Paris Hit Big G In The Head

We took the Max to Paris last month, where he climbed the Awful Tower (actually we rode the elevator up because it was night and the stairs were closed), made him absorb some art at the Louvre and some history at the Musee de Paris,ride the Metro, wander around Notre Dame (and pose for appropriately touristy pictures) and let him drink beers at sidewalk cafes. A good time was had by all, except for the part where a street leapt up and hit Big G on the head and caused me to lose my balance and my wallet at the same time.Or maybe I lost my balance and that's when the street hit Big G in the head, and really, I have no idea what happened to my wallet.

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Hahahahahahahahahhaha.
thanks to Stacey Nosek over at Pajiba

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Sh Boom! The Big G and I off to London for a 'Marriot Weekend' tomorrow...life can be a dream!

Vimeo Valise


This is just what I needed on this blustery grey day: kids, terriers, bubbles and buckets.

Bubbles & Buckets from Paul Joy on Vimeo.
Remember you can always watch these in HD over at Vimeo!

Motown 50


Ladies and gentlemen....The Supremes!

Press Leak

In the midst of this euphoria over the monumental and historic event of Barack Obama's election to the US presidency and all the hopes that we pin to this, there is a small and quiet voice that speaks of how dangerous and difficult the road ahead truly is.Below are three articles via Common Dreams that recognize that voice and address its concerns for more eloquently than I can.

Published on Friday, January 23, 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle
The Gulf Between Hope and Change
by David Sirota

Published on Saturday, January 24, 2009 by the New York Times
More Than Charisma
by Bob Herbert

Published on Thursday, January 22, 2009 by The Washington Post
Calling a Time Out
by George McGovern

Swiss Bit

So we got out of the house over the last week or so, traveled up to Basel on Monday and Tuesday (and missed all the feverish inauguration coverage) and took the Max up to Les Mosses to ski the weekend before last. I hadn't been on skis in a dozen or so years, but was pleasantly surprised how it all came back to me.Not so pleasant was the stiff and sore muscles the next day.

Up in Basel they were thawing out from the unusually cold weather all of Switzerland experienced at the beginning of the month, and the Tinguely fountain was a delight of ice and Tinguely mechanical weirdness.

Motown 50


Here is the first of many Stevie Wonder tunes that are on my top 50.

Vimeo Valise

For all my Canadian friends suffering through another long and cold January here's a two minute instant vacation.

Ocho Rios - Jamaica: Timelapse from Brian Boudreau on Vimeo.

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I missed all the TV coverage, but after reading Obama's inauguration speech, this song started playing in my head.

Motown Top 50

Guess who turns 50 this year (aside from me and Barbie that is)? Yes, Hitsville USA! I'm going to attempt to pick my top 50 Motown hits over the next few months, a task I fear might be beyond my Libra sensibilities (can't I love them all the same?!?). I'll be posting some of that signature sound on a regular basis,in an effort to narrow it down and I'd like to hear which songs make your top 50 (or top 10). First out of the post 'My Girl':



"I've got sunshine on a cloudy day...."

Swiss Bit

I first read about the Kaufdorf car junkyard near Berne last summer and thought it sounded both enchanting and weird in that Swiss way.The site contains around 500 cars mostly from the 1930s to 60s has not been touched for more than 30 years. The local commune and canton would like to see the site cleaned up so that oils and solvents from the vehicles don't leach into the ground which prompted a local artist to put together an installation last summer, in hopes of raising public awareness and have the site deemed a historical monument.The wheels of Swiss bureaucracy grind exceedingly fine and slow and with any luck I'll get a chance to go see it next spring.In the meantime, I found this on Vimeo:

run out from Jörg Brönnimann on Vimeo.


There's also some lovely photographs over at The Artificial Owl.

Vimeo Valise

As if I don't already waste enough time, I wandered over to Vimeo today and discovered hours and hours of HD quality videos, animations, short films, documentaries and other bits of art.The Vimeo Valise will stop in here from it's travels and give us a taste from time to time. For starters, here's a little bit of fun:

Ooh Yeah - dancing headphones from beshart on Vimeo.

Short Cuts


It's been awhile since I posted any short films, so here's a wonderful piece from the incomparable Pixar.

