Very · Inspiring · People

Holland Bulb Farms is having their November Clearance now through Monday, November 9. Selected bulbs are 50-85% off.

I got mine! *happy dance*

Well, I used a lot of the suggestions that came my way from that post the other day! I was pretty pleased with the turnout of readers for that question, I must admit. I guess it's because you hear a lot that people don't give a darn about history in this country, if depressing yearly polls from the Dominion Institute mean anything, but it's clearly not the case among my livejournal followers. You guys are great!

I had to do a general sweep that involved a good range of places, professions, backgrounds and time periods, so you know, not everyone's favorite author is going to be in there but I sure did like the range in suggestions. Looking at it now I wish I had someone from the NWT (not one! for shame) and New Brunswick. Stompin Tom is from New Brunswick but he's also sort of from everywhere.  I could have put the Irvings in there, I think they control history in NB as well as anything else.

I was all crazed out with strep throat while I did this, but listening to Radiolab shows and a burning passion for Canada I guess(?) kept me going.  You can find the image in today's National Post, along with an article about the Historica/Dominion merger! Interesting stuff.


( picture is under the cut because it's huge )


Here is the legend, the rows are sort of wonky but you'll figure it out:

Row One (bottom):
James Wolfe, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, David Suzuki, Louis-Joseph Papineau, John A. Macdonald, Terry Fox
Row Two
Emily Carr, Joseph Howe, Joey Smallwood, Robert Bartlett, Louis Riel, Joy Kogawa
Row Three
Marshall McLuhan, Samuel de Champlain, Marilyn Bell, Wayne Gretzky, Emily Murphy
Row Four
Rene Levesque, Sam Steele, Farley Mowat, L.M. Montgomery, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail, John McCrae
Row Five
Pitikwahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker), Oscar Peterson, Rush, Pierre Berton
Row Six
Les Filles du Roi, Mary Pickford, Skookum Jim Mason
Row Seven
Charles Best, Frederick Banting, Pauline Johnson, Mordecai Richler, Tecumseh, Stompin’ Tom Connors
Row Eight
William Hall, Tommy Douglas, Marc Garneau, Roberta Bondar, Rosemary Brown, John Diefenbaker
Row Nine
Shanawdithit, Louis de Buade de Frontenac, David Thompson, William Shatner

Paul helps Rhiannon with her Noisician drum kit.

I have quite a few bottles of vitamins/supplements that I don't need/won't use. Many are unopened, but some have been opened and partially used. I need to get rid of all of them. I'm not a big fan of the idea of dumping them all in the trash because that doesn't seem environmentally friendly, but what are my other options? I thought about selling at least the unopened ones, but ... A) I don't know if anyone would buy them and B) I don't know if there's any kind of law against selling them. I mean, they're not drugs in the legal sense, but I'd hate to find out the hard way that an individual selling them was illegal.

So, my question: what would you do? Try to sell them all? Try to sell the unopened ones and throw away the open ones? Throw them all away? Something else?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SociologicalImagesSeeingIsBelieving/~3/pcxc4tIptkM/

http://contexts.org/socimages/?p=15214

Ilari Sani sent in this vintage ad encouraging Americans to eat vegetables and “Toughen Up.”  Today salad is definitely considered “girl food,” and there are plenty of vintage examples in which meat was connected with strength and toughness (and, more generally, masculinity; see below).  This ad tries to contest that idea.  I wonder if the effort was successful in its day, or if it fell flat alongside the meat = real food narrative.

For vintage examples of meat being connected to masculinity, see here and here.

For contemporary examples, see here and here.

Found at Vintage Ads.

(View original at http://contexts.org/socimages)

Every year, around this time, I post something about how now I remember what it's like to be behind a flooded bridge. Examples are here, here, and here. I know it gets old for all of you dear readers, but can you imagine how old it gets for me?

And so I sit, driving down every couple of hours to check on it, knowing that poor Poncho is sitting at the vet, waiting to be picked up. Shame, poor old boy.

