New Year's Eve celebrations - past and present

So it's the end of 2009.  Some say the end of the decade, and most people act like it is, what with all of the "best/worst of the decade" stories flying around like so much New Year's confetti.  Others (those who properly say that the decade didn't start until 2001) say the end of the decade is *next* year, but I see the point of the early celebrators.  The year 2000 was the first year with a "2" at the beginning, so it automatically begins the new century.  Whatever floats your boat, I always say.

The true one-hit wonders of the 80s (Part 1)

Back in August, I watched VH-1's "Top 100 One-Hit Wonders of the 80s" and decided that I would do a series of posts giving my opinions of these songs.  It got me a bit nostalgic because this is the decade that I grew up in.  The series is still my most popular group of blog posts, getting hits all the time by people either researching one of the singers or just doing a search on one-hit wonders.  You can just go to #100-91 and then follow along from there.

One of the common themes in those posts, however, is the question of how VH-1 derived this list, as quite a few of the artists actually had more than one hit if you count songs that made the Billboard Singles Top 40 chart.  It became a running joke in the posts.  The blogger who posts to Scrubbles.net agrees, but he took it one step further.  He looked through the definitive Billboard book of Top 40 singles and discovered that there actually isn't much overlap between reality and VH-1 reality.  He posted his list here.

Since I'm in a mood (yeah, one of those moods), I figured "what the hell?"  Why not post my thoughts on the true list? Also, what better way to ring in the new year than a look back? So what if it's not *this* year that I'm looking back to?

These are taken in the order they are on the Scrubbles blog, and I'm only going to do 9 at a time.  I'm not going to mention the ones that are also on the VH-1 list, as I've already addressed them in my VH-1 posts. Also, I'm removing any "group" projects, such as Artists Against Apartheid and USA For Africa, as they are by definition "one-hit wonders."  Keep your eyes peeled for more of these posts in the future.

Oh, and seriously...if you want some laughs (maybe not as much as I hoped, but I tried), go see my VH-1 posts.  I hope you have as much fun reading them as I did writing them.

Comment Weirdness

This is just a notice that a couple of people have tried to leave comments on this blog in the last few days and those comments didn't show up.  Others have left comments with no problems, so it's not a Blogger-wide problem.

Since I'm not moderating comments at this time, if you leave a comment it should show up immediately.  If it doesn't, then for some reason it didn't work.  Please try to leave it again.  If you're leaving a long comment, you may want to "copy" it first, so that it's in your clipboard.  Then, if the comment doesn't show up, you can leave it again and you don't have to type it all out.

I've posted this issue on Blogger's help forum, so hopefully something will be done about it soon.  In the meantime, please try to leave it again if you can.  I love hearing from you!

It's little niggling issues like these that start pushing people toward Wordpress.  *grumble*

Blog Template Change - Mark 2

I loved the design of the old "Theater Room" Blogger template I switched to in early December, but there were a couple of niggling annoyances with it that I finally got tired of.

The first thing is that, when I was home, a number of the elements were cut off when I was using both of my parents' computers.  It actually looked pretty ugly.

Secondly, the "Read More" link bled off of the column where the actual posts were.  That irritated me as well, because again, it just looked ugly.

Finally, it didn't show the date each entry was posted!  I really couldn't believe that.  Despite having all the settings done correctly, it refused to show it.

In my December 6 post announcing the template change (wow, imagine that!  I can see what date it was posted!), I mentioned that one of the benefits of the Theater Room template was that the site I downloaded it from offered technical support.  These three problems were obvious right off the bat, but I figured "Hey, they've got tech support.  They'll help me."

In the comments of the template's page, there were plenty of people getting help.  One person mentioned the date problem but later said she figured out, but she never said what the solution was.  So I posted my problems.  No answer, almost a month later.  Some support.

