The Magpie Bjournal

K.D. Lang – Hallelujah, Crying

Jane Siberry – The Walking, Calling all Angels

Glenn Gould - Bach - Goldberg Variations: Aria, Bach - BWV 828 - 1 - Overture

The Tragically Hip – New Orleans is Sinking, Blow at High Dough, Poets

Sarah McLachlan - Ice Cream

Rush - YYZ, Tom Sawyer, The Trees

The Barenaked Ladies - One Week, Brian Wilson, Lovers in a Dangerous Time

Neil Young - Heart of Gold, Helpless, Needle and the Damage Done

Bruce Cockburn - Deer Dancing ’round a Broken Mirror, Mama Just Wants To Barrelhouse all Night Long, If I Had a Rocket Launcher

The Guess Who - American Woman

BTO - Taking Care Of Business

The Band - The Weight, Up On Cripple Creek, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Spirit of the West - Political

The Reostatics - Claire, P.I.N., Power Ballad to Ozzy Osbourne

Sarah Slean - Lucky Me, Pilgrim

Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi, Raised on Robbery, Woodstock

Oscar Peterson - Hymn to Freedom, C Jam Blues

Lenny Breau - The Claw, Georgia

The Cowboy Junkies - Sweet Jane, ‘Cause Cheap is How I Feel, Blue Moon Revisited

Blue Rodeo - After the Rain, Trust Yourself

Holly Cole - Little Boy Blue, Cry (If You Want To)

A cool version of two guys playing Boston’s “More than a Feeling” on Guitar Hero’s Expert Level, on a freeway overpass. It might make more sense if you just watch it.

Or maybe not.

In the interest of building some critters with more of a chance of surviving in the wild than a “legless X-Wing”, I’ve come up with these fellow creatures.

A being of few words, and the occasional orca-like shriek, the “Alien” is a quiet species that mostly keeps to itself and never gives the neighbours any reason to complain.

This slightly skittish, always vigilant, tri-hooved fellow is a pink “Pupeteer”.

This monopodular gumdrop-shaped chap is the shiny, megalomaniacal, “Dalek”.

“Mike Wazowski” is an enigmatic and animated imperfect sphere, fond of modern dance.

Uppity Torch Bearer pulled from Olympic run.

It was Billy Dee Williams who got me thinking about the Star Wars films again. Not Billy personally, mind you, it’s not like we hang out or anything. But that would be so cool.

Anyway.

I have a nifty new computer that is capable of doing many dark and arcane things at once. As a result, I can now play some new games with all of the quality settings pushed beyond maximum.

This is nice.

I picked up the latest incarnation in the Command & Conquer series. Real-time strategy, resource allocation, pretty things exploding. Wash, rinse, repeat. You may even know the drill.

Anyway.

Between the battles, you are giving briefings by actual actors playing out short scenes. The first dude you recognize is Michael Ironside. He’s the guy who took over from Roy Scheider on seaQuest after Sheider left the show because it had become “too silly”. Next up, we see Grace Park, Boomer from Battlestar Galactica. I don’t know what she’s doing, but she’s awfully cute doing it.

Later in the game, we find out that Billy Dee Williams is the president of the United States. This does not bode well, as, to the best of my recollection, most big disaster movies have black presidents. Still, Lando was my favourite positively portrayed African American character in the original trilogy…

Maybe I’m just reading too much into things.

If you have ever participated in any sort of debate concerning violence in video games, this review of “Manhunt” may be of interest. It might also appeal to socially maladjusted Marylin Manson listening twelve-year-olds with painted black fingernails and gobs of eyeliner.

Oddly enough, the whole thing kind of dovetails into my previous “Will Wheaton on parenting” post.

Writer, poet, photographer and all-around cyber dude Will Wheaton offers some excellent parenting advice.

With computers getting faster and smaller and closer to taking over the world and all, it’s nice to see a game that really doesn’t take advantage of any of that: Compromise Tetris.

If you were ever a Tetris player, playing two simultaneous games of Alexey Pajitnov’s classic using a single set of controls will make for a compromisingly interesting new game.

There’s a dude out there who is trying to make top level in World of Warcraft, playing a pacifist character. Essentially, he’s trying not to kill anything or anyone in the game world. I like this idea, partly due to my natural pacifistic tendencies, but mostly because it seems to run contrary to the game idea. And I like that. A lot.

I guess that if running contrary to the game ideal means dashing about not killing this and not murdering that, it makes it all about pacifism again. Which is cool.

“How well do you know your famous first lines?” is a fun little game for all you lit-heads out there.  Offering three levels of difficulty, (Lit 101, Grad School English Degree, and Professional Book Reader) the game invites you to identify a series of famous books by their opening lines.

The rest of Between the Covers Rare Book Inc.’s site ain’t bad either (on account of all them rare books an’ stuff).  Where else are you going to find an original 1819 copy of Norman Lindsay’s “The Magic Pudding: The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his Friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff”?