The Tragically Hip - Live at The Garage, Glasgow

The night after we saw the Hip in Manchester we drove North on the M6 until it became the M74 across the border in Scotland. It didn’t take too long to reach Glasgow, or to find our hotel, right in the centre.

The gig was at The Garage on Sauchiehall Street, the long main street in Glasgow with just about everything on it. Our hotel was on one of the streets off Sauchiehall Street, and was literally about 300 yards away form the venue. We walked up the street, and turned left and there it was.

Again there were several Canadians present in the crowd. I got talking to one who was incredibly excited to meet a British fan! Her partner was very chatty too, although he’d never really heard of the band.

Like the previous night, the Hip did two sets. They started off with New Orleans is Sinking – the song they’d concluded with the previous night. In a bizarre way, that made it feel like the gig was a continuation of where they left off. For the first set I left Cathy in the safety and comfort of a booth (yes, they had seats!) and pushed my way to the front of the crowd. I was ecstatic when they played Fireworks, my favourite song, which had been omitted from the Manchester set-list. They also played The Drop-off, which I love, despite containing the rudest borderline blasphemy in any Hip song.

For the second set I joined Cathy in the booth, where we could stand on the seats (naughty us!) and get a great view over the crowd. They began with a couple of acoustic numbers, like the night before, but played different ones, including Wheat Kings, which the crowd swayed along to. A few people even held up lighters, which is rare at gigs nowadays.

Again, Gord Downie’s interaction with the crowd was worth the ticket price alone. He told one person to lower their Canadian flag in the most egomaniacal way possible: “Don’t let your nationalism obscure people’s view of me!” His rampage off the topic in At the Hundredth Meridian included quizzing members of the audience about where their camera-phones were when security had to intervene in a scuffle. And then he did the most brilliant thing ever!

During the final song of the set (My Music at Work) he jumped off the stage into the crowd. Then he climbed up on the first booth near the front. He climbed over the seat into the second booth and hugged the large drunk lady who was standing on a table. Then he climbed into the booth next to us.

I thought ‘He won’t keep coming’. But he did. The next second he had climbed into our booth and was pointing the microphone at me in time for me to sing ‘My Music at Work’. He passed the mic to another guy, hugged the girl next to me and then jumped from the booth into the audience and pushed his way back through to the stage.

The girl next to me (who had raised her pint glass to me because I knew all the words to the bit in Hundredth Meridian where it talks about Ry Cooder) was immediately shouting into her phone. She had called Canada to tell a friend about her close encounter. Meanwhile I was just stunned. Fortunately, Cathy had got a photo of it so I knew it had actually happened!

They came back on for a short encore, and played the song that everyone had been fruitlessly shouting for in Manchester: Little Bones. Then the lights came up and we spilled out onto a fairly quiet Sauchiehall Street. I was slightly punch-drunk with excitement and texted as many people I could think of who would in any way care.

The funny thing is that after Manchester, I had wondered whether we were being silly going on to Glasgow. In the morning in Manchester Central Travelodge, I had temporarily regretted buying tickets for both nights. We’d seen them once. Was it really worth seeing them again?

Turns out it so was.

The Tragically Hip – Live at Manchester Academy 3

It’s been a week now since I saw my favourite band live in Manchester and I feel I ought to write it up even though no one has heard of them or could care less really.

We arrived in Manchester and checked in at our hotel really easily. After a short wander round the Christmas markets and tea at Pizza Express, we walked about a mile south to the University Campus.

Academy 3 is a small room on the top floor of the Union Building. It had a low ceiling, a bar, a sound-desk, and just about enough room for 400 Canadians. Hip singer Gordon (Gord) Downie described it as “a bunker” during this show. It sure felt like that, particularly as the sound came at us like a wall of noise.

The reference to Canadians in the previous paragraph was intentional to reflect the ethnic diversity of the crowd. Basically, it was full of Canadians. They had an unofficial Canadian uniform on – beards, check shirts or hockey jerseys. I went to the loo during the interval and as I walked back to ‘our spot’ I didn’t hear a single British accent. It was like going to a gig in a foreign country like, er, Canada.

