Apparently, this is a creation of Shed Simove, who calls himself “Ideas Man”. According to his “About” page, he’s a “performer, author and serial entrepreneur” who turns “his unconventional concepts into lucrative new business ventures which form the basis of his completely unique stand-up routines and corporate speeches”.
The best comment I’ve heard in response to Martin Loofah King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by how well that skin has been exfoliated."
I was at the Make Web Not War Community Night at the Drake Hotel’s Drake Underground room last week, mostly just to catch up with my former coworkers at Microsoft. Among them was Montreal-based developer evangelist Frederic Harper, who wanted to try out the accordion, and I was more than happy to oblige. I think it suits him!
Fred and I will cross paths again early in the new year. First, we’ll both be attending CUSEC in Montreal – the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, quite possibly the best tech conference run by students out there – which runs from Thursday, January 19th through Saturday, January 21st. Then we’ll meet up a month later at the “Web Techno Conference” known as ConFoo, which takes place from Wednesday, February 29th through Friday, March 2nd.
Lately, I’ve been cranking up the volume on tunes with female vocals. Here are three that have been getting a fair bit of play on my sound systems…
Dum Dum Girls: There is a Light That Never Goes Out
The final track on side two of The Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen is Dead (yes kids, once upon a time, media had sides, and you had to turn it over) is There is a Light That Never Goes Out. It’s one of the best songs in The Smiths’ ouevre, equally showcasing Morrissey’smarr trademark over-the-top emo-angsty lyrics and voice and Johnny Marr’s instrumental skills, both on guitar and keyboards. The strings in the song are Marr playing an Emulator II sampling keyboard; as the keyboard player, he’s listed in the credits as “The Hated Salford Ensemble”, a reference to the fact that they didn’t want to use a synth but couldn’t afford a real string ensemble. I wore out a couple of cassette recordings of this album, and this song takes me back to the time of big changes: from high school to university, from living at home to living away, from an awkward adolescence to a less-awkward adulthood and a very memorable romance with a hardcore Smiths fan.
The California-based indie pop groupDum Dum Girls sound like a gene-splice of The Ronettes and The Jesus and Mary Chain, and their straight-ahead indie-rock-meets-Phil-Spector cover of There is a Light Never Goes out is catchy. I’ve been enjoying this track for the past couple of weeks. You can find it on their 2011 EP He Gets Me High.
Satomi Matsuzaki, John Dieterich and Greg Saunier are the trio known as Deerhoof, an experimental rock band from San Francisco. Normally, the phrase “experimental rock band from San Francisco” should be considered a warning sign, but I dig the weird little musical biscuits they bake. Their current album, Deerhoof vs. Evil – which you can download for free, legitimately! – is a joy to listen to, from the Game Theory-esque Behold a Marvel in the Darkness to the folky No One Asked to Dance to Hey I Can, where they almost channel Chromeo. It’s a delightful, oddball album.
The video above is the official video for the track Secret Mobilization, and it’s just as odd as their tunes. Enjoy!
This goes out to all my Jewish friends who are also honorary Asians. Click the image to see it at full size (nice and large too; image courtesy of Cake Troll.)
I’m looking around nervously, checking for signs to see if I’ve somehow been transported to a parallel universe, thanks to the video above: it’s Ice Cube waxing poetic about Charles and Ray Eames, relating their works to mash-ups and sampling.
“The Eames made structure and nature one,” says Cube, who studied architectural drafting before becoming that most gangsta of rappers. “This is going green 1949 style, bitch! Blee’dat!”
Mind. Blown.
I’m going to have to close with this graphic, in honour of the changes between the AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted-era Ice Cube and today’s version. I’m cool with both:
I found this map of New Jersey on Facebook, and having visited New Jersey many, many times – I’ve got friends and relatives there – I will say that there’s some truth to the map, assuming you’re looking at the world from a New Yorker’s eyes. If you’d like a closer look at the map, just click on it.
I narrowly avoided becoming a New Jerseyite. Or is it New Jerseyan? New Jerseyoid?
Back in the early 1980s, my mom got a sweet research job offer from a drug company that would require us to move to the town of Summit, New Jersey, which in the annotated map above is located in the “Executives Living in Mansions Driving Mercedes-Benzes” zone. The deal was a hair’s breadth of going through when U.S. Immigration put the kibosh on the plan, citing some obscure restriction, and we remained in Accordion City. A few months after that happened, Mom was contacted again and told that the restriction had been lifted, but by then my parents had decided to stay in Canada.
