[originally posted on The Farm]
Joel Washburn is a developer in Tucows’ Starkville, Mississippi office (we acquired the company formerly known as Boardtown, and I’ll leave it to our CEO Elliot Noss to explain the details). More importantly, he has mad yo-yo skillz, as this video [3 MB QuickTime] shot by acrhitecture guru Frank Reiter shows. As someone who comes from the same country as the yo-yo, I salute you, Joel!
I’ll be damned: MuchMusic just called me, asking for the location of the Secret Swing.
VJ Jennifer Hollett (whom I met during my 2002 and 2003 appearances on the live afternoon show
MuchOnDemand) placed the call; she thought it would be a great place to
conduct a band interview.
The Secret Swing is a perfect place for interviews — I can see rock,
indie, punk and hip-hop bands jumping at the chance to answer questions
and try out the swing. It’s also located quite conveniently: a
five-minute drive from the MuchMusic studios. I’m also sure that sooner
or later, someone’s
going to shoot a music video there (I see Hawksley Workman crooning and
swinging there).
I can draw two conclusions:
Here’s Scott drinking beer — hardcore robot doggy style!
We really have to stop serving malt liquor at the Tucows annual picnic.
Suw (who used to be “Sue” until a misprint in an academic paper transformed her name forever) Charman, one of the regulars on the #joiito IRC channel, points to this report that one of my musical idols, Ben Folds, is collaborating on an album with The Original Starfleet Captain, William Shatner, on a new album, titled Has Been. A substantial snippet of his cover of Pulp’s late-nineties hit, Common People, is available online [QuickTime link]. It’s awesome: Shatner does the verses in his trademark Shatnerian reading, with Joe Jackson doing the vocal wailing for the chorus, and surprisingly, it works.
I will buy this album the day it comes out.
BoingBoing links to Chris’ blog entry about the Secret Swing, in which he — presumably after reading BoingBoing, who found out from me, who found out from Rannie
— and two friends give the swing a try. Chris wisely does what I did:
put an attractive young lady on the swing and take pictures.
In case you’re visiting Toronto, the alleyway in which you’ll find the
swing is just south of Queen Street West and runs parallel to it. Its
west end is at Bathurst and its easternmost terminus is at Spadina (just a couple of blocks south of my house); the swing is in an alcove in the north wall of the stretch between Denison and Spadina.
Sometimes Scott and I have these conversations that end up sounding like this police scanner chatter:
Make sure you the read the whole comic.
(I am sooooo car 15, dude.)