Category Archives: PopCulture

FTRW 2009 – Burn Before Reading: A Hot List of Banned Books

Here's an article about FTRW that appeared in Xtra.ca (“Where Queers Conspire”).  They asked various Canadian literary types and free speech proponents to give their thoughts on some common and/or recently challenged books.  From the article's introduction:Canada is a censorious country. Our nanny state bans most hate speech (not the religious-based homophobic kind), stops erotica […]

FTRW 2009 – Margaret Atwood Debates Ducking Dubai While Being Challenged in Canada

What's FTRW without a couple stories about Peggy Atwood…  Her books are currently being challenged in a Toronto school by a parent who says: “…if students repeated some of the words from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in the school halls, they'd be suspended, so he questions why it is okay in the classroom.”  But […]

Happy Birthday Shea!

You don't look a day over 29 (okay, maybe one day over 29! )

Little Mosque on the Prairie & Indian Head, Saskatchewan

My hometown served as a backdrop for many of the exterior shots of the CBC comedy, “Little Mosque on the Prairie”. (Saskatchewan has a film tax credit that gives incentives for productions to shoot here and increases the benefit if you shoot a certain distance outside our cities.  Indian Head is just outside this zone, […]

Friday Fun Link – DeweyMusic (Feb 6, 2009)

The title of this site is perhaps a bit misleading, especially for us library types.  So  I'll let the original poster on MetaFilter take it away… “DeweyMusic makes browsing archive.org's Live Music Archive super easy.”(For anybody who doesn't know about Archive.org, I'd suggest reading its Wikipedia page or watching a talk given by the site's […]

A Few Mini-Movie Reviews (Avec Tangents)

– Just watched “The Reader” and after a slow start, it turned out to be quite an enjoyable film.  Plus I don't think it's a spoiler to mention that a helpful prison librarian plays a small part in the movie near the end – always a bonus to see librarians in films and a double-bonus […]

Friday Fun Link – Text to Music Generator (January 30, 2009)

“The P22 Music Text Composition Generator allows any text to be converted into a musical composition. This composition is displayed in musical notation and simultaneously generated as a midi file. The P22 Music Composition Font was proposed in 1997 to the John Cage Trust as an accompaniment to the John Cage text font based on […]

A Hypothetical Post From the Past

It's Oscar season again and that reminded me of a very hypothetical post I did about a year ago which stands today except for the first link in step three no longer working (but you can go to the second link for much the same effect.  Or so I've heard.)  On a completely unrelated note, […]

YouTube Now Muting Videos Which Use Unauthorized Copyrighted Music

About a year ago, I got a “Claim of Copyright” notice for the montage video I made of photos around Pace's birth using the song “Tippy-Toeing” by Loretta Lynne.  When I first read it, I thought the music label (Universal) was saying they were going to take down the video unless I could prove I […]

Mortality Movie Weekend

Last night, we watched Tim Burton's “Big Fish“.  I barely remember hearing about this movie when it came out for some unknown reason.  I only picked it up now because it was recommended a couple times in a thread I posted on AskMetafilter asking for suggestions of works about fathers and sons (a big theme […]