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. :)

Photo of the week

Sam Kirk finds a roadside ad for a Dry Grad Manure Sale at a local high school.

Johnny Paycheck, where are you when I need you?

I need to switch jobs.

While I whinge to myself, please check out the Bob Larson Fan Club Homepage, which I hope gets updated some day.

Hey DJ, this is the *flip* side!

Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, I guess that record companies had to make it painfully obvious to disc jockeys which side was intended to be the hit and which song was intended to be the extra one that you'd never play. Buzz Clifford's 1960 hit Baby Sittin' Boogie is a case in point.

I've played the flip side, Driftwood, for the first time this morning. Here are the lyrics:

Driftwood
A floating piece of heartbreak
Our love is...Driftwood!
The residue of heartaches
Surrounded by teardrops,
Darling, since you drifted from me.
My love for you tells me that I am destined to be only...

Driftwood!
Upon a tear-filled ocean
I've lost direction
'neath waves of sad emotion.
I'm laid up, divided by your love
and drifting helplessly....

Driftwood has its own charms--I like it better than the A-side! But, with its Joe Meek-like or "Incorrect Music"-esque stylings, it was only supposed to be played by accident when the disc jockey wasn't looking at the labels carefully. Too bad.

Can't top this

As much as I love my parents, I won't be encoraging them to celebrate one of their 60th birthdays by saying yes, if they ask the entire family to go skydiving with them.

Miss Smith also has a grandmother who says interesting things at dinner which you would not wish her to say if the Queen was your dinner guest.

Although, I can't go to a certain Mexican restaurant any time soon due to my uncle, but I was too mortified at the time to share any more.

Is Gordon Campbell still a goner?

I've reminded readers of The Shotgun of that prophecy by U.S. christian prophet Jim Goll last year that Gordon Campbell's days of Premier of B.C. are numbered and that the B.C. Liberals are going to lose the current B.C. election. All the juicy details are there.

(Although, if a giant disembodied hand writes "Mene, Mene, Tekel" on the wall of the B.C. Liberal headquarters, all bets are off. ;) )

Things I overhear at bus shelters, Part 1

Young lady talking on a cell phone:

I think his name rhymes with 'ovary'. Oh, its Ovi. I think he's from Israel..."

Things I overhear on the bus, Part 1

A frumpy, middle-aged lady talking to a friend on her cell phone:

"Throwing a lit match at you is *not* respect!"

Unshackling

Kathy Shaidle has discovered Unshackled, the very long running Christian radio drama.

She hasn't heard the program, but I have. I can assure her that it is very old fashioned radio, but not scary at all. It runs on my one of my local Christian radio stations in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I haven't heard it in years due to my wierd shift on Saturdays, and my computer being too old to use the online broadcasting software that they use at www.unshackled.org.

I can imagine that the program reaches a lot of people who are driving the freeways in the wee hours of the night and don't mind a program that sounds like it was first broadcast in the 1930s. And Unshackled supports the Pacific Garden Mission, a shelter for the homeless in Chicago, so you should give it points for that.

Got spoilers?

Michael Jenkinson can tell you all about the plot of Revenge of the Sith, because he has read the book.

Disunite the right

In the run-up to B.C.'s provincial election, it seems that the free enterprise parties other than the B.C. Liberals are being very quiet. Other than a Vancouver Sunstory a couple of weeks ago, which poked fun at B.C. Tory leader Barry Chilton for not owning his own house and staying with friends, I haven't seen anything on the B.C. Unity Party or other vote splitters. Perhaps Jordan Bateman would know, but I haven't heard anything.

I'm not the "60 second Socred" type, and I am hoping that the B.C. Liberals are not my only choice.

People you run into

Since Jordan Bateman has a tale about this guy with a B.C. Lions hat that he often runs into while buying coffee, I think I should share about Dog With A TV Dinner.

Several times now, I have passed a man walking south on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, with a dog on a leash. The dog always has a TV Dinner (today some kind of Michelina's pasta dish) clenched in his mouth. I don't blame the dog, as a TV dinner is sometimes better tasting than a stick, but I have sometimes wondered why the man doesn't carry the meal himself. Does the dog only eat TV dinners?

Perhaps I should ask. The man, I mean, not the dog.