HiR:tb Toots (@warwalker)
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By junior on December 23, 2008, at 11:42 pm Did you know that Santa has some helper elves in Florida? And did you know that Santa’s sun-worshipping assistants are in charge of ensuring that all power yard equipment is properly prepared to celebrate the Yuletide festivities?
It’s true.
On Saturday the 13th, Spouse and I hosted the office Christmas party. What preceded the party, of course, was a massive clean-up/decorating binge to get the entire nation of Juniorvania ship-shape and ready for its most extensive influx of visitors in recorded history. Some consternation briefly ensued while Spouse and I debated the most appropriate means of providing a suitable repository for the cold refreshing BEvERageS accompanying our guests to the party. I am no engineer, but if I do say so myself, I think I resolved that little dilemma with some flair (not to mention ten bags of ice and a couple of strands of lights) in the following manner:
Somehow, word of this festive little piece of power equipment seems to have made it to Santa’s southern associates. Apparently, St. Nick himself was impressed by the tractor’s display of holiday verve, but saddened to learn that the little implement lacked one crucial piece of Christmas gear; he put his Floridian designates on the case and voilà, the tractor is ready to receive Santa’s bounty on the Big Night.
By junior on December 22, 2008, at 11:11 pm  South Dumfries Community Centre Both Spouse and I had the day off today – the first of a few in a row over the holiday season, I am pleased to report – and we started things off with a bang by getting up early and heading over to the local community centre for a free skate, courtesy of no less significant a Canadian institution than Tim Horton’s. It’s become a bit of a Christmas tradition for everyone’s favourite donut-and-coffee provider to provide free public skating on a number of days over the holidays in little rinks across Canada.
It’s a great idea, the perfect marriage of community-minded goodwill with a marketing opportunity made in heaven. Those most likely to partake are those who already spend a fair portion of their lives haunting the ramshackle rinks in the little places across this frozen country; travel team Dads, figure-skating circuit Moms and pickup hockeyists of all ages, shapes and sizes are the ones likely to see the signs and to bring out their loved ones for a free turn around the local sheet. They are also, of course, the folk most likely to be sitting rubbing their hands together in the frozen blue light of a cold Canadian morning that hasn’t quite arrived, desperately trying to warm the car up before heading off for their scheduled game, lesson or competition, and the folk most likely to drop in to the Horton’s drive thru for a cup o’ joe to try and stave off the chill for just a little while.
 The Author in a Resting Phase For me, the skate was a welcome opportunity to get out from under what Spouse assures me is a very powerful Christmas jinx that is certain to cause all manner of calamity. The particular jinx involved arises, I am told, when one has failed to use a Christmas gift prior to the next ensuing Christmas Day. As it happens, I have a brand spankin’ new set of CCM Tacks, a lovely Yuletide gift from Spouse last year that – with last winter’s search for a new home and our eventual move, among other things – didn’t get taken out for a single spin.
Needless to say, the boots were feeling a little stiff. I laced them up, pulled as tight as I could and knew I was in trouble when I had essentially run out of laces when it came time to tie the knot; this suggested very strongly to me that the skate boots were not drawn nearly as tight as they should be on my foot, a fact that was quickly confirmed when I took my first tentative steps out on to the ice. It was the difference between wearing the skates and having them tied to your leg; between standing in them and standing on them. I lasted only a few slow and technically undemanding laps before I retreated to the seating area for another attempt at tightening the laces much more substantially, an effort I am pleased to report was fruitful.
Spouse too was facing challenges; her own skates were a gift from her parents more than half a dozen years ago, a stoutly constructed pair of figure skates that are still rigidly unyielding and far from broken in.
Today’s skate was early: the session started at 8 o’clock and ran ’til 9:30. We arrived fashionably late, and were pleased to find that – on this day, perhaps because of the early Monday morning start – the sheet of ice was relatively empty. We turned our laps in the company of perhaps twenty other people, at most. We briefly tried a little ice dancing – Spouse is a brave soul to get into that kind of close quarters with a fellow whose two left feet and uniquely spastic rhythms have had their usual level of hazard augmented by the attachment of freshly sharpened blades to the bottom of his flailing limbs.
After forty-five minutes, our extremities were telling us we’d had enough and we headed back to the little dressing room with smiles on our faces. Skates removed, pins and needles buzzing in the bottoms of our feet, we headed out of the rink and were greeted warmly by a stranger coming in with an armload of hockey gear for an oldtimer’s game of some description. The rink is truly the hub of small town Canadian community, and you feel it very palpably as you stand in the lobby near the concession stand, smell the arena popcorn and french fries; you haven’t ever been in this building, but you have very definitely been here before. We headed out into the brilliant blue morning, rosy cheeked smiles on our faces, off to do our last minute Christmas shopping, or whatever else lay ahead on the snowy road in front of us.
