Barkerburgh

A few months back, my friend Greg, a guitarist with a flair for the above mentioned Rock’n Roll with a heavy metal bent, went to Toronto’s Necropolis cemetery for some moody album cover shots.

I was the art director and photographer. Greg brought his guitar.

I thought the cemetery closed at 8:30pm but they had just changed the closing time to 6:00pm for the winter, so when it began to rain and we decided to leave, we discovered we were locked in and had to climb over the high wrought iron gate in the rain.

Good times. Good times.

A delightful tongue-in-cheeky docu-drama about Mrs Mary Whitehouse, an early 60s English housewife and her reaction to the type of new ‘with-it’ programming on the BBC of the day, as presided over and encouraged by Sir Hugh Greene. It’s been on WNED, the local PBS channel before, but I missed it, finally seeing it this past weekend.

Julie Walters plays Mrs Whitehouse and Hugh Bonneville plays Sir Hugh. Their characters never meet:he refuses to see her, despite her many letters and his colleagues’ advice.

From the production company Wall to Wall’s own page about the film (with my link):

“Armed only with good Christian values and a sharp tongue, Mary Whitehouse’s^[wikipedia] mission was to stop filth entering family homes via the media. Remarkably in 1967, the epicentre of the most liberal decade in history, she forced the resignation of the BBC’s director general after a row over the Beatles’ use of the word “knickers”. This film shows us how she did it.”

The opening credits are run with a song playing that I guessed must be Flanders and Swann (thank you Leslie), and I was right. The refrain was a variation on “Pee, Po, Belly, Bum, Drawers”, a sort of humorous Tourette’s Lite petillant reference to the story itself. Interestingly, and relevant, the title of the song on their album, according to the wikipedia page, is ‘P** P* B**** B** D******’.

Mrs Whitehouse’s obituary from the Guardian.

“By The Associated Press

NEW YORK - Ashlee Simpson-Wentz and Pete Wentz are the proud parents of a baby boy, and they’re celebrating with some Bronx cheer.

Their representative says the pop and rock star couple have named their son Bronx Mowgli. The baby, born Thursday night, weighed seven pounds, 11 ounces.

Bronx is the first child for Simpson-Wentz, best known for the hit “Pieces of Me,” and Wentz, bassist for the platinum rock band Fall Out Boy. They were married earlier this year.”

That’s like being surnamed Barker and getting the Christian name Pudding, or Arf. Celebrities should not be allowed to name babies. It’s like they don’t go through the routine; Bronx? Bronze. Bronx Cheer. Brooklyn. Manhattan. Queens!!! Nope, not Bronx. Mowgli? No fuckin’ way. There’s just way too many. Let’s just call him Fr3d.

Flickr has a feature called ‘The Commons.’

From its homepage: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You’re invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.”

Just jump on in and click around. It’s very cool.

Well, it’s finally got cold enough outside for me to pull out my winter bedding and my big comfy pillows, which are generally too hot to use during the warmer months in our climate.

I haven’t slept at all well for a very long time, but with my window open a bit, 5-7 layers of blankets, and my big foam-core with chipped foam pillows, I have slept like a rock for several hours more than a few times over the last few weeks.

¡Qué raro!

Wordpress is seriously screwing up.
Rrrrr.
Yeah, this it gets right.

(I was trying tz gesknit a chulm to flurkensnur and it wodn’k snun a kroo kro. Jeex!)

I freakin’ love this Discovery Canada commercial. It’s based on an American version but ours is better.

I find myself humming the tune at odd moments, and even ones too.

I sing along with it and laugh and clap, then prowl the airwaves searching for it just to hear it again. Now though, I’ve downloaded it to hear as often as I like until I am sick to freakin’ death of it.

Boom-di-yada!

(Added Thursday, September 25, 2008, 17:55:
wikipedia entry
xkcd: XKCD Loves The Discovery Channel)

The Thirteenth Cylon, originally uploaded by David "A Thousand Words" Barker.

I took this in the local cemetery and as soon as I saw it full sized I realized what I must call it.

A Telegraph article on The Clbuttic Mistake (sic). Seriously.

So I’m walking along Gerrard and a parked car I’m walking right past starts to back up. This really annoying voice starts to talk out of the rear bumper. It’s a woman’s voice, with a vaguely Japanese accent, with the pitch and timbre I usually associated with anime Japanese schoolgirls, like in ‘The Cat Returns.’ ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]}

“This car is backing up. This car is backing up. This car is backing up. This car is - ” you get the picture.

I actually thought it should have a New York accent like Rosie the Robot Maid ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]} (Jean Vander Pyl ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]}) on ‘The Jetsons.’ ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]}

Gratuitous wikipedia ^[imdb] and imdb ^[wikipedia]  entries.