We were no there

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Last night I may have had a chance to get into last night’s Mogwai concert (which Frank from Chromewaves sums up nicely here) but I failed to tap the transatlantic-and-back-again connection to a member of the band that might have gotten me on the guest list. Probably. There was some confusion there. Anyway.

I don’t really know that anything could top my first time seeing them (like Frank, my ears have only recently stopped ringing) but I’d like to give them another chance after 4 years of good work since Rock Action. Some day the timing’ll work.

You can follow the boys in their fabulous driving machine at mr.beastmap.com.

[tags]mogwai, chromewaves, beastmap[/tags]

I KNEW IT!!

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Not dogs…rodents. This makes sense; I generally consider any animal my cats could eat to be a rodent.

A new study proves that the Chihuahua is actually a type of large rodent, selectively bred for centuries to resemble a canine, says The Watley Review. “This is clearly going to raise some eyebrows in the Chihuahua world,” said Peggy Wilson, president of the Chihuahua Club of America.

And really, how does one aspire to become president of the Chihuahua Club of America?
[via]

[tags]chihuahua, rodent[/tags]

Jesus Christ. And so on.

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

From Ireland Online: Da Vinci Code provokes protests ahead of premiere.

Christian groups as far away as South Korea, Thailand and India protested against the movie The Da Vinci Code ahead of tomorrow’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. They were planning boycotts, a hunger strike and attempts to block or shorten screenings.

I suggest the protestors read the following:

fic·tion: A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.

You know. Like the bible.

.:.

Skype drops a big one: it will be free for outbound calls to any phone number in Canada and the US until the end of the year. That smell you smell is the telcos and Vonage shitting themselves.

.:.

From the BBC: Apple rival ‘tries to ban iPods’.

Digital music player maker Creative Technology has asked a US court to ban Apple from selling or marketing its iconic iPods in the US. Creative claims that the navigational menu used for finding and playing music on the iPod, violates its patent for its own Zen MP3 player.

I feel like my underdog home team just threw up a hail mary.

.:.

From TSN: Hurricanes GM – Habs were toughest test.

“No disrespect to Philadelphia, Ottawa and New Jersey, they’re all good teams, but some teams are a little better than others and I think Montreal is one of those teams,” Rutherford said from Raleigh, N.C.

Well…that’s some small consolation, I guess.

mesh: day 2.0

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The mesh conference wrapped up a couple of hours ago. Final thoughts:

Day 2 wasn’t quite as good as day 1, if you ask me. There was more of a marketing focus today (there was a venture capital/PR stream as well, but I ignored that), and it felt like the potential of the conference got a bit lost in the noise of the “blogs are an extension of marketing” vs. “blogs are the end of marketing” debate; yesterday, the “old” media vs. “new” media debate seemed more reasoned and friendly, but today the marketing/PR people seemed to be dug into a trench. Or maybe that was just how I heard it. Anyway…

The first two keynote speakers — Steve Rubel and Paul Kedrosky — were both great, especially Kedrosky. He’s very funny, and has some great stories about who’s getting funding and why.

By the way, lots of people were liveblogging the keynote sessions, in case you want the summary versions of what was said. Technorati should point you in the right direction.

Of the “15 minutes of fame” spots, my favourite was Favorville.com…even though the poor guy talking to us about it was interrupted by a shrill and persistent fire alarm. It drives me nuts when the security desk comes on every few minutes to tell you…exactly what they told you a few minutes ago. Or to give you useless information like “The fire alarm was triggered on the fourth floor of the south building…that’s the fourth floor of the south building…not the concourse level.” Uh, that’s great; can you clarify for me whether or not there are deadly flames? That I’d like to know. Sheezus.

Tara Hunt was next. Maybe I was expecting the wrong things from her keynote, but I wasn’t wowed. Strange, ’cause if you hear her talk for five minutes, you’d kind of expect to be wowed when she has a whole hour to herself. She’s obviously smart, and I could just tell from her comments and reactions in the afternoon panel (which I’ll get to in a minute) that our brains were in the same place on the topics at hand…but I just didn’t feel like I knew anything new after her hour was up.

After lunch I had three session. The first and third were very focused on marketing, brand, PR…all stuff that I think is the devil, so it was interesting watching the two camps — the old guard who suspect something’s up and keep saying “blog-o-sphere” hoping that they’ll fit in, and the idealists who want to lead a revolution to kill marketing and PR as we know it but keep getting shouted down in their company’s meetings — face off politely. The best point of the day, I thought, went to Jonathan Ehrlich from Chapters.Indigo, who simply stated that you can have the best marketing in the world, but unless you have a kickass product behind it,the marketing’s pointless. To me, this seems like common sense, but some people actually debated him about it. Specifically, they claimed that it was marketing that made the iPod great; Ehrlich’s point was that the product was good first; then came the top-notch marketing. Good product + great marketing = #1; great product + shite marketing = Creative Labs. Their players have more functions, longer battery lives and better prices. Ever heard of ’em? Exactly.