By junior on December 21, 2008, at 2:09 pm …is listening, but confused about the address to which the merchandise should be delivered. In other news, my Mom is ready to knock over a liquor store after leaving the opera tonight.
 This Year's Hot Christmas Item: The Mamaclava
By junior on December 20, 2008, at 1:01 pm I couple of days ago, I posted about the story behind the making of Sebastien’s Theme, a piece of music that my band and I wrote and recorded for a movie soundtrack several years ago. I also posted a clip of the “video” for the song, courtesy of YouTube.
There are lots of things I love about YouTube; for starters, the service makes it so simple (please read cost-efficient cheap) to disseminate a video clip like this one; I’d never be able to justify the expense of hosting a video clip on my own server (bandwidth costs money, and this little site o’ mine ain’t about revenue generation, I can tell you that).
Beyond that simple basic premise, though, YouTube has recently added some awesome tools to their site. For instance, they have added a viewing statistics package called “Insight” that is just rocking my world right now. This package goes way beyond simply telling you how many “views” your video has had (Sebastien’s Theme is up to 27 as of today – this record may go triple teflon yet). One of the things that it can tell you is where the traffic is coming from. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’ve always been curious about how exactly who has been watching – Insight doesn’t quite go that far (although there is a “demographics” function built in to the tool as well), but it does provide some tantalizing bits of information about the countries from which people are watching, and (for the U.S.) what state they’re connecting from.
I just happened to check the Insight stats for Sebastien’s Theme this morning and my curiosity is definitely piqued: I see that there have been views from California (and I think I can guess who that was); I also see, however, that there have been views from New York state (hmm?) and Germany. I would love it if my Empire State or Deutsche viewers would roll up and represent in the comments section (um, for you non-English speakers out there, that means “please let me know something about yourself and how you found the video by leaving a comment below”). In the meantime, absent any verifiable information on the subject, I will content myself by fantasizing that King Kong took time out from scaling a skyscraper to eyeball my video, and that somewhere there is a lederhosen-wearing, beer-drinking bratwurst manufacturer humming the tune to himself while he warms up the BMW in the driveway.
I’ll try to remember to post a little tutorial on how to set up the Insight function later. For now, I’m off to Christmas shop and then – because this may be the only time in recorded history I get to truthfully write this next sentence – it’s off to the symphony with Spouse for tonight’s performance of Handel’s Messiah. You can search long and hard on this here blog thingy, and you’ll find many a mention of hockey players, an extended discussion about a young child submerged in a filthy pond, and more tractor-related exegesis than you might reasonably expect, but I don’t think you’ll find a single other reference to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra or their performances. Gotta make hay while the sun shines.
By junior on December 20, 2008, at 12:26 am “Snow-mageddon“, the snowstorm of the year, has come and gone as promised. Mother Nature behaved quite civilly, for an old lady throwing a meterological shit fit. ‘Round these parts (he said, hitching his overalls up by the straps with both thumbs) the storm began at a reasonable hour – sometime around 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning, and really didn’t gather  ferocity until after Spouse and I had safely arrived at work. The teeth of the storm were mostly bared during the meaty portion of the work day – a frosty, face-full-of-cold-razor-blades undoubted inconvenience while walking around downtown Hamilton, but really nothing more. At around 4 o’clock, as promised (such genteel behaviour!) and in plenty of time for us to journey home in the daylight, the storminess of the storm fizzled and we set out on our journey home.
The roads were snow-covered and generally somewhat slippery, but more than passable. I think we may actually be in a better position than many folks, living in our current location, because we generally only have to travel over main roads to arrive at our destination – main roads that get prompt and careful attention from the plowing crews. I suspect that folks who live in subdivisions and down residential sidestreets were having to negotiate thoroughfares that were much more generously covered with snow than we did. We really didn’t reach any significant obstacle at all, until…
…we reached the driveway.
