Getting there is all the fun

I spent almost a month sans assbike, since I had to retire the rapidly failing Tequila Sunrise Marinoni, but really it took only a few minutes to move the parts to the porn shop hybrid.



I love booting around on a snowy day. It's so fun I don't even feel wet or cold. The fun thing about riding a fixe, especially in the snow are the mind bending tricks you can do. Like Skidding ... which becomes really easy in the snow.

I've also been trying to learn to ride backwards (like the dude below). I still haven't figured it out yet.

Last night I assbiked down to Nathan Phillips Square, there was also some odd Cirque de Soleil type act and I picked up a pulled pork sandwich at one of the food vendors.


But the reason I went was to check out Sloan :



Sloan is a garage band at heart, but garage music never gets the credit it's due, when everyone is hyping the newest Brazillian Reggaeton or whatever. When the Vox AC30 amp was introduced in 1959 every piece was in place for all of music for all of eternity.

I can't get enough of that catchy lo-fi sound. Of all the music John Peel heard and played "Teenage Kicks" is known as his favorite song. The Beatles were a garage band. There's your testimonial there.

Here's two proto garage songs for yr dining and dancing pleasure.

? and the Mysterians with perhaps the first ever garage-rock song from 1962:

96 Tears (3:00)

and Gang of Four with

Natural's Not In It (3:07).

Ancestor to all the jerkey choppy art-school rockers like Talking Heads and Franz Ferdinand.

Download some Jools Holland Later

Right now there's a few dozen very cool vids from the BBC show "Later w. Jools Holland" available on the download.

Live songs from the likes of Sonic Youth, Morrissey (I know he's an asshole but still...), Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Franz Ferdinand, and more.

LINK

Sloan at Nathan Phillips Square Tommorrow

Heads up yo. Sloan will play at Nathan Phillips Square tommorrow at 8:00 pm.

Here's two tracks from their Peppermint EP.

Underwhelmed (5:25)
Sugartune (3:37)

Bad TV

The weirdest and definately creepiest infomercial on TV is for the this colon cleaner - Dual Action Cleanse. See a clip here

You would think that a product that claims to make you look and feel better would have a spokesman that looked good or at least healthy.

The pitchman is this oily weasel-looking guy with bad skin and a skinny moustache. I'd feel uncomfortable buying a stereo from this mook, let alone an anus cleaner.

He just has that look that says "I may have a hard drive full of kiddie porn".

He expounds on the wonders of clean colon to two incredulous old farts. The old witch and her sequin blouse creeps me out too.



Another other show that makes me ill is "House of Carters" aka "Meet the Uglies". Apparently they've osilate the gene for stringy hair and pasty skin and put it on MTV.

In 2000 Nick Carter was one of People's 50 Most Beautiful People. But six years of hitting the ugly sauce has left him bloated and pasty. Love handles and cheesy tattoos. I was a surprised to read that he's 26, he looks ten years older.



And little bro Aaron grew up to be a squeegee kid. He suposedly dated Lindsey Lohan, but now he looks like too dirty to live under an overpass and his face is a full blown dermatological crisis.

I thought the point of TV was to set unattainable ideals and aspriational models, not make you lose your appetite.

Update: Oh shit there's more info on the dude (Klee Irwin) and his Dual Action Cleanse here.

And also I'm not the only one that made the comparison between Klee Irwin and John Waters

Music from Archive.org

I hadn't realized, but the internet archive at archive.org has a pretty big music offering, mostly live shows.

Not a lot of famous bands, but there's twenty-nine Butthole Surfers and sixteen Supersuckers shows.

Link here : Browse music at archive.org

As an aside I like this excerpt from the Butthole Surfers' Wikipedia entry:

Often without speaking to or even acknowledging the audience, sometimes playing in darkness, the band would assault the attendees aurally with four channels of sound placed throughout the venue. This allowed the band the opportunity to "swim" the sound in a circular pattern which, when combined with the visual stimuli would occasionally evoke nausea from those in attendance. ...

... the combined effect with the swirling sound and the sudden, lengthy strobe-light barrage is said to have caused panic and even seizure in some participants.

Other common elements of the stage show included Gibby's fascination with singing through a bullhorn or smashing a cymbal mounted upside-down and filled with flaming rubbing alcohol, causing flames to shoot up with each rhythmic beat (that's pictured above there). ... For daylight shows, Gibby instead would occupy instrumental passages with shotgun blasts over the audience's heads.

While on tour in Times Square, the band met a woman whose control over reversal of her digestive tract had given her the stage name 'Ta-Da the Shit Lady'. She was brought along and became a fixture of several tours in which, unannounced, she would leap onto the stage and perform a frantic, gyrating dance in the strobe lights after disrobing (it was not a libidinous presentation). ... the total effect of the live presentation was unique in popular music.