So this is the Night Gate template, and it was my second choice to the Theater Room template.  I actually really like it.  The gadget sidebars are a bit crowded, but not too bad.  I was testing a black template that also looked really cool, but I didn't like the light text on a dark background.  My parents read this blog, among other people, and I thought that might be hard to read.

I like the "Contact" and the "About this blog" links up above, as well as the link to the Blogger home page (which means I didn't need to add the Blogger button in the sidebar).  In the "About This Blog" link, I just linked to my very first post where I explained what I want this blog to be.  Of course, the "contact" link should be obvious (and don't be afraid to email me!)

So let me know what you think!  I promise this will be the last change for a while.

Foursquare: Should I join?

One of the new social networking ideas is something called "Foursquare".  Basically, when you go out to places, you "tag" where you are and you can also leave "tips" on the place's site for what somebody else may want to check out ("Try the new Jumbo Burger.  It's divine").  You can leave "shouts" that announce that you're there and invite others to join you, or just tell people what's going on there.  It's also kind of a game, as people can rise in status and become "mayor" of a certain place if they've visited that place the most often in a two-month time period.  Restaurants, coffee houses and the like actually have given discounts to Foursquare participants who are frequent visitors to their establishments, especially if they become "mayor."  When you announce that you are at a place, anybody on your friends list will see it immediately, and can head there themselves if they want to meet you.

I'm just wondering whether I should take part in this.

Dr. Who - The End of Time: Part 1

David Tennant's time as the 10th Doctor is coming to an end, but he appears to be making the most of it.  Tennant's final episodes as the Doctor are the two-part story "The End of Time," and I've just seen part 1 (which aired on the BBC on Christmas Day).  A tour-de-force, though I can understand why some people may not like it.  Like most of outgoing producer Russell T. Davies' season climaxes, this story is cosmic in scope, very broad, and with the very fabric of Time itself (or maybe just the universe) under threat.

Updating Windows 7 with fun and frolic

One of the things I was looking forward to upon getting home from my trip was finally getting rid of this horrible Windows Vista on our machine.So today was the day to do that. I was a bit apprehensive, as updating an operating system isn't necessarily a lot of fun, or at least it seemed fraught with peril. Then again, there are people who do this all the time, so it must be easy, right?

Surprisingly, this time it was. It was just long, that's all.

I'll give you my experience in upgrading. I'm not a computer expert, so don't take any of this as expert advice on how to do it, though. This is just what happened for me.

My traveling adventure

What a tiring day yesterday.  Travelling the day after Christmas has been really bad the last couple years, though before that it was wonderful.  The weather in Chicago has been frightful (and the fire was not delightful to make up for it) the last couple years.  However, I made it home, and that's the important thing.  I was up for almost 24 hours, but I'm resilient.

Merry Christmas, Everyone

We're heading up to Chicago early for Christmas this year, so I just wanted to wish all of my many readers (Hi, George!) a very merry Christmas and all the best in the new year.  Of course, I will be posting between Christmas and New Year's Day, but I thought I'd bring all of the good wishes into one post.  That way, I can be cranky the rest of the time (you know it's true).

Everybody's heard about the various attempts to take Christmas out of the mainstream.  All of the "you can't call it a *Christmas* tree..it's a *Holiday* tree!" controversies, and things like that.  I sometimes wonder if, within a decade or two, Christmas won't be as public a holiday as it used to be.  It will always be celebrated, of course, but there seems to be an attempt to take Christmas out of the public venue.

So it really heartens me to see things like the fact that radio stations still give over their airwaves for Christmas music for 24 hours (and some for a couple of weeks) and the many Christmas messages being put out by various companies.  And the radio stations don't just play secular Christmas songs either, but religious ones as well.

Whatever the case, I hope you all have a Merry Christmas, and I will see you on the 27th!  I'll be en route on the 26th, so won't be posting then either.

