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So this morning, as I’m taking out the recycling, there’s a Department of Works guy taking pictures of the unruly mound of trashbags already on our sidewalk, and our house, and (to my instant chagrin) me.
“Trash is s’posed to be in barrels,” he says, none too kindly.
“That’s not my trash,” I reply, with an unfortunate […]

I found Gray’s enormous, dense history of The Clash mostly fascinating, but the obviousness of Gray’s authorial agendas bugged me. The book is subtitled “The Story and Myth of the Clash,” and Gray spends a lot of effort looking for the points of divergence between the (hi)story and the myth of the band. He provides […]

Laurie Lindeen’s rags-to-well,rags chronicle of her band Zuzu’s Petals reminded strongly of Tommy Womack’s excellent and thematically similar Cheese Chronicles, with the added fillip that Laurie hooks up with someone Much More Famous midway through the band’s career arc.
Almost all of the book is written in the present tense. Lindeen is sometimes deliberately cagey about […]

What have I learned from this experiment? After 4 weeks of keeping track, I’m still very conscious of the need to make decisions that won’t lead to 6+ cup days. I’ve started alternating coffee with water in the morning to stretch out my caffeine allowance. Can’t rule out placebo effect, but I think I’ve been […]

Art by Chris Jordan (also a short interview). Wow. Just, wow.
I don’t think his work needs any words, but a) words are my stock in trade and b) if you’re like me, you won’t just click some random link without some context. So I proclaim that Chris Jordan is the Fugazi of digital photography, because […]

Then again, maybe not.
I just requested Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from my library. It doesn’t provide a lot of information on the queue structure, but it did tell me:

1106 holds on first copy returned of 428 copies

My first thought was “holy crud, 1106 holds!?” But my second, presumably smarter, thought is “holy crud, […]

If you happen to have commented on this site on Friday afternoon, chances are your comment was swallowed up by the ether. Sorry ’bout that.
I’ve long maintained that the real measure of a webhost (or any service provider, really) is how they respond when things gang aft aglay. As far as I’m concerned, ServInt once […]

Although it scarcely seems possible, I’m older now than I was before. Actually, I’m older now than when I typed that, but I recently passed one of those points where society asserts that you’ve made a quantum state change from n-old to n+1 old.
I commemorated the occasion, in part, by checking the weather in Montréal, […]