I went into this whole Winter Olympics thing with a distinctly jaded outlook. I'd been hearing about the lack of snow in Whistler and the possibility of the Blackcomb resort filing for bankruptcy protection, and I started thinking that the whole thing was going to be a major train wreck. To make matters worse, I then read this article by Vancouver's poet laureate Brad Cran stating his reasons for not participating in the Olympic celebrations, and I my blood started to boil a bit. When large corporations start telling people what they can and can't do, I get angry. Real angry.

But the whole corporate thing is fodder for a post of its own. And believe me, I will return to it.

So I wasn't really planning to watch much Olympic coverage. I knew I'd end up seeing at least some of it, because CTV was basically suspending all regular programming except for the news and broadcasting non-stop Olympic coverage for the entire seventeen days of the games.

I knew there was no avoiding it.

My lukewarm reaction to the opening ceremonies further clinched my negativity. I sighed, yawned (because it was late), and shook my head. I had no great hopes for Canada's big shot at the hosting gig.

But even before the opening ceremonies began, something happened that no one could have predicted, no one could have anticipated, and surely no one would have wanted: Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia was killed when his luge crashed during a training run at the Whistler Sliding Centre.

This was one of the most sobering, gut-wrenching things I've ever seen or heard. It put a damp chill on the games even before they'd begun, and it made many, myself included, wonder how the Olympics could ever manage to proceed normally.

But it did something else as well. As tragic and heartbreaking as it was, Kumaritashvili's death solidified an already-strong Olympic community spirit. It brought everyone together, and started the games with a note of deep feeling that would resonate throughout the seventeen days and only strengthen as the games went on.

No one wants to see an athelete die. No one. But when you're faced with tragedy, you either buckle or you shore yourself up. And the Olympic community shored itself up, honored its fallen son, and proceeded to do what it was there to do, weaker for losing one of its own, but stronger for bearing up under the weight of that loss.

I think it was partly that introduction of deep feeling into the games that prompted me to start watching the coverage after the opening ceremonies. These past few months have been all about feelings for me. I'm a cynic, yes; I make no bones about that. But I'm also an emotional person. The cynicism helps me to keep things at arm's length, but the feelings are there. And they can be quite strong at times.

I've gone through quite a tubulent period since the fall. My mental health reached a new low in September, but I managed to write a novel in November. I went through an intensive group therapy programme over the Christmas period and came out of it with new insights and access to deeper feelings than I'd ever experienced before, but I also came to realize that I needed to go through a grieving process that I'd managed to avoid years ago.

They say timing is everyting. Going through my mental and emotional explorations during the Christmas period was challenging in itself, because I love Christmas and have many emotional memories and associations with it. It made my experience that much deeper. And now, here I am, coming out of the process yet still going through it, and along come the Olympics.

Well, let's just say that I've had kleenex near to hand at all times.

I've been glued to the television for the last two weeks. When I haven't been at work, I've been home watching the Olympic coverage. I've managed to check my e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter regularly, but most of the rest of the time, I've been on the couch, watching sporting events I knew very little about, and cheering for Canada.

The cynicism has all but dropped away. I think that shift began when I watched Jennifer Heil go for the gold in the women's moguls competition on February 13th. Though I shared the disappointment the rest of the country felt that Heil did not break Canada's gold medal slump (i.e. not winning any gold medals in Olympic games we had hosted), I discovered something: That sport is damned exciting to watch.

And so it began. What started as curiosity soon turned into a near-addiction as I watched event after event, each one as exciting and thrilling as the next. And then Alexandre Bilodeau won Canada's first gold medal in the men's moguls, and we all settled in for what was to become one of Canada's best Olympic games ever.

Joannie Rochette will forever represent the 2010 Winter Olympics for me.

And then there was Joannie Rochette.

I cannot begin to tell you how touched and moved I am by this young woman's courage and tenacity in the face of personal tragedy. Just two days before her performance in the women's figure skating short program, her mother died suddenly of a heart attack, mere hours after arriving in Vancouver to see her daughter compete. Joannie decided to proceed with the competition, to honor her mother, and she ended up with the bronze medal.

I was unable to type that last paragraph without pausing.

As I write this, we are in day seventeen, the final day of the games, and Canada will be playing the U.S. in men's hockey later this afternoon. We're all hoping for the gold, and Team Canada has come together so strongly over the course of the tournament that it seems likely they'll take it. Whatever happens, though, we can all stand a little taller knowing that Canada, with thirteen gold medals, now has the record for golds won by a host country in the Winter Olympics and is tied with the former Soviet Union for the most Winter Olympic gold medals overall.

So, I suppose you could say I'm a convert. I still have my cynical moments, but by and large my Olympic experience has left me breathless, emotional, and glad to be Canadian. And say what you will about "I Believe", the theme song for the CTV Olympic broadcasts; it may be a fairly typical pop song and not particularly Canadian-sounding, but it's stirring and rousing, and when it's combined with those video montages of Olympic moments, it never fails to reduce me to a puddle of protoplasm on the floor.

Go Canada. You've got me believin'.

Don't forget to leave the TV on.

(Here's the video for "I Believe", featuring footage from the Olympic Torch Relay. Grab your kleenex.)

I was seriously underwhelmed.

I'll probably end up sounding like some kind of jaded cynic—and, truth be told, I actually feel like one a lot of the time—but I have to be honest here. There was a lot of stunning visual stuff going on, but not a lot of substance.

