Patrick

Compare & Contrast

Posted on by Patrick

Years and years ago we showed a film at the Evans called Hard Core Logo, a mock­u­men­tary about a punk band that reunit­ed for one last tour, and spent the bulk of the tour re-hash­ing all the rea­sons they’d called it quits in the first place. (Spoil­er: It does­n’t end real well.)

The sound­track was a “trib­ute album” to a non-exis­tent band (the epony­mous Hard Core Logo), and as such it con­tained some great com­pare & con­trast moments, where two bands with rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent sounds cov­ered the same song.

My favourite con­trast was the two ver­sions of “Son of a Bitch to the Core”:

Lugen Broth­ers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg0nte_VbL8
Headstones

I love both ver­sions. If pushed to pick a win­ner, I’d prob­a­bly give the edge to the Lugen Broth­ers’ country/roots ver­sion — their ver­sion of the char­ac­ter seems more bad-ass than the hard-rockin’ woe-is-me one in the Head­stones’ ver­sion (I think the defin­ing moment is “If you take me on, you’re gonna lose” vs. “If you take me on, I’m gonna lose”).

Something useful on the Internet

Posted on by Patrick

(Well, use­ful for some­one of my ilk, at any rate.)

Today I learned that there’s an Open Exo­plan­et Cat­a­logue online, with all the cur­rent­ly-known extra­so­lar plan­ets list­ed. This will come in handy, I’m sure, when writ­ing sci­ence fiction.

It lives at the inter­sec­tion of astron­o­my and Open Source:

The Open Exo­plan­et Cat­a­logue is a cat­a­logue of all dis­cov­ered extra-solar plan­ets. It is a new kind of astro­nom­i­cal data­base, based on small text files and a dis­trib­uted ver­sion con­trol sys­tem. It is decen­tral­ized and com­plete­ly open. Con­tri­bu­tion and cor­rec­tions are wel­come. The Open Exo­plan­et Cat­a­logue is fur­ther­more the only cat­a­logue that can cor­rect­ly rep­re­sent the orbital struc­ture of plan­ets in arbi­trary bina­ry, triple and quadru­ple star sys­tems as well as orphan planets. 

It even has, as they put it, “an xkcd-style bub­ble chart” of the planets.

found via this io9 story

Musi­cal pair­ing: “We Are Not Alone”, Voivod

Ah, spring

Posted on by Patrick

It must be spring. I drove around with a win­dow and the sun­roof open. I saw at least two peo­ple rid­ing motor­cy­cles. I smelled bar­be­cued meats on the air.

And I saw an adorable lit­tle blonde girl walk­ing down the side­walk with her father, wear­ing a pink rain­coat, green dress, rub­ber boots, and a princess crown made out of a paper bag.

Now I just need all this snow to melt from my yard.

Update.

April 12th: The snow melt­ed, and has now returned. That was rather an under­whelm­ing summer.

Daffodils

Posted on by Patrick

They were sell­ing daf­fodils at a table at Sobeys when I got some gro­ceries. $7 a bun­dle, all pro­ceeds to the Cana­di­an Can­cer Society.

Daffodils

For Dar­cy.

For Sil­vio.

For Dave, with whom I shared a birthday.

For Car­ol.

For Ryan.

For Nick.

For Moe.

For Xeni.

For Jay.

For Adam.

For any­one that can­cer has touched, any­where in the world, any­time in the his­to­ry of people.

Fuck can­cer.

Abby Travis

Posted on by Patrick

If you haven’t heard — or heard of — Abby Travis, here’s a sample:

Her first 3 CDs (Glit­ter­mouth, Cut­throat Stan­dards and Black Pop1, and The Abby Travis Foun­da­tion) are on sale for $5 each — get ’em at her online store — toward the bot­tom of the page. With ship­ping to Cana­da, they come to $29 USD.

  1. How can you not want an album with that name? Seri­ous­ly. ↩

Burkina Faso

Posted on by Patrick

This inspired a bit of rem­i­nis­cence between me and a co-worker:

Pat J: I saw Ter­ror of Tiny Town live at SUDS
Pat J: and at the Unwinder, back in the day
Craig: yeah my bud­dy’s band opened for them at the Unwinder
Pat J: really?
Pat J: they changed their name like three times dur­ing their set, IIRC
Pat J: start­ed out Bitch Jihad and end­ed up Mag­num something
Pat J: or the oth­er way around
Pat J: TOTT was open­ing for some Cana­di­an grunge band
Pat J: after they played I left, because noth­in’ was gonna top what I’d just seen and heard
Pat J: not a sin­gle track on the CD I bought is a disappointment
Pat J: but Burk­i­na Faso is a favourite
Craig: I need to get a tape from my bud­dy — not sure what band they were when they opened…
Craig: Kil­go­re Trout maybe?
Craig: but they had a side project called Forces of Destruction
Craig: and they have a song called Grand Moff Tarkin
Craig: and it’s great
Pat J: they were Mag­num Jihad at the end, Sev­en Year Bitch at the start
Pat J: and Geoff Bern­er, the lead singer for TOTT, took the stage and said, “Let’s have a round of applause for, uh, Bitch Jihad, or what­ev­er that was”
Craig: haha