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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 

A lesson in a line

Posted on by Patrick

Read­ing in bed last night, I came across this gem:

It is always a temp­ta­tion to say that such feel­ings are inde­scrib­able, though they sel­dom are.
— Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lic­tor (vol. III in the Book of the New Sun tetral­o­gy), chap­ter XXII: “The Skirts of the Mountain” 

In a sin­gle line the author evis­cer­at­ed a fair­ly com­mon trope in SF/F writ­ing. Now and for­ev­er after, when I read a sen­tence stat­ing that X was inde­scrib­able or refer­ring to an inde­scrib­able colour or an inde­scrib­able feel­ing, I’m going to won­der: Is it real­ly inde­scrib­able, though, or is the author sim­ply not inter­est­ed enough to describe it to me?

I’ve tak­en the les­son to heart, though: from here on out I’ll be doing my best to excise inde­scrib­able from my own lexicon.

Series: Gene Wolfe

The entire series: The Gold­en Sen­tence; A les­son in a line; Inde­scrib­able; My head­’s swim­ming now; The Island of Dr. Death.