When we arrived there was a queue. I was surprised and checked with the doorman that we were in the right place. The Canadians in front of us were very interested in the fact that we weren’t Canadian. The girl in the group had been to several Hip concerts before, but all massive festivals. Afterwards she said this was the best gig she’d ever been too.

The band did two set lists, coming on as their own support act, and taking a half hour break in-between. If you are at all interested in what they sound like, you can hear a lot of their stuff on their website. However, even though I’ve listened to them over and over, they were something else again live. Gord Downie is a cross between a comedian and an utter mentalist, naturally entertaining and a little bit scary.

Trying to start the gig with a new song (Love is a First) and expecting people to know the words and sing along form the get go was ambitious, and didn’t really work. But things picked up after that with a rendition of Courage (the opening track of their stand out album Fully Completely).

They played a number of my favourite songs, including Bobcaygeon during a couple of acoustic numbers at the beginning of the second set, and an amazing version of At the Hundredth Meridian, which included a rambling monologue between Gord and the crowd, which was very amusing. He also held up a flag someone threw on the stage that had a Maple Leaf superimposed over a St George’s Cross, and had a tangential conversation with the person who threw it about nationalism that was three hundred years out of date, and also how he couldn’t use it as a handkerchief.

Oh, yeah, that was another thing. He sweats a lot. So he was constantly wiping his face and head with handkerchiefs that were tossed onstage by the roadies. Whenever he threw them, used, out into the crowd, there would be surge of people trying to get to them like desperate bridesmaids trying to get the bouquet at a wedding.

The gig ended on a high note with the band playing New Orleans is Sinking and the crowd jumping along. We bade farewell to the Canadians we’d met in the queue and who were driving back to York that night, and made our way back to the Travelodge, psyched up and ready for the next stop on our tour…

Micro SD Cards and the pace of technological change

Almost two weeks ago I bought a new phone. My previous phone was one of the first ‘flip phones’ produced by Samsung, which had a ‘call screen’ on the top so you could see who was ringing you before you flipped the phone open.

My new phone is also a Samsung. It’s an iPhone wannabe with touch screen and scrolling menus and other gizmos. Like just about every phone these days it has a camera. I can get the web on it and update my Facebook status and so now I am constantly fiddling with it like a teenager!

It also has a Micro SD port to ramp up the memory. I bought a 2 gigabyte card which promised me space for 250 songs, 1200 photos, and 3 and a half hours of video. The card was tiny – about the size of my fingernail.

Just over ten years ago, when we set up our own business, Cathy and I paid a small fortune for a ramped up computer with 6 a gigabyte hard disk! At the time it was the most we could afford.

Years later we took that computer apart for spares and the hard disk was the size of a dinner plate. Now I’m carrying around a third of that space as an optional extra in my phone, and if I’d bought an 8 gig card, then I’d be carrying round a more powerful machine in my pocket than we bought for our desktop back in the day.

America's Next Top Model cult science fiction occasional character lookalike

Cathy is a fairly keen follower of America's Next Top Model (on right now as I blog this on Living TV).

One of the judges on ANTM is J. Alexander, otherwise known as Miss Jay. He's very amusing and, er, flamboyant, I guess. (Old school types will probably mutter that he's more camp than a row of tents...)

Anyway, this series he has a fairly daft-looking 'bowl cut', which looks like this:



The official pic doesn't really do it justice. But in the show, when he's moving around, he really reminds me of someone... who could it be... oh yeah!



Dwayne Dibbley!

(If you don't believe me, watch ANTM followed by a classic Dibbley episode of Red Dwarf and tell me that's not the same haircut.)

Borders Bookshops have gone into administration, and that makes me sad

Went into town today, mainly to buy a new phone (more on that later), and popped into Borders, having heard they are in serious financial trouble. As I walked in there was evidence everywhere I looked that all was not well.

