I was watching Letterman on Monday night and the musical guest was Baby Gramps. I’d never heard of him before and was interested to see what he was like. What a surprise. He was an older gentleman with a large puffy beard who plays a mean steel guitar and makes noises with his mouth. An interesting performance and an interesting alt-country type song. The song is found on an album called Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys. I have yet to hear any other tracks off the album. [via Red Blondehead]
Archive for August, 2006
Pitchfork has a new song from the upcoming Decemberists album The Crane Wife. My first impressions are that this is a good tune: simple and melodic. I hope the rest of the album is as good as this. Reports say it’s going to be a lot like The Tain EP, in that it’s a lot of connecting songs. I never listen to The Tain EP because 18 minute songs typically don’t jibe with me.
Update: A version of the album has been leaked and a three tracks can be heard over at Red Blondehead
Movietally is a service for indexing and tagging films you’ve seen that will then make recommendations of other films you may like. I like the idea of these types of services (last.fm, pandora) but I don’t know if this really works for films since people tend to watch all sorts of different types of films. [via eHub]
If your summer was a little ‘ho-hum’ then maybe you should have thought about taking part in the Mongol Rally: an 8 000 mile race from London to Ulaanbaata across 2 deserts and 5 mountain ranges, on roads ranging from bad to non-existent, with no support crew, and all in a car with no more than 1 litre of power. Now that’s intense.
The Mongol Rally is not about making sure you reach Mongolia but the fun you have trying. If you get there with no hiccups you won’t have any fun. Exceptions will be made for vehicles of notable unusualness with high comedy value. You are free to sneak, bribe, cheat, connive and generally out-wit the world to get yourselves to Ulaanbaatar. In fact you will probably have to. If you get to the end of the race without some good stories to tell, then the Mongol Rally has failed in its mission. Which it won’t.
160 cars set off on the race, 64 cars have finished, 19 cars were abandoned before the finish and 77 cars are still on the road. The website makes good use of Google Maps to display the routes people took. Maybe less ‘risky’ (okay, not even in the same class of risk) but this is something that I think could be a neat charity in North America. Anchorage, Alaska to St. John’s, Newfoundland anyone?
I’ve often gone looking for an easy way to browse some American website that require me to be located in the US. Today I came across a complete browser solution in Palary Browser. “The Palary Browser is a cutting-edge, web application that delivers a secure, personalized surfing experience.” It’s a browser inside your browser. It’s still in beta, so if you sign up it will maintain bookmarks and enable ad-blocking. It seems to work with YouTube but doesn’t like videos on Showtime’s website.
I don’t know how I’ve never seen this before. The guy in Toronto that wears the Santa hat, no shirt and does push-ups, has a 15min documentary on the Internet. He calls himself Zanta and swears he is as mentally fit as he is physically. [update: wow, this guy is even in Wikipedia]
I couldn’t find an easy way to share this video. Click here to be taken to the Advertising Age page, then scroll down to the bottom and select the ‘Short But Fun’ video. Volkswagen in Germany had this commercial created for their new car, Fox. There are some other great ads on this page as well, as these are the highlights from the Cannes Advertising Festival.
The TTC on flickr. 800+ photos of the TTC system; get ready for a fantastic collection. You can also view the condensed favourites set at just over 80, but you miss a few gems.
A lot of our stations are plain looking, but some have character. This is Davisville Subway Station, Toronto.
Animator vs. Animation. a stick figure drawn in the Flash interface comes to life and does battle with its unseen creator. [via boingboing]
Google joins the music data capture segment with Google Music Trends. The service requires you to run Google Talk. Google Talk will capture all your listening habits to help create charts of popular music.
fresh comments