Book Review: Richard Castle - Heat Wave

Been a while since I've posted a book review, but my review of Richard Castle's Heat Wave has now been posted on Curled Up With a Good Book.  This is an unusual book in the sense that the "author" is really a character on the ABC television show, Castle.  On the show, he's a writer who tags along with the cops because he's going to be writing about them.  This book is loosely based on those cop characters (thus, we have a character writing a book containing characters based on other characters...confused yet?)

Many thanks to Sharon, the editor at Curled Up, for saving my ass on this review.  See, I didn't know any of this when I read the book and wrote the review.  The review copy of the book I had contained a DVD with an episode of Castle on it, but I wasn't really interested in watching it.  I guess I should have, as it would have explained everything.

So many thanks to Sharon for adding a disclaimer at the beginning of the review, as well as a few words here and there within the review to make it look like I'm not a total idiot and that I actually knew how this book worked.  I believe (I hope, anyway) that this is the first time she's had to do that, and I hope it will be the last too.

You're the best!

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - First Impressions

*Note:  This game is only available on the PS3*

After playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, I knew that I would be picking Uncharted 2: Among Thieves up quite soon after it came out.  Only the fact that I play games singularly and I was in the middle of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 kept me from getting this one when it first came out.  I bought it last week before I left, so I haven't had a whole lot of time to get into the story.  But I have played it long enough to know that this game will rival, if not surpass, the original.  And it's even got multiplayer too!  The first game didn't have that.

Think you hated Star Wars: Phantom Menace?

Were you there on opening day in 1999, waiting anxiously for the first Star Wars movie in 16 years to come onto the screen?  Were you holding your breath, waiting for that George Lucas juicy goodness (get your mind out of the gutter!) to be presented to you in full stereo sound with massively improved special effects?  Did you cheer when the opening crescendo of the Star Wars theme came blasting out of the speakers and you saw the first original scrolling introduction in quite a long time move up the screen?  Did you read it and start wondering "what's this about taxes?  Trade Federations?  What the f---?"

And afterward, did you turn to your friend, lover, legal guardian, parole officer, or whatever, and say "what the hell was that?"  Or even worse, did your companion have to poke you because you had fallen asleep?

The wonder of Capercaille

I've been a Celtic music fan for quite a while now, and one of my favourite bands is Capercaille.  This Scottish group that does a mixture of Celtic and contemporary music that has to be heard to be believed.  There's a reason I bring them along with me on any of my trips, as I did this time.  The band is headed by lead singer Karen Matheson, with a voice that could sing with the angels, but the musicians behind her are wonderful too.

I usually can't listen to music with words in a different language.  For some reason, it frustrates me that I can't sing along, even mentally.  But when Matheson cuts loose in Gaelic for some 400-year old folk tune, or even a contemporary one, it doesn't matter at all.  Her voice just becomes part of the music for me, and I'm entranced.

I'm going to give you a sample of why I love this band so much below the fold.  Hopefully you'll fall in love with the voice and the music as much as I have. 

Soundtrack of my trip

Here's what I was listening to on my trip, in case you're interested.

Capercaille - Secret People  (wonderful Celtic music, which I will go on about further in another post, maybe tomorrow)

Dr. Who Soundtrack - Series 3

Enigma - A Posteriori

Mars Lasar - Yosemite Valley of the Giants

Vangelis - Cosmos

Yes, that's a lot of New Age stuff too.  It's very relaxing and makes good dozing music when you're just sitting on the bus doing nothing.  And Capercaille gave me a couple of songs I could sing along to under my breath (certainly I'm not going to inflict it on anybody else around me!)

All excellent stuff that I highly recommend.

On the plane, it was podcasts from:

Games Radar (video game talk)
Game Informer (more video game talk)
The Roadhouse (Blues)
Stuff You Missed in History Class (don't laugh!!!!!)

I've got others loaded, but those got me through both flights.

The trials and tribulations of travelling

Friday was my day of travel, heading home to see the folks and the rest of the family for Christmas.  It was a long day, but ultimately it turned out really well.  There were no real trials (there were a couple of annoyances) and no tribulations to speak of (what the hell's a "tribulation," anyway?).  However, I just like alliteration, hence the title.