The projection of images onto the stage floor was a brilliant idea and beautifully executed, and the dancers and aerial performers were awesome, the orchestra was fabulous, the lighting and effects were great, the giant inflatable light-up polar bear was incredible, and the native costumes were beautiful. But something was missing.

Something to hold my attention, maybe? Something to keep me awake at one-bloody-o'clock in the morning when I'm starting to question why I stayed up this late in order to watch squares of wheat projected onto the floor and hear our national anthem turned into a hip-hop diva moment?

Nothing against Nikki Yanovsky. She's an amazing talent, a sixteen-year-old jazz dynamo, and a future national treasure. But I didn't particularly like the arrangement of O Canada they gave her or the way she pulled out the pop diva card on some of the notes she belted out. I'm not saying it was disrespectful. It's great to try out new arrangements of things, even national anthems. But this just didn't work.

The Parade of Nations was interminable, as always, and, aside from the standing ovation given to the Georgian team in honor of their fallen comrade, Nodar Kumaritashvili—an emotional moment if ever there was one—there was really little of interest except for the opportunity to point and gape at the questionable fashion choices made by many of the participating nations.

Germany, for instance, decided it would be fun to make its athletes look like a package of liquorice allsorts. The Czech Republic outfitted its athletes in camouflage that was obviously designed for combat inside a Toys-R-Us. Finland's camouflage design, which would have worked well inside an Escher print, looked tame by comparison. With few exceptions, the assault on the fashion and color sense of the world was pretty much unremitting.

But I want to get back to the music, because music is important to me, and because it was sorely mishandled in this ceremony. For example, what was with that song Bryan Adams and Nellie Furtado performed? Was that even a song? I did a quick Google search and found out that Bryan co-wrote it.

Bryan. Dude. You've written some great songs over the years. This wasn't one of them. What happened? I think you're losing it, man.

On the other hand, we had Sarah McLachlan singing "Ordinary Miracle". When I heard those opening piano chords, I just about fell out of my seat. It's one of my favorite songs, and when I first saw the video on YouTube a couple of years ago, it affected me emotionally. I was absolutely flabbergasted—not to mention delighted—that they pulled it out for the ceremonies. Sarah looked lovely and sounded fantastic.

Alas, it was a short-lived high. As great as the orchestra was, we did not need an extended orchestral instrumental break in this song. It was fine just the way it was. The instrumental break was so long, in fact, that Sarah didn't sing the song's last two verses. I felt cheated.

I was also scratching my head a bit, as the song was written by a Brit (Dave Stewart, formerly of Eurythmics) for an American movie (Charlotte's Web). Much as I love it, it's a puzzling song choice for such a thoroughly Canadian event.

Oh, well. Moving on.

The fiddling and tap dancing sequence was a welcome injection of energy into the proceedings. I liked that they added a bit of a punk vibe with the costumes and hair styles, and I had to chuckle at the very beginning, because the "fiddler" (or should I say, the guy pretending to fiddle) in the suspended canoe made me think of Wolverine from X-Men.

You knew I was a geek, right?

I figured either Natalie MacMaster or Ashley MacIsaac would appear, and I was rather hoping it would be Natalie. Nothing against Ashley; he's a fine musician and all, but he's a bit of a whack job, and I personally would have preferred Natalie's light and upbeat energy to Ashley's dark moodiness. As it was, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that he is also a great tap dancer, and the energy he puts into his playing is amazing. It was a good bit.

We now come to the "kid flying over the prairies" portion of our programme, which made good use of the projection stage and included some pretty nifty wire-flying by the young performer involved (I'm still not sure if it was a guy or a girl), but pulled out another questionable music choice. Let me be clear on this: The fact that Joni Mitchell wrote "Both Sides Now" does in no way mean that she should be encouraged to sing it. This was the absolute worst arrangement of this beautiful song I have ever heard, and I can only assume it was a recording, because there were no shots of Joni singing.

k.d. lang's performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", on the other hand, was easily the highlight of the night. She has one of the finest singing voices in show business, and I absolutely loved what she did with that song. Truly stunning.

Only problem with k.d. is that she's starting to look like the secret love-child of Wayne Newton and Quentin Tarantino. I don't think that's the look she was aiming for, frankly.

I know, I know. My cynicism knows no bounds. It's true. What can I say?

All that aside, however, I have to tell you that when I heard them introduce Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire as one of the flag-bearers, I got all choked up. To even think about the things that man experienced in Rwanda gives me the chills. He's a true Canadian hero in my books, and I'm sincerely glad, not to mention touched, that he was chosen to help carry the Olympic flag.

The other flag-bearers represent a wide range of Canadian endeavour: Donald Sutherland, Betty Fox, Barbara-Ann Scott, Jacques Villeneuve, Anne Murray, Julie Payette, and Bobby Orr. I was most impressed with the choices and reminded yet again of what tremendous diversity and talent we have in this here country.

I was equally impressed with the choices of torch bearers. Rick Hansen, the Man in Motion, brought the flame into the stadium, and Catriona LeMay Doan, Steve Nash, Nancy Greene, and Wayne Gretzky all lit one another's torches in turn. Then, after what seemed like endless hours waiting, three of the four ice-sculpture-totem-pole-torch-support-thingies creaked their way out of the floor and rose to a somewhat less-than-majestic stance around the main torch-thingy.

Then Steve, Nancy, and Wayne stepped forward to light their appointed support-thingies, leaving poor Catriona standing there looking like a third wheel on a prom date.

