Or at least my favourite, anyway. (Life lessons, free of charge) — There has been a lot of silly talk about balloons in the sky lately. I’ll come back to that in a minute. Comedian Bill Burr, whether you think he’s funny or you don’t, describes the perfect joke as one that “has zero fat on it, where every last word of…

It fixes everything. And everyone already knows that. — But. I’m going to write about it anyway. I live in a city. It’s a big city alright, though not a huge one, in the big global picture, but it is definitely an urban agglomeration of concrete, steel, glass, roads, trains and bridges on the northeastern edge of the roiling…

Globetrotters March Writing Prompt / Challenge — Green Around the World — This month, presumably because it includes the yearly Festival of the Patron Saint of Ireland / the Bringing of Christianity to the Emerald Isle / Reason to cut loose at the tail end of winter, the fine folks at Globetrotters have exhorted us to detail and describe our encounters with…

There are many ways to listen to music. And that’s a good thing. — I’ve been writing a series called “You Need to Listen to This Song” for just over a year now. It doesn’t get the same amount of traffic as my non-music articles, but if I have a niche that I most enjoy, that’s it. At the bottom of each article, in…

Or at least I am. — Not concerts, shows. That’s what actual live music fans call them, apparently. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve been going to them since I was a slip of a lad at 14, when I saw Sting in his post-Police glory in 1988. I even wrote about it. What Was the First Live Show You Went To? Mine was Sting. July 18, 1988 / BC Place Stadium / Vancouver BCmedium.com Since…

How can the quality of our interaction be connected with my ability to keep up with everything on TV? — It has happened to us all. It’s annoying but you just have to accept it, the fabric of society is complex. How often when someone begins describing a show to you do you say that you haven’t seen it and this is followed by the predictably breathless freak out along…

Heavy Rotation — Is Love, White Lies (Ritual, 2011) — Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that, one way or another, got incessant airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotations that a particular record was given on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into…

Does it still do to you now what it did then? — The yearly Hollywood celebration of excellence / self-high five / circle jerk known as the Oscars has come and gone and to be truthful, it barely raised a blip on my radar screen. I’d only seen one of the movies that attracted the attention of the esteemed Academy and its…

They did what they could with what they had. But even the best can’t touch the master. — David Bowie. What’s the first song that comes to mind when you hear that name? “Diamond Dogs,” “Let’s Dance,” “Young Americans,” “The Man Who Sold the World,” “Blue Jean,” and “Dead Man Walking” are just a few that come immediately to mind for me. But another question when talking about…