Taken at a small family gathering yesterday. From left to right, Wilmer Bloy, myself, Christine Davis (née Bloy), Barbra Bloy, Steven Bloy.
Yearly Archives: 2008
NASA Images
I recently discovered a wonderful website for anyone interested in astronomy and space: NASA Images.
In addition to the huge collection of images and multimedia of the universe, our solar system, the Earth, aeronautics and astronauts, it’s also got a nice time line from the late 1950’s until the present day.
High resolution versions of the images are available for download.
Crab apples
Sting Unplugged
I recently stumbled upon this little gem: a bootleg of Sting’s Unplugged performance at MTV studios, in March of 1991 — back when MTV actually had music on the channel.
Sting was touring to support his latest release at the time, The Soul Cages. He plays four songs from that underrated CD, but the highlights of the session are outstanding versions of “”Fragile,” “Tea in The Sahara,” which segues into “Walking On The Moon,” an excellent cover of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and my favorite song of the set, “Message in a Bottle.”
Although a cover image is included in the archive, I didn’t think the publicity image of a Synchronicity era Sting made sense, so I came up with my own cover based on images from The Soul Cages CD.
Share and enjoy.
Weeping willow
Blizzard of lies and video proof
From a New York Times editorial, Blizzard of Lies:
I can?t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
And right off the internet comes video proof.
Honeybees
Reading meme
Andy, the Information Tyrannosaur, tagged me with the following meme. So any embarrassment I might incur is his fault!
This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked unread by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you?ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- Anna Karenina
- Crime and Punishment
- Catch-22
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Wuthering Heights
- The Silmarillion
- Life of Pi : a novel View more →
Cowboy Junkies: Trinity Revisited
For the album Trinity Revisited, the Cowboy Junkies celebrated the 20th anniversary of their classic release, The Trinity Session by revisiting Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity to see “what twenty years of experience would bring to those same set of songs.”
Not simply a rerecording, the songs are re-imagined and improved, featuring performances by guest musicians Natalie Merchant, Ryan Adams, Vic Chesnutt and Jeff Bird. The track that really grabbed me on the first listen is the bluesy shuffle, “I Don’t Get It.”
No longer a Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone was the first adult magazine I subscribed to. I’ve been getting it delivered to my home for over twenty years now. But I let my subscription expire this month, and I’m a little nostalgic about it.
Its musical focus was what first got me reading Rolling Stone — especially the music reviews. Over the years though, they’ve added more features on pop-culture things like fashion, television, and video games. Lately a good deal of their random notes section looks like it came from a sleazy tabloid. Often the music news in the bi-weekly magazine was not news to me. I had already heard about it online. I became less and less interested, and issues would pile up, unread. Over the past few years I wondered why I was paying for a subscription, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop.