Cars

I snapped this picture while skiing near West Hawk Lake in the Whiteshell just before Christmas. The interesting thing is that, while I haven't spent a lot of time in the Whiteshell, it seems every time I do I see a rusted-out 1930s (I'm guessing) car. I've probably seen 5 cars in similar condition, including the last time I was in the area, on the Mantario trail in 2003. It just seems odd to me.

Also from the trail:
When you're on 2m-long cross-country skis and haven't been in a while, it's not the most comforting sight. Turns out that hill wasn't too bad though, although there were some monsters the next day.

And from the "town" of West Hawk Lake:
These two were from a too-tame herd of deer. This is the closest I could manage to get for a picture but some were like dogs and would come right up and sniff you. That can't be good for anybody.

Viral Marketing

The Internet has changed a lot of things. The way products are marketed is just one of these. Spam, for instance, is a hugely successful marketing technique that, despite being somewhere between a minor and major annoyance (depending on who you ask) generates billions of dollars in revenue.

Still, people hate it. So you can imagine my surprise last week when I received word of the upcoming Arcade Fire album by way of fake spam. I received the following email on Thursday:

is it ne0n Bi*ble? She likes it
F. Murray Conscription Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 4:09 PM
Reply-To: "F. Murray Conscription"
To: removed

You and her both are looking for NE0N BIB*LE; Revolutionary safe new Program really works. Count on Time to work it out--*wink* *wink*

1-866-NEON-BIBLE ext. 7777

how doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people how is she become as a widow she that was was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary she weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.But Thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth if obedience is

bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives not by bread alone.

But dost Thou know that for the sake of that earthly bread the
spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will strive with
Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, "Who can
compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!" Dost
Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the
lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin;
there is only hunger? "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!"
that's what they'll write on the banner, which they will raise against
Thee, and with which they will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple
stood will rise a new building; the terrible tower of Babel will be
built again, and though, like the one of old, it will not be finished,
yet Thou mightest have prevented that new tower and have cut short the
sufferings of men for a thousand years; for they will come back to
us after a thousand years of agony with their tower. They will seek us
again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for we shall be again
persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to us, "Feed us,
for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven't given it!" And
then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes the
building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name,
declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they
feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as
they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our
feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will
understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for
all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able
to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can
never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and
rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat
again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever
sinful and ignoble race of man? And if for the sake of the bread of
Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the
millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not
have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the
heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the
great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the
sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the
great and strong? No, we care for the weak too. Tell me LORD am I the


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I initially thought that this was one of the few renegade emails that had managed to sneak through the otherwise nearly inpenetrable Gmail spam filter, and reported it as such. It wasn't until the next day, when I started reading on various blogs that "Neon Bible" had been chosen as the title for the new Arcade Fire album that I went back and re-read this last message.

The message text itself contains several elements of typical spam: a few suggestive phrases ("She likes it", "You and her both are looking for NE0N BIB*LE", "Count on Time to work it out--*wink* *wink*"); a phone number; and then a torrent of real, but generally meaningless text designed to out-wit the spam filters.

The text in this particular case is rather interesting: first, rather obviously, a biblical quotation from Lamentations 1:1-2 (King James Version), and then a longer quotation from the visit of the Grand Inquistor in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, one of my favourite books. Arcade Fire fanboys are conspiracy nuts will no doubt spend hours analyzing lyrics and trying to find some sort of links between the passages and the albums title, which may or may not be a reference to the John Kennedy O'Toole novel of the same name.

For me, I was just excited to hear a track from the new album. You can hear it yourself by calling the number and extension above, or by clicking below. The song, "Intervention", isn't new and a sparser version of it has been available online for a long time, but the "Neon Bible" edition has a whole different feel to it, with massive church organ, back-up chorus, strings, and holiday chimes.

Arcade Fire - Intervention [new version]

Arcade Fire - Intervention (live on KCRW) [old]

So is fake spam a successful marketing technique? It got me talking . . .

update: This song is available now on iTunes, sort of. There's a track on iTunes called "Intervention", but listen to the 30-second clip and it is clearly something different. Turns out it is a song called Black Wave/Bad Vibrations. Check out "Win's Scrapbook" at the band's website for details. I paid my $0.99 and listened to the song, which is pretty good and more like the Arcade Fire you and I are used to.

In case you think I got some kind of scoop here, I read it somewhere else first.

New track: The first official single from the album is called "Black Mirror" (mp3).

Ear in review

A friend of mine is organizing a year-in-review mix CD party. We did it last year as well, along with some Texas Hold 'Em poker, which I dominated, due to far too many hours spent watching the World Series of Poker on TV (It got so bad that I was able to identify several of the players by name).

Putting together my list of songs last year was easy. Having spent a good part of the year living in close proximity (30-minute walk) to a busy music venue in a major city, I saw a good number of shows so I merely picked one of my favourite songs from those bands that I had the chance to see live in 2006. So this is what I came up with:

1. Pilot - The Notwist
2. Black History Month (Alan Braxe and Fred Falke remix) - Death From Above 1979
3. Don't Run Our Hearts Around - Black Mountain
4. Modern World - Wolf Parade
5. Superconnected - BSS
6. My Heart Is An Apple - Arcade Fire
7. Proposition 61 - Most Serene Republic
8. The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead - Final Fantasy
9. Soft Revolution - Stars
10. Andvari - Sigur Ros
11. Cue The Strings - Low

This year, it's not so easy. The only show I saw was Final Fantasy back in September, I didn't buy a lot of new CDs, and there weren't a lot of artists that I got excited about hearing for the first time. If I just pick the songs that I got most excited about in '06, there'd be a lot of Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado.

My favourite foreign language music blog is doing a more ambitious, 50-track year in review, with a few good selections on Day 1 and Day 2. In particular, you can expect to find some Junior Boys and MSTRKRFT among my favourite 10 or 15 tracks from this year. I also really like the track "When You Go Out" (mp3) from Sebastien Grainger, the non-MSTRKRFT half of DFA1979. I enjoyed LCD Soundsystem's 45:33, but I don't want to take up two-thirds of a mix-CD with one track.

So perhaps 2006 has been a dancy kind of year. Which would be a return to my roots, in a way, to the days when I first started buying music and I thought the only stuff that was cool was from the Hackers soundtrack.

Knee deep

I received a letter in the mail the other day setting a date (29 January 2007) for surgery to reconstruct my torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). This has seemed like a long time coming, with the surgery to fall almost exactly a year after I hurt my knee for the first time.

So here's a timeline of knee-related events from the past year.

End of January 2006: Hurt my knee playing ultimate. Extended, guy falls on leg, hurts a bit (not a lot).

End February 2006: Knee feels OK, play another ultimate game, hurt again (making a turn, no contact). Hurts a lot.

A week later: Go to the doctor (Pan Am Clinic) for the first time. Schedule an MRI.

Every few weeks, March-April 2006: Appointments with doctor at clinic. Each time, told: "Come back in 2-3 weeks and see if anything has changed". Took off my pants a lot.

First week of May, 2006: Had MRI. I'd highly recommend it. You enter into a sterile room (not sure why it needs to be so clean), get partially inserted into a large tube wearing borrowed hospital shorts, receive earplugs to shield yourself from the aural symphony of pulses and hums that I wouldn't be surprised to hear at the New Music Festival, and 20-minutes later you're out. done.

Two weeks later: Get MRI results. Knee messed up. Schedule appointment with surgeon

Late June 2006: Appointment with surgeon. Book surgery. Expected wait 6-7 months.

June-present: Wait.

November 30, 2006: Receive information package scheduling surgery.

Future dates

January 29, 2007: Surgery.

Two weeks following: On crutches.

3 months after surgery: Allowed to resume cycling, running on level surfaces, other such activities. Basically same condition as I've been since about March.

6 months after surgery: More or less recovered. Allowed to re-start "start/stop" activities, that is, most sports.

All in all, it has felt like a lot of waiting, which would be more problematic if I was waiting for something like a new hip or heart surgery. But given that I'm relatively young and my problem relatively minor, it's not such a long time.

What have I learned?

1. Ultimate (frisbee, a disc sport) isn't that great. This isn't entirely a conclusion based on pent-up bitterness from injuring myself playing such a low-impact, non-contact, friendly sport. Instead, I make the call because I don't miss it. I miss playing soccer, even though I haven't played since early 2004. Why isn't it great? Forced co-ed meaning a wide gap in speed and size between players. No referees meaning constant bickering about rules which few players completely understand. Cult ethic which I never really got into. Lack of running, fluidity, compared to soccer.

2. Having a major knee injury isn't that bad. Apart from being prevented from playing sports I may or may not have played anyway, it didn't change my life much, aside from having a convenient excuse to skip out on some activities I might not want to do. I walked, canoe-tripped, and cycled more than I have at most any other points in my life, and hauled Christmas trees around in the last few weeks without noticing it much. I missed out on running the half-marathon this year, which will probably have to wait until 2008 unless I can find an event somewhere in the region in fall.

3. MRIs are cool (see above). I especially liked when I was shown the images on a set of fancy wide-screen monitors, as the doctor rotated the image this way and that.

So now you know.