Exeter

My son has an opportunity to do a two week school exchange next spring to Toulouse, France.  We had a meeting with the organizing teacher and the travel agent this week.  The travel agent was from Ellison Travel, based in Exeter, Ontario.  I hadn't heard of Exeter here in Ontario before, although I was pretty familiar with Exeter in England as they had a good speedway team back in the 70's (and I supported The Coventry Bees).

Later, the same evening, I started to watch Angels and Demons (which I'd PVR'd a few days prior).  In one early shot, Hank's character is seen standing in front of a large Exeter pennant in his Harvard office.

The Cars

My brother in-law is a massive music fan and loves vinyl (and he just bought a very old Dual turntable).  He told me about a second-hand vinyl show scheduled at a neighbourhood community centre tomorrow.  I'm thinking of joining him and on the drive home tonight I was thinking about some of the albums I have (to sell perhaps or to buy for nostalgic reasons).  I was recalling that The Cars' Candy-O was one of the first albums I bought when I frist came to Canada.

As usual, we were flicking around various radio stations on the drive home and as I'm thinking about The Cars, I switch to Q107 and they are playing You're All I've Got Tonight from The Cars' debut album.

More Champion

I heard a great Haiti charity song just this week on my friend's blog - it was a very gritty version of the classic, I Put a Spell On You.  As you may be aware, I'm a big of a band called Champion and I have all their albums.  As I was looking on iTunes for the track, on the first page of hits of I Put a Spell On You, I noticed Champion had a version of the song as a single.  Nice surprise coincidence.

Philth(y)

A friend of mine in university once gave me the nickname Philthy.  For the record, she was a rather sloppy character herself.  I named a soccer team The Philthy Kickers and my first ultimate team I put together was called The Philthy Flyers.  My CKMS radio show was called The Philthy Show.  The name morphed into just Philth and some people still call me that moniker. My mom was never a fan of the name and today the name is perhaps a little like a poorly chosen tattoo you got when you were drunk once.  It's cool sometimes, but not really appropriate for someone who works in an office and has two children.  PJMixer seems much more my style these days.  Although I see the name quite often in my neighbourhood because there's a bar called Philthy McNastys, I was quite surprised to see that there are lots of references to Philth and Philthy on the internet.


I was at the Champion concert last night and DJ Champion (Max) was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt with Club Filth on it.

TMZ

My wife was talking about music sensation Justin Bieber this morning.  I'd never heard of him before, it seems this young kid is just massive these days.  I guess my wife was doing a little research to find out what all the fuss was about, so she tells me about some stuff about him on a web site called TMZ.  Again, I've never heard of TMZ.


On the walk to the subway, I'm listening to Hedley's song Cha-ching (I saw their performance at the Olympics closing ceremony) on my iPod and he sings "watch TMZ".

100's and 1000's of strangers

I've been doing a photo project called 100 Strangers for about 9 months now and I'm up to over 40 strangers.  I  met Pam, #43 on Monday night before my ultimate game.  He talked about a lot of different things, including 100 Strangers and she told about her friend, Hilary Leung and his 1000 Stranger project.  Hilary takes photos of people in public spaces, then draws an illustration of that person.  He is exhibiting his work at a gallery starting this week on Queen West in Toronto - see his blog and website for details.  What a cool coincidence.

Heart of Glass

I have a playlist on my iPod that contains recently downloaded tracks.  Along with some new releases from Phoenix and The Courteeners (both great albums), I also just downloaded my 2 favourite hit tracks from Blondie's classic Parallel Lines album.  So as I'm listening to shuffled tracks from this playlist this morning on the way to work, I hear the line " all the girls singing Blondie with heart of glass"" from The Courteeners' Good Time are Calling.  Blondie had come to mind recently because of a few new bands that had some of that Blondie early new-wave sound.  So I had downloaded Heart of Glass and One Way or Another and those tracks were in the 41 song playlist.  Next track that my iPod automatically selected in the shuffle, Heart of Glass.  Beautiful.

Spartacus

I was channel surfing the other night and paused briefly on The Rat Pack on HBO Canada.  I wasn't that interested, so I was ready to flick to another another station.  Instead if going through the on-screen guide, I was using the Info button so I could just scroll up and down to other channels.  Just as I heard one of the characters say something about "Spartacus", I hit Info and went to the next station and is showed Spartacus: Blood and Sand on The Movie Network.  Nice one Spartacus.