Ranting and Roaring

It's a little bit funny, but let's face it, the situation is a little bit funny:

Try it yourself (via London Fog)! President Hitler's plans of subsidize airplanes, burning coal, cutting takes, building nukes and telling the foreign-types to go to hell didn't work out so well in the simulation (see end comments though)

And that's where the simulation falls of the rails — Europe never voted against any Hitlers.

CBC reports:

The Police reunion tour will begin May 28 in Vancouver and include at least two other Canadian dates, the band announced Monday.

[...] Toronto's Air Canada Centre on July 21 and Montreal's Bell Centre on July 25 will be among the arena and stadium venues for the tour, the first since they disbanded in 1984.

[...] Other confirmed shows for the spring-summer tour include the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee and Madison Square Gardens in New York, as well as in Seattle, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, New Orleans and St. Louis.

The tour will continue this fall with dates in the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France, and is expected to continue in Mexico, South America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

When do the tickets go on tour?

Via Joey, here's last night performance of The Police (previous writings) on the Grammys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sHXCs84iJc&eurl=

Nice rant by Lefstz Letter:

But no, we’ve got to give the award to the act with the brand name.  This would be like giving the Oscar to…"Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest".  It’s RECOGNIZABLE, it’s just not CLASSIC!

[...] "Not Ready To Make Nice" is ubiquitous on the coffee tables of baby boomers who want to impress their liberal friends, fuck, it probably doesn’t even make it into the CD player.

Nor did it make it on to people’s iPods.  It wasn’t even in the iTunes TOP FIFTY!  It was number 61, yup, that’s my definition of a hit.

[...] Oh, we know why the Dixie Chicks won.  Because nobody RECOGNIZED the rest of the nominees, they went for the name around longest, which they were FAMILIAR WITH!

I bet not even ten percent of Grammy voters know who Danger Mouse is, never mind Cee-Lo.  So, they shouldn’t have been allowed to VOTE in this category.  You don’t search for and reward excellence by turning over the decision-making reins to CHIMPANZEES!

When Boosh is a distant memory, in a decade or two, who'll remember the Dixie Chicks song that won at the Grammys in 2007.

Here's a set of photos I took in St. John's a couple of winters ago. Click here to see them all.

I'm playing right now with Google/Picasa Web Albums. So far … it's cool that it's integrate with Picasa (my desktop photo album), but beyond that it's somewhat craptastic. It's ignoring my crops, clicking on the "view" link is bringing me to 404 pages and there doesn't seem to be very good control over what the size or dimensions of the uploaded files.

I'm not going say much here — it was awesome, though I may have said that if they just came out and did polkas. I though the first verse was a little rough — it sounded like Copeland and Summers were playing half a beat out of sync — but when they went into the improve section, well, heaven. On the subject of Copeland, I had to laugh at the guy smiling like a retard; yeah baby, here comes the paycheck!

More:

• Toronto Star:
  Chalk it up to understandable rust, but the Police's show-opening rendition of "Roxanne" wasn't likely to inspire skeptics to fork out for tickets to the trio's upcoming 30th anniversary tour, details of which will be announced today. The appearance at the Los Angeles Staples Center was the first joint performance for singer/bassist Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland since The Police were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. The band hasn't toured since breaking up after 1984's Synchronicity tour.
• IndyStar:
  his highly hyped reunion appearance opened the show, but the rock trio could have made a bigger impact with a song other than "Roxanne." While this desperate plea to a prostitute ranks among the group's best-known hits, a tune such as "Message in a Bottle" would have been a stronger showcase for the various sides of the Police — namely punk, reggae and progressive rock.
  At the same time, vocalist Sting, drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers didn't neglect the reggae aspect of their sound. A mid-"Roxanne" improv segment slowed down the rhythm and gave room for Sting to sing weighty lines such as "I won't share you with another boy" wrapped in an echo.

