How convenient...

So... the Spengler Cup is being played right now in Switzerland. It's basically a club-invite hockey tournament; the oldest in the world. Generally, it's European hockey clubs, plus a 'Team Canada' in the tourney. Here's the kicker. Because of the lockout, Hockey Canada wants to be able to field a team of non-NHL players in the 2006 Olympics, so the Spengler Cup is a test-bed for a non-NHL team. The other clubs, however, have no such restriction.

On a related note, kudos to Team Canada (where the player closest to the NHL is Alex Auld, and the team includes erstwhile Oilers fourth-liner Domenic Pittis), for being 2-0 so far, and beating, today, the host HC Davos team which includes Bruins superstar Joe Thornton, league leading scorer Rick Nash and Hart and Art Ross winner Martin St. Louis.

The christmas message wasn't doctored... I just didn't upload it til the next morning

inuyasha the anime right? It is on YTV and is super popular with the tween, anime fan set right now. Apparently we are not that much farther behind the Japanese broadcast of the show. Only a few weeks at the most. That doesn't answer any questions but some more useless info to put away for later.

Google Zeitgeist (Top Searches). Not that I have a problem with it, but can someone explain Bob Marley as the #7 most searched man? And why is inuyasha the most popular Canadian search?

Also, based on local search queries, apparently the most Google-d day involves waking up at a Holiday Inn, going shopping at Walmart, hitting the Spa, grabbing a Pizza, buying Real Estate, heading to the YMCA before going to the Doctor.

That MMFT site is too nerdy for me! I ban myself from ever going back to that site ever again! I posted one little thing and then suddenly they all draw out their knives and start going crazy like I did something wrong. I just posted: "Have you ever had a idea and then someone else, someplace else uses your idea but in a slightly different form? How was your reaction?" Then one bastard is like: "You are a arrogant person to think that people take or steal your ideas. If you are such a creative genius then why can't you think up better ideas. If you can't then your just full of it." And I'm like what the hell just happened? I didn't say I was a creative genius! I just posted up a topic about subconcious idea exchange! I know every idea has pratically all been done, it is the interpretation and variation under someones influence that makes it different. So why the hell do these nerds have to attack me? Can they sense I'm not nerdy enough? I'm not that hardcore into mechas as they are?

Well, Beck, I thought it was rad. Haven't checked out Delicate Art yet, but many thanks for it. Also, I love the (obviously doctored) christmas message at 12:25 am.

Yay I have sound, and a diminishing number of viruses!

Hey Par that RSS feed is rad, and "The Devil's Chaplain" is great - thanx.

Visions of sugarplums shall commencing dancing in my head in T-minus 30 seconds.

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A freshly nuked computer... now to fix everything anew

I just completed the Exclaim! Annual Reader's Poll. All in all, this year mostly sucked my asshole in terms of albums. Last year, there were like 3 or 4 albums that I could consider life-changing, but this year I can barely think of 1 or 2. Nonetheless, here's how 2004 stacked up for me (as according to my reader's poll entry):



Pop/Rock Album of the Year
The Go! Team
Thunder Lightning Strike

It's difficult to figure out how to classify the Go! Team, but the overwhelming desire to
make comparisons with the Jackson 5 or an obscure Charlie Brown soundtrack calls for a
kitschy pop category of some sort despite how hard these penny-whistle and schoolyard
double-dutch anthems rock. An impressive debut album, this collection of hip-hop-scotch-rock
compositions will have you out of your seat in seconds flat. Whether or not you'll
subsequently bust a queue red-rover style or shake your ass to the beat is a question I
haven't yet resolved. One way or another, this album ranks among the best of the must-haves
in the ecclectic pop collections of 2004.





