Theo Parrish- The ugly edits compilation

amazing, essential 2002-2005 series of singles refashioning soul & disco hits...which doesn't adequately describe them or what they do...

My father managed to establish a Ham radio "shack", rather more modest than most of those pictured above, in all of the houses (mostly RCAF PMQ's) we ever lived in, culminating in a rather nice greenhouse in Scotland...

in Portland...

lovely tribute the the late, great Sammi Smith

On “Saunders Ferry Lane,” for example, from her Mega debut, her phrasing is so matter of fact, her delivery so quiet, and the string chart behind her is so melancholy and spare, that as Smith tells her story it’s as if we can see the leaves she describes tumbling and the clouds threatening, as if we can hear the dock in the song creaking. In Smith’s voice we can feel the “awful cold in Saunders Ferry Lane,” and we understand she’s not just complaining about the temperature...

YouTube SAUNDER'S FERRY LANE

YouTube - Help Me Make it Through the Night

Hallelujah For Beer

"Sunshine" & "Today I Started Loving You Again" MEGA LPs

Brooklyn Revealed

...a virtual experience through which users would not only learn about how the streets of Brooklyn got their names, but could also share with the world their knowledge of Brooklyn’s streets and neighborhoods...

local & Tswasssen trees

Soothing Sounds

The Wisdom of the Discount Rack

It's one of those covers where I had trouble matching the characters with the illustration and, after a bit, gave up because I didn't want them to look like that in my mind...

it's a Jackie de Shannon kind of day around the manse...

(above playing Monopoly with George Harrison in '64)

Sita Sings the Blues

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told".

YouTube - John Cale On the Game Show "I've Got a Secret" on September 16, 1963

the secret is Satie...

from "National Geographic"-- Alberta Tar Sands

Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine,
the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two
tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges
contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles. Last April some 500 migrating ducks mistook one of those ponds, at a newer Syncrude mine north of Fort McKay, for a hospitable stopover, landed on its oily surface, and died...

events in Toronto & Portland

Stan Persky on George Stanley's 'Vancouver: A Poem'

My point is: if you're a writer in Vancouver, there's an obvious temptation to figure out the enigma of a city that's a cross between a multi-ethnic Floating World Shangri-La and a shabby netherworld of boarded-up storefronts, discarded heroin needles, and basket-carts of the homeless rattling through the back lanes. It might be interesting to know how a poet sees this West Coast patchwork...

(cover & bottom photo by Roy Arden)

The Indian Railway King

Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China...

Charlie sez: spring is just round the corner, really, so why not celebrate by buying my grampy's generally acclaimed book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton
or, if awesome pictures & poignant anecdotes are your bag why not try

To the Dogs

Local trees