Assbike Song: Nick Cave and Sloan

Spread your collar and slick your hair back. It's Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - except now they're called Grinderman. Here's the hilarious "No Pussy Blues". I mean c'mon he fixed the hinges on her gate!

Grinderman - No Pussy Blues (4:24)

Sloan will play a FREE show Sat. January 27th at Nathan Phillips Square. Here is their very-Beatleseque "Who Taught You ?"

Sloan - Who Taught You (3:02)

More Visualization Fun

Indexed has Venn diagram and other graphical jokes drawn on index cards.

Fighting the fatties in Delhi

It's no surprise that obesity is on the rise in India - 29% according to the article below. Indians have no culture of exercise, no facilities and there is a general disdain for physical exertion.

Cycling is new mantra for Delhi kids

New Delhi: Delhi schools are finally waking up to the scourge that is obesity. With 29 per cent of Delhi school kids between the age of 14 to 18 years being obese, a couple of schools have hit upon an old idea to tackle this big-sized problem.

For a student of Class IX, Aditya, going to school just became healthier. Plus, he seems to like the freedom this mode of transportation provides.

full article here

...so finally a few are waking up to the draw of biking. Not all these kids will become lifelong bikers, but there is a type of person, that 5% that values that freedom.

YouTube for Data

Swivel is the so-called YouTube of data. Users can upload and share datasets and plot them against each other.

It has some weaknesses, including poor choice of the visualization of a lot of the data and also right now there isn't a lot of data there yet.

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

I discovered this Periodic Table of Visualization Methods from BoingBoing.

If you hover your cursor over the entry you see an example graphic.

Shocking Tales from 2007

David Bowie turns 60 today !

The Simpsons are in their 18th season. Someone who was born when the Simpsons first came (1989) on will be starting university this year !

Wed. Night Ride.

The awesome winter weather of '07 continues : 2007 to be warmest on record.

But, yukk it up while you can chumps, as always Mother Nature will have the last laugh when your summertime picnic and softball games are hit with gale force winds and class-4 thunderstorms.

It's seems like a waste to let a nice day pass, so thanks to day after day of warm days I'm on the verge of exhaustion from all the riding I've been getting in.

Tonight I headed to the CNE even though I was still recovering from some hard rides over the last couple days and the holidays (I think I'm the only person that lost weight over the holdays).

After a warm-up I did a four lap interval, where I go as hard as I can without actually throwing up. It's only about 10 km, but it takes it's toll.

I spun a few listless laps after that, but because of creeping ADD I cannot ride by myself for more than an hour in the CNE. Just as made the decsion to head home my buddy Fernando showed up. He always rides until 9:00. I never want to be the one that initiates the end of the ride, so I always stay as long as he does. Now my ticket is stamped 'til 9:00. Fine, we mix it up a bit, but also go easy, 2 more hrs like that? No problem.

But... more showed up. Six or seven, including, Marshall, 80's-Mark and Peter, and whenever more people are involved restraint goes out the window. It wasn't a hammerfest, but it fast enough that I was burning more gas than I had in my tank. I knew I was headed for a bonk. I didn't have food, figuring a short or easy ride. But, like Miles from Risky Business I just said "What the fuck!".

When we finally eased off at around 8:45 I was lightheaded and having trouble staying upright. My arms and legs were numb. I picked up a V8 and bagels at the corner store, but it took me forver to fish for coins I was shaking so bad.

After a shower I was shivering so bad, I layered on the clothes and had a bagel, some cookies and a coke before crawling to bed at 10:00. In that state I couldn't handle anything more.

More new pics

Over the top Christmas decorations continue. One of my neighbors put up this MASSIVE sno-globe.



It's fan-powered. Inside it the snowmen on the merry-go-round actually go around ! It's on Palmerston north of Bloor, if you want to go eyeball it in person while it's still there.

Also, I'm practicing close up pictures. This is a new TTC token :



Not great, but the best of like a dozen tries.

New Photos

January - High of 9 degrees and no rain or snow. Yeehah, the Inconvenient Truth --> some convenient weather for biking around.



This one's from visualresistance.org :



... and I found these ones of flickr. Everything about this picture is perfect.



bikes outside a bar in NYC :








Someone gave us chocolates, and this one had math on it. Integratin' by parts ! It even looks like it's done on LaTeX.






Windows XP is so cool and businesslike, but search for something; it fires up the searchdog. The little dog that scrathes it's head and flips through a book while you wait.



..and here's my latest photo technique, collage. Greta eating chips.