Then Wayne, unsatisfied with the proceedings, bolted from the stadium in a fit of pique, stole a pickup truck, and drove down to the waterfront to light something else on fire.

Charges are pending.

Don't forget to leave the torch on.

(Here's the proper version of "Ordinary Miracle", complete with short (yes, short) instrumental break and clips of cute little girl, cute little pig, and nearly-cute spider. It's just a lovely song.)

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.

When I looked at those pictures of the Green Lantern restaurant, taken in 1941, I very nearly audibly sighed. The shiny newness of the tables, counters, seats, and fixtures made me want to step into the images and experience what it would have been like to sit there, order a meal or a coffee, and watch the people go by. It all just looked so… nice.

How weird is it to suddenly feel nostalgic for a restaurant that opened a couple of decades before I was even born? Well, it did operate into the sixties, but I don't remember ever going there. Even if I had, I would have been extremely young, and the shiny newness seen in those pictures would have long since faded.

The whole experience of finding these photos and reacting so strongly to them reminded me of how much we romanticize the past. I know I often think fondly of times gone by and wonder what it would be like to visit times before my birth. Sometimes I want to pick a spot, stand there, and move progressively back through the years so that I can see the changes unfolding backwards.

Intellectually, I know that the past was not better. Previous years of my life all had good points and bad points, ups and downs, high and lows, just like the present time does. And some day down the road, I know I will look back upon 2010 with the same gauzy filter through which I now gaze upon my childhood.

So why do we do it? Why do we remember selectively? Why do we idealize past events and put them up on pedestals built of nostalgic longing? Why do we filter things so much? Is the present really that bad?

Well, I have my theories about that.

From what I've observed, people tend to get more nostaligic as they get older. This applies not only to people I've met, but also to myself. The older I get, the more stuff I have in my head, and the more stuff I have in my head, the less attention I have for the world around me, and the less attention I have for the world around me, the faster time seems to zip on by.

Remember when you were a kid? (Yes, let's get nostalgic for a moment here.) Remember how long the Christmas break was? Remember how long the summers were? Remember how each school day dragged on and on? Time was different then. There seemed to be more of it. Even the pleasant days lasted longer.

That's because there was less stuff in your head back then. Less worry. Less planning. Less responsibility. Less distraction from the moment. You were free to soak it all up, see it for what it was, without all the voices in your head tearing your attention away from it.

We talk about the carefree days of childhood. And for a lot of folks, that's pretty much what they were. Obviously, not everyone has the same experience. Childhood was a nightmare for some people, and they look back with a different filter entirely. But for many, thinking about childhood brings back fond memories. We might not have been free of cares, but we certainly had less of them.

As we grow older, however, and accumulate knowledge, skills, and responsibilities, our attention is more frequently hauled away from the here and now. And so the present becomes something less than it could be. We miss the moment because of our inner time travel. We fret about the past and worry about the future. We go over and over things we might have done differently and try to plan things we can't possibly control.

And suddenly, the present is not so great. But it's not the present's fault. We're clouding it with hurts from the past and uncertainties from the future. The poor present moment doesn't stand a chance.

And therein, friends, lies a profound irony. As much as we look back on certain past events with pink gauze over the lens and sigh about how much better things were back then, we are simultaneously corrupting the present moment with ghosts and shadows of past events that just weren't that shit-hot at all.

Today, I purchased a book entitled The Secret Pulse of Time. It's a science book, and it looks like it's going to be an interesting read. I'm looking forward to it, because, well, I'm a little obsessed about this whole time thing.

As I'm sure many of you are as well.

Don't forget to leave the light on.

(And, in keeping with the nostalgia theme, not to mention the time theme, here's a live performance of "Time" by Pink Floyd.)

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.

Right from the iconic opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" (which I was tickled to read has recently been analyzed by a computer science professor at Dalhousie University here in Halifax), I knew I was entering a different world with this album. The simple fact of having vocals in the middle of the mix and the instruments separated behind them is like putting 3-D glasses on your ears. The sound is much more immediate and present, and you feel like you're inside the song.

Add the digital remastering to the equation, and you have an album that sounds like it could have been recorded last week. The sound is incredibly clean, all the instruments are fully audible, and distortion and muddiness are scarcely to be found.

I think the thing that really stood out for me on this album were the songs that used acoustic guitar: "If I Fell", "And I Love Her", and "I'll Be Back". The sound is warm, clear, and rubbery. It's hard to explain what I mean by "rubbery", but it's a good word in this context. You'll have to listen to tracks to understand what I mean. "And I Love Her", in particular, just oozes warm acoustic guitar goodness. I want to wrap myself in it.

Also stand-out on this record are the vocal harmonies, particulary in "If I Fell", in which John and Paul harmonize, and "Things We Said Today", which features a double-tracked Paul harmonizing with himself. The vocals in general are top notch (except for the falsetto bit in "Tell Me Why"), and when you strap on the headphones and really dig into the mix and listen to the individual instruments, right down to the strum level, you begin to realize… "These guys are good."

That may seem an odd thing to say, but how many of us really listen to the musicianship in the recordings of the Beatles? We love the songs, and we know they were dynamite songwriters, but when you have access to something as painstakingly produced as these stereo remasters, you gain the ability to really comprehend how talented and versatile the Beatles were as vocalists and musicians. They'd been playing together a long time before they ever started recording, and that tightness is more than evident on the songs presented here. They weren't just a lucky bunch of lads who happened to be in the right place at the right time. No… They were good.

