the blog quebecois

and I have bad news.

The good news is that I got a new computer for Xhriata. (I was intending to type "Christmas," but this is a new keyboard, so my fingers are getting a bit tangled up. Besides, "Xhriata" sounds like a perfectly good holiday, if somewhat paganistic.)

It came just in time. My old computer was beginning to generate some interesting (read: incomprehensible) Windows errors and I was contemplating buying an external disk drive to backup my files.

So with considerable delight I unwrapped a very nice, very powerful Hewlett-Packard computer running Vista Home Premium. At last I'll be able to play the latest version of Flight Simulator (running the demo on my old machine was like watching a slideshow).

Now for the bad news: I got a new computer. The first thing I noticed when I popped off the Quick Access Panel is that the hard drives used a completely different cabling configuration than in my old computer. I'm not sure if this is a Vista thing (I really can't see why) or, more likely, that Hewlett-Packard got a deal on some strange Chinese drives. Or that the computer industry decided to make a massive technology shift, and I didn't get the memo.

Well, whatever. The upshot is that I had some 200+ gigs of stuff on my old drives, with no convenient way of transferring it. Much of it was in the form of programs that would have had to been upgraded to Vista-compliant versions. No point in moving those; but there were thousands of music files, photos, etc., that I am rather fond of and would have to transfer eventually, most likely by setting up a network or with a null-modem transfer cable.

The things I really needed -- bookmarks, certain specialized programs and the like -- would fit comfortably on a single CD, so I set about burning that. Then the CD writer died, and the CD itself was unreadable. I was starting to believe in The Curse Of Xhriata.

Then I had one of those d'oh! moments familiar to anyone who's worked with computers. I was absently-mindedly thumbing through some advertising flyers when I came across one from a local electronics chain, offering its post-Xmas sales. Hi-def TVs, games, iPods, Flash USB drives, Nintendo acc-- wait, what?

Though both computers had slots for them, using USB memory sticks to transfer data never even crossed my mind, likely because I hadn't used one before.

Far faster than CDs, and much less in expense/frustration than the other solutions I was thinking of.

So that's what's been occupying my attention for the last few days. I expect posting will be erratic while I sort out my computer and try to whip myself into some semblance of a routine.

It's good to be back; I hope to have some new stuff up shortly.

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, if you like laws and sausages and rock music, you should never watch them being made.

This was an older song that we'd never recorded, maybe because it had one glaring flaw. That would have been the last line of the chorus (the one I've marked with an asterisk). The original lyrics have long since vanished, but I recall announcing that I refused to sing it -- at least that particular line -- from that moment forever on. It was that bad. Not obscene-bad -- just something that was intended to be clever and wasn't, a pimple on the nose of the prom queen. Nor would it scan, no matter how I twisted the syllables.

So eventually I crossed it out and scribbled in something to remind me to replace it. We ran through the song one more time, and guess what? The line fit perfectly, so we kept it. Laws and sausages and rock music.

And now you know . . . the rest of the story.

========================

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
I was just too erratic
And it stood out
I said it stood out
--------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

Caught by computer
Snagged and tagged
Sorted and recorded
Coded Gulag

Captured by a keyboard
Magnetic pulse mindless
This next line I gotta change *
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
But you spat me out
It was innocent defiance
You figured it out

-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
You selected my file
Put it to the side
For a little while

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

[Chorus]

========================

Caught By Computer Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

Canada.com:

The Liberals are calling for the firing of junior foreign affairs minister Helena Guergis for imperilling the lives of their leader and his deputy by giving advance notice of their visit to Canada's provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar City.

In a scathing letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion called for Guergis's removal as secretary of state for foreign affairs because she sent an e-mail to journalists giving advance notice of the Liberal leadership's trip to the PRT.

And why, pray tell, would the Taliban attack their most important allies? If Field Marshal Dion gets his way, Canadian troops will be doing more critical things than annoying the Taliban.

Like, oh, handing out complimentary gift baskets in Kabul.

Or shovelling snow in Toronto.

Or invading Pakistan.

The Beatles, on their first tour of North America, were frequently quizzed by reporters about how they wrote their music. To which they had a set of flippant answers: "With a blue pen"; "First we sit down. Then we write the song." So, you're thinking: "Gee, were journalists as stupid back then as they are now?"

Well, yes. But it's a legitimate question from outsiders who have no idea how songs are written.

Rock is a small subset of music and fairly easy to categorize, so let's give it a whirl. It's (usually) a heavily-amplified and sped-up mix in 4/4 time combining chords and musical techniques common to the blues and to country music. Structurally it follows some arrangement of verse/chorus, sometimes with a "bridge" or "middle 8" (a contrasting or complementary musical/lyrical passage) thrown in to tie the elements together.

