Tag: Radio and TV

Spring is a comin’

warmer in Farenheit
All melting all the time! Don’t things look much warmer in Farenheit?

Seeing as it is within view, I find the weather forcasts from the next TV south at WWTI Watertown is more reliable for this corner of the lake compared to Ottawa or Toronto generated CBC radio weather. Kind of like the Bar Harbor, Maine / Yarmouth, NS thing. You are always adding 2 or 3 degrees and forgetting 75% of the snowfall compared to Ottawa. As a result, with a little luck all our snow will be gone by mid-week.

By the way, I think italicizing the word “Storm” in the upper right is a masterful use of graphics.

Grammy Show

I watched last night with half my attention elsewhere. Here is what I saw:

  • I like “Hey Ya” and was happy to see how the video was trasformed to a stage performance for live TV. Sooner or later I am going to be able to hire a high school marching band for some purpose in my life, too.
  • If you did not wait to the very end you missed Faith Hill, looking like a Republican’s dream of the girl to be met at the country club, squawking something into the mike to the effect of “the show is over” and walking away as 43 people (who were not going to be invited to that club) representing OutKast celebrated winning the final award for album of the year.
  • The Foo-Fighters appeared, perhaps uniquely, as a rock band playing things like instruments and singing in to microphones without dancers or lights or any other distractions. That was good.
  • The White Stripes were very good.
  • My world just about crumbled when Richard “Dicky” Marks won an award for best song co-written with the living human tribute of the night, Luther Vandross. The king of the mullet was shown and, though shorn at the rear of his head now and though his song is something of a thematic rip of that 80s “love my departed Dad” song by Genesis going by another name Mike and the Mechanics, at least it was not a loser rock song about going down to the river and offing oneself which Dicky Marks was the absolute king of twenty years ago.
  • Warren Zevon starred and won as the guy who recently smoked himself to death. [Ed.: error fixed in replies.]
  • No one got Yoko Ono when she said give peace a chance.
  • No one told Paul McCartney (who is really looking like a muppet who has sat too near the fire and melted a bit) that he was not speaking for all the Beatles as he followed taped Ringo and live Yoko and a nice also live lady who knew George (last year’s guy who won for smoking himself to death) thanking everybody for remembering they were on TV 40 years ago.
  • Christina A. and Beyonce Knowles were the only proponents of the porcine squealy decending decrecsendo pseudo-gospel thing done really well twenty years ago by Whitney Huston, destroyed by everyone ever since – especially the now disappeared Mariah Carey. Perhaps it will soon die.
  • Funk (the music Jesus loved) had its day with Parliament/Funkadelic and Earth, Wind and Fire.

If you take anything from the show, go buy funk.

Led Zepper

Just listened to Terry Gross’s interview of Robert Plant on NPR’s Fresh Air:

Robert Plant. The former lead singer of Led Zeppelin has a new CD that includes tracks he recorded before ‘Zeppelin. On the next Fresh Air, Terry Gross talks to Plant about his life and listens to recordings that span his career.

The show focused on a recently released record of pre- and post-zep Plant recordings but also had great moments of Plant being asked about the sexuality of his Zep lyrics – he sounded a little embarassed in his fifties to explain himself in his twenties.

Iowa

Not my country but what the hell. Ian’s comments as a Iowa leftie lad in NYC are interesting as are Michael’s, the Newf of Atlanta. Michael has pointed out the angry-man thing about Dean while Ian speaks of electability. I cannot for the life of me ever imagine an NDPer as US president – that is really what Dean is: early against the war, early pro civil unions for homosexual couples. Like Hollywood, Vermont is a foothold of Canadian infiltration of the USA. Good for us. Bad for Dean. Plus he looks like a Muppet extra, the guy at the other table not given interesting features, the guy with the fly in his soup.

Compare Edwards. No gaggle of techie dreamers around him either as “journalists” or groupies. He points out that he is electable in the southern states (key #1) and he speaks well (key #2) and he stands for being nice (…hmm…). The trouble with Democrats outside of the Brooklyn bench is that they do not know how to put the boot in because they stand for not putting the boot in. Edwards strikes me as a guy who can’t put the boot in.

Kerry won but he won’t win. Too many Kennedys.

So on to New Hampshire. For a election junkie such as me, the USA and its absolutely nutty voting system is a gold mine for graphical analysis of statistics which really come to nothing in themselves. Charts. Charts and talking heads. Wolf Blitzer saying things like “I don’t know anything about that, Phil, but I can confirm that CNN is predicting Dean will finish third. Dean will finish third” about 45 minutes after Dean confirmed he was finishing third.