So what is there to do here in my cottage alone all day long? I've picked wildflowers, done some exercise up and down the hill, tried on all of my old formal dresses, done my nails and my toes, and played with the dogs. failblog, pages 1-26, are read, so is wedinator. Someone find me a project before I start painting the puppy's toenails, training the jasmine to grow around the car, and making new curtains out of woven veldt grasses. Actually, that could be quite cool. Hey, I could even use chongololos* as curtain hoops, if they'd only stay put..

* six inch long millipedes that are everywhere these days. Sweet things, but don't step on them. The crunch will stay with you for days. I just wish they'd stay off my bathroom floor at night...

EDIT: PS.. Bernie made it over. He has more balls than me, and a bit of a bigger car...

I am haunted by phantasms, of late-
kept company by their tittering laughter,
told stories and been diverted by
flashing eyes, white hands fluttering.
A chorus of ghost girls has come to tea.

Glittering masks and bony arms,
they're always hungry but never
say much. They seem to be smoking,
but you can't smell it. Strange
ladies, these friends who are
here, and not. Glamourous, grim.

New post on Angeliska Gazette: Ghost Girls Preserved in Honey

Ben left this morning for the weekend. Gone till Monday. To Shreve-fucking-port, pobrecito. We're hardly attached at the hip or anything like that when he's home, but when he's gone I feel it acutely. And he feels my absence, so he reports, when he's away. It was an almost tearful farewell this morning when he left.

I had no plans for this evening except that whatever plans I made I wanted no or very-little alcohol to be involved.

Kristin tweeted about a folksy show Uptown — a performance by the Oakland-based Moore Brothers. After listening to some music on their website, I deemed them harmonically competent and opted in for the show. I was, after all, craving music with actual real live harmony.

Ben took the car to Shreve-fucking-port, so I took the streetcar for the first time in I-can't-remember-how-long. Been years, I'm sure. I used to like the streetcar. The rickety rattles, harsh lurches, clinks, clanks and clunks.

I forgot that getting a streetcar on a Friday at 9 at Canal St. is a thing of not to be of the doing. Boisterous woo-hoo'age a-go-go. No seats. Girls Gone Mild frotting me with no subtlety to speak of. The car was late, and the moment everyone piled onto it, an empty one showed up right behind us. Too late to switch.

At Louisiana Ave., ours stopped for 20 minutes, then we were all told to board the one behind us. Another 15 minutes later we were on our merry way again.

I got to the venue and the boys tuning their guitars were not the Moore Brothers. "Oh well," I thought, "I'm here. A cup of coffee and some singing might be nice."

They didn't entirely suck, but harmonics was beyond their musical realm. Tonic, dom, sub-dom, repeat, seemed to be as far as they got in music school.

The Moore Brothers ended up play Baton Rouge instead, it seems. I could have gotten there and back quicker (if I had a car, that is).

I left after playing my anagram game on my iPhone on a sofa, walked back to St. Charles and waited about an hour for another streetcar.

A nice, filthy-mouthed dishwasher from one of the Uptown Bluehair restaurants waited with me for the last 15 minutes, leavening my mood a bit with his vituperative jeremiads re: N.O. public transit. Sing it, sistah!

An incredibly stinky ride home. "It's called Speed Stick. It's not es'pensive…"

A walk down Bourbon wherein I stepped in a)vomit, b)piss, c)what I hope was dog excrement. I "washed" my boots off in pissy, vomity, daiquiri-hued gutter water and went to see Micha at Monaghan's for a soul-booster.

Home now, still wanting music with actual well-thought-out harmony, so I'm listening to Beethoven.

Maybe a glass of red wine, some backlogged Mad Men, and an early bed.

Reading of docbrite's Amsterdam travels on LJ and her Twatterings is making me jealous for a little Eurojaunt.