The beauty that is Peggle

See?  I do respond to reader requests, so keep sending them in!  One video game that I've been having a lot of fun playing is a cute little Xbox Live game called Peggle.  That's just where I play it.  You could play it pretty much anywhere (I think it's even on the iPhone!)

Peggle is kind of an odd form of addiction.  I play it non-stop for a while, until I finish the Adventure levels, and then I just keep going back to the Challenge levels as well, but not as often.  It's a wonderful time-waster that's classically simple to play but hard to master.

So just what is Peggle?  I'm glad you asked.

Review - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

I was really pumped when Modern Warfare 2 came out in early November.  The hype behind this game was phenomenal, and it sold 4 million copies its first day.  I can only imagine how many it's sold by now.

I've been playing the game almost non-stop since November 6, getting at least two hours in most nights.  I'm a multiplayer junkie, so it actually took until just the other night to even finish the single-player storyline.  You could certainly say I've gotten my money's worth regarding playing time.  I've played multiplayer for over 3 days (it keeps a running total of how long you play, so of course that's not 3 days straight).

But is it worth all of that hype?

Is Jesus on the Cross a "violent image?"

Does drawing a picture of Jesus on the Cross make you a violent person?  A school principal in Tuanton, Massachusetts seems to think so.

This report in the Taunton Gazette about an 8 year old boy being suspended and sent for psychological evaluation after he drew such a picture just royally pissed me off.

New or Used?

This is a question for both books and video games, though I'm going to mainly talk about video games in this post.  Do you prefer to buy your books/games new or used?  Of course, the obvious answer is "used, because they're cheaper."

But is that the best answer?  Sometimes, but not always.

Obviously, I understand that when money's tight, used is always the best option if it's available, as they are cheaper.  This is even more true for books than it is for video games, as you can go to the Salvation Army thrift stores and buy a paperback (normally $7.99 US) for a dollar or maybe $1.50.  Hardcovers are even a better bargain!  Though you suffer at the whims of whoever wants to donate that store's stock (or sell it back, if it's a used book store).

But in the grand scheme of things, cost is not necessarily the only consideration.

Rat pics!

Due to popular demand (ok, one demand, but it was a really strident one), I'm posting a couple of pictures of some of the many rats we've had in this place.  These rats are super-cute creatures, as you will be able to see.

My wife is the main rat-person in the family, though I do find them cute.  She takes such wonderful care of them, that I truly admire her for it.  It's not many people who can sit with a sick rat for long periods of time, knowing that they will eventually die on you.  The fact that they're not dying alone has to be a comfort, though I know it's extremely hard.

But on to the cute rat pix.

Vancouver Canucks - The glory that is Rick Rypien

My latest Canucks post on Penaltykill.net is up, about the fiesty scrapper Rick Rypien.  He's quickly become a fan favourite here in Vancouver, mainly for his refusal to back down from anybody.

"You need many different types of hockey players on a team for it to be good. Of course, you need some guys who can put the puck in the net. You need forwards that can check the other team’s best players. You need an at least decent goalie, and you need both defensemen who can move the puck as well as those who can shut down the other team’s guys (even better if those qualities reside in the same defenseman).

But you also need some energy guys. You need guys who can play a good shift, hopefully keep the puck in the opposing team’s end, and who can get the crowd (and their teammates) energized with either a big hit, a fight, or whatever. It also helps to have a tough guy that can keep your star players safe by taking on the other team’s tough guy. The Vancouver Canucks thought they had this when they signed Darcy Hordichuk, but something’s happened to him. He doesn’t fight any more; he doesn’t really hit, and when he does try, he often misses. Tanner Glass has earned his spot on the Canucks by doing a lot of this, and I’m really glad to have him on this team. However, he’s not the guy I think of when I look at all of these qualities."

