We really need Batman

It seems Vancouver is desperate for a super hero, so much so that we have sent 20 super lights up in to the sky. We have left the symbols out, as Canadians don’t want to offend and are willing to be equal opportunity hero recipients.

Apparently we need 20 of them and are not fussy about who.

This is actually all part of the Olympic hype. Some fancy artist designed the concept and asked people to submit patterns via a website. They change about every 10 seconds and are pretty cool (Though very distracting when driving towards them).

The city is well and truly in hype mode now and I am a little sad we are going to be missing it, but really excited to be going home for a few weeks. I hope to get downtown for a walk around and take some pics this week.

Vancouver Time Lapse

This is doing the viral thing around Vancouver at the moment, everyone is watching it cause it is pretty cool.

Take the time and let it download in HD

Maybe this is why the average house price is 9.6 times the average household income. Bummer of an expensive place to buy a house, but what a great city.

Greatest albums of the decade

It’s that time when everything things seems to come in the form of a countdown. In keeping with the trend I have decided to do one of my own, with my personal greatest albums of the decade.

Here are my self-imposed rules:

1. Must be originally released between Jan 1, 2000 and Dec 31, 2009

2. Cannot be a live album (Unless no studio equivalent exists)

3. No Greatest Hits albums

4. An artist may only feature once.

But aside from the rules, it is also important to consider what makes an album great? I think my primary criteria is that it must stand the test of time, meaning I think I will enjoy listening to this album in another 10 years time. Unfortunately based on experience, this pretty much eliminates all my Christian music and almost all hip hop/rap.

So here they are:

10. Jay Z – Black Album. The only rap album on my list, I don’t listen to it often but when I’m in the right mood nothing compares.

9. Jack Johnson – Brushfire Fairytales. So simple, just great summer relaxing music. I think it could have been a lot better if all his subsequent albums weren’t exactly the same.

8. The Raconteurs – Broken boy Soldiers. It’s typical Jack White, which is to say it is not typical of anything else.Powerful kinda old school rock, but new and fresh at the same time.

7. Ben Harper & The Blind Boys From Alabama – There Will Be a Light. The beauty of the blind boys voices combined with the rawness of Ben Harpers voice make this a pleasure to listen to anytime.

6. Dave Matthews Band – Big Whisky & The GrooGrux King. In 10 years time this might be higher up the list, but it just hasn’t had that time to settle and compete against their other albums.

5. Killers – Hot Fuss. O.K. so it’s cheesy Vegas rock, but I love it and every time I hear it I sing along. This is one of my all time fav driving albums.

4. Evanescence – Fallen. Her voice, that’s all. One of the greatest voices ever, when she is singing you pay attention. (By the way, the only female singer on the list)

3.  Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head. It really could have been any of their albums, they are all great I just had to pick one and to me this has the most truly great songs, Though Viva la Vida can put up a good case for being the most complete album.

2. Fat Freddys Drop – Based on a true Story. New Zealand music at it’s best. I think of home, I think of summer and I think of little else. I am relaxed and happy when listening to this. This album is musically brilliant because of the patience shown, it is not formulaic and that is why they will always struggle to be mainstream outside of NZ.

1. John Mayer – Continuum. Yes I know he is a jerk, but what an amazing album. Song after song makes me marvel at his skill with a guitar, his ability to write lyrics that aren’t just churned out from a pop factory, they way he brought blues back in to main stream music. From start to finish, this has been played on my ipod more than any other album and I’m sure will be for many years to come.

So there you have it. It wasn’t a list based on what anyone else likes, but simply on what I enjoy and will continue to enjoy. What’s your list?

Other notable mentions include: James Morrison, Lifehouse, U2 and the Foo Fighters. The first 2 just didn’t quite cut it, the second 2 released their best stuff prior to 2000 and while great in this decade, not quite great enough.

Happy New Year – Let’s fly a car

This guys is really quite insane . . . and I love it!

Actually speaking of flying a car – it’s 2010, wasn’t I supposed to have one of those by now? I was lied to by Hollywood in my youth.

Haiku for lint

Belly button lint

Stuck in that hole every day

And you’re always black

Hmmm, it’s possible I might be a little tired this evening. But these things confuse me at night and to be honest, sometimes they will keep me awake.

Why is there always lint in my belly button? Seriously, always – I swear there was a day we spent on the beach and I didn’t wear a top all day but I still had belly button lint. Why?

Any why is it always black? I can wear a white shirt, a green short, and orange shirt (if I owned one) and still the belly button lint would be black.

If it is coming from my shirts, why don’t I ever have holes forming around that part f my shirt. If the friction is significant enough that it is drawing fabric from something, into this magnetic force that is my belly button, why do shirts never wear out in that area?

Do fat people get belly button lint? Are they aware of it? If you were to pull back the layers around a fat persons belly button, would it reveal years of well preserved lint which could then be wound in to a ball of wool and re-knitted in to a garment? If this was the case, how much weight would they lose?