I keep having to remind myself that on Tuesday we leave for Madrid. Why Madrid? Because the tix were too cheap to pass up. And I need one more semi-long flight this year to get platinum status on AA, which is very valuable in that you earn double miles, better chances at upgrades, and other perks. It was from being platinum last year that scored us free first class tix to Thailand and, in March of '10, free first class to Australia.

Plus, hello, Madrid? MUCH? Ben found us a cheap hotel in the gayborhood. All the yummy Spanish eye candy you can eat. And there is no candy sweeter than the Spanish.

That should be brightening up my mood, but I remain sullen and blue. I just want my husband-elect back. Now.

My blueberry bush is finally fruiting and a lot of the berries are getting big and dark.

How do I know when the berries are ripe enough for the picking? So far I've had one berry fall off into the pot and I ate that one and it tasted great.

http://feeds.nationalgeographic.com/click.phdo?i=ab4b916ade65167df0f6b314d15e0bd0

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/rss/article_id.pl?id=5277297

Asteroids slamming into Earth, a planet sneaking up on us, an angry sun singing the planet—find out why these and other end-of-the-world events won't be happening in 2012.

http://feeds.nationalgeographic.com/click.phdo?i=6f236021e754f5351dbfc598a20679de

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/rss/article_id.pl?id=28660527

Supposed Maya predictions of the end of the world in 2012 have some people seriously scared. See what experts say about the unknown planet predicted to pummel Earth, the cataclysmic "galactic alignment," and more.

Quick! I just made vegetarian lentil soup with peas and carrots. The peas were too sweet and now the soup is really sweet and, well, nasty. I was hoping for something more savory. How do I hide the sweet taste? Ugh!

THE VERDICT: Thank you, everyone! One tsp. vinegar, 1/2 cup cheddar cheese, cumin, and 1/4 cup sour cream that I found in the fridge later...

Delicious! :D

Here are three videos of Carousel rehearsals last month at Music Bank in the Tower Bridge Business Complex in which I sang through -- for the first time with real musicians -- three Jacques Brel songs arranged by David Coulter and Mike Smith, and translated by me (you can read my translations, two of which were made specially for this performance, beside the videos as they appear on YouTube). The band of twenty musicians (including Roger Eno on piano, Seb Rochford on drums, Leo Abrahams on guitar, Kate St Clair on oboe and Thomas Bloch on onde martinot) performed these songs with me at The Barbican on October 22nd and the Warwick Arts Centre the next day.


Don't Leave Me (Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas)
(for comparison, watch the 1993 version of my version of this song, filmed in on my Christmas tour of Japan that year)


The Town Tumbled (Brel's La Ville S'Endormait)


Bourgeois Pigs (Brel's Les Bourgeois)


Finally, Jacky, filmed onstage at The Barbican at the end of the first concert.



I was particularly taken with Aberdonian drummer Seb Rochford (of Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland) and his extraordinary afro. Seb exudes a 70s countercultural cool as well as incredible percussive flair, and it was easy to believe Leo's tales of Brian Eno attending recording sessions with Seb, watching all his takes. Here he is doing his stuff:



As for Roger Eno (he crosses the picture at the beginning of the video for The Town Tumbled), the man does this footstomping thing while playing the piano, and grins like Elton John, and loves to laugh, joke and do crosswords. On the tour bus to Warwick I noticed that a lot of the stories he was telling sounded familiar: there was one about the Pepsi campaign that promised "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", one about Picasso undermining representational image-making by asking a man who showed a photo of his wife "But is she really so small and flat?", one about art being a plane you can crash and walk away from, and one (at my request) about his dad the postman. Eventually the coin dropped. I'd heard some or all these tales from the same source he had: his big brother Brian. But Roger had heard them firsthand.

More to come, later

http://feeds.nationalgeographic.com/click.phdo?i=ca00084d2829f7a5e4780f4f32ee055f

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/rss/article_id.pl?id=85976724

A star explosion that blazed as bright as ten billion suns but faded away within 20 days might be the first proof of a theoretical new class of supernova, astronomers suggest.