Believe me, I do mention Rypien right after that.  Go read it and tell me what you think!  Especially you Canucks fans who I know check this blog.

What I'm Reading Now

Having just finished Suicide Kings, the latest "Wild Cards" novel (another excellent book), I picked up Robert Kaplan's Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground.  Haven't gotten into it much yet (page 5, I think), but I'm really looking forward to it.

Robert Kaplan writes for The Atlantic magazine, and he's an avid fan of the US military, which makes him a-ok in my book (seriously, when was the last time you heard that expression?).  He was for the Iraq invasion, though he has since decided (or at least as of the writing of this book, as I don't know how he feels now) that it was the wrong thing to do.  But he's always pulling for the troops, the men and women on the ground who are doing the fighting for our country.

Population control rears its ugly head again

The National Post is, relatively speaking, one of the more conservative newspapers in Canada, or at least as conservative as you can probably get in Canada.  I used to get the paper for a long time, but gave it up because I wasn't reading it as much as I used to.

It's too bad I gave it up, because that takes away the opportunity I would otherwise have to cancel it with disgust after reading Diane Francis' latest piece, "The Real Inconvenient Truth."  I had thought that the idea of "population control" had pretty much waned in the Western world, with the exception of those radical environmentalists who would gladly get rid of all humanity in order to save the planet.  But those theories never reached the mainstream.

Until now, that is.

Handwriting in the computer age

In finally getting our Christmas cards out this year, I'm hit by something that hits me every year, but this year I have a blog to talk about it.  In this day and age, when everybody types, handwriting has gone by the wayside.  The art of the personal letter, handwritten, has almost disappeared.  As @avflox tweeted once, a couple of days ago, "Now I sit in a red robe at my desk, hot coffee in one hand, composing a letter to @abartelby. By hand. It's divine."

Now, I'm not one who ever reveled in the art of handwriting like she was apparently, and my penmanship was never very good.  But it has gone so far south in the last 10 years that it might as well be in Antarctica.  Doing a massive amount of writing at any one time is almost painful, I'm so out of practice.

Can video games actually be - *gasp* - good for you?

Many thanks to @jradoff for posting this interesting article, "Six Wonderful Things About Games."  So many people have a negative opinion on video games.  They're too violent; they'll warp kids' minds; they make them antisocial.  Granted, many games are being made that are rated "M for Mature" (though I was playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 online the other night and happened upon a father and his young son playing, which was kind of interesting), but some of the complaints about games have been about adults as well.  If there's a shooting anywhere, inevitably video games are blamed, rather than the psychosis that the person responsible for the atrocity already has in his (and they always seem to be male) mind.

So how about some positive views about gaming?  Can gaming actually be beneficial for both kids and adults?  In regards to that question, I quite agree with Jon.  They certainly can be.

Great podcasts - and a complaint about them

I've been loving my iPhone ever since I bought it this last summer, because it can do so many things.  It's not surprising that "There's an app for it!" has become a running joke in the media (saw it on CSI, just to name one show).
But one thing I hadn't done until just recently is take advantage of  the ability to listen to podcasts on it.  I think this is one of the greatest innovations in a long while, where people can produce audio (and sometimes visual) content for the masses to download and play at their leisure.  The ability to download these podcasts to your iPhone (or iPod) and listen to them on the go makes them even cooler.

I used to listen to a couple of podcasts on my computer at work, either through iTunes or my feed reader (Noopod).  But it was only recently that these podcasts have become part of my drive to and from work. 

What's coming up?

Just wanted to alert my regular readers (Hi, Alan!) that I'm looking to change the template of the blog, so it's going to look a lot different shortly.  I'm still debating between a few choices, so no guarantee on when it will occur, but it is coming.  Part of the reason is because I'm getting a little bored with this one.  However, the main reason is that I have inserted some HTML code to do various things, and some of it is either obsolete now (thanks to Blogger implementing jump breaks) or is interfering with something else I want to do.  So, if I install a clean template and build my widgets from scratch (I'm doing that on a test blog), all of that crap will be gone and I can start adding some other cool stuff.