The path leading in to Juniorvania is about a hundred yards long, measured from the edge of the road on our northern border. We need a path about nine feet wide to get the official Juniorvanian Transport vehicle up the drive. The snow was about a foot deep. By my calculations, assuming uniform distribution and depth of snow (an unwarranted assumption, especially at the roadside where the plows had wrought their special brand of hellish magic), 2700 cubic feet of snow needed to be moved. It was a very physical and very intimdating demonstration of the last mile concept. Click here to continue reading Friday Night Blowout: Old Guy Style
By junior on December 18, 2008, at 1:35 am  In 1998, it somehow happened that my band agreed to write some music – on a volunteer, we can’t pay you for this basis – for a movie that was being directed by a friend of a friend. In truth, I do remember how this arrangement came to pass, but the story is boring, pointless and convoluted and involves far too many ridiculous characters. In one of life’s clever little ironies, it so happens that one might say exactly the same thing about the script for the movie in question. (Dammit, Joel Siegel, this game is easy!) It’s more fun, therefore, if I decline to tell you the truth about how this composing engagement came to pass and simply tell you instead that Heroes in Rehab won this opportunity as a prize for placing sixth in a sack race at the Directors Guild of Canada annual summer picnic. That is saying something, because even this last explanation is roughly as much fun as gum disease.
But I digress.
My point is that we had this job to do and people were depending on us. Those of you in the working world will understand these concepts and identify them as something known as “responsibility”. It is something that is entirely foreign to musicians, serious artists and other more highly evolved and important life forms. Being a musician is not about producing things on time (except for musicians who actually get paid to do what they do because they’re good at it); when you are a Serious Artist (please read: “unemployed”) working on a Weighty Piece of Art, you cannot be rushed, especially when you haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re doing or why (which is most of the time). Click here to continue reading Introducing Wavy Gravy and Sebastien’s Theme.
By junior on December 17, 2008, at 9:07 am The 10 cm of white fluffy precipitation promised for today did not materialize, at least not within the borders of Juniorvania. It’s a good thing, too; when the alarm went off (having been suitably, if somewhat shockingly, advanced to accomodate snow removal activities), your faithful (?) correspondent would not at first be moved from his place of peaceful repose. Instead, man’s most glorious invention, the snooze alarm, was deployed to excellent effect and the Public Works Department slumbered on.
Upon finally coming to terms with both consciousness and reality, the crew quickly dressed itself in a curious amalgam of pajamas and sweatshirts and clomped outside to examine nature’s offering. In the cold, quiet blue of the newly blanketed driveway, a revelation offered itself: if one is spending a considerable amount of time deciding whether it is possible to snowblow an accumulation, it is unlikely that such a process is – in any event – necessary. Thus was born “Junior’s Law of Snow Augury”.
It is unlikely that Mother Nature’s reprieve will transform itself into a commutation of sentence; eight to ten inches* of snow are expected on Friday – the one day this week that Spouse and I will absolutely have to be at work early.
———-
* Canadian Corrollary to Junior’s Law of Snow Augury: If the expected accumulation of snow is expressed by meteorologists, weathermen and other charlatans in centimetres, you will not need a shovel; if, however, it is expressed in inches – you will, and how.
By junior on December 17, 2008, at 1:07 am …and it may well offer the first serious challenge to the winter coping skills of Juniorvanians everywhere. Wish me luck, people, with ten centimetres expected between midnight and six a.m., I foresee myself entering a cold and frosty garage at six bells for the purpose of firing up the snow blower.
To quote Major Tom: “Tell my wife, I love her very much – she knows.”
By junior on December 8, 2008, at 12:41 am Henry examines John, Paul, George and Ringo – four new swimmy friends for Walter the Betta (they’re in there, honest – look under the filter at the bottom right of the tank – George and Ringo are clearly visible. Or is that Paul?).
I am nothing if not a serious stickler for blog-related traditions and protocols.
By junior on December 6, 2008, at 4:11 am After many years of searching, last night I managed to find (thanks to the glory that is teh Intarwebs) not one but TWO copies of Johnny Bower’s vocal masterpiece, Honky the Christmas Goose. Recorded for charity in 1965, the tune gave the Beatles a battle on the CHUM charts in Toronto for a while that year and made an unlikely musical hero out of the Maple Leafs’ brilliant goaltender.
It’s important to understand that Bower made the record for charity and never banked a dime of the considerable proceeds generated by its sale.
I have posted a little screed about Bower’s selfless and unselfconscious act of charity over at Pension Plan Puppets. It’s amazing to me that Bower would have agreed to do this; it speaks volumes about the man’s good heart and compassion. I couldn’t help thinking about the contrast between Bower’s decision to use his fame to help others and Sean Avery’s efforts of self-aggrandizement.
Anyway, you can check out the full-on rant by folowing the link above. Incidentally, take a peek around the site and consider joining up. Pension Plan Puppets is the epicentre of the Barilkosphere, the community of Leaf bloggers that have plenty of funny and insightful things to say about the Blue and White. If you join the site as a result of this referral, let me know (by leaving a comment on this post or sending me an email), because – if you then make a paltry 20 comments on the site in the month of December – I, as your guide and PPP mentor, will be eligible to win some awesome swag.
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