Monthly Archives: August 2002

My boss found my blog.

My boss found my blog. Veteran Halifax promoter Greg Clark [no relation], my main man at the Marquee Club, was searching the net for Halifax music when he stumbled upon this website.

Greg’s review of swordfight.org: “I was reading the site and looking for the part where you started badmouthing me,” he said. “But I didn’t find anything about me, and then I got bored.”

Last night I did sound for the big Halifax hiphop show. Afterwards, I ran into Greg at the back of the club, sipping on a Rev.

“I’m gonna hack your blog,” he growled.

The best thing that happened

The best thing that happened to me today was that I bought some light bulbs. We don’t even have any bulbs burned out at our house… I was just at the grocery store, and I was struck by the beauty of the common light bulb. I can’t get over how inexpensive they are–two for ninety-nine cents–and yet so valuable.

Outside, in the Sobey’s parking lot, I took out one of the frosted bulbs and held it up to the sun. The curved glass… the cool metal of the spiral base. I squinted at it. Electricity will excite the gases inside, providing me with a chip off the sun itself.

This bulb is going to shine forth in my kitchen with the light of universal radiance. I felt the small surge of an equation through my arms. Electricity equals power and love. I held the bulb out at arm’s length and dropped it.

The light bulb hit the pavement with a dull ping. It bounced once or twice on its base and then fell over, completely unharmed. I listened carefully to the sound as it rolled back and forth a few times in its little sixty-watt arc.

Somehow, when I was a little kid, I learned how to drop a light bulb from a height. I’ve won bets doing this. As long as you release it carefully, the base will absorb all the force of the impact, and the bulb will never be harmed.

For all their seeming fragility, light bulbs have a secret strength.

Jim morrison. There’s a salmon

Jim morrison.

There’s a salmon on the lawn
There’s a salmon on the lawn
He just comes here to spawn, and
Then he will be gone
Salmon on the lawn

Girl you gotta love your trout
Girl you gotta love your trout
This is what it’s all about
so slap him in and pull him out
Gotta love your trout

All right, yeah

I walked into Robertson’s Business

I walked into Robertson’s Business Supplies, all excited because I was on the way to buy my laptop computer. I was all ready to spend the two hundred bucks in return for portable word processing power. Time for me to become a roving laptop rock’n’roll machine.

And then I spoke to the salesman and he crushed all my illusions. An extra fifty bucks to install MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Oh, and if I wanted WordPerfect 5.1 that would be another fifty bucks.

I told him I had an Epson inkjet printer that I’d found at a yard sale and asked if there was any way that the driver for it could be put on the laptop. Oh sure, they could download the driver… That would be ten bucks for the download, plus half-an-hour’s labour charge to install it… probably another thirty or forty bucks.

The dream was crumbling. I started to get the impression that the salesman didn’t really want me to own this machine. His indifference was contagious. Finally I said, “Thanks for your time,” and wandered out into Cunard Street in the rain.

So much for sitting in the park and writing about the mating habits of ducks. Summer’s almost over anyway… I guess I’ll just stay home. I’ve still got a ten-dollar Mac Classic in my bedroom that I can use to write the Great Canadian Novel, or at least the Great Canadian Sloppy Jumble Of Words That Don’t Go Anywhere.

I’ve also got my notebook and gel pen that I carry with me everywhere. Too bad writing with pen and paper sucks. It’s slow and linear and not at all analogous to how my brain works.

If I didn’t live in the computer age I’d probably never write at all. Much of the time I spend “writing” is actually spent editing and fine-tuning, fiddling with the placement of commas and so on. Hard to do that with pen and paper.

I’ve been playing with Google’s

I’ve been playing with Google’s translation feature and having lots of fun with it. I took a recent hot action post and translated it from English to Portuguese and back to English. Here is how it wound up:

In all the case, hi. He is 6:30 in the morning. I am in the studio, walking only all the way I stop backwards of the south extremity. A pretty session steamy of makeout to the side of, I only start done we do not know, church or a school or something, what it wants that was… it was in the south extremity of the nothing of the god. It swims, was cute. It swims. It had the fine chests.

Or English to French and back to English:
Just before it embraced me for the always good night and goodbye: “I then not to believe that you waited until 3:30 speaking to me.” “but you did not make the contact of the eye.” Its jaw was dropped. “what! These types ran up against me and I looked at you completely tastes, ‘ please come and to pretend you know that I with me does not have to thus speak to them.’ “silently, I thought of the manner of which we were not on our way to have the sex. And how if the weather were really hot, it would have returned after me to the bar. “you are not too fast on the hook,” it indicated.