The next album, Beatles For Sale, bears this out unequivocally. This stereo remaster is just as bright and clear as its precedessor, and the instruments pop out just as distinctly, if not moreso.

Despite the crisp sound and the bang-on performances, however, the album has a bit of a personality disorder. While it's clear that John and Paul's songwriting ablilities are evolving beyond the straight-ahead rock'n'roll/R&B roots evidenced in songs like "Please Please Me", "Love Me Do", and "I Saw Her Standing There", Beatles For Sale goes back to the formula of earlier albums by including a whopping six cover songs. Again, the performances are great, and the mix is fabulous, but I've never been as fond of the Beatles' cover tunes as I am of their originals.

There's also an unmistakeable country-ish flavour to this album, which, while not unpleasant, is a little disorienting. The inclusion of two Carl Perkins tunes ("Honey Don't" and "Everybody Wants to Be My Baby") leaves no question about his influence on the group, but the songs are starkly simple, especially when compared with the likes of "No Reply", "I'm a Loser", and "Baby's in Black", which lead off the album and give a clear indication of the direction John and Paul's songwriting is taking. "Honey Don't" is a terrible track, and Ringo sings it really badly. Thankfully, his vocal participation in the group is destined to be limited.

But even "I'm a Loser" and "Baby's in Black" have a slight country-ish feel to them, especially the guitar solo in the former. It's possible they were experimenting with styles, just as they were experimenting with recording techniques and overdubs in the studio.

While the album lacks a certain flow, it was certainly nice to revisit great songs like "Eight Days a Week", which predicts the addition of the sitar in later recordings with it's unusual jangly guitar fade-in, and "I'll Follow the Sun", a pretty, melancholy song that is easily Paul's sweetest vocal performance up to that point.

The remastering process has brought new life to these albums, and believe me, I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of the collection. And I'm going to subject you to the same microscopic analysis of each one as I experience it. I have a good ear, and I'm enjoying the process of immersing myself in each album and then writing about it. So, brace yourselves.

And don't forget to leave the light on.

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.

As a matter of fact, I've read in several places that the Beatles themselves participated in the mixing sessions, but only for the mono mixes. They apparently didn't care about the stereo mixes and went home once the mono mixes were done. I've also read comments from other reviewers that the mono mixes are better than the stereo versions, even on an album as complex as Sergeant Pepper.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's back up and start with the first two albums, Please Please Me and With the Beatles. Both of these albums were recorded on two-track tape machines at EMI studios in London. The main reason for using two-track machines was to capture the vocals on one track and the instruments on the other to allow for at least some control over the balance between the two.

But this works best on a mono mix. In stereo, you basically get the vocals on the right side and the instruments on the left. Adding some reverb to the mix helps to blend the two together, but the tracks are still essentially separated spatially.

Listening to the stereo remasters bears this out. For example, the first track on Please Please Me, "I Saw Her Standing There", has the vocals and one of the guitars in the right channel and the drums, bass, and second guitar in the left. The separation is marked, and there's nothing "in the middle". I tend to listen with headphones, which makes the division even more dramatic. It's a good thing they recorded one of the guitars over with the vocals, because if they hadn't, there'd be nothing on the right during the instrumental break.

Now, don't get me wrong. The sound is incredibly clear and crisp for something that was recorded forty-seven years ago. You can hear every note, every strum. You can almost hear the boys breathing. Well, almost.

This is good most of the time, but it does offer some interesting anomalies. For example, in "Misery", the second track on Please Please Me, George Martin overdubbed some piano phrases in between some of the vocal lines in the song's bridge (or middle eight). With my headphones on, I can actually hear the change in ambience when those piano bits kick in. The piano is primarily in the right channel, but there's a weird echo of it in the left. The rest of the song is pretty well separated out, though I must say the vocals sound a bit muddier than they do on "I Saw Her Standing There".

Now, I don't have the mono box set, so I can't really do any kind of real comparison, but two of the tracks on the stereo release of Please Please Me are in mono, so that affords at least a glimpse into the other world. The original twin-track tapes of "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" (the A and B sides of the Beatles' first single) were lost, due to the common practice at the time of wiping and reusing master tapes once they had been mixed down to mono, so there was nothing available to the engineers of the remasters that would allow them to create a stereo mix. Hence, the mono mixes of the two songs are included on the remastered stereo CD.

And I'm glad they're there, because the difference between mono and stereo here is quite dramatic. I found "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" to be much punchier than the other tracks on the CD. The bass is more audible, and everything's in the middle, which means the sound is much more balanced.

Sigh. I may at some point have to get a copy of the mono box set.

The rest of the tracks on Please Please Me have pretty much the same acoustic characteristics as "I Saw Her Standing There", though it's worth mentioning that "Chains" has a bit of distortion here and there in the left channel, which is oddly charming, really, and "Boys" has the drums on the right channel, which is probably due to the fact that Ringo is singing lead vocal.

The stereo mix of the second album, With the Beatles is very similar to that of Please Please Me, except there are no mono tracks. Interestingly, I actually found the right and left channel separation more irritating on this album than on Please Please Me, which may be due in part to the fact that I listened to the two albums back to back in preparation for this post.

Again, I found the instruments, particularly the guitars, really crisp on this second album. "It Won't Be Long" has an escpecially clear, and deliciously rubbery, guitar sound, and the acoustic guitar on "Till There Was You" is rich and smooth.

