First up - happy birthday, Meg!

Next, I’ll make a half-hearted apology for keeping a relatively low profile lately. I’ve been too busy to blog. Oh well, I’m sure you’ve been getting by.

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The new year is upon us, and with it comes a whole whack of ill-advised promises to do better this time around. I just wanted to take a few minutes to mention what I’d like achieve in the next twelve months as far as this blog and others are concerned. So, without further ado …
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Yup, another year’s over. I figured before I got all carried away about the next year, I’d take a moment to reflect upon the last twelve months and share some of my favourite things with you. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, here’s the most surreal thing I’ve seen in a while: CNN’s Anderson Cooper reporting live from Oscar the Grouch’s garbage can.

Mr. Cooper did a great job, and I laughed my butt off. If you missed it, that ought to learn you for not watching Sesame Street religiously.

If I didn’t have kids, I’d miss out on so much.

I may have finally found my dream job. Sure, the pay is lousy, but the gig is a blast.

I’ve wanted to take a kick at the music journalism can for pretty much my whole life, and now that I’m doing it I couldn’t be happier. It’s a totally new situation from me. Before, when I was desperate to play in a good band, I’d network my ass off to get a musician’s phone number just to have them ask me never to call again (I had no idea at the time that guitar players are a dime a dozen).

Nowadays, thanks to the magic of the internet, I’ll an drop interesting musician an email through his/her website asking to help promote their show and they gladly send me their phone number, usually within twenty-four hours. And so far they’ve been a pretty decent lot to talk to as well.

Tonight, I get to talk to Richard “Demon Rich” Underhill, the brains-of-the-operation behind the Shuffle Demons. I can’t wait!

(BTW, has anyone else noticed that the spellcheck tool in the Google Toolbar doesn’t recognize “internet” as a real word? Oh, the irony is richly ironic.)

Well, it looks like the folks over at BC Hydro want to give a bunch of money to help sick children, and you can help, too. All you have to do is click on the picture below and play the game to make them give an extra $.25

Photo by Alexandra Samur

Holy crap! I thought my lot was small. This house, built on what used to be a driveway, is on a small patch of land 7.25 feet (2.2 metres) wide and 113.67 feet (34.6 metres) long. The interior area of the house is just under 300 square feet (under 28 square metres).

The asking price for this one-bedroom, one-bathroom house near Dufferin Street and Rogers Road is $179,900. But you have to sleep in a Murphy bed.

I guess this goes to show what’s happening to real estate in this town. Seven years ago, my wife and I managed to get three times the house on twice the land for significantly less. I’m tempted to go to an open house here just to see if there’s anywhere I can lie down without touching an exterior wall.

Evidently, I can’t get enough of this blogging stuff. So, I’m pleased to announce that as of today I’m writing a music column with blogTO.com.

The focus of my column is live music in Toronto, including touring musicians visiting our fair city, and new releases by Toronto-based artists. The first article is about local multi-instrumentalist Christine Bougie.

‘Tis the season and all that jazz, so with no further ado, here it is, in no particular order, my top five list of the most popular Christmas tunes in our house this year:

• Christmas Time is Here: Rather unconventional for a yuletide song, this Vince Guaraldi minor key jazz waltz perfectly captures the melancholy of the season.
• What Christmas Means To Me: From Stevie Wonder’s 1967 album Someday At Christmas, this absolutely righteous tune have one of those grooves you could only get out of classic Motown. Plus, Stevie plays a kick-ass harmonica solo on this one!
• Wonderful Chritmastime: Only Paul McCartney could take a couple of crappy sounding synths, pump them through far too much delay, and still have me singing along.
• The Christmas Song: Chestnuts roasting on an open fire! Nat King Cole has always done it for me, and that’s all there is to it.
• You’re a Mean One, Mr Grinch: All hail, Thurl Ravenscroft, the un-credited voice actor who sang this tune in Dr Suess’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Perhaps one of the deepest and definitely one of the most notable voices in the business, he was also the man behind Tony the Tiger. He’s grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!

Well, it looks as though Toronto is in the throws of the winter woes again. There are snowdrifts in our backyard up to our knees and it was pretty pointless even to attempt driving this morning. By the time I cleared the snow off the car and got back to the point where I started I had to brush it off all over again. Then, once inside the car, the snow on the street was too high to even get out of our parking spot.

If the snowplows don’t make it to our street by tomorrow morning it looks like we’ll have another snow day. I know Penny’s boss will be sad if that happens, but personally, I’ve got my fingers crossed (yes, it does make typing difficult).