Category: Uncategorized

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.

President Kerry?

It would be facinating to watch if the wheels really came off the current US administration. This was slipped in the Toronto Star‘s article on Kerry’s wins yesterday:

One national poll yesterday put Kerry seven percentage points ahead of Bush as the president continued to be battered by the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq and his secretary of state seemed to express second thoughts about the decision to go to war. Perhaps more ominous for the sitting president, his approval rating had dropped to 48 per cent, the lowest of his presidency, according to the CNN-USA Today poll.

I would think that sending soldiers to a war which has had its primary ground – WMD – generally disproven is a biggie.  [Apparently Colin Powell thinks so, too.]   It feels like there was never a true buy-in to the Saddam-Osammy link. And the tighter security rules must discomfort – I don’t think this is a big thing at the border and security agencies will be security agencies but when you are checking up on what my kids take out from the library it gets a bit weird. But the main thing is the messed up budget. I don’t think you can have 20 years of being told that you must reduce government spending and reduce taxes only to have the shift to big spending and low taxes bought by the people. It used to be said of conservatives that they shifted the tax from rich to poor. This guy shifts it to no one…but money does not work that way. The loans from the Saudis and China mount. Who wants that dependency mounting?

The real question is, all in all, what has George Jr. done uniquely that another leader would not have done? I am not convinced the war on terror (remember that one?) would not have been taken on by anyone in the White House after 9/11. Others might have pursued it more diligently. Others soon might.

Mid-Winter Thaw

Winter weather colours so much of your mental landscape in Canada. Walking home yesterday it was a balmy -2 and everyone was Gene Kelly singing in the rain. Jackets open, heads bare. It has actually warmed up enough to snow (figure that one out, Ale-fan) and we are set for 15 cm or so – which would be the biggest snow in our corner of the world yet this season. This morning, however, the roads are wet. Luxury. A little early to think of them as million dollar snows, the snows that make sure there is enough moisture in the ground for a good growing season, but still we are past the middle. Mid-winter thaw was a time as a kid for ground hockey, a form of the game played on still frozen ground, ruining next spring’s lawn, road hockey without the incessent call of “caaaaaar”.

Formula 1 Threats

Here in Canada we have had ann annual game recently of Formula 1 racing threatening to pull out all activities unless we change our anti-tobacco ad legislation. Now I read they are threatening the EU as well:

“The EU is strangled by unnecessary and excessive regulations,” said [F1 head Max] Mosley.

“If you are involved in something that is at the cutting edge you’ve got to question if this is the right place.

We are involved in something cutting edge…umm…cutting out the lies of death merchants. People are free to smoke – away from me if you please. Just don’t teach its virtues to my kids.