For example, this song. The original lyrics are long lost, so I had to transcribe them from the recording. The lyrics from the bridge do not lend themselves to easy analysis. Indeed, the only word I can make out is "telephone." The rest is, to quote a fellow countryman:

Just guitars screaming, screaming, screaming
Some guy screaming in a leather jacket

25 BonusPoints™ * go to the first person who gets the reference.

Once you have the broad outlines hammered out, you can turn your attention to details like the melody. Because the vocal drives the melody, you're bound to make changes to it once you test it out against the full instrumentation, with its often-unexpected harmonics. At least that's the way I approached things.

Now, writing a good song, that's a bit of a different beast altogether. If you want to write one of those, ignore everything I've told you.

* Void where prohibited by law. BonusPoints™ are not transferable to any known legal tender; in fact, they are useful only for bragging rights. And now that I think about it, not so much for that, either.

========================

[Verse]

Should I rent out a billboard
Put out an ad
Should I hire a skywriter
Would that make you mad?

Should I call up your girlfriend
And ask where you are
Fly down to Rio
Is that going too far?

-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]

Yeah, just so you know
I want you to know
Just so you know
I want you [rpt.]
-------------------------------------------------
[Verse]

Should I distribute handbills
With your name and your face
Paste them all over
All over the place?

Should I engage a detective
Call the police
Jump from the rooftop
And land in your tree?
-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]
-------------------------------------------------
[Bridge]

Something, something, something
Telephone. Something, something
-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]

==================

Just So You Know Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

. . . in your lap:

Full size picture here.

Line Golfer is a variant of the popular Line Rider. Instead of drawing slopes for your little sledder to traverse, you design a golf hole to play (it doesn't seem to have the capacity yet to link holes together to build a course but I expect it soon will). It's more like miniature golf in that you can set up tunnels, etc., to channel the ball. If you don't want to bother building your own, there are plenty of other designs you can load and play.

Note: If the game doesn't seem to do anything, close the window and load it again. Second time's usually the charm.

I wrote this after watching a documentary on TV about junkies and prostitutes in Vancouver`s Downtown Eastside, a notoriously seedy area. It was just depressing, a panorama of failure and misery. It was and still is a tough place: An acquaintance from high school went out there for the party scene and was dead within the year. As are, I presume, all of the people interviewed for the documentary. Dead from overdose; dead from AIDS. And though Robert Pickton was still only a malign shimmer on the horizon, there was no shortage of his predecessors.

========================

[Verse]

Hangin' round the park
It's no place to call home
Got no place really to go
And I need to score
Hangin' round downtown
It's getting dark so fast
Summer's almost gone
Yeah, that's a fact

Hangin' round my friends
We're in it 'til the end
No future, no prospects
But we don`t care
Hangin`round the park
No place to call home
No place really to go
And I need to score
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

I need fifty dollars
Gonna have me
Some fun tonight
My girl`s out walking
The street
Yeah, she`s all right

There`s a party down the alley
Later we`ll get a room
I know a guy who`s holdin`
I`m meeting him soon

I wanna get out
But my legs won`t move
I wanna get out
But my legs won`t move
I wanna get out
But my legs won`t move
-------------------------------------------------
[rpt. verse, chorus]
========================

The song isn't complete -- I had only the one verse and the chorus. At some point we realized it was better to go with what we had, even if it meant repeating parts of the lyrics. At least this way, we were getting experience with the song while waiting for the Muse to drop her gifts on Mr. Sensitive Songwriter.

One other thing of note: The song refers throughout to "Hangin' round" where the title (I still have the original ms. to confirm it) has it as "Hangin' in. " I think I couldn't at the time decide which sounded better; but with time I realized that my initial impulse was correct. "Hangin' in" better conveys the awful pathos of people waiting helplessly to be lynched on a gallows of their own making.

Hangin' In The Park Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Just So You Know Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

the morning call.com:

Allentown police had suspected William Torres of dealing drugs in the city. But an undercover narcotics investigation yielded much more, and resulted in Torres, 21, being charged early Saturday with two counts of homicide.

Police said Torres, whose last known address was 436 Turner St., Allentown, gunned down two men at Fourth and Allen streets last month. According to court documents, Torres admitted killing the men.

Torres was driving on Turner Street Friday afternoon when he was pulled over by police and arrested. He was wearing a hooded sweartshirt with a skull-head pattern on it, pajama bottoms and fuzzy lion-faced slippers at the time. He was still wearing the get-up when he was arraigned after midnight at Lehigh County prison.

Via Dave Barry

women in Toronto, if Saturday's SUNshine Girl is any indication.

SUNshine Girl Cat is a brown-eyed Capricorn who strives for nothing short of the best at all times. This fitness enthusiast loves stretching out on the beach and soaking up the sun. Dogs everywhere better watch out, this Cat is not to be messed with.

Indeed.