Heist!

art has a message and the message here is I am a rich bastardI noticed at The Star this morning that there was an art theft thisweekend in Toronto – a heist. Is there any other crime which so warms the heart what with unending bad 70’s police TV episodes guest starring the likes of George Peppard centering on the thievery of art.

But why these things? Likely because they are literally pocketable and worth millions. Like Stalin’s retention of the great czarist buildings, our relationship to the image is not so simple. This is the face of another polticial era, that of the tyrant. This man never lifted a shovel or pen, a product of solely the power of inheritance. Google the name. The figure, Charles Mordant, left the world nothing of note other than this nasty, purse lipped, bloated face under a ridiculous wig, a symbol of virility affordable and wearable only by the wealthy and unvirile.

Later: Recalling that Google sucks, I did some more digging on the lost art and found this at the AGO’s web site:

Portrait of Charles Mordant, 3rd Earl of Peterborough and 1st Early Monmouth of the second creation (1658-1735)
Made by David Le Marchand (1674-1726) between 1704 and 1713
French, active in England
Ivory
Inscribed with artist’s monogram on front center of panel beneath truncation: ‘D.L.M.’
21.6 cm ht.; 17.8 cm w.; 5.1 cm d. ( 8 ½ x 6 ½”)

Hmm, doesn’t help that the AGO spells his name differently from other records which refer to Charles “Mordaunt” as the 3rd Earl of Peterborough. Here are records for five portraits of him at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He was an ambassador with an unhappy diverse career and private life as pointed out by notes to these portraits:

Admiral, general and diplomatist. A vehement whig and a supporter of William III until his ejection from political office in 1697 and imprisonment in the Tower. As General of the expeditionary force to Spain in 1705, he fought a controversial but largely successful campaign…

Here seen shortly after his return from serving as British ambassador to the Duke of Savoy, and his final fall from royal favour. The last of Kneller’s four portraits of the sitter….

Title: ‘Hon Mrs F- and Incautious Lothario’ (Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough; Mrs Edward Foley)…

I am now starting to warm to the jerk. Voltaire was his guest for 3 weeks in 1727. He was perhaps the first to cultivate fennel in England. A Colonel of the Royal Horse Guards in 1712 He has a slim but curious relationship to Nova Scotia’s Oak Island gold. He died on board his yacht off Lisbon 25 Oct 1735, is buried Turvey, Beds, 21 Nov 1735 and is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather of Camilla Parker-Bowles, Prince Chuck’s fancy lady. Cooling off again…

“Why Should I Care?”

Brent played the greatest rock drive home record this afternoon, 1973’s “5:15” from Quadrophenia, which it about the thoughts of a stoned kid heading home from a crappy job on a London train. Amazing how the boring old CBC is pushed by this show.

As the greatest teens ever, The Who deserve a come-back but they ran so many farewell tours that they overrode their own nostalgia. With only Roger and Peter left, a duo album would be interesting. In Feburary 1994, there was a two night show in New York of Daltrey singing the songs of Townsend. Pete has a great website. Recent BBC interview with Daltrey here.

Biometric Day

Yesterday was very biometric:

  • The date for my seminar with the Surveillance Project at Queens was reset for later this month. I am going to talk about my thesis on the constitutionality of automated biometric surveillance and the recent cases on the liberty right in section 7 of The Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
  • The US confirmed that we need to get the new biometric passorts before October. I, too have no problem with this as it is not my country.
  • On West Wing the nutty DARPA (not ARPA) character in the Hawaiian shirt admitted to spokesperson lady that they were doing biometric studies within government on the biometrics of citizens. [It was very well described in the script.]   And she was shocked at the imposition on the US Bill of Rights.

Neato. Gaff and gaaf. Spelling has yet to settle on that one.

Oswald

Children’s TV is a wasteland. Smarmy Barney is banned from our house. Caillou is nothing but an example of the whinging bad child. Clifford is a big red moralizing freak surrounded by little pink moralizing freaks banished to the Island of the impossible economy. Hidden within the chaff is a gem – Oswald the Octopus. A happy surrealist’s dream, it is a bright cartoon about symbolistic New Yorkers. Henry the Penguin who is nervous about doing anything much. Weiner who is, in fact, a hot dog. Best of all, like Messrs Rogers and Dress-Up, is the music. Light hopeful themes in the style of a sloppy burlesque orchestra. Be glad. There is a CD. Don’t trust me – read this review. Tony Orlando singing the Sammy Starfish tune in the style of Tony Bennett with a nod to Tom Waits is a treat. Put it in random rotation on the CD player with Brian Eno ambient music.