Swiss Bit
Ice Faeries

Lovely little crystal formations all over the yard the last few days!

Swiss Bit





We had a snow/freezing rain storm on New Year's Eve and the temperatures have remained frosty enough for some natural ice sculpting to form.Pictures courtesy of 24 heures (photo credits online).

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Bill Withers doing a slower acoustic version of this r&b classic.

Bonus track:
A static clip of Fiona Apple rocking another great Bill Withers tune:

Random Stuff


So I haven't been posting much lately, due largely to being underpowered from the lack of sunlight, but I have done some interesting (all right, aimless) surfing and found this for starters. TinyEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.I love this widget and I'll probably put some more up over time.

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Gives one a little perspective.

LOLCat of the Month


Oldest LOLcat ever?

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The Hollies with one of my favorites.

The Ties That Bind


*sniffle*

Random Rant

As a rule, I don't respond to comments on other websites forums,although I usually read the 4 or 5 posted comments on the CBC.ca news site, if only to reassure myself that the majority of posters have too much time on their hands and far too little information.But today I read this post by one KLM409 and it got me to thinking just how wrong his little parable is.Here's his post:

What a load of crap. If anyone could look at things objectively, if they could strip away all the emotions, politics, history, and whacky religious beliefs, and bring it down to a level everyone understands, here's what we'd be left with:

There's a big guy who lives on the corner, he's a bit of a bully but he doesn't do much unless provoked. Every day on the way to school this little guy goes up to the big guy and kicks him in the leg. This goes on for a year until one day the big guy turns around and beats the snot out of the little guy.

Moral of the story: don't kick the bigger guy. I mean, come on, a five-year-old knows better than that.


This is how the parable should go:


There was a big guy, who once upon a time had been just another little guy, homeless, beaten and abused and he moved into the house where another little guy lived.The former little guy felt pretty comfortable and started throwing his weight around.The big guy told the little guy that had been living in the house prior to his arrival that he could stay in the house but only in certain rooms.The little guy wasn't allowed to use the orchard, the tree swing or the deep end of the pool and was given a little strip of the sandbox to play in. The parents who lived in the house felt that the big guy really deserved these perks, after all, he'd had a really tough time of it and they felt a little guilty that they hadn't done anything in the past.Mom and Dad tried to explain to the neighbours that it was all good and that the little guy living there didn't have it so bad, even though he wasn't allowed to travel freely from downstairs to upstairs or have the same unlimited access to what was in the fridge or the toolshed.
Eventually the little guy got tired of having the big guy tell him what to do and when to do it and started to poke the big guy with a small twig.The big guy would tolerate this for a time and eventually go out to the shed and get the sledgehammer and beat the living shit out of the little guy, as well as cut off his access to the fridge and the medicine cabinet.Mom and Dad would beg the two to settle their differences, but neither one took the sledgehammer away from the big guy and only begrudgingly let the little guy have a package of Bandaids.And they all lived unhappily ever after.

Press Leak
For those of you out there that feel Israel is 'justified' in bombing Gaza because of Hamas' ongoing homemade rocket attacks since the truce fell apart, please read the two articles currently at Common Dreams.org and pay attention to not only the disproportionate numbers of dead and injured between the Palestinians and the Israelis, but mark closely the very sneaky and quiet way Israel has been punishing the Gaza Strip for well...decades now.

Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by The Independent/UK
Leaders Lie, Civilians Die, and Lessons of History are Ignored
by Robert Fisk

Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
Gaza: Where Civilians Become Targets
by Andrea Becker

UPDATE: I was going to post this article:
Israel turns back aid workers en route to Gaza
... Activists aboard the boat were members of a group called the Free Gaza Movement
and were carrying about three tonnes of medical aid to the region, a passenger ...
www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/12/30/gaza-tuesday.html
that had appeared, however briefly on CBC.ca, but the link has now been replaced with a more 'balanced' and well hidden report of what happened to a boat load of 3 tonnes of medical aid trying to reach Gaza today.I must agree, preventing medical aid from reaching 1.5 million trapped and besieged Palestinians is certainly protecting the Israeli people.

But I digress

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

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Merry Christmas Everyone!

