Anticipation is high around Prometheus in these parts. Ridley Scott rarely disappoints.

If you’d asked a few years ago, I’d probably have said I never expected to be in Saskatchewan again. I’m not sure I ever thought I’d get there in the first place, but I knew the place had appeal and it seemed likely to happen at least once in my life. My mother and I took a road trip in 2005 and visited Biggar and La Fleche. The first was the town my grandfather was born in and had left as a young man; the second was the town that one of my mother’s closest childhood friends had retired too and eventually passed away in succumbing to breast cancer.

It was a good trip, that one. I’ve done a few road trips with my mother and in hindsight they’ve gone better than some might expect. We usually get along pretty well, and the occasional moment of stress if far outweighed by the times we’ve spent together visiting far flung family and friends. That Saskatchwan trip carries a lot of fond memories these days.

I’m going back, but this trip is a different one. It’s been seven years since that last trip and a lot’s changed since then. I’ve moved a couple of times, finally landing in West Vancouver in a place I actually own. I’ve held a couple of jobs since then and that may not be surprising in the modern economy but I think I’ve finally landed at a place that offers a future instead of being just a job. There’s been a lot of change, and life is good.

The biggest change is the reason this trip is happening and that’s Allison. Her parents live in Swift Current and, as it turns out, her Grandmother in Qu’appelle is turning 90 in about a week. If a 90th birthday party isn’t a decent excuse for a road trip I can’t imagine what would be.
This trip is going to be a bit different than that last one: we’ll be staying with family in Swift Current instead of just passing through. There are friends—both hers and mine—to be visited in Calgary and Regina along the way. There’s classic small town chinese food to be eaten, the Landing and Grasslands National Park and Whitehorse are playing in Swift Current and we’ll all be going. There might not be time for all of these things, it won’t matter. This is a family trip, and the sight-seeing is secondary.

So here we go: the car is packed tomorrow night it’ll be heading east…to Saskatchewan. This time, I’m pretty sure I’ll be heading back again someday.

That’s just the way things change sometimes.

Daniel Lanois was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and i didn’t win the contest to attend the ceremony. Blurg. This video is what I have to settle for.

Words by Woody Guthrie, from New Multitudes.

My Grandmother died today. It wasn’t much of a surprise, I think. The last couple of years have been hard for her, and there were signs in the last few days that things were getting worse. She lived in Ontario which meant I got news of these things from afar and infrequently since moving to Vancouver.

She lived just about 91 years. When I moved to Vancouver she was healthy and, after living alone in the house she shared with my Grandfather for years, had decided to move to a retirement home. It was good for her that first place: she seemed happy there and whenever we visited we’d head out for a day trip. The Big Apple was one of the places we took her quite a bit. It was close, and the food was good. She was quick to smile in those days, and liked to joke about living with old people. It’s true: she was one of the younger people there.

Things took a turn for the worse when she moved into a long term care facility. Watching someone you love slip away isn’t easy. My visits weren’t as frequent as I would have liked, and every time I saw her she seemed noticeably worse than the time before. A couple of years ago I got on a plane on very short notice when we thought she was going to pass away. We were all there that weekend, but she rallied and by the end of it was as fine as she had been for a while. I have pictures of her that I took that weekend: I don’t like looking at those pictures. She looks awful. I keep them, but I don’t like looking at them.

My grandmother was funny, a wonderful sewer, quilter, knitter and crocheter; she could cook just about anything you wanted for just about as many people as you could imagine; her favourite music usually included bagpipes but she liked a little Country too. She grew up on a farm in the Kettle Valley near Midway, got married young, had three wonderful kids and wound up moving around a lot when my Grandfather joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. They settled in Trenton in the 60s thanks to a transfer, and that became home. I liked it there and we visited often. I actually considered going to Queens University in Kingston and living with her for a while. I sort of wish I had. It was just after my Grandfather had died, and I think it would have been good to spend some time with her.

Yesterday would have been her wedding anniversary, but she’s been alone for more than 20 years now. I like to think that she fell asleep thinking about my Grandfather and the time they spent together and decided it was time to finally go with him.

She will be missed, but she will never be forgotten.

Wilco visited Vancouver a few nights ago, almost two years to the day since the last show they played here. In an unbelievable stroke of luck I scored third row seats right in front of Nels Cline’s spot on stage, a photo pass from the band and—best of all—the show was on a Sunday night which meant Allison was able to go.

I wrote a review which was featured on No Depression. I had to skip the Seattle show, which means the next one might be a while but there’s always flights to Chicago…

Continue reading "Wilco: Orpheum Theatre, February 5th, 2012"

Arthur died a couple of days ago. He was a farmer, a rodeo rider, one of the first students in the Midway schoolhouse and the son of some of the Boundary Region’s earliest settlers.