To the right: completely empty magazine racks. No credit means no new mags.
Straight ahead: Yellow 20% off signs plastered everywhere.
To the left: "Closing down - everything must go" posters indiscreetly stacked up next to the entrace in readiness for the fire sale*.

I like Borders. I like the ambience. I like the fact you can sit and read comic books and no one hassles you (although I can see that my selfish comic book reading won't have helped their profit margins at all). They often have books I don't see anywhere else. They have a Starbucks inside the shop. It was the first home for our Book Group. For geeky bibliophiles, there is always something else to make you go 'ooh'.

Although they shouldn't have tried to sell DVDs. They were very expensive. Maybe they should have only stocked literary ones - book adaptations for example. But even then, DVDs are not money-spinners. They are so cheap now in supermarkets I think the day is coming when they won't be available on the high street at all. So, that was perhaps one mistake they made.

One sad thing is that I have already started talking about Borders in the past tense. (I went back and changed 'was' to 'is' in the last paragraph but one.) I have a nagging fear that they are going to be this year's big name to disappear. A victim of the credit crunch. A mundane tragedy, but tragic none the less. In some ways my visit today was a preliminary requiem.

*They looked exactly like the ones that appeared in Woolworths last year as that shopping chain tanked. Somewhere a signwriter is rubbing his hands with glee.

7 things that really probably do not exist

The Mongolian Death Worm
The Golden Plates that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from (sorry, Mormons, I like you, but you have to admit, the provenance is ropey and the claim that the plates had to be returned to a celestial librarian seems a little "convenient")
Thetans
Glittery vampires
The Force (ooh, controversial)
Altruistic cats
Aliens in flying saucers probing people

What would you add? (Or what of these does exist?)

Seems it's a fine line between saviour of humanity and humanity's darkest fears

Irony Boy sent me this the other day (see I credit people when I publish the stuff the send me, Ian...)





















Source

If you are thinking of picking a new religion

...then use this handy flowchart.

2 quibbles.
1) Jedi is not an option.
2) Why can't Jews like hummus?

1 ROFL.
I need to say how much I LOVE the alternative to 'atheism' and the question that gets you there.

Midnight Oil cover charity single - free to download at Amazon

Hey up. I've been a longtime fan of Midnight Oil, so it's cool their classic Beds are Burning is being covered by various people to raise money to comabt climate change.

And you can download it for free at Amazon (for a limited time). There are other tracks too. Phantom Limb are a bit funky and worth a free listen to. The Amazon downloader takes a second or so to install and then feeds the tracks directly into your iTunes or Windows Media Player depending what you got.

"Seriously? I survived leaukemia for this?"

Yeah, this is turning into a blog about X Factor.

Last weekend's show featured the most toe-curlingly vomit-inducing charity single premiere I have ever had the misfortune to watch. First off it was a cover of Michael Jackson's painful attempt at an anthem for caring, 'You are not alone', which I have hated from day 1. Then it was sung by X Factor contestants, who each took a line each.

Given that it was obviously recorded a few weeks ago (else those were seriously fast costume changes for one song, then back into the outfits they'd been in all evening), it was interesting to see who only had a couple of lines, and who got to sing the stirring reprises towards the end. Obviously the key players were in the limelight, like, er, that bloke with the afro who got voted off last week. Oops.

Now it's for a good cause: Great Ormond Street Hospital. And to make sure we knrew it was for a good cause we had to watch a video featuring a little boy who had Survived Leaukemia despite the fact that his parents had been Told That He Would Die. He was very happy to be alive thanks to Gweat Ormond Stweet, as he told us in his charming lithping little boy voice.

But then, after championing the cause, the poor mite had to sit through the performance of the charity single and looked singularly nonplussed throughout. I can't blame him. Frankly, it left me hoping that a life-threatening disease would curtail my life expectancy to 'just before Christmas' so I don't have to hear that ear-offending drivellous pap played again.

But knowing my luck, that won't happen.