mattblair.ca

Suresh is a ridiculously skilled musician, and a good friend. His latest disc, Lost in new York, is rightly getting some very strong reviews. Get on board!

The Perry Bible Fellowship is yet another comic that I can only really recommend on the basis of its archive. Not because it’s gotten really shoddy, like some strips I’ve mentioned, but because it’s updated sporadically at best these days.

Once again, though, there’s some really great stuff in the archives. Do check it out.

Yes, that Jill Hennessy. She just released an album, and it’s actually pretty great.

Local journalist Jonathan Goldsbie, whose work I quite enjoy, has made a habit of live tweeting municipal debates and press conferences. Following him is a great way to get an informed sense of what’s happening at these events, with the odd dash of humour thrown in for good measure.

Yesterday, at an event called the Toronto Youth Priority Symposium, Goldsbie quoted mayoral candidate Rob Ford as saying that he has “seen things at City Hall that would not benefit the youth.” He went on to joke that Ford’s use of the term “the youth” also doesn’t benefit them, which I think is a little too critical. Frankly, as long as Ford’s not physically assaulting the youth, I figure that’s enough.

Sorry, I meant to say “allegedly physically assaulting the youth.” I just caught the disclaimer at the top of that Star story, noting that it’s currently “subject to legal complaint by Rob Ford,” and I don’t want to have to put one of those up on my blog. So for the record, I’m definitely not saying that Rob Ford’s been hitting kids.

Although if he had, it certainly wouldn’t have benefited them. And if it had happened at City Hall, then yes, I’d have to agree with his argument at the symposium.

In truth, I don’t know what Ford was actually getting at when he made that statement. I wasn’t at the symposium, and Goldsbie didn’t elaborate. But based on what I know about Rob Ford – his flair for the dramatic, his apparently limited grasp of political reality – I like to think his argument went something like this:

“I have seen things at City Hall that would not benefit the youth. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. And I don’t think the taxpayers should have to foot the bill for that.”

I would have loved to been at that symposium. That moment would have been classic. I would have been the one whose slow, mounting clap ushered in a wave of raucous applause – and not just because the only appropriate way for Ford to follow a soliloquy like that would be to withdraw from the campaign.

“T.O. is leader in speeder readers” read the headline on the cover of yesterday’s edition of Metro. As the story in question reveals, we have more speed traps than any other city in the province.

Now, somebody clearly worked very hard on that headline, and I don’t want to give them a hard time about it. But the problem with sacrificing clarity for a bunch of cute rhymes, as plenty of newspapers often do, is that you’re bound to leave your readers wondering what it is you’re actually talking about.

Sure, in this case, it’s a story about speed traps. But that headline could just as easily refer to… I don’t know, speed readers. People who read fast. Maybe Toronto’s got the most of them, or the fastest of them. It’s impossible to tell from such a vague headline!

Hell, do you want to know the first thing that came to mind when I caught the cover of yesterday’s edition? “Too many amphetamines at the library.”

Would you look at this blog lately? Underworld fan site or what, right? Well, I hope you’ll indulge me once more and let me post the video for the second single off the band’s upcoming album. It’s really quite good.

Hey, have I mentioned that my sister has a website? Well, she does. And as you can see, much like my brother, she’s got an awful lot going on.

She’s bringing the whole thing back to Toronto later this month, after a year of study in the UK. Looking forward to it, Rach!

I’m in the middle of a pretty excellent book at the moment called The Checklist Manifesto, written by a surgeon named Atul Gawande. It’s “a gripping exploration of the nature of complexity on our lives and essential reading for anyone working to get things right.” So yeah, it’s got an endorsement from Malcolm Gladwell on the back cover.

Jokes aside, it’s good stuff, and I’ll tell you more about it once I’ve finished it. But in the meantime, I’d like to share a quick excerpt dealing with the last thing I expected to read about in a book like this: the infamous Van Halen rider clause calling for “no brown M&M’s.”

“Listening to the radio,” Gawande explains, “I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth‘s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse.

“As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, ‘Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors – whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.’

“So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. ‘When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,’ he wrote, ‘well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.’

“These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.”

As much as I like his music, it isn’t often that I’m compelled to admit that David Lee Roth might be a genius. But you know what? That’s pretty brilliant.

The reason I’m linking to the St. Lawrence Centre is to tell you about Poetic Fashion, which I’ve mentioned in this space before. It’s a great event, and one of just many amazing things happening under the Literature for Life umbrella.

I do hope you’ll check it out. Tickets can be purchased in advance through the St. Lawrence Centre’s website. Stay tuned to this space for more following the event.

I haven’t really written much about the gun registry issue during the past few days. Hell, I haven’t even been able to keep up with some of the more recent comments that have been posted on this blog about the gun registry. But it’s not for lack of new developments, and over the course of the next couple of days, I’ll try and catch up.

One of the first things I’ll need to do is get caught up on all the news, blog postings and crosstalk that’s been floating around on the web about this issue – and thankfully, I’ve got a fairly easy way in which to do that.

If you’ve ever set up a Google Alert before, then you know how useful they can be when it comes to following an issue online. For the newbies, these alerts are just “email updates of the latest relevant Google results… based on your choice of query or topic.”

Enter the search term of your choice – like “gun registry,” for example – and each day you’ll receive an email containing the latest results for that term. I’ve had emails like that piling up in my inbox for the past couple of weeks, and it all adds up to a pretty good chunk of reading.

A lot of it’s going to overlap, of course, and some of it surely ought to be taken with a grain of salt – including the few posts of mine included in recent alerts, which I guess I don’t need to read again. But I’ll try to get on top of the bulk of it as soon as possible, and I’ll link to some of the highlights here as they continue to unfold.