Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

I like to think of myself as pretty musically eclectic: it’s not so much that I like one category of music or another, but rather that I like the good stuff. Which leads to lots of pockets of music that appeal to me throughout the entire space of music. There are areas I’ve kind of [...]

OK, my open tab situation has got to the point where I was forced to research new Firefox plugins. I might talk about that soon, since that old “favourite plugins” post is waaaay out of date, and due for an updating. Right now, though, I want to run through a bunch of these things, attaching [...]

(photo credit: www.iliaphotography.com) In the weeks (well, at this point I guess I could say “months” although it doesn’t feel like it) that I’ve been back in Ontario, I’ve had a number of encounters with things that were once regular parts of my life before my near-decade out East, and some have been shocking and [...]

It’s been a couple of months now since I finished the pre-move project of ripping all the CDs that hadn’t yet made it into digital form. I’ve been slowly cleaning up the metadata on them and moving them into the main collection, and then doing a lot of listening to things I haven’t listened to [...]

Since moving to Ontario, I’ve been buying my comics at The Beguiling. This, obviously, means that from time to time I have to take a run into Toronto to actually, you know, pick up the comics. So far I’ve managed to work these trips either into other shopping outings I’m taking to the city, or [...]

Am I the only one uncomfortable with “too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release” apparently being a legit category? Doesn’t that pretty much read as “we can’t prove you did shit, but we’re going to keep you in jail anyway”? I officially call bullshit on that. Of course it should come as no [...]

Yes, that’s right, a new Kleptones album was made available yesterday as a New Year’s present for us all. I’ve been a fan since A Night At The Hip-Hopera (and have mentioned The Kleptones several times here over the years) so you can imagine that this is very welcome news to me. Having listened to [...]

I have finished1 the ridiculous project of ripping all my previously unripped CDs before the move. This has resulted in the addition of exactly 9175 new MP3 files to the collection–a bump of about 1/3 in the overall size. That seems like a lot. In celebration of that seemingly endless effort being completed allow me [...]

Tom Wilson, doing one of the songs from the Lee Harvey Osmond project. ’nuff said.

Collected from here and there about the networks, for your amusement or edification, I would really like to believe the story of Denny & Peach is a vignette that accurately captures a bit of the wonder of the world. But even if it’s a fiction, it’s a lovely little one. Also, SWORD CANE! Same thing [...]

As part of the process of getting ready for our impending move, I’ve been engaged in a process of ripping all my audio CDs that hadn’t previously been ripped. This keeps leading to my having that “Oh, I haven’t though about you in a while” experience. I had that recently with Crass. Since I was [...]

I spent a lot of time last night looking at translations of Latin and Middle High German poetry. Oh, and listening to what I can only refer to as operatic renditions of the pieces. How did this happen? Well, actually, like many times when I start following a trail of weird connections, it all comes [...]

Yesterday was a marvelous mail day at the McLaren household. Through a confluence of mail karma–or possibly because our mailman seems to be skipping a day whenever he gets bored with the route–I had several books arrive from several different publishers. This will consequently be one long post full of book porn. If you’re not [...]

It’s been a little while since I did a music post, so let’s do a bigger than usual one, with nine tunes instead of my normal five. Tonight’s theme is pretty broad: music from some awesome female artists. I’m not going to try to narrow it more than that–it’s some good stuff, and hopefully there’ll [...]