Two of the Beatle's lesser known songs, "Devil in Her Heart" (a cover) and "Not a Second Time" (by Lennon/McCartney) are two of the best balanced tracks on the whole disk. I'm not sure what was done here, but the left and right separation doesn't seem as pronounced on these tracks, and the blend is really nice.

Again, little things come to the forefront. There's a bit of distortion on the bass drum in "All I've Got to Do", which isn't nearly as charming as the distorion in "Chains" on the previous disk. "All My Loving" is notable for its complete lack of instruments in the right channel. Other tracks have this lack, I'm sure, but here it was obvious. "In your face" obvious.

"Don't Bother Me", sung by George, is a bit muddier than most of the other tracks, and the vocal has a bit more reverb than the other tracks. The vocals on "Hold Me Tight" are also a bit muddy and sound a bit far away. In "I Wanna Be Your Man", sung by Ringo, the instruments, especially the drums, sound a bit thin. Also, the drums are back in the left channel again, unlike the Ringo-sung tune on the previous disk.

And one of the oddest things I found about the album was on "Little Child". During the instrumental break, the bass sounds like it's in both channels. Then, suddenly, when the vocals come back in, the bass abruptly leaves the right channel and drops in volume on the left. It's really quite jarring when you listen to it with headphones.

But really, these are all nitpicks, and likely have nothing to do with the remastering process. Recording techniques were not sophisticated in 1962 and 1963, and we can't expect albums from that time to live up to our high modern standards. In fact, the sound on these first two remastered CDs is exceptional. Taking a two-track master tape and turning it into a digital stereo CD is no mean feat, and the engineers have given us a product of which they can be proud.

But the best is yet to come. With the next album, A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles moved from two-track to four-track recording. And that gives a digital remastering engineer one helluva lot more to work with.

That's up next.

Stay tuned.

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.

Between listenings, I've been doing a different type of delving: scouring the internet for information about the recordings and the remastering process. I've owned a lot of books about the Beatles over the years, and the individual remastered CDs themselves have booklets containing original liner notes plus historical notes and recording notes, but I still want more data! When it comes to the Beatles, there's no such thing as too much information.

But more on that later. First off, the packaging!

Beatles Stereo Box Set. Photo by Faltarego (click on the image for a larger version)

The box set is absolutely gorgeous. The shiny black box is protected by a shiny black boxboard slipcover. Both bear the Beatles logo above a green apple. A thin white rectangle runs around the outside of the cover, set in about half an inch from the edge. The back of the slipcover bears a description of what's inside the box, while the back of the box itself is nearly identical to the front cover, except that apple below the logo is now cut in half with its cut side towards us. The box is kept closed by that ingenious "magnet under paper" gizmo that's become so popular of late.

The inside of the box is divided into two CD-sized compartments separated by a black cardboard divider. The top compartment holds the first eight albums—Please Please Me through Sergeant Pepper—and the bottom compartment holds the remaining albums—Magical Mystery Tour through Let it Be—plus the Past Masters CDs and the DVD of mini-documentaries.

A cloth ribbon is attached to the bottom of each compartment, and when the CDs are all stacked neatly inside, the ribbon runs along underneath them and up and out the righthand side. Pulling the ribbon up lifts the CDs out of the compartment for easy removal. Just remember to keep the end of the ribbon outside the compartment when putting the CDs away.

The CDs themselves all look like miniature versions of the original UK-release albums. The covers are all tri-fold cardboard sleeves with a pocket for the disk itself in the righthand panel and a pocket for the booklet of notes and photos in the lefthand panel. The front cover of each CD is a replica of the original album cover, and the back cover is a faithful redesign of the original album cover's reverse side. Any liner notes that appeared on the original back cover have been moved into the booklet. The size discrepancy between album and CD covers would make the liner notes unreadable if the back cover had been reproduced exactly.

The exception to this packaging scheme is The Beatles (the White Album), which has a four-panel gatefold sleeve inside a slipcover. The slipcover has the title (The Beatles) embossed, whereas the gatefold sleeve beneath has the title printed in gray lettering. Each panel of the sleeve has a pocket in it, two containing the disks themselves, one (the leftmost) containing the booklet, and the last (the rightmost) containing a mininature replica of the album's poster, complete with lyrics in a small typeface on the reverse side.

The Past Masters 2-CD set contains all the singles and EP tracks that weren't released on the UK albums. The packaging is similar to the albums, except that the three-panel gatefold sleeve has a pocket in all three panels, two for the disks and one for the booklet.

Pulling the CDs out of their sleeves reveals yet another nice touch: Replicas of the circular inner labels found on the vinyl LP disks. The labels are larger than the originals and take up the entire top surface of the CD disks, but there's no doubt what they're supposed to be. It's a brilliant addition to an already fantastic packaging design.

One other nice thing about the disks themselves—and this is more about content than packaging—is that each one contains a mini-documentary with pictures, clips, and sound bites related to the making of that album. The disks need to be put into a computer CD drive in order to access these documentaries, but the box set also includes a DVD with all thirteen mini-documentaries on it, so you can watch all the videos at one go if you like. The video quality is better on the DVD too, so that's another bonus.

So, I'm pretty much in love with the packaging of this set. I think the attention to detail is phenomenal, and with the booklets containing additional historical notes and recording notes, you get a lot of bang for your buck here.

And I haven't even gotten to the music itself yet.

