Guaranteed Fresh with Peter Projects

Peter Projects was one act that I missed out at Pop Montreal this year.

Music is a mix of indie pop electro hip-hop.

The EP has a theme of being squeaky clean.

Catchy and funky sampling.

Interesting collaboration with More Or Less, Masia One, Wordburglar, Laura Barrett and Maylee Todd for those that don’t know she sings in the Woodhands song Dancer.

Quote from Musebox about the EP:

“What’s particularly rad, though, is the packaging: the EP is available ONLY as a bar of soap! Weird, right?

It’s actually a download card imbedded into a handmade soap bar designed to look exactly like an iPod.

And since the download card is right in the middle, you kind of have to use the soap to get the music.”

I would love to purchase this unique EP.



Best tracks:

• Simply Fresh
• Unorthodox feat. More Or Less
• The Quest For Extreme Personal Freshness feat. Laura Barrett
• In Retail feat. Masia One, Maylee Todd and Wordburgular

This EP gets me all boucing with its funky beats.

As the title suggested his music is guaranteed fresh in my books.

Crossing my fingers if he makes a stop in Ottawa for a show.

[Via http://mwmusic.wordpress.com]

Buskers Pay Royalties

It is 10.45pm on a Monday night. I am tired. I’m listening to ‘Crazy Ol Dreams’ by Now You See Them… But I’m sick of it so now I’m listening to ‘Youthless’ by Beck.

In Canadia… specifically, Vancouver, buskers are being told that they may have to start paying royalties to greedy assholes the ‘Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada’ for the songs they play.

$1500 for a performance licence.

Music is not a product. It’s not something you buy and drink like Mountain Dew. It’s performance or listening to does not deprive a creator of creating anything. The second kids learnt to use Kazaa… LimeWire…  this was the second the idea of capitalizing off an artist’s creativity died.

Royalty payments are the last fingers on the edge of the cliff for the monopoly of bigwig record companies who hide behind the beurecratical misconceptions of what is fair and legal.

The music industry will die, but music never will.

[Via http://agorilladressedaschris.wordpress.com]

2nd Anniversary Spinning Adventure!

Our route from Dover, NH, USA to West Jeddore, NS, Canada (and back).We took the southern route on the way there, and the northern route on the way back.

Last week, for our second anniversary, Beth and I took a trip to Nova Scotia to take a textile spinning workshop. During the trip we stayed in two very nice Canadian B&B’s. We packed up after thanksgiving dinner and hit the road for St. Stephen, New Brunswick just over the US/Canada border to stay at the Blair House Heritage Inn.

Beth researches activities for Saturday in New Brunswick

The breakfast of pancakes and fruit was delicious. David, our host, made excellent tea. David hails originally from England, and worked as a hunting and fishing guide before taking over the bed and breakfast a few years ago. I really liked our room’s hand-shaped light fixtures:

From St. Stephen, we traveled to St. John, the capital of New Brunswick, which is on the coast. Apparently they really like their Saint names in the Canadian maritime provinces. The downtown area of St. John is populated by these stocky wooden sculptures of pedestrians:

can you spot Beth?

The wooden people even walk around in the mall!

After escaping the wooden Canadians we checked out the New Brunswick Museum for a few hours. We weren’t allowed to take pictures in the museum, but my favorite parts were the exhibits on ship building (New Brunswick was a major ship building center during the age of sail), and the Hall of Great Whales, where there were complete skeletons of several kinds of whale, and a 90% scale model of a North Atlantic Right Whale named Delilah.

From St. John we continued on to Musquodoboit Harbor  on the southern coast of Nova Scotia, where we were taking the weekend-long spinning workshop. There was going to be one other student, but she canceled due to swine flu. So, Beth and I had the entire workshop to ourselves!

I should explain how we ended up going to Nova Scotia for a spinning workshop. Having practiced drop spindle spinning for a few weeks, we decided we’d like to learn to spin with a wheel. We found the Spinner’s Loft online, and thought a weekend spinning workshop vacation in Nova Scotia would be a fun way to celebrate our anniversary. So we called up Leslie, the proprietor of the Spinner’s Loft, and found as luck would have it that she was available for the weekend of American Thanksgiving.

There were many wheels in the spinner's loft.

Leslie has been spinning for about 30 years, and has spun an amazing variety of fibers: wool, silk, flax (linen), horse hair, musk ox, dog hair, cat hair, organic cotton from tampons, and lion’s mane to name a few! Don’t worry, the lion was not sheared. The lion’s mane hairs were gathered from tree branches where they’d become stuck when the lion rubbed against the tree.

We began on the first day by learning about washing, picking and carding of fleece. I passed some Cotswold fleece through the triple picker, which was definitely the device most closely resembling a medieval torture implement. A triple picker consists of a cradle shaped bed of nails, and a nail studded pendulum that swings just above the bed. You feed the locks of wool in one end while swinging the pendulum-of-death, and an airy cloud of wool magically comes out the other end.

Cotswold fleece and the triple picker (right). Cotswold are cool looking dredlock rasta sheep (see photo).

We took the cloud over to the drum carder and learned to use it. This is basically a pair of giant round hairbrushes, and a crank to drive them. The drum carder produces a moderately tenuous bat of fiber, which can either be torn into strips along the “grain” to make roving or it can be rolled perpendicular to the grain to make little logs called rolags.