The second session of the afternoon was about corporate blogging. Tara Hunt was back for this one; they also brought up Jeremy Wright and Debbie Weil, whose comments were as vapid as her site is godawful. You know when someone gets about 50% of what’s going on (I mean in the grand scheme of things, not just what went on in the session), but thinks they’re an expert, and talks to everyone else — most of whom fully get it — as if they’re the expert? Everyone in the room just rolls their eyes and laughs a little bit? That’s kinda what this was like. In spite of this, I did manage to catch a few useful tips from Jeremy and the audience about how to sell executives on corporate blogging, so maybe I can take another run at mine.

.:.

The conference was a pretty good time, and tomorrow I’ll be pushing some of what filtered into my head out into my work blog(s), but I’ll be curious to see what’s on the agenda for next year. Will there be two days’ worth of new topics 363 days from now? Hard to say. Did I get anything out of it this year? Honestly, I think it may have been worth the money just to get the kind of kick in the ass that the 5-minute speech from Elissa Gjertson of Are You Frank? gave yesterday.

.:.

I arrived home today to find my “Bomb The Blogosphere” t-shirt in the mail, one day after I really needed it. Oh fate, why must you tempt me with tardy vestments?

[tags]mesh06, mesho conference[/tags]

(Many) more thoughts on mesh

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I left halfway through that last session with Dave Pollard (and two others: Tom Williams from GiveMeaning and George Irish from Amnesty International) and popped next door for the session about media with Jian Gomeshi (from the CBC), Andrew Baron (from Rocketboom; sadly, Amanda didn’t tag along) and Amber MacArthur (from TechTV).

After a quick walk, we were off to the last session of the day. I had trouble deciding which session to attend, but settled on “How and Why to podcast” with the afore-mentioned Amber MacArthur, which turned out to be pretty busy. Apparently the “Blogging 101” session earlier was packed too.

In general, it was less geeky/techie than I had originally thought it might be…which is the whole point of the “social web”. There were lots of people there from the business/marketing/entrepenurial side of things, and some from the media area as well. The most interesting session was Michael Geist’s talk on digital copyright law…which, from the title, you would think would be the most boring topic on the planet. But he used his powerpoint well, just throwing up visuals to support what he was saying, and talked about things that affect us every day and just happen to be about digital copyright as well.

Little things:

  • I love, love, LOVE the MaRS space. I’m trying to convince my boss to move us down there. Not that it’s up to him; he’d move us there in a second, I think.
  • I bumped into an old colleague from Delano. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years, so it was good to catch up. His company was just bought by Verisign, so congrats to him.
  • While standing at the registration desk the guy next to me said “Joey deVilla” when asked for his name. Without turning I said, “Hey, the Accordion Guy.” As he said, “Yep,” out of the corner of my eye I looked…and he actually carries a frigging accordion with him. I thought it was just a name, but dude actually straps on an accordion when the leaves the house. Now that’s living up to a reputation. Anyway, I was so dumbfounded for a minute that I didn’t even introduce myself or anything…I just wandered off. I’m sure he wondered who the big rude dick was.
  • My favourite 1/3 of the “15-minutes of fame”: Are You Frank?

There are lots and lots of pictures from the conference up on flickr already, including this one where you can see that I have a blurry bald spot. Lovely.

[tags]mesh06, mesh conference[/tags]

Are you meshin'?

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Since the mesh conference began this morning I’ve heard Om Malik and Michael Geist (both of whom you wouldn’t know unless you follow technology news), and Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne (who you’d know if you read the National Post or Maclean’s respectively). Warren Kinsella (who’s a dead ringer for Bill Murray) moderated the discussion for those last two.

The next session’s about to get underway…funny, there’s a gentleman in the panel who I’ve had lunch with: Dave Pollard. Didn’t even realize he was on the agenda until an hour ago.

Also: the free brownies in the lobby kick ass.

[tags]mesh06, mesh conference[/tags]

The decadence continues

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This morning CBGB called and asked us if we wanted to go for brunch. After some minor waffling because we had brunch yesterday, and because I’ve got lots to do today, we happily caved and met them on the Danforth. We went to the Old Nick, a pub well known for their brunch. I was pretty impressed, actually; I had the “Well Hung” breakfast, consisting of scrambled eggs, chicken sausage (with bits of pineapple and red pepper), home fries, greens and toast & jam…all of it organic. GB got pretty much the same thing, and CB got some french toast that looked pretty damn tasty (also organic through and through). Nellie went old school and got the non-organic bacon & eggs, and couldn’t get her eggs done properly (she never can; does anyone know how to ask for eggs fried over very, very hard, with nothing even remotely resembling liquid left inside?) but she seemed to enjoy it overall.

There was a ton of food on my plate, but I didn’t feel stuffed or greasy after eating it. I think we’ll be going back; now that we’re going over there more to see CBGB, it’s slowly sinking in that the west end of the Danforth really isn’t very far away. I blame the Don Valley for being a mental barrier.