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I've had this stuck in my head for the last couple of days....la dee dee one two three...

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And on that note, here's some Swiss style trees.The one with the rubber ducks reminds me of stumbling upon this item online shopping one day.

We'll be decorating 'le sapin' tomorrow , but not with ducks I think.

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Squeeeee!
I watched this special in '68, on my knees in front of the TV, burning with jealousy that I wasn't one of the lucky girls seated at the feet of the King.

All Things Swiss


Last week we got quite a bit of snow here, 50 cm or so and one of these little fellas, called a fouine or stone marten, decided to weather the storm in the ancien grange out the back.I first saw him in evening around 6pm,I heard some scrabbling on the wooden staircase of the grange and thought it was one of the local kittehs.I made some noise and the fouine stuck his head through the railing and gave me a serious once over.He was surprisingly big, like an otter or the size of a large, long cat.Fouines have a reputation for being destructive, so much so that there is a 'fouine insurance' here in Switzerland.Apparently they have an appetite for the electrical cabling on cars (BMW's in particular). The kittehs were aware of its presence earlier, I suspect fouines have a strong scent and refused to come outside without me for 2 or 3 days.I saw him once more scuttling from the hedge to the grange and when the snow stopped he was gone.The kittehs did some cautious sniffing around and have declared the yard fouine free...for now.

It's snowing again.

LolCat of the Month

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That funny funny reefer man!

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I always knew Travolta stole those dance moves in Pulp Fiction from somewhere...here's the original from the totally hip Tom Jones.

Press Leak

What two words have Stephen Harper petrified and inflaming everyone west of Manitoba with talk of "unity" and "separtists"?
Coalition Government.
I'm hoping the GG does not call another election, they are costly and let's face it, if the government cannot stand up to a confidence vote in the first 90 days of its mandate then it should be dissolved.

The 'Tempest in a Teapot" coverage here at CBCnews.ca.
PM asking GG to suspend Parliament

Random Stuff

Monty Python launches the Monty Python Channel on YouTube.What a great idea!!!

heh heh.

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They broke the mold when they created this band....pity.

And a bonus: Dixie Chicken with Bonnie Raitt, Emmy Lou Harris and Jesse Winchester!!!!



My day is done now !

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Simply...perfection.

Press Leak

Published on Sunday, November 30, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

by David Michael Green




Here's a small excerpt from the above article posted over at Common Dreams and it is a fair example of the scathing indictment that the Boomer Generation has got to face up to:


You'd almost think we lived in a Stalinesque dictatorship of the most repressive sort, given our disinterest in using the tools readily available to us to replace or even stymie a government gone insane. Who would think, looking at the mass violent crime called Iraq committed in our name, and using our tax dollars - a crime that we stood by and watched happen - that we actually had the power to do something about this? Who would think that we live in country where a president can be impeached for as little as lying about getting a blow job? And yet we did nothing. Shame on us. My god, shame on us.

We could go on and on here. How broken is our educational system? How obscenely twisted is that corporate business enterprise masquerading as our healthcare system, a beast only incidentally concerned with keeping our country well? How messed up is American foreign policy in the Middle East, not even counting Iraq or Iran? How bankrupt are our societal values when everyone knows who Britney and Brad are, but probably not even one in ten could name the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court? How jive is our commitment to equality of opportunity (let alone actual equality), when we fund our schools through property taxes, with absolutely predictable results? How dishonest can one society be, when it deploys more mercenaries than soldiers, woefully abuses the National Guard and the Reserves, hides the bodies coming home in caskets, avoids a draft, cuts taxes and deficit spends, all to prevent citizens from having to think about a war that would instantly be massively unpopular in the absence of such ruses? How breathtakingly paranoid are we, and how devoid of the most basic skills of diplomacy, that we spend more money on ‘defense' than every other country in the world - about 195 of them - combined? How fundamentally deluded at the wholesale level are we that it would be effectively impossible for an atheist to be elected president? How shamefully lazy are we that - even in 2008 - a third of us still didn't bother to vote, and the rest of us tolerate an electoral system frequently designed to suppress turnout?

And so on, and so on. Like I said, we could go on and on here.

I recommend you take 10 minutes and read the full piece, even it makes you feel guilty (as it should).