What a night not to be in Toronto: Rheostatics

I learned yesterday that my favorite band is breaking up today. Tonight, the Rheostatics will play their final show in Toronto's Massey Hall.

I stole my first Rheostatics disc from the music director's mailbox at the college radio station where I had a midnight shift. The first few times I listened to Introducing Happiness I thought it was nothing special. On the fifth listen, I clicked: here was a lyrically dense, musically intricate work that quickly rose to a favorite album.

And every Rheos album I've ever been able to get my hands on has been amazing. From their first album (Greatest Hits) to the back-to-back Whale Music releases to 1997's Double Live album to their most recent release 2067, each work holds up not only as a collection of great songs, but a unified, flowing composition.

Guitarist Dave Bidini pens a farewell letter in The Globe and Mail. Fans deliver eulogies in this MeFi thread. There's a tribute album out this month. Their live shows are freely available. In 2000, two of the top five albums in Chart Magazine's Best Canadian Records poll were Rheostatics releases. As for me, I tell people I don't know where I got my slight canadian accent, but I know it's probably from singing along with the Rheos.

Some minor piracy: the Rheostatic's cover of Neil Young's Everyone Knows This is Nowhere.

John C. Dvorak Needs an Editor

Folks who spend anytime at all in the Information Technology realm are familiar with John C. Dvorak. He's prolific as can be, writing more than 4k articles since 1986. He writes not one, but two columns for PC Magazine. I have to give him props for that, as well as inventing the nifty Dvorak keyboard layout.*

He's a bit hard to criticize, what with his "cranky" persona, but he holds a special place in the hearts of Macintosh users. In fact, he's admitted to baiting Mac users to increase traffic to his website. Where I come from, we call that "trolling". But can't he have someone check his work before it's printed?

In a recent article on the Nintendo Wii he mentions the potential for Wii Remote-related accidents:

Those news reports about people losing control of their controller and hitting the dog? They seem to stem from the baseball simulation, where you create a 100-mph curve ball by letting go of your controller while it's still strapped to your wrist.

In the article he talks about his extensive testing of the Bowling game within Wii Sports, but he must have skipped playing the Baseball game. I can't imagine how he got the idea that one must release the controller at any point in the pitching process. One can firmly hold their controller throughout the entire game. There's a few microgames in Wario Ware: Smooth Moves (which Dvorak refers too as "Wii Wario" rather than using the game's actual name) that let you relax your grip on the controler, but these are pretty sedate affairs. No fast balls required.

An earlier article bashing the deserving target of Sony mentions a Blu-ray disc burner for PCs:

The latest fiasco is the recent revelation that Sony's Blu-ray player for the PC will not have the ability to play HD movies on the PC. This is to protect the interests of the movie makers somehow. Are they kidding us?

Would that be this player? The link states quite clearly that it plays Blu-ray movies. It does not play HD-DVDs, a competing format in a escalating format war. That's like criticizing a Betamax machine for not playing a VHS tape. Mr. Dvorak clearly understands the difference, so I'm not sure what point he's making here.

Similarly, parsing this sentence is a bit challenging too:

While Microsoft, because of its sheer size, is no more doomed than IBM ever was, it's never going to be a leader again, if the Vista saga is any indication.

What's the argument here? Vista is so bad that it will cripple Microsoft? IBM was big and now it isn't? It's a delicious mix of parenthetical clauses, negative statements and pronouns without antecedents.

Maybe I'm just being cranky. His minor errors and need for minimal fact-checking certainly don't rise to my favorite Central Minnesota weekly: a paper so in need of editing that seven entries in a top-ten list contained errors (one was a misplaced horoscope). I know that by picking nits I'm opening myself up to Gaudere's Law. John C. Dvorak's columns are usually pretty good, if not particularly insightful. But I don't think it's too much for a columnist in a review magazine to write clearly and accurately describe the products he's talking about.

*Disclaimer: Not actually true.

Frozen Dead Guy Days.

Last week I was lucky enough to be able to attend the most prestigious public cyrogenic event in all of North America: Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland, Colorado.

The Dead Guy in question was Bredo Morstoel, former Director of Parks and Recreation in Baerum County, Norway. He passed away in Norway in 1989, was packed in dry ice and shipped to America. He now rests in a Tuff Shed in the hills above Nederland. When the Nederland City Council found out about their frigid resident, they passed a law against keeping corpses on one's property. Ex post facto, suckers! So, given icy lemons, the town decided to make frozen lemonade. The Chamber of Commerce has been celebrating Grandpa Bredo's suspended animation with a yearly festival every year since 2002.

My friend Tim and I got into town just before the saturday parade. Nederland is about 2500 feet in elevation above the front range so while it was bright and sunny in Boulder, it was 40 degrees and snowing in Ned. Perfect weather for a parade! And what a parade!

The local industry and sponsors made a strong showing, throwing handwarmers and mushroom bread to the crowds. The competitors in the afternoon's Coffin Races showed off their teams and the New Belgium team made a point at stopping at every bar along main street. The highlight of the parade was the long string of hearses. Some classic, some restored and some heavily modified.