.:.

The Senators, once again, have bowed out of the playoffs much sooner than expected. To me, their chances of winning the cup faded badly around the same time as my chances of winning my hockey pool: when Dominik Hasek was injured early in the Olympic tournament. As Bob McKenzie says, the team will likely be dismantled to some degree.

I gotta say, if you’d told me that Ottawa would be knocked out by Buffalo and Carolina would have New Jersey on the ropes, while Anaheim was moving on in the west and waiting for the winner of Edmonton & San Jose (which looks to be the only real scrap in round 2, unless Jersey can win today), I’d have called you a crazy man. Or woman. Or what have you.

.:.

Sigh…have to start reading marketing again.

[tags]brunch, old nick, organic, danforth, ottawa senators, nhl playoffs, marketing[/tags]

"You got an ATM on that torso lite-brite?"

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This weekend has been an exercise in comfort food. Last night we went to Fieramosca, just to relax after a long week. Nothing like a three-hour dinner to kick off the weekend, especially when it involves cheesecake.

It’s gotten to the point where they remember where we sat last time we were in, and to where the hostess is practically an old college buddy. I guess this is how Norm felt at Cheers.

Also: I love how, in all the times I’ve been there, I have yet to order off the menu.

.:.

After dinner we watched This Girl’s Life (imdb | rotten tomatoes), one of those DVDs that arrives from Zip (twice; the first copy was cracked nearly in half) and I don’t remember adding it to my list. Must’ve been a recommendation from someone. Anyway, it wasn’t very good; the lead actress looks an awful lot like Angelina Jolie, which made it easy to watch, but James Woods did such a convincing job playing her Parkinson’s afflicted father…which made it hard to watch. There were little bit parts from Rosario Dawson and Michael Rapaport, but the funniest one was Kip Pardue: both Nellie and I thought he was Sean Dugan, who played homicidal minister Timmy Kirk on Oz. She was disturbed by how well he cleaned up, when our lasting memory of him was burying Luke Perry alive inside a wall. Anyhoo.

.:.

The comfort food journey continue this afternoon after we’d picked up some food & drink at the Summerhill LCBO and All The Best, and stopped in at the Rebel House for brunch. It was a perfect day for some french toast on the patio. When he saw that Nellie had ordered a Dennison’s Weissbeer our server told us about the Press Club, a place on Dundas West that served a great Ephemere wheat beer…can’t remember if he said it was apricot or peach. Anyway, maybe we’ll check it out if we ever get down to Little Portugal.

.:.

I’d heard some bad things about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ Show Your Bones, but after a few listens I really like it. I guess, despite whatever early press I’d heard, I’m not the only one.

.:.

This Michelle Goldberg article in Salon about the rise of “Christian Nationalism” in the US is fascinating and frustrating. These two paragraphs were the most compelling, and alarming:

“It’s not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty-five-year-old book ‘The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,’ I shivered at its contemporary resonance. ‘The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith,’ he wrote in the introduction. ‘They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness.’

Fascism isn’t imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the ‘mobilizing vision’ of fascist movements as ‘the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it’ (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right.”

As she said, fascism isn’t around the corner, but I worry that we might be able to hear it in the distance.

.:.

Speaking of fascism (but the funny kind), check out this claymation video of the Emperor hearing that the Death Star had been destroyed. It’s funny if you’re even half a Star Wars geek. [via the movie blog]

[tags]fieramosca, rebel house, press club, yeah yeah yeahs, michelle goldberg, christian nationalism, death star[/tags]

Slashing, meshing and bombing

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I’m a bitter critter. My Bomb The Blogosphere t-shirt didn’t arrive in time for the mesh conference (which starts Monday). I was so looking forward to stirring up some shit.

.:.

For some reason, a colleague asked me today if I remember Clint Malarchuk. Specifically, if I remembered seeing the video of the game where he had his throat slashed and nearly bled to death on the ice.

Uh, yeah. I remember that. Apparently, so do lots of people, ’cause they’ve put it on YouTube. Warning: do NOT watch that video if you don’t like the sight of blood. Seriously.

[tags]mesh conference, clint malarchuk, youtube[/tags]

Je deteste le marketing

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I finished my first (and last) marketing assignment this week. Here’s what I told a friend about it:

“I believe that, were I to print mine, an Indian somewhere would shed a single tear. Moreover, every employee on Madison Avenue would feel a cold chill down their spine, and the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto would all get nosebleeds. I, myself, shall know the very meaning (or translation, as it were) of schadenfreude if I get anything above a C-.”

I’m not the only one who said this. Everyone I’ve talked to in the class thought the assignment was ridiculous, and as far as I can tell everyone just shat out 3 pages of gobbledegook and hit the ‘submit’ button.

Hooray for higher education.

[tags]mba, marketing[/tags]