As I said, I'm taking my time with this collection, savoring it slowly, and I'm going to do the same with blogging about it. Next time around, I'll talk about the first two albums—Please Please Me and With the Beatles—which were both recorded on two-track equipment and originally mixed for mono. I've found a lot of information on the internet about the whole mono vs. stereo issue, and I'll get into that a little bit too.

Until then, don't forget to leave the light on.

(Here's the official promo for the box set, followed by clips from the "Help!", "Hello, Goodbye", and "Get Back" videos. The way the first part of the ad is put together is incredibly slick and clever.)

[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.

I've decided to move on. 2010 is not only a new year, but a new number ending in a zero. And that's something we can all get excited about.

I know I'm on board.

I've never been the sort of person to indulge in New Year's resolutions. I find the whole concept repulsive. It's become a cliché, and nearly everyone who makes them ends up tossing them out the window by the middle of February.

[If you join a fitness center in January, be patient. It will get much less busy as the first six weeks of the year roll by. The "resolutionaries" will start dropping like flies.]

I do, however believe in setting goals. "Resolution" is such a dictatorial word. I'd be setting myself for failure even trying to resolve this or that or the other thing. But I've definitely got a few goals in mind for 2010. Many of them involve my health, both physical and mental, and others involve my financial world and my creative world. None of them is unrealistic.

And that's the thing, right there. Whether you call them goals or resolutions or bumblebee lollipops, they have to be realistic. They have to be things that you actually have a hope in hell of attaining. If you get too grand and sweeping with them, you'll overwhelm yourself and thus put the kibosh on any possibility of actually accomplishing them.

Because 2009 was such a consistently horrible year for me (with some notable exceptions, of course), I am uncharacteristically motivated to seek massive improvements in 2010. So, the goal-setting was a no-brainer. I know what I need to do, and it's not going to take a whole hell of a lot of doing to make the coming year a better one than the last.

Okay, even that was too much whining. I think you get the picture: 2009 sucked. Moving on…

"Three Sphinxes of Bikini" by Salvador Dali

One of the things I am going to be working on, and have already been working on, is my mental health. I have been subject to bouts of depression for a very long time, and I was recently told, after years of wondering, that it is probably not a chemical-imbalance type of depression, but more of a psychological-issues type of depression.

I could deal with that. I'm not a fan of the psychopharmaceuticals. So I've been working on dealing with past issues and getting in touch with buried feelings.

And it's been working.

It's been heartening to see the occasional public service ad on television dealing with mental health. For a very long time, this whole issue has been something people have been reluctant to talk about. Mental health patients have been marginalized, and people seeking treatment for mental illnesses are very unlikely to share that information with friends and colleagues.

I have no statistical data on this, so don't ask. It's an impression I have gotten over the years.

Mental illness is just as real as cancer or any other disease, and it needs to be addressed just as seriously as other diseases. We only get one mind, and if things start to go wrong with it, we need to know that we can seek help for it and not feel like we're suddenly creatures from another planet.

Because the stigma is still there.

I have a mental illness. I'm not going to make any bones about it. It's just something that is. It doesn't make me any less intelligent, or creative, or verbose. It just means that I get overwhelmed easily at times and find it hard to see the positive in things at others.

I consider myself fortunate, however. I get depressed, but I can still function. Other people are not so lucky. Some people sink into depressions so deep that they can't even get out of bed in the morning. Others become afraid of the simplest things. And it's not their fault. It's an illness. And it must be treated as such.

I'm also fortunate in that I've finally found the right treatment for my illness. I'm stronger now than I have been in a long time. 2010 looks pretty good so far.

It's all about awareness. And perspective. People who know me would probably never guess that I had anything wrong mentally. But it's been there, hovering just under the surface for a long time.

And I've decided that I'm not afraid to talk about it. Yes, this is very personal information. But it's also important. Because mental health is important.

So along with diet and exercise, one of my goals for 2010 is to take what I've learned about maintaining and safeguarding my mental and emotional health, and put it into practice.

And while I'm getting healthier, I'm also going to finish editing my novel and get it publication-ready. Because I'm going to become a published author this year. That is most definitely a goal.

I wish you good health, mental and physical, in the coming year.

Don't forget to leave the light on.

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.

There was a lot of slam-bang editing in this thing, and that's director Guy Ritchie's style, no mistake about it. But it made the film feel a bit too modern. Especially the flashback sequences where Holmes is explaining something that happened earlier on. There was a lot of slowing down and speeding up of clips, super-saturation of colors, fake film scratches, fake burning at the edges of the frame, and overexposure. All within a fifteen-second flashback. It was too much style heaped on top of what was otherwise quite reasonable substance.

There was also a lot of CGI in this film. A lot. Tons, in fact. London had to be made to look Victorian, and that takes a lot of modern building removal. Tower Bridge, which plays a significant role in the film, was under construction during the time in which many of the Holmes stories are set, and it appears in unfinished form here, providing a dangerous setting for a dramatic sequence in the film's final act.

Unfortunately, this intense sequence suffers from some rather sloppy effects. For one thing, it's obvious at certain points that the actors are working against a green screen. I mean, it's one thing to know that actors are working in front of a green screen, but it's quite another to be able to tell that they're working in front of a green screen. Kinda dampens the old "willing suspension of disbelief."

At another point in this same sequence, a metal structure at the top of the incomplete bridge is pulled down by the weight of another object. It doesn't just collapse. It doesn't crumble and then tumble. It actually looks like it's being sucked downwards. The descent is so rapid as to be jarring. It reminded me of something out of Star Wars.

