At a two-day kite-flying festival in Lahore, Pakistan (former home of my good buddy George), injuries and deaths were caused by:
- People falling off rooftopsStray bullets
- Electrocution
- and sharpened kite-strings [Joey’s note: Huh?]
Those of you who went to Crazy Go Nuts University and hung out in Clark Hall Pub in the early 1990s are probably familiar with Meryn Cadell’s spoken-word piece The Sweater of her album Angel Food for Thought, a number I used to play near the beginning of my DJ shifts before the dance floor really got rocking. If you don’t recognize the title, you might recognize the opening sentences that followed an opening organ riff sampled from the theme to Un Homme et Une Femme…
Girls, I know you will understand this, and feel the intrinsic, incredible emotion. You have just pulled over your head the worn, warm sweater belonging to A Boy.
Unlikely as it was, the number proved to be a hit; some people even got on the dance floor when this number came on. For a while, I’d always get a request from some young woman to play the song, and I recall people asking me to put it on a mixed tape for them.
(For the younger readers: Back in the stone-age days of the early 1990s, the most practical way to share music was to pass around recordings made on a spool of thin plastic called “tape” contained in a plastic casing called a “cassette”. We also thought that ADD was caused by evil spirits.)
The Sweater also got heavy rotation on Accordion City’s alt-rock station CFNY (now “102.1 The Edge”, a mere shadow of its former self) and MuchMusic. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can watch the old video:
So where is Meryn Cadell now? According to Torontoist, Meryn’s now in Vancouver, working as a university professor, happier than ever and…a man.
This Torontoist interview is the inspiration for this week’s Song of the Week, The Sweater [4.8 MB MP3], which will be available for a week, and then will evaporate. (Well, there’s also the matter of my not having a copy of Monty Python’s Penis Song handy.) Enjoy the song, and welcome to the club, Meryn!
Categories
Apparently, People Have to be Told That
I’m in the middle of cleaning out my wardrobe, getting rid of stuff that’s worn out or hasn’t been worn in over a year. In the process, I’ve noticed the following trends in my clothing:
- Since meeting Wendy, I’ve bought a lot of clothing in Boston, most often at “pricey stuff at discount prices” places like Filene’s Basement and T.J. Maxx. Although Winners here in Canada is owned by the same parent company as T.J. Maxx, the selection isn’t as good. For nice stuff at lower prices, I go to Tom’s Place in Kensington Market.
- A healthy chunk of my wardrobe is made up Nautica and Claiborne dress shirts.
- I like dress shirts but hate button-down collars.
- Blazers and vests rule.
- I wear running shoes, track pants and other clothing you can buy at Foot Locker only to the gym.
- Okay, I have a decent number of Hawaiian shirts. I’m from the South Pacific and in the computer industry, I’m allowed!
- I buy only two things at The Gap and Old Navy: boxers and t-shirts. My casual pants come from Tip Top and Eddie Bauer now.
There remains one “kiddie store” from which I’ve been buying clothes: Bluenotes, where I get one particular pair of jeans that Wendy likes on me (they’re dark blue with a tan undertone). They also have a couple of nerd-related t-shirts that I’ve picked up specifically for techie conferences — I’ve had my eye on on that reads “Nobody cares about your blog”.
I figured that I would eventually stop buying stuff there as a function of moving into my forties in November, but perhaps that’ll start sooner. I vote with my dollar, and the t-shirt pictured to the right has convinced me that it’s time to cast my vote elsewhere.
This one goes out to my brother-in-law, Andy Ramoniac, who like me, is a fan — it’s the Boris Vallejo-inspired poster for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters:
In the late 1990s, a surprsingly large number of friends-of-friends who were women were involved in relationships with older married men (it was never clear to me how much thought they’d given to the long-term prospects for the relationship). I remember a Globe and Mail article from that time that talked about “The Man Glut”, a situation in which the author estimated that there was something in the order of 10,000 more single men in Accordion City than women. It’s probably no coincidence that I took up the accordion at around the same time.
When I lived in San Francisco around the end of 2000 and the first half of 2001, a number of people I knew complained of the lack of single women. There were a number of news reports that made the claim that the male-female ratio in Silicon Valley was even higher than in Anchorage, Alaska. As for the available men, women there had a saying about the nerds in the Valley: “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” I remember hearing about some very expensive “how to meet women” courses in the valley in which nerds paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars to workshop their dating and socializing techniques.
Returning in Toronto in 2001, I came back to the complaints about the lack of eligible single men. In one particular case, the expectations of a friend of a friend were impossibly high.
It turns out that my experiences were indicative of larger trends, as the map below showing the ratios of single men to women across the United States shows. The west coast has a higher ratio of single men, while the east coast has a higher ratio of the single women. You might say that the country looks like a middle school dance:
Click the map to see it at full size.
My proposed solution: a big barn dance in “flyover country”.
[found via Reddit]