  More than anything, Copeland's crisp striking heightens anticipation for a full-fledged summer tour.
• MTV:
  With a buff-if-balding Sting in fine form and voice, the trio's homage to a woman of the night sounded as hypnotic as it did all those years ago, but in keeping with the bandmembers' jazzbo backgrounds, it also felt fresh (see "Timberlake Rocks; Blige Weeps; Chicks, Chilis Clean Up At Grammys"). The group lived up to its reputation for experimentation, dropping into a dubby, echo-laden live remix of the song during the second verse; Sting did a bit of scatting and mashed up the song's loping tempo, as if to suggest that this reunion won't be a rote sleepwalk through a 90-minute greatest-hits set.

I moved on a few seconds after The Police, as Jamie Foxx was painful. They say the Dixie Chicks cleaned up; weird since I don't think I've ever heard them played on the radio though I understand they had the courage to call Bush Hitler or something. Then again, I've never heard Michael Bublé before and apparently he's pretty popular too.

This is me at the Horseshoe talking on Agent X's phone to Tony Pierce about BlogMatrix, Nirvana, Matt Welch, and Ken Layne while having my photo taken by Raymi, whom I introduced myself to a few minutes earlier, just because it seemed like the thing to do.

Canoe sez:

Variety.com reports that Harrison Ford will reprise his role as Dr. Jones after a nearly 20-year hiatus. At the moment, plot details are more heavily guarded than the Ark of the Covenant.

I'm wondering if that guy ever saw Temple of Doom.

My RLS is really acting up today. My uncle is suffering from RLS. Java? In my day, we used to program in RLS. It looks like there's a problem with the RLS. His batting record is poor but you should see his RLS.

TransitCamp on Sunday was very interesting. Here's a video from CityTV that gives a pretty good overview of what was going on (that's me standing up, red scarf, trench coated at :17 in):

[[player=http://www.youtube.com/share?v=PDkEPvIwarI]]

I attended two sessions and did the usual networking thing. The first session was about data as in opening up the transit schedules and providing real time locations of all buses and subways along the routes. You can read the session notes here. My impression? There's lots of good ideas. Kieran (who's net identity I haven't figured out yet) is working on a open collaborative data system for mapping the TTC and its routes. I'd prefer that the TTC and the city open up all its data information but I realize that this is going to require change mandated from the top down. This is something I've been b*tching about for years, and not only as an abstract sort of thing, but because I've been personally burned by it and that I think it makes Canada less competitive than the US. The TTC people in attendance didn't really say a lot. I wonder if they were scared by the presence of TTC Chair Adam Giambrone? In either case, they all gave the impression (to me, anyway) that that the TTC is very bureaucratic and not too fond of change.

In the afternoon I attended TTC + other modes of transit which covered many of the same issues. With an open way of sharing data, the TTC data could easily be integrated with Go, AutoShare^*, ZipCar^*, Greyhound and so on and so on. To address a particular concern about "not everyone has a computer" — think 10 years out: with ubiquitous wifi and displays as cheap as singing birthday cards, we'll be living in a different future sooner than you think.

Other people writing about TransitCamp:

• Mark
• Will Pate
• Joey
• Julia Brechenreid
• David Crow

^* Notice how I'm linking to sponsors.

You've been warned Alberta. Pay the price for Canada to make it's Kyoto commitments or there'll be consequences:

by Charles Adler

As I apply my ink stained fingers to the trusty keyboard, it's been more than 72 hours since Mark Holland, the Liberal Natural Resources critic, belched out the most threatening words I have heard in a political conversation in years.

[...] When I asked Holland whether a Liberal government under Stephane Dion would shut down or limit oil sands production if necessary to meet Kyoto targets, his response was, "Exactly." He then went on to say "I think what you are going to see is we're going to say you cannot exploit that resource, basically go in there and pump it out as fast as you can to give it to the Americans and sell out our national interests and blow apart our emissions targets."

I also heard that Dion is going to ban the use of small jet planes by individuals such as Al Gore, you know, since we're facing the end of the world and everyone — great and small — have to make sacrifices. Ha ha, just kidding: that would hurt Quebec, which isn't the point of the exercise.

I'll be attending TransitCamp this morning to discuss APIs, Mashups and Microformats and to provide at least a little "from the right" perspective to what's going on:

An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto's talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto's transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.

• "who represents" -> www.whorepresents.com
• "pen island" -> http://www.penisland.net
• "mole station nursery" -> www.molestationnursery.com

Read them all at Mungowit's End.