Next we did some drop spindle spinning “in the grease.” This means spinning wool that still has a fair amount of  lanolin in it. In our case, there was also some vegetable matter and maybe an occasional trace of sheep poo in it, too. The spindling was much easier with Leslie’s spindles than our tiny whorled homemade ones.

From the drop spindling warm-up, we moved on to learning to use the wheel. I think this post is long enough, so I’ll save the wheel stuff for another post.

[Via http://bpatricksullivan.wordpress.com]

Qype: Tim Hortons in London

London

The brand name Tim Hortons is ubiquitous in Canada. Driving along Canadian city main streets it seems a Tim Hortons outlet appears every several hundred yards. There are some 3000 branches, the majority located in Canada with around 500 in the U.S. They began in the 1960s initially only offering coffee and donuts. Now they do soup and sandwich style lunches offering combo deals as well as a range of bakery goods. Good coffee has been a consistently strong feature of the brand.

We were travelling east towards London, Ontario on Highway 401 and feeling like a bite for lunch stopped at Ingersoll, a fairly small town close by. The Tim Hortons Ingersoll branch is strategically located being one of the first retail premises encountered as you enter the town. We noticed people eating there who appeared to be truckers and delivery drivers.

My partner and I both had some chicken noodle soup which at 2.59 Canadian dollars [equivalent of 1.47 GBP] was very reasonable. The soup, served with crackers of course and not bread, was just a little greasy but still very good. I had a chicken sandwich too was quite wholesome. It had some vinaigrette dressing which I would have appreciated knowing about beforehand. In Canada the sandwich default tends to be with dressing rather than without as is the case in the U.K. We both had a tea as refreshment poured in a Tim Hortons container, a familiar sight in Canada.

The bill in total was moderate and the service, Canadian style, was once again civil and cordial.

Check out my review of Tim Hortons – I am grian1954 – on Qype

[Via http://grian.wordpress.com]

Joining the Mile High Club

Back in the day, taking to the friendly skies and belonging to the elusive Mile High Club meant one very specific thing. Nowadays, “getting lucky” in the air means receiving a bag of sesame snacks or pretzels. Since some airlines offer absolutely nothing in terms of complimentary food, the snack box provided by Porter Airlines during a recent Toronto to Montreal flight was more than a pleasant surprise.

The box features Porter’s cute raccoon mascot and slides open to reveal a small turkey sandwich (on whole wheat with a tasty spread), a pack of melba toast, and a Babybel cheese round.

Considering the flight was just over an hour and I was prepared for nothing, I was overjoyed to have this snack. The sandwich offered sustenance, I love cheese and the feeling of being fed, even a little bit, left me singing Porter’s praises. Plus, I was offered complimentary wine, beer or a soft drink served in an actual glass. This isn’t even taking into account the wonderful lounge with complimentary wireless internet access, bottled water, cookies, almonds and latte’s in their Toronto City Centre Airport.

Unfortunately, I’d be remiss not to note that on the way back, the flight attendant was crusty and didn’t hand out a snack box (my heart sunk), though we were given a choice of snacks, which included a bag of Terra Chips or biscuits. But I guess it’s better to get lucky once, than never at all.

Leave a comment and tell us about the best in-flight meal you’ve ever had.

[Via http://platoputas.wordpress.com]

Close Call

On Tuesday we all sort of split up, so I was left to my own devices, which in all sincerity is not a good idea.  So after completing my normal routine, I got a quick massage and again jumped on a motorcycle to make my way to MBK for some business.

I lost track of time and realized that I had to shoot back to help Mehdi train.  I was going to be late so again I jumped on a motorcycle.  It is so exhilarating to weave in and out of traffic, accelerating to smash through intersections, and sucking in diesel fumes.  Ok maybe that last point is not cool. Anyway we were weaving in and out of traffic and a pick up truck blindly switch lanes.  At the last minute the driver recognized his error and switched back, but he still clipped my shoulder with his side view mirror., torquing me hard in my seat.   This was followed by a litany of curses from my driver.  But I was ok, as long as my Oakleys and Maxpedition bag was still with me .  But it pays to have a good core, otherwise it could have been worse getting torqued like that in my seat.  However I really enjoy the motorbike, so I will still keep using it.

Dinner was amusing.  I had Persian food, in Thailand   Tomorrow will be cool as I booked in some time with a private coach to work some clinch.  This will be painful   Here is another video for you guys, please enjoy, Jd

[Via http://kombatarts.wordpress.com]

Why you need to reconnect your life power after a trauma

by Dr. Brent Lipke DC

When Christopher Reeve aka Superman fell and broke his neck, his brain didn’t become totally disconnected from his body, or he would have died, but he did become partially disconnected brain from body. 

When this happened, less of the LIFE power from his brain flowed to his body and his body began to degenerate.

The day after his injury, although he looked the same, he was as disconnected from that LIFE power as he was ever going to be. 

Years later, before he died, how did he look? Muscles atrophied, organs weakened, but his body was the same amount disconnected from his brain as right after the accident.

All that changed, was time passed. What happened to superman in a second happens to people on a smaller scale every day due to the traumas of life.  They slowly get disconnected from parts of their body leading to disease.  Chiropractors focus on reconnecting this LIFE power between the brain and body, restoring normal function.

To learn more about how a safe, gentle and scientific, Chiropractic adjustment could TRANSFORM your health contact your chiropractor.  If you are interested in a complimentary consultation, CALL  The Family Chiropractic Centre, 519-837-1234. 

I’m Dr. Brent Lipke, educating you to help you educate others !

[Via http://familychiropracticcentre.wordpress.com]