In this day and age, this kind of CGI sloppiness is just unforgivable.

On to the performances. As I mentioned above, Robert Downey and Jude Law were both fabulous in their respective roles as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. Their onscreen chemistry was perfect, I thought, and the dialogue they were given was sharp, witty, and often hilarious.

Downey, as usual, immersed himself in his role and became a character separate and apart from any other I've seen him play. He convincingly portrayed both Holmes' genius and his human failings. Though Holmes' drug addiction was not mentioned per se in any of the dialogue, it was more than apparent in several scenes that this was a troubled, haunted man who had difficulty coping with the workaday world. It's unfortunate to have to say that Downey knows of this sort of trouble all too well, but kudos to him for tapping into his dark past and bringing that shadow to life in the persona of Sherlock Holmes.

Jude Law plays a much younger Dr. Watson than we're accustomed to seeing, but he plays him with cheek and intelligence. He leaves no doubt that he knows his friend Holmes inside and out, and that he is more than capable of stepping in to save him when necessary, sometimes from himself. I've always liked Jude Law, and that's partly because, like Downey, he's a chameleon who manages to make the character stand in front of the actor, fully adopting the persona of the person he's playing.

Rachel McAdams, on the other hand, was hopelessly miscast as Irene Adler. She's a lovely and delightful actress, and I've enjoyed her performances in The Wedding Crashers and The Time Traveler's Wife (which I also reviewed), but she lacks the edge required to be both romantic interest and intellectual rival for Holmes. She was entirely too pretty and soft and scrumptious to be believable as a wily and devious master criminal. Someone like Angelina Jolie could have pulled it off. McAdams, unfortunately, was not the right choice here.

Mark Strong plays Lord Henry Blackwood, the villain of the piece, a self-proclaimed mystic who purports to possess tremendous supernatural power. He doesn't have anywhere near the screen time that Downey and Law do, but I found his scenes compelling and his twisted evil quite believable. In a bit of an ironic twist, I found that, with his hair slicked back the way it was, he reminded me of Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes in the Granada Television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and its follow-up series from 1984 to 1994, and who is generally considered to be the definitive Holmes of his time.

On the one hand, I kind of enjoyed this movie, but on the other hand, I kind of didn't. So, even after writing all of the above, I'm still conflicted. I know the script could have been tighter, I know that some of the dialogue was so rapid that I didn't catch it, and I know that I really didn't feel that overwhelming sense of peril that you're supposed to feel as the villain's plans come near to fruition. But it was certainly a ride, and the look of the film (above-mentioned CGI laziness aside) was rich and enveloping. And then there were Downey and Law, who made up for many of the film's missteps just by being the consummate performers they are.

I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing this film. I would, however, caution potential moviegoers that it's probably not going to be what they expect.

It was fun, but it was the cotton candy variety of fun. There were lots of tasty bites to be had, but after all was said and done, there really wasn't much to chew on.

Happy Holidays!

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.

I saw a soup commercial this evening that combined snippets of the song "Mister Lonely" with bits from Trooper's "Raise a Little Hell". I was immediately transported back to the late 1970s and my mishearing of Trooper's lyrics. Not a word of lie: I thought they were singing "Pray For Little Al". Seriously.

But I think some background is in order. The origin of the term "mondegreen" is perhaps as entertaining as the things themselves.

American writer Sylvia Wright coined this term way back in 1954. As a child, one of her favorite poems was a seventeenth-century verse entitled "The Bonny Earl of Murray". The last two lines of the first stanza are: "They have slain the Earl of Murray / And Lady Mondegreen". Or at least, that's how her young ears heard them. When she finally realized that the actual last line was "And laid him on the green", she was so devastated by the non-existence of her tragic heroine, that she named the whole concept after her.

It took until the twenty-first century for the term to finally be adopted by a well known dictionary. Random House Webster's College Dictionary added the word in 2000, and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added it in 2008. About time, I'd say.

There are many well known mondegreens, and many websites devoted to them. I'd like to pass on a few of my favorites here.

Probably the best known of all pop music mondegreens comes to us courtesy of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who helpfully inform us that "There's a bathroom on the right" in their song "Bad Moon Risin'". The actual line is "There's a bad moon on the rise." I think it's probably quite useful to know where the nearest facilities are when you're about to get the living piss scared out of you.

Another favorite of mine is from the Beatles (they have many, as you'd probably guess). The song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" mentions in passing that "The girl with colitis goes by." Perhaps she could consult with the CCR boys on the location of that bathroom. The actual line, of course, is "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes."

Another classic is from Jimi Hendrix, who begs our indulgence for a moment when he says "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." This misheard lyric became popular when Hendrix was still alive, so much so that he made it part of his show, singing the mondegreen while moving towards one of the tech crew as if to plant one on him. The song is "Purple Haze", and the actual lyric is "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky."

I have a book entitled 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy (and Other Misheard Lyrics) by Gavin Edwards. It also contains some whimsical and funny illustrations by Chris Kalb. It's a nice complilation of some well-known and some little-known mondegreens (though Edwards never actually uses that term) and is one of those books that you can open anywhere and get a hearty chuckle.

I'm going to have to go and dig it out when I've finished writing this.

Here are a few more that have stuck with me over the years:

During one of my Google searches a few years ago, I came across a website that contained a story about a fellow who went to visit a friend of his. His friend had a stuffed bear prominently displayed in her abode, and when he asked her who the fluffy fellow was, she replied, "Oh, that's Gladly." He remarked that it was an awfully unusual name for a stuffed animal. "Oh, you know," she said. "Gladly, The Cross-Eyed Bear."