Of course, I will be posting normally in the meantime, but I wanted to give you all a heads-up.  And I promise, sometime soon.

Rat pics!!!

Update:  So what do you think?  I like the design of this template, but I'd love to get your opinion on it.

I used the "Theater Room" template from Bloggerstyles, and I think it's neat.

Update #1: Of course, as you can now see, I'm no longer using Theater Room. See this post for details.

Vancouver Canucks - The Curse of the Trap Game

My latest post at PenaltyKill.net, about yesterday's horrible Canucks game against the Carolina Hurricanes.

"As Vancouver Canucks fans, we’re all familiar with the problem this team usually has: playing down to the level of the competition. I can’t count how many bad teams that the Canucks have just barely beaten, including the Maple Leafs earlier this season. It’s a quality that no Canucks team, no matter how talented and successful, can seem to get rid of. Add that quality to a third game in four nights (and an afternoon game, to boot), and many Canucks fans were worried about yesterday’s date with the Carolina Hurricanes. It had all the symptoms of the classic “trap” game."

It was not fun to watch.

Please read the rest and let me know what you think.

Jeff Healey - RIP

When the world lost Canadian jazz/blues musician Jeff Healey on March 2, 2008, Canada lost one of its best musicians and the world lost an awesome guitarist.  I've been a fan of Healey since college, when his album "See the Light" came out.  I was hooked by "Confidence Man" but he became big in the States with the smash hit "Angel Eyes."

I sit here alone while the wife is out at an office holiday function, at the computer trying to write a review, and I've got the Blues station on my TV (one of those digital music stations that all the cable companies offer now).  Suddenly, "I Think I Love You Too Much" comes on and I just have to sing along.  As soon as its over, I go to Youtube and find some other Healey, and I'm lost for at least half an hour.

Saturday MST3K

I haven't done one of these in a while, but I was just browsing through Youtube and found myself laughing my head off again, so I thought I'd give you a couple a chance to as well.

For those of you who don't know (or don't remember), MST3K basically takes really cheesy movies and makes jokes about them, all the way through the movie.  You know those annoying people who talk through a movie?  Imagine if the movie was horrible and the annoying people were actually funny.  That would be this group.

Here are a couple of hilarious pieces that I'm sure you will enjoy.

Vancouver Canucks - Canucks Score 2 Big Wins

My latest post is up on Penaltykill.net.  The Canucks just finished two games back-to-back, against the very tough New Jersey Devils and the good (but not right now) Philadelphia Flyers.  Things are beginning to go quite well for the Canucks, and hopefully they can keep this up!

Two more games in the East before they come back home for 17 out of the next 23 games.  Should be an interesting set of games.

Jessie Ventura Antics

I see former wrestler and Minnesota governor, not to mention Navy SEAL, Jessie Ventura is adding luster to his sterling reputation.  He was on the Opie & Anthony show on Sirius FM yesterday and got into an animated discussion with comedian Jim Norton, who is a regular on the show.  Jim Norton is often on Fox News' Red Eye, and I've always liked watching him.  Sure, he can be crude and some of his humour can be a little forced, but I still like watching him and it's nice to see a conservative voice in the comedy field.

After this argument, I have even more respect for him.

Vancouver Canucks - Why is everybody panicking?

My latest post on PenaltyKill.net is up, talking about how Vancouver Canucks fans are starting to push the panic button on the season a little too early.  It's way too early to do that, people!

Looking forward to tonight's game against the Devils.  They're going to pull it out, I just know it.

Too many thoughts to tweet!

My drive home is the pretty much the same, day in and day out, unless I'm running an errand or something.  So, while my attention is still riveted on the road and traffic, parts of my mind just start to wander.  This is sometimes the result (though sometimes I've had these thoughts before but just never written them down):