http://www.dovemanfootloose.com

From the BBC: South Africa’s Chinese Reclassified as “Black”

we here at speakpeppery would like to congratulate lil wayne on selling one million copies of “tha carter III” in one week. good work wayne! your album is amazing. so is your guitar playing, and your un-autotuned singing.

“my picture should be in the dictionary
next to the definition of definition
because repetition is the father of learning
and son i know your barrell burnin’”

Hi from Toronto. I’m here for about a week, while Gray builds some outdoor stone fireplaces for some friends of ours (not for free though!!!) and I do some journalism in a delightful attic office. That’s something my former editor used to say that both grossed me out and strangely appealed to me: “Let’s do some journalism!” Or sometimes, “Who’s ready to do some journalism?”

I’ve been reunited with my bicycle here in Toronto. Toronto’s not the world’s most sexy city, but I must say that it’s a first-rate bicycling city. Maybe I’m just saying that because I’ve been living in S. America for a while, where biking on the street is horrifying for me to even contemplate. But anyway, I love biking here. Canadians are generally pretty cheerful and Canadians on bikes are even more so.

We’re house-sitting an antiseptic condo in a highrise at the edge of Lake Ontario. It’s not really my steez but beggars cannot, as they say, be choosers. Our first night there I was kind of reeling at the clean-smoothness of the entire environment, at the efficiency with which you can basically inject yourself like a shiny little pinball into a whole “lifestyle” when you move into one of these condos. I was like, “dude, where’s my self?” Then I looked over at my filthy luggage and leaky toothpaste tube that was making easy work of messing up the pristine bathroom sink, and I remembered.

Anyway in the midst of this stainless steel and frosted glass overload, I went out onto the balcony. I heard some kind of live music coming from 23 floors below. After a few moments I realized that it was Billy Bragg performing across the street at the Harbourfront Centre, and the sound was so good I could hear the lyrics to “Greetings to a New Brunette” with stunning clarity. I gathered from the crowd response that it was a good concert.

 

Time exposure shots of crowds in St. Petersburg, Russia, by Alexey Titarenko. Courtesy of bldgblog (care of Algomantra).

hi everyone,

as you can see– the old site is down, and we are currently replacing it with this monstrosity of boringness.

by all appearances, our old site was hacked by someone using it as a platform for a mass-mailier. worst of all, they appear to have deleted everything in our “content” file, which included all of our IMAGES. gasp. i’m really bummed about this. (music and movies were stored in a different folder and were spared).

there is a possibility that the web host (dreamhost) has backups.  for now, we’re stuck with this.  no plug-ins for now.  i’ll try to make things more lively in the coming week.  for everyone else who blogs here, feel free to add some decorations…

sigh.

g

I’m coming home to USA from Brazil soon. It’s been a truly lovely six months in S. America. Lots of good work done, also lots of not-working. I drank the best coffee of my life and also the coldest beer of my life. Here’s the song I always think of when coming home from far away, one of my old faves, Flying Home. This one is a swing version performed by Lionel Hampton and his band. Enjoy the accompanying WWII images. My favorite version is performed by Illinois Jacquet but I couldn’t find a good one. [youtube]uRQ1QL4Z9YI[/youtube]