You might have to think about that one for a moment.

Do you remember the movie Shaft? Not the remake with Samuel L. Jackson, but the original from 1971 starring Richard Roundtree (no relation, and he has an extra letter). The theme song was composed and performed by Isaac Hayes, and late in the song, he apparently tells us that Shaft is "a carpet-cleaning man, and no one understands him but his woman." The actual line is "He's a complicated man…" I like the symmetry of this one. If he cleaned carpets by day and fought crime by night, he would indeed be a complicated man. Sort of a janitorial version of Batman. And you don't get much more complicated than Batman.

I'll finish off with one of my favorites. Anyone who ever watched The Wonderful World of Disney (or any of its similarly-titled incarnations) knows the Davy Crockett theme. The words go something like this:

Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the Land of the Free.
Raised in the woods, so he knew every tree.
Killed in a bar when he was only three.
Davy, Davy Crockett,
King of the wild frontier.

I think I nearly wet myself when I first heard this one. The image of a bar-brawling three-year-old will probably stay with me until my dying day. I picture him with a broken bottle in his hand, waving it menacingly at a fur-clad degenerate. (These flights of fancy overtake me on a regular basis, and I must seek help.)

The real lyric from the song, is "Killed him a b'ar when he was only three." Which is just a southern/western way of saying "bear". If it weren't for the ludicrousness of the substitution, I'd say it was an easy mistake to make.

I've laughed myself silly over many of the mondegreens I've discovered over the years. They're usually hysterical, sometimes stupid, but always entertaining.

Just do a Google search for "mondegreen" and have yourself a bit of fun.

Faltarego.com: Putting the "fu" back in "fun".

(Oh, dear God. This is so hokey, I just had to include it here. Brace yourself for intense cringeworthiness. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

I've even got a lot of my shopping done. This is uncharacteristic of me.

And oh, yeah. I, um, also decorated the blog. Like I said, goofy, wacky…

As the song says, "We need a little Christmas…"

2009 has been, not to put too fine a point on it, The International Year of Crap. Stress, disease, death, and bad news have appeared at every turn. Yes, I exaggerate. Yes, I do it on purpose because… hello… that's what it felt like.

So, Christmas is incredibly important to me this year. I'm going to make the most of the season and basically enjoy the hell out of it.

A family Christmas picture from my childhood. Me (far left), my brother, my mom, and my dad. I must be ten or eleven here, which would make this 1971 or 1972.

I'm not a religious person, but I still love Christmas. It's a time of year made of childhood memories, pretty decorations (okay, tacky sometimes, but it's allowed this one time of year), colored lights everywhere, and the anticipation of… something really magical.

It's not about the presents anymore, for me. I do enjoy discovering that perfect gift for someone, and I will admit that I enjoy getting stuff as well, but now, as an adult, I find that the anticipation comes more from the feelings I get when I take a walk around my mom's neighborhood after a traditional Christmas Eve supper. It's the anticipation of quiet, of the world slowing down, even just for a day, a moment.

It's the anticipation of peace.

Peace is a loaded word these days. It seems to have so many meanings that it's hard to know just where to place it in the ol' vocabulary. Peace and quiet. Peace on Earth. Peace in the Middle East.

Peace of mind.

I think that last one is more important to me than any other meaning you might offer. Especially considering the above-mentioned stress. Our society moves at a rapid pace, and stress is everywhere. My ability to handle stress waxes and wanes, but I have an almost pathological aversion to the trappings of modern life.

Don't get me wrong. I love technology. I'm amazed at what it can do for us. But now, because we can do things more quickly, it's expected that we will do things quickly. And that creates stress. And stress creates sickness. And sickness creates more stress.

And so it goes.

We have to slow down. We can't survive as a species if we keep doing what we're doing. I'm not talking about ecological disaster, here. That's a whole other bag of worries. I'm talking about the human body's ability to tolerate long periods of stressful activity without a reprieve.

That's what a lot of people today are doing to themselves, all because we can do things faster than we could a few decades ago. Deals have to be made, clients wooed and clinched, properties and stocks bought and sold, pre-Christmas sales gotten to before the product is gone.

It's madness.

I opted out of that whole mindset years ago. I've been struggling financially and emotionally ever since, but at least I'm aware of my limitations and am now taking steps to heal myself so that I can figure out what I really want to do with my life and then set about making plans and setting goals.

And I'll do it without credit cards, loans, and corporate treadmills, thank you very much. The old cliché is true: It's a rat race out there, and I refuse to be a mindless rodent, twisting and turning my way through a maze constructed by someone else so that I can get my paws on a lousy piece of cheese.

It's not worth it.

So this Christmas, as with many before, I will take that walk around Mom's neighborhood on Christmas Eve night and soak in the silence. I will listen to the sounds of the world slowing down, just for a day, just for a moment, and bask in the peace.

It's possible. Peace can be had.

It's all in how you look at it, and how you define it.

So… Peace.

(P.S. Writing this blog entry made me cry. But don't think I'm weak. I'm not. My vulnerablity is my strength. I know that now. The peace will come from within.)

(Well, the old YouTube search didn't let me down. This video takes me back a ways. It's become a true classic, and I can't think of a more suitable clip to put in this post. Bing and Bowie. Enjoy.)