Punk Album of the Year
Hot Cross
Fair Trades and Farewells

These days I don't even know what the fuck punk IS anymore. It used to be you could classify
music as punk if it somehow fit into the mold of that original punk-rock triumverate of the
Clash/Ramones/Sex Pistols. But now you have all this SoCal Fat Wreck Chords stuff and all
that pop-punk crap for skate kids with spastic cases of attention deficit disorder. And it
really didn't make matters any easier when Sunny Day Real Estate came along with a sound
which somewhere along the line turned into this emo trendwhore thing, and that whole
post-punk phase where everyone wished they were Fugazi (though promising) ultimately didn't
help us get back to the root of the punk classification problem either. All of this just
culminated with an influx of metal which gets you a new "hardcore" category that has nothing
to do with what the term "hardcore" used to mean in the first place. Is it just me, or is
this entire genre one big fucking mess these days? What does one so-called punk band have to
do with another anymore? Jack all, as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, this unruly
miscellany of sounds never fails to push the boundaries of music. Hot Cross' 2004 release,
Fair Trades and Farewells, picked up where At The Drive In left off. While the post-ATDI
offspring of Sparta and the Mars Volta push off in somewhat diverging directions, Hot Cross
took up the torch and plowed straight ahead to produce an album that is easy to imagine as the
successor to ATDI's Relationship of Command. I think in order to make sense of this
whole damned punk genre today, you gotta make little family trees that go something like
this:

Drive Like Jehu, Saetia, ATDI, Hot Cross.

Considering the impressive track record of the bands listed in this branch, you might wanna
keep tabs on Saetia's grand-children here. Well on second thought, maybe that whole
family-tree metaphor makes things a bit incestuous considering how Greg Drudy (drummer for
Hot Cross) originally WAS a member Saetia back in the day. Okay then, fuck it. Forget I
ever even tried to make sense of this punk shit. I'm done here. Just get that Hot Cross
album and don't ask questions that can't be answered.





Electronic Album of the Year
Wolf Eyes
Burned Mind

I'm not sure if this would normally be classified as an "electronic album" although clearly
it is. I'd be more inclined to file this under "punk" at the record store myself, but that's
besides the point. Here's what IS the point:

In the long history of music, no one has ever successfully written a song called "Stabbed In
The Face" that makes you feel like you're actually being stabbed in the face while listening
to it.

Until now, that is.





Metal/Hardcore Album of the Year
Blood Brothers
Crimes

While all the hipster indie-kids are making a big fuss over Arcade Fire and the latest Modest
Mouse, the genre that really did the most to push musical concepts this year was hardcore.
Whereas the whole dance-punk phenomenon had mostly been played out only months after its
inception (with the notable exception of a few bands like !!! and LCD Soundsystem), hardcore
was busy paving the way for a new musical gestalt entirely based off of distressingly
dischordant harmonies in complex polyphonies that have not been arranged so intelligently
since the passing of JS Bach. I kid you not. Cursive did it last year with their
brilliantly dischordant "the Ugly Organ", and this year the dischord was reprised thanks to
such hardcore acts as the Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge, but in 2004 the Blood Brothers
did it best. What makes the Blood Brothers' latest album Crimes so innovative is their
obvious ability to mutilate the concept of standard Westernized scales. Let's face it, North
America has become culturually stagnant in the wake of chromatic progressions. It's been
done to death already. In 2004, the Blood Brothers were but the best example of a handful of
bands that are actually attempting to reinvent music as we know it.

This can only mean good things.





Hip-Hop Album of the Year
K-OS
Joyful Rebellion

I'm perfectly aware that I'm not even remotely qualified to answer the hip-hop section, but
damn... that K-OS album was as catchy as the HIV!




Folk/Country/Blues Album of the Year
Johnny Cash
My Mother's Hmyn Book

Country music on the radio these days is bullshit. Thankfully we have a few champions like
Neko Case and Corb Lund who remind us what country music is supposed to be. But nobody did
it better than Jonny Cash. He did it better then, he did it better now. It didn't matter
whether or not he wrote the songs he performed; he made every last one of them his own.
Whether or not anyone put out a better country album this year is irrelevant anyway; none of
those albums would exist without Cash's influence. Properly honouring the legacy of the Man
in Black requires at least this much.





Year's best TV collection on DVD:
Roswell, season I

This is the only the show on television that I never missed an episode of. What more can I say?





Year's best film (movies that were theatrically released in 2004):
Spider-Man 2

Aw, what the hell... There's a lot of good independent films out there that totally deserve
this, but I love Spider-Man too much for that shit.