My grandmother referred to him as her Baby Brother for as long as she could refer to him at all. I’m not sure if she knows he’s gone or not, but things seem to have taken a turn for the worse for her as well in recent days so we’ll see what happens.

So many parties, so little time. Tonight it’s time to party with these guys. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Who knew Swee’Pea was such a great dancer? Genius. I know Allison would say that violence is never the answer, but that Wilco brand spinach really sparks Popeye up.

Whitehorse played the Rio Theatre in Vancouver a few nights ago. My review of the show is on No Depression or you can read the text after the break.

Continue reading "Whitehorse at the Rio Theatre"

Wilco made an appearance in the most recent Popeye strip, immortalized as a brand of spinach. In the last panel at the back of the line that’s the boys in the band unloading the ship.

Despite the fact that I have a well deserved reputation as a Wilco fan, it really just takes one track with Daniel Lanois and Emmylou Harris to tear me away.

The New York times posted a great article celebrating Bill Cosby’s 50 years in show business. The man’s been receiving accolades for years, and they’re all deserved. In a day and age where being funnier seems to be a synonym with being louder (I’m looking at you Sam Kinison) and crasser (I’m looking at you Chris Rock) Bill Cosby has remained a very funny while staying clean. I’m not saying those other guys aren’t funny, it just seems like a cheap, easy way out sometimes.

I saw Cosby live once. It was the end of a very hard summer for me. I was fifteen, and things weren’t good at home for me largely due to circumstances of my own making. I’d asked to leave Toronto and wanted to move to Cranbrook to live with my father. There was screaming, there was shouting and in the end my mother let me do what I wanted. She packed my stuff and put it on a bus and I was gone.

As these things so often happen, what I thought I wanted wasn’t what I actually wanted and things didn’t work out in Cranbrook. After a few weeks and before the end of the summer I finally screwed up the courage to call my mother and tell her I wanted to come…home. We talked for a few minutes about the trouble I’d been causing and she said yes without evening thinking about it. That’s what parents do. Good ones anyway. That was a hard call to make. She could have made it harder. She didn’t.

When I got home she asked me if I wanted to go see Bill Cosby with my Aunt & Uncle. She’d bought three tickets for a show at Exhibition stadium and she was giving up her own so I could go. It was a warm, dry memorable night in Toronto. The Blue Jay’s were on the rise and shortstop Tony Fernandez and outfielder and home run legend George Bell were in the audience. Cosby took the stage in a Jays jersey. He joked with the players, ran through some material and closed his show with his justifiably famous The Dentist routine. I’d probably heard that routine dozens of times but seeing it live was an entirely different thing. That man is capital F Funny. If he has an equal, I can’t think of who it might be. Lily Tomlin? Steve Martin? Maybe.

I’m sure I didn’t realize how much that night made me feel like I was at home at the time. Typical of most teenagers, I suspect it just felt like another night.

I’m not sure if my mother ever got to see him live. I don’t remember her mentioning it. I might have to make up for that sometime.

Cosby’s performing days are winding down—and tickets cost an abolute fortune I’m sure—but if he comes to your town don’t miss seeing him. You won’t regret it. That’s my commitment to you.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to see Mavis Staples sing The Weight live on a pretty magical night of live music. I’m not sure I’d ever anticipated hearing that, and it’s a fond memory of the year.

Mavis singing The Band classic with Wilco live in Chicago? I think my mind would have been blown. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t there. This will have to do for now (though you can hear the live version in the Roadcase on the Wilco site for now.)

With a rapid rise in the user of mobile devices for browsing and a lot of sites publishing their own site specific apps there’s been a trend towards mobile site interstitial pages. Having your own app poses an interesting dilemma for some sites, but these interstitials are just part of a larger trend of problems with browser aware home pages that attempt to serve mobile content.

In the early days of mobile content, a lot of sites would redirect mobile browsers to a mobile specific home page. This may seem sound in theory, but in practice links that are sent out through Twitter and other social media posts were broken: clicking on a link for a specific article would, instead, take you to a home page and you’d have to find your article all over again—if you cared. The Georgia Straight did this for a long time, though I think they’ve since stopped.

Next was the interstitial pleading with you to download a site’s app. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked by IMDB to download their app. I refuse every time, but they keep asking. This is exactly what persistent cookies are for friends: stop pestering me into a form of behaviour I’m not interested in.

The other day I clicked a link and saw the interstitial pages above, with an app download button so large and a continue link so small I couldn’t actually select it. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this sneaky little trick is: downloading the app requires several more steps, so you’re not going to fool me into it. If I can’t click the link I can’t continue and you’ve just lost a page view, and a probably a bunch more from other people in similar situations.

Really though: are there that many people who need to check FailBlog every day that you should even be distributing an app?

Sometimes the land rush to the new mobile world demands a bit of careful consideration, and I don’t think it happened in this case.

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