I live in the El Pretentiouso

The Ambler discovers that a name can't turn the apartment equivalent of a sow's ear into a silk purse.

It's a good thing that sheep don't fly

Anthony posts a photo of The Biggest Bird Car Poop Ever. That should be the "biggest bird poop on a car hood ever."

Reminds me of the time that I was in Stanley Park with my friend Jim and his family. A seagull just missed me, and the ground looked like it had been carpet-bombed by the 101st Seagull Airborne.

Singing like an alley cat, part two. Or why you should never ask me to make you a mix tape

While reading Colby Cosh's thoughtful musings on recent pop music, I've been listening to the infamous Can't You Hear The Beat Of A Broken Heart? which I discuss a few posts below. My 45 of the Iain Gregory "song" has recently arrived from a used record store in England. It was very inexpensive, for some reason.

Can't You Hear The Beat Of a Broken Heart's lyrics are as wonderfully awful as the singing. A sample:

Can't you hear the beat of a broken heart?
Can't you see my love is dyin'?
Like the boom boom boom of a tom tom tom
Because I know that you're a-lyin'

Can't you see me sigh, when you pass me by?
Can't you hear my love a cryin'?
Like the woah woah woah of a cupid's bow
To find your heart, I'm a-tryin'...

To my dismay, none of the recent American Idol contestants covered this song. I fail to understand why. :)

Ian Paisley's favourite soccer team

In Europe, you're not supposed to cheer for some soccer teams if you are a Protestant. This post helps explain the alleged reasons why.

Once, I was watching a Scottish comedy show sketch about a great player being signed to Glasgow's (Protestant) Rangers team. He was being signed, until he let slip that he was Catholic. The rest of the sketch was about the manager falling all over himself not to finish the contract.

Transformers! MLAs in disguise!

During last night's B.C. election there was an amusing TV blooper, thanks to the fumbly fingers of whomever was doing the closed captioning for the Vancouver channel 9 supper-time news.

I was eating in a Chinese restuarant. The restaurant had the TV on with closed captioning.

I could tell that the typist was trying to go too fast because they were calling Belinda Stronach something like "Strnck" during the story on her defection.

Then, they did a preview of that night's election. They intended to talk about the riding of Vancouver Fraserview where B.C. Liberal Wally Oppal, a B.C. appeals court judge, was running against Ravinder Gill of the NDP. Mr. Gill DRIVES a school bus for a living. (Oppal would win.)

However, it didn't read that way on screen. The main battle of the riding was described, in the closed captioning, as pitting "an appeals court judge against a school bus." Period. New sentence.

Transformers! MLAs in disguise! (It would be easy to get the attention of the Speaker if you were transmogrifying into a car.)

Poor Mr. Gill. Nobody deserves a blooper like that.

Belinda, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out

My friends at The Shotgun will have more to say on this, but I am actually pleased in a small way that Belinda Stronach has defected to the Liberals. It will put an end to all that media carping, at the federal Tories', expense, that the party should have a small-l liberal like her as leader.

Might save Paul Martin's bacon, though, which is certainly a bad thing.

Movie Sign!

Big hat tip to Colby Cosh for this:

MST3K's Mike Nelson's perhaps surprising opinion about The Passion Of The Christ:

"Q33 (Forrest): Have you seen The Passion of the Christ? If so, what did you think?
A33: I have seen it. I have mixed feelings about movie depictions of the central event in the Christian faith. For myself, I have the Bible and that works well for me. Also, I’m a Protestant, and we tend to be more Easter focused, while traditionally, Catholics have been a little more Passion focused. So it did me good to spend a little time there.
All that being said, I think it was a pretty fine movie, and darned if it didn’t get people talking about religion again, a subject that some are trying to close off from the public square, a pet peeve of mine. Though the Judeo-Christian worldview has served us well for more than two hundred years and underpins the finest society in the history of the world, there are those fighting hard to throw it all on the scrap heap and replace it with radical secularism, a worldview that has brought us Nazism, Communism and some of the greatest horrors of all time."

"....Catholic nuns in North America have put themselves out of business, which I believe was their (unconscious) goal all along...."

Part of Kathy Shaidle's interesting post on why some nuns are far too modern for their own good...

Why I am not allowed to have a "Currently Playing" box on my weblog

Other bloggers often have "Currently Playing" notations on their weblog. visitamanda is one example. She likes lots of trendy movies and recordings.

I would have a similar box on my weblog, but I don't have a credit card to access Amazon and make such a system work for me. There is also the tiny matter of having a fondness for bad music. Take 1960s British TV star, Iain Gregory who was not allowed to sing on his hit song Can't You Hear The Beat Of A Broken Heart?.

It's been described online as follows:

Iain Gregory Can't You Hear The Beat Of A Broken Heart (39)....One of Joe Meek's more drastic salvage jobs. Mr Gregory was a moody-looking actor of fleeting repute who appeared in the contemporary TV version of "Ivanhoe." He couldn't sing for toffee, so what you actually hear on this record are slivers of his hapless quavering pasted over the guide vocal sung by a proper session singer (Dave Adams). Fantastic, of course.

Here's another description:

Iain Gregory’s “Can’t You Hear The Beat Of A Broken Heart” went to #39 with more than a little help from Dave Adams, who actually sang the song—Gregory’s voice is mixed in with Adams’.

As someone who was asked, when he was participating in a touring church youth musical, to mouth the entire thing because they had no time to teach me to sing, I can empathize with Mr. Gregory, who also could not carry a tune in a pail.

So, in an act of mercy towards my readers, no Currently Playing lists on my blog...at least for the time being. :)