That's Project Alexi, far and away the fan favorite of the parade. Zachary was very careful not to immolate any spectators.

After the parade the crowd dispersed to the many local restaurants, the Polar Plunge or the New Belgium Beer Tent. Tim and I grabbed elk and buffalo burgers then hit the beer tent. One has to support the sponsors of an event such as this.

Then the focus of the festival: The coffin races. Each team was composed of seven members: six pallbearers and one "passenger" carried in some sort of homemade conveyance. These conveyances ranged from coffins (naturally) to hotrods and oversized beer bottles to fighter aircraft. As seen in this snowy panorama, two teams raced head to head. From the starting line, through the Tuff Shed, over (or under) the limbo bar at the swingset, then to the slide. The passenger clambered up the playground equipment and down the slide. The pallbearers performed a "fire drill maneuver" around their coffin and raced to meet their departed on the other side. Finally, a sprint to the finish over five slippery berms of snow. Heats were won and lost at this stage of the race, as pallbearers fought to keep their footing and balance. They weren't always successful and more than one passenger ended up being dumped in a most unceremonious fashion.

The final heat found a team of Elvis impersonators facing off against Team America with their F-15 coffin. The race was close, with the narrow Tuff Shed injuring several people, but in the end Team America came out on top.

Tim's got plans to race himself next year. He said, "This is like the day after Christmas. Now we have to wait a whole year before Frozen Dead Guy Days comes around again." But that's a year of planning, training and coffin building. We'll be back, Nederland! We want everyone laughing at us next year.

Plenty more picures on the flickr.

Dee-do! Dee-do! Dee-do!

--begin rant--

I was rudely awaked at three this morning by my cell phone. It wasn't a death in the family or a friend in jail this time. It was my phone kindly letting me know that my battery was running low. In my still-asleep stupor, I let it bother for at least half an hour (every seven minutes) before I realized that it was not going to stop. After all, it hadn't stopped all the other times I forgot to plug it so many times before. And, just like every other time, I wondered how much battery power went into letting me know it was low on power. Why, it could probably run for hours on all the needless noise it was generating every seven minutes. Seriously Motorola engineers, I'm rarely more than a half-hour's walk from a charger - a single notification would be enough.

And faceless engineers: while you're at it how about some warnings that would actually be useful? Why can't my phone beep at me while I'm walking out the door when it sits, lonely and forgotten my desk? Why won't it let me know to buy more milk at the store because the carton in the fridge is bad? Why doesn't it sing to remind me when I forget to call a friend or family member on their birthday?

Despite my gadget-lust, I don't dig beeps or dings or rings or buzzes. Truth be told, most of the time they scare the crap out of me because I'm focused on something else. But as long as we have to live with these electronic beasties, why don't they actually make a difference in our lives.

--rant mode off--

Happy Pi Day!

Self Portrait with Security Mirror

Someone in the club tonight has stolen my ideas

Crossposted from the OkCupid:

I had a chance meeting with another writerly sort yesterday. Naturally we talked about the projects we were working on. I'm always pretty forward, but this other guy vaguely hinted at what he was working on. He was afraid to even tell me the name of his protagonist, even after I assured him I don't generally work in fiction. I can't understand people who are deathly afraid their ideas may be stolen.

I don't believe for an instant an idea can be "stolen".

Maybe the specific implementation of a particular idea can be emulated... if two authors have exactly the same background, skills and writing styles. But two authors are going to treat the same idea differently. Furthermore, the phrase "nothing new under the sun" springs to mind, as does "the hero with a thousand faces". Everyone who creates is standing on the shoulders of giants.

I resent the implication that an author can be "out of ideas" and seeking, like a vampire, new ideas to steal. I reckon most creative sorts have more ideas than they have time to write down or paint or choreograph or cook or carve or what have you. Ideas are everywhere. Ideas are common and have no value. They're like grains of sand. Sand is worthless. It's only when blown into glass for our champagne or formed into silicon wafers for our computers that it has real value. Ideas have no value until somebody makes something out of them.

Of Philatelic Interest

The United States Postal Service makes it quite clear that "No living person shall be honored by portrayal on U.S. postage". Stamp subjects have to be deceased for at least ten years (unless they happen to have been president). Nevertheless, plenty of living people have appeared (though, to be fair, not as the subject) on stamps. Here's a few:

The Two Cent "Farming In the West" stamp, issued in 1898 is said to be the first stamp depicting living people.


Two stamps from 1938 depict people that were likely alive at the time, a pair of children planting a tree and an runner on his mark.


Due to public outcry, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima was issued five months after the flag-raising.


The 1966 American Circus stamp bears the likeness of Lou Jacobs.




The iconic picture of Florence Owens Thompson was released on a stamp in 1998. Roger Sprague, the grandson of Thompson, says that two of the children were still very much alive at the time the stamp was issued. Other photographs of people in this series can be found on the Vietnam War and the Hostages Return Home stamps.


The "Heroes 2001" stamp, commemorating raising the flag Ground Zero was issued March 11, 2002, echoing the Iwo Jima stamp.