In lieu of attending Bloggercon III, which I can’t attend as it’s
happening on the weekend of my birthday and the
Wendy’s-parents-meet-mine events, let me instead give it this most
heartfelt plug:
“Go to BloggerCon. You never know who you might meet!“
…if I would be attending BloggerCon III, which takes place in Palo Alto (or “Shallow Alto” as Cory
and I called it when we lived there) on November 6th. I’d love to, but
I can’t. My birthday’s November 5th, my annual birthday extravaganza
takes place on November 6th, and that weekend is also the first time my
parents will meet Wendy’s parents. Simply put, I’m going to have my
hands full.
I’m going to a launch party at the Drake Hotel for my friend Chris “Turner” Turner’s first book, Planet Simpson.
Chris is a friend of mine back from our days at Crazy Go Nuts University, where he and I were both DJs at the engineering student-run Clark Hall Pub. He later went to become a freelance writer, submitting some of the best pieces for the late great Shift magazine (a creation of Canadian Gen-X pundit and CBC fixture Evan Solomon) and later, Time magazine. Wendy and I attended his wedding in January.
I have no idea if the party is an open or closed one; if you’re in the neighbourhood, drop by and check it out!
As for the book, it’s quite thick (450 pages!) and attempts to balance popular appeal with scholarly rigor.
Booklsut has this to say:
While the book will hold on to every reader, Turner’s dense academic
feel towards the end may feel like homework, and will definitely place it in
university bookstores for next semester. Some of the chapter subtitles have
a textbook feel, for example: “Journey to the Center of the Simpsons:
Self-Awareness, Self-Reference, Self-Parody, and the perfection of the Postmodern
Aesthetic.” But there is so much to this book that everyone will love
it.
The cultural studies canon has recently expanded to include dissections of
tv shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos and
Sex and the City. But Planet Simpson trumps them all.
Turner scored a coup (hah!) by landing Douglas (“Generation X“) Coupland to write the foreword. An excerpt:
If this book were to have an alternative title, it would most likely
be, How to Cook for Forty Humans. If that makes no sense to you,
chances are you probably haven’t read this far anyway. If it does make
sense, you’ll understand the treat that’s coming your way just a few
pages from here.
I’m looking forward to sharing a Guinness with Turner tonight. Congrats on getting published, dude!
It’s almost that time. The legendary Joey deVilla birthday party
returns, now enriched with an extra reason to celebrate: my engagement!
Here’s the basic info:
A number of people of asked me, so I’ll state it here: as much as
I would love to have Neil’s wonderful hot tub on a truck back, if my
neighbours from across the street even see
that truck coming down the street, they’re going to call the cops on
me. Besides, seeing Eldon in a Speedo should be a once-in-lifetime
event for anyone. (There is a story about what happened when the cops
showed up last year, and I will tell it soon.)
At the 2001, 2002 and 2003 parties, I have been accosted by one of my lovely female guests (here’s the 2003 story). Since this is also an engagement party and since my lovely fiancee
will be there, this streak is likely to be broken. It was fun while it
lasted, but as an older, wiser gentleman (stop snickering, you!) it’s
time to move on.
Want more details about the party? Contact me.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet accordion number four, an Iorio “accorgan” (which I assume is a combination of “accordion” and “organ”):
I’ve heard of these things before — they’re acoustic accordions with
some electronic components and switches that suggest that they’re like
electronic organs. According to Wendy, the accordion has a number of
electric switches and volume dials not unlike old-school electronic
organs; I suspect that it could be plugged into an amplifier for REAL
ULTIMATE POWER.
This lucky find never would’ve happened without Wendy. She was riding home on the bus when she overheard a woman talking to the bus driver.
“Who can I give my father’s accordion to?” the woman asked.
Wendy, who says that her ears perk up whenever she hears the word “accordion” (aww…) approached the woman and said “My fiance plays the accordion! You could give it to him!”
And so an arrangement was made. Last Saturday, they met at Dunkin’
Donuts, where the woman gave Wendy the accordion, which was wrapped up
in duct tape and garbage bags.
“It must’ve looked like a drug deal,” Wendy said.
She brought it back, played a couple of notes for me over the phone so
I could hear it (it might need a little tuning) and took the picture
above. She says it “smells like a bar”, to which I said “Good! That
means it has stories.”
And now the Iorio sits in her living room, waiting for my next visit.
She says it’s strange having an accordion in her house, but no guy. Soon, sweetie, soon!
My fiancee is nothing short of amazing.
Liz “I Speak of Dreams” Ditz sent me this news about yet another convert to the accordion:
Murphy’s Law string band has “transmoogafied” into a traditional
Cajun band. Caity’s been pulling out the squeezebox and making noise at
folkfests and dances around the state of Florida including the
recent Cajun Cafe On The Bayou’s Fais Do-Do Fest ’99 held in Pinellas
Park FL in early October.
Thanks for the heads-up, Liz!
Quirky singer-songwriter Wendy McNeill
is also a convert to the accordion. For her third album, Such a Common Bird, she’s taken up
the accordion as both songwriting and performance instrument. Bravo!
She’s put a couple of tracks online, both of which are quite good:
And finally, here’s the last paragraph of an article from the September edition of Air Canada’s in-flight magazine, EnRoute.
The article is about the ukelele (an equally-maligned instrument,
championed by BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder), but the paragraph could
easily be applied to the accordion:
it will become impossible to continue to associate the ukelele with
novelty acts. And Hawaii itself will no longer be considered to
be one big Elvis movie, augmented by happy dancing natives, wacky
cocktails and tacky tiki. This sort of thing has happened before. At
the beginning of the 20th century, for instance, a certain instrument
was associated only with vaudeville comics and horn-honking clowns. All
it took was a single virtuoso to reform that instrument’s reputation.
That man was Coleman Hawkins, and the instrument was the tenor saxophone.
I was walking back from the Warehouse Grill with Scott Murff when he mentioned the voice-over-IP company Vonage. He used the French pronunciation, “voh-nahzh” instead of the English “vonidge”.
“Dude,” I said. “Vonage a trois!“
“Whoa.”
“We could even get ‘Lawrence’ from Office Space
to be the spokesman. ‘What would I do with internet telephony?
Tell you what I’d do, man…phone two chicks at the same time, man.'”
[via UFies.org] Well, I’m sort of American. I’m the direct descendant of an American (my great-grandfather is James O’Hara,
who left Dayton, Ohio for the Philippines after the end of the
Spanish-American War). Therefore, I’m entitled to take the How
F**king American Are You quiz.
Here’s my result: Happy and Horny American.
Wendy could’ve told you that.