just to show her where a lot of these blog stories take place (NASA, Velvet Underground, Zen Lounge, The Paddock, Bovine Sex Club), or perhaps Toronto’s best ambisexual dance night, Tallulah’s Cabaret at the Buddies in Bad Times theatre.

(I haven’t been to Buddies in a while; I stopped going when a large number of my outing there ended in annoyance or social disaster. It’s the only place where I’ve ever started a fight. In retrospect, the story’s kind of funny…)

Tomorrow night, I’m performing at C’est What with Lindi. We’ll be a stripped down band tomorrow — I mean we’ll be clothed (well, drummer Devin and I will be; Lindi’s outfits get skimpier with each gig), but it’ll just be Lindi, Devin and me. We’ll be doing the show with Lindy, the really tall, really sweet Icelandic folk-rocker. After the gig, we’re going to go to…

…The Matador!

Infamous Toronto “after-hours establishment” (I’ll leave it to you to decipher that), place where Harrison Ford likes to hang out when he’s in town and site of a few accordion-related hijinks.

Anyone who wants to join me as I show Jill around is welcome to come — drop me a line, or show up for the Lindi/Lindy gig at C’est What on Saturday night.

Mischief is expected.

Jesus and the accordion player, remixed

Lindi took the “Jesus/accordion player” image from a couple of days ago and made it a little more pencil-sketch-like. Here it is:

French 101

In case you were wondering, “fuck you” in French is “baise-toi”, pronounced “bez twah”.

(If you don’t know what this is all about, read this story).

“We be flyin’ all over this bitch!”

John London’s classic Ebonics-ized Delta Airline ad parody is available as an MP3 or a Flash animation.

Peep it, homes.

Flip Daddy, the Thrilla from Manila, out. Word.

Let my footage go

Slightly updated to be even funnier at 1:50 p.m. EST.

Bill Barol’s not a big fan of Cecil B. DeMille’s epic, The Ten Commandments, as he writes in this blog entry:

Watching the annual broadcast of “The Ten Commandments,” I was struck once again by the mind-altering terribleness of it. I mean, I don’t think it makes me irreligious to say that this is one very large stinker of a Bible picture. And this year, as my mind was wandering, I found myself wondering about lines that had been cut from the original release. There must have been some, despite its three-day running time. For example: In the Passover scene, after Eliazar asks why the Israelites eat bitter herbs and Moses answers that it’s to remind them of the bitterness of their slavery, it seems plausible that the screenwriters had Eliazar answer: “But uncle, I work sixteen hours a day in mud over my head, I need no reminders. What am I, stupid?” That line? Cut.

Here’s what I think ended up on the cutting room floor…

DELETED SCENE ONE

The scene: At the coast of the Red Sea, which Moses has parted. In the distance, you can see Moses leading the Israelites across the narrow strip of dry sea bed. In the foreground is the Pharoah’s army’s captain and his lieutenant, debating their next move. The captain points at the firestorm that Moses has cast behind the Israelites in order to slow the army down.

Captain: Look! The fire dies! This is our chance! All right, men, let’s go after —

Lieutenant: Begging your pardon, sir, I don’t want to seem to be advocating cowardice, but…

Captain: But what?

Lieutenant: Well, sir, I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s just better to…uh…let them go.

Captain: Let them go? At the brink of our victory? Have you gone mad?

Lieutenant: Think about it. Their god’s been wiping the walls with us, right? The plagues — the frogs, the locusts, the dust turning into gnats, everyone running out of toilet paper and Kleenex at the same time… And what about that thing with the water? He turned the Nile into blood…and on my laundry day! Do you know what it takes to get blood out of togas? Then that angel of death guy ices all our firstborn sons, mine included! I had everything riding on little Johnny, and now I’ve got to bequeath all my chattels to my younger son Lance, who’s…well, he’s turning out a little…well…fruity. And now that we’ve chased Moses and the Israelites to the sea and think we’ve got him cornered, poof — he cuts a path across the water and blocks us with a giant firestorm.

Captain: Your point being?

Lieutenant: This hardcore god of theirs clearly gets results. Don’t you think it’s a little odd that now, of all times, one of this god’s tricks has just fizzled out? Call me paranoid, but I smell a trap. And besides, our failure to stop their attacks in spite of our wizards, superior numbers and weapons should clearly indicate flaws in our mideast polic–

The captain pulls out his sword and lops off the lieutenant’s head with a single stroke.

Captain: (muttering to himself) Damned liberals and their “blame Egypt first” rhetoric… (To his men) All right, men…let’s roll!

DELETED SCENE TWO

The scene: Moses returns from the mountain with the two stone tablets, only to find that the Israelites are now worshipping a golden calf.

Aaron: Hail the cow. Amooooo.

Moses: What the…? I leave you idiots alone for a couple of days and you go all pagan on me. Don’t you remember all that God did for us? The plagues? The Nile turning into blood? The thing where I turned my nunchucks into deadly snakes? With His help, we got Mesopotamian on their ass!

Aaron: Um…yeah, but…we thought about it and decided that this God person is a little too right-wing. And He’s way too much into gross-outs for our liking. I mean, the frogs, locusts and gnats? Icky. I mean, couldn’t he have come up with, I dunno, a plague of puppies? And the bit where He gave all the Egyptians boils? Ewwww! Half of Cairo was still inch-deep in pus when we left. And as for killing all their firstborn sons, well, isn’t that a little…well, sexist? We’ve been thinking that if He has to resort to fascist tactics like that, the Egyptians have already won.

Moses (screaming): And so you switched gods? You worship this (Points to golden calf) now? You worship something we make freakin’ brisket out of? If you’re going to worship stuff you can find at the deli, why didn’t you save yourself a lot of sculpting work and make a golden…matzoh?

Aaron: I’m sensing a lot of hostility here…

Moses contemplates breaking the tablet with commandments one through five over Aaron’s head, but decides not to. He looks at the cow and realizes something.

Moses: Hmmm…it just occurred to me…we were slaves. Unpaid labour. No pyramid builder’s union. We were dirt poor with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Where did you get enough gold to make this false god?

Aaron (nervously): Uh….we found it. Yeah, we found it. You know, near that place beside the thing…you know…

Special memo to my sister and brother-in-law

Dear Eileen and Richard,

I know it’s a little soon, what with you guys having gotten married only two and a half years ago, but I think now would be a good time for you guys to renew your wedding vows. Why?

Because you can now get wedding cakes made out of Krispy Kreme donuts!

Love,

Joey

(I found the story at Bill Barol’s blog.)