The errant blogger returns. Better late than never, I suppose.

I do have a topic for today, but before I get to it, I feel an odd compulsion to share with you the rather bumpy and circuitous route by which it arrived in my brain. Synapses work in mysterious ways, and this is a fairly good example.

Bear with me here. The link density in this first bit will be rather high.

One of my Twitter friends, who goes by the handle @AliasGrace (and whom I met in person for the first time at PodCamp Halifax two weekends ago), has a blog entitled East Coast by Choice, for which I wrote a guest post three weeks ago. She's had a number of guest posts over the time she's been blogging, the most recent of which, entitled "The Death of Barrington Street?" and written by Paul MacKinnon (Twitter handle @downtownpaul), was a really interesting read.

Paul's post mentioned a number of well-known buildings on Barrington Street, but the one that caught my attention was the Green Lantern building. Now, being the geek that I am (you knew that, right?), you'd think I'd have known Halifax had a Green Lantern building. For some reason, though, I didn't remember the name at all. But, of course, I was tickled by it. So I went to my dear friend Google to see if I could find some pictures.

And find them I did. The Coast (our local artsy/cultural/gritty/emo/freebie newspaper) has an article about the building, complete with historical pics from the time when the building actually housed the Green Lantern restaurant. The building's official name is the Keith building, and it currently houses Pogue Fado, a traditional Irish pub. Nice to know the green is still there, anyway.

Still with me? Good. 'Cause I'll be getting to the point any second now. Read the rest of this entry »

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Yes, I'm still on about the Beatles. The remastered stereo box set is so cool, I might just write a blog post about each album. Or maybe a post for every two albums. I haven't quite decided yet.

So, let's see how much I have to say about A Hard Day's Night, the first album the Beatles recorded on four-track equipment. It's also the first album to contain exclusively Beatle-penned songs and the only album in the entire catalog to contain nothing but Lennon-McCartney compositions. There are no covers, and no songs written by George or Ringo.

The album is the soundtrack for the movie of the same name, or at least half of it is. When originally released, the first side of the LP contained the seven songs that were included in the movie, and the second side contained songs that Lennon and McCartney had written with the movie in mind, but were never actually included in the film.

Let me just say right off the top that putting in A Hard Day's Night after listening to Please Please Me and With the Beatles is a bit like watching the middle part of The Wizard of Oz, where it switches from black and white to color. The depth of the mixes here is leaps and bounds above those of the first two albums. I know some people still prefer the mono mixes of all the albums that were released that way, but this stereo mix of A Hard Day's Night is, to my ears, bloody awesome. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last time around I prattled on at length about the packaging of The Beatles Stereo Box Set. I think I might have even gotten a bit of drool on my keyboard, but it seems to be working okay nonetheless.

This time around I'm going to start talking about the remastered music itself. The set I have is in stereo, but there's also a mono box set—called The Beatles in Mono—that includes the ten albums that were released in mono in the UK (Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let it Be were never given a separate mono mix) along with Mono Masters, which includes the mono mixes of the singles and EP tracks that were not included on the albums.

Why all the fuss? What's the big deal about mono? Isn't stereo better? Well, you might think so, but remember, back in the early sixties, stereo was a relatively new phenomenon. Mono was still the preferred format, and stereo mixes of LPs were usually only purchased by true hi-fi enthusiasts. Read the rest of this entry »

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Thanks to the arrival of Christmas and some not-so-subtle hinting on my part over the last three months, I've been visited by the Beatles. Or, should I say, I've been revisiting the Beatles.

The Beatles Stereo Box Set (the big black box) was under my tree on the twenty-fifth, and I couldn't have been more excited. As any of you who read my previous post on the Beatles will know, I'm a huge fan, and to own the entire album catalog plus the singles in remastered digital format is pretty much the motherlode.

I'm still kvelling.

I'm taking my time with this one. I've listened to the first three albums so far, and I've been just sitting back and taking them in, not doing anything else at the same time (which is a challenge, as I've been listening to them on my computer). I don't want to gulp it all down at once, and I don't want them to just act as background music. I want to delve deeply into the experience. Read the rest of this entry »

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Well, as this is the sixth of January, the Christmas season is officially over. Today is Ephiphany, at least according to some calendars, and is the first day after the Twelve Days of Christmas (or Christmastide). I had originally thought that Epiphany was the twelfth day of Christmas, but it turns out I counted on my fingers wrong.

[I'll still wait until tomorrow to take my Christmassy banner off the blog.]

Anyway, on to the blopic at hand. On New Year's Day, I started writing what was to be my first post of 2010. It was all about how horrible 2009 had been, and it got rather long. It also ended up containing a lot of really personal stuff and a few passages that I now consider to be bitter whining.

So I decided to sit on it a while, and I've now come to the conclusion that this stream of negativity should not be posted. I no longer have anything against sharing personal stuff on this site, but some of the things I wrote on January 1st really went a bit too far. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I first heard that Robert Downey, Jr. was going to be playing Sherlock Holmes, I was seriously conflicted. I mean, this is Sherlock Holmes we're talking about here, a much-loved, much-interpreted character firmly embedded in our collective literary consciousness. Is the recent Tony Stark really the right choice for a resurrection of this classic character?

But on the other hand, this is Robert Downey we're talking about here. One of the great actors of our time. I know it sounds hyperbolic, but I mean that in all sincerity. The man has serious chops. I'd watch him as a Teletubby.

Well, I've just come home from watching the movie, and it's the damnedest thing. I'm still conflicted.

I really don't know what to make of this movie. It was a spectacle, for sure, and it looked gorgeous, and Downey was fabulous, and Jude Law was fabulous, and there were lots of funny lines and lots of action and lots of brainy deduction going on.

But it all felt a bit off for me. There was something about the whole thing that just didn't ring true. It was all a bit… um… artificial, I guess, is the word I'm looking for.

One of my friends on Twitter posted a less-than-140-character review of Sherlock Holmes a couple of days ago, saying that the film tried too hard. I think that's a good and apt summation. I'll expand on that slightly by saying that this was a film that was entirely too stylish and clever for its own good. Read the rest of this entry »

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I've been thinking a lot about mondegreens lately. It happens every few months or so. I get a few of them stuck in my head, and then I go off to Google to search for more.

Don't know what a mondegreen is? Well, friend, let me fill you in:

A mondegreen is a lyric or phrase that has been misheard. Misheard lyrics are the most prevalent examples, but I often derive great pleasure from realizing that I misheard something that someone said. It usually only takes a fraction of a second for my brain to correct the error, but in that fraction of a second… tremendous potential for hilarity. Read the rest of this entry »

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