O.k. I thought maybe jotting these musings down might clear my head, but I think it is going to be another sleepless night for me.

oh, and p.s. Yes I am aware that I pushed the bounds of the haiku a little by using you’re instead of you are thereby breaching the 5 syllable rule – but I don’t really care.

I forgive Tiger

My first reaction was disbelief, then disappointment. I have always admired Tiger for his ability to live a life so clean that he is able to keep his name and his face out of the media, then this comes up and it shocked me and made me sad.

Part of that sadness is related to the fact that I really want to support him, I really want to be a fan but it is now going to be a struggle to see him and hope for the best for him after what he did.

I realised something today though; while he has negatively effected my opinion of him – he has hurt himself a lot more than he has hurt me and so I really have nothing to hold against him. So I forgive him for that little bit of wrong that he has done me by misleading me.

Our reality is that he has hurt his family more than most of us can imagine and that is the saddest thing of all.

What is almost as sad is that we won’t leave them alone to sort it out. The message the media and in fact society wants us to believe is that this whole thing is not right unless his wife leaves him and the world hates him enough to make him hide in shame for the rest of his life. That is the wrong message and we should not buy in to it!

The real solution here is for us to forgive him for the small indiscretion he has committed against us by misleading us to believe he is a perfect person, and allow him and his wife freedom to reconcile and allow Tiger himself to seek help to become the husband and father that he needs to be. Maybe he won’t do it, but we need to give them that chance.

As much as I enjoy watching him swing a club, golf needs to come second and he needs to sort out his marriage in the peace we would all desire.

Tiger, I hope for the best for you and your wife. I hope you take your time to come back to the golf course and I hope that when you do, you can continue with your success.

All this sun

Well it’s winter but you wouldn’t know it to look out the window.

We have the cold aspect of winter down. Today we reached a high of 1 degree, and overnight lows are around – 5 and it is not forecast to get above 3 degrees for the rest of the week either.

A typical Vancouver winter = rain, and lots of it. We got that pretty well covered in November with something like 24 days straight of rain. In December though, I don’t think we have seen a drop and have had nothing but beautiful blue skies. I like the blue, but it also means no snow and I like snow more than I like clear skies.

But a good thing about the blue skies is that I can get some nice pictures. I went for a walk on the beach this evening with my camera and got some of these which I quite like.

So that’s it now, I have some nice pictures – now I need the snow to start falling.

Pleasant surprises.

Recently I have been enjoying looking for some old music on YouTube, and enjoyed some classic performances from the likes of Queen, Michael Jackson etc.

One person who I never paid much attention to before is Prince. I always knew Prince as a good singer and song-writer, but I never realised what an amazing guitar player he is.I should have, I guess I just always assumed he used other guitarists in his music.

I found a bunch of stuff of his making guest appearances at different events, but this is one I really enjoyed. It is at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction of George Harrison as a solo artist. I like the song anyway, but the solo that Prince throws in at the end of this is really quite impressive, especially for someone I knew primarily as a singer.

The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is good. (See if you can figure out who George Harrison’s son is)

Decorations at last

We have been in Vancouver almost 3 years now. For most of that time our walls have been quite bare, apart from some lovely paintings which Kirsty has done, and a few wedding photos. But finally we have got around to getting some pictures framed and printed.

We had these 3 from our trip to Europe:

This is from The Cinque Terre in Northern Italy. 5 Beautiful coastal villages within a few hours walk of each other.

This is the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, located near to the Parthenon.

Obviously this is the Coliseum in Rome, and happens to be one of my favorite pictures. I love how dramatic it looks at night.

So we now have these three pictures hanging in our living room. They are in square frames, so the dimensions are a bit out from what you see here but they look pretty cool.

In the summer I was able to get up early one morning we were in Squamish and get these pictures which are now hanging in our bedroom. I love the lighting, the reflections and the clam water in these.

I am excited to have these hanging on our walls as they are pictures that I took (Though Kirsty may have taken the Cinque Terre one) and I think are pretty good.

I also have to find a place to hang this which is from our last trip to central Washington, just after a sand storm and just at the start of a huge thunderstorm.

Technically these are not amazing picture, they are a little better than point and shoot stuff but no remarkable skill to take them. I do have some other pics which required a bit more knowledge and photographic skill to take, but they are just not as interesting to look at.

I am enjoying the DSLR camera and am proud to have some of my “art” work on the walls.

Need a job

Funny how life changes. On Thursday afternoon I got laid off from my job.

I’m not upset about losing the job, it has been a while since I have enjoyed it there and I have never really felt like I was challenged there. It was one of those jobs where I just showed up, did the work and left. Even though I know I was good at it and that people appreciated my work, satisfaction was rare.

It does kinda suck to be laid off though. It feels a little bit like failure, even though it was a financial decision and nothing to do with my ability or performance.

It has actually been quite flattering to see the effort that my now former employers and workmates are putting in to finding me a new job. They have all asked for my resume and are forwarding it on to everyone they can think of, pretty much everyone I have worked with has been let know that I need a job so I have this big force of people looking for me.

I’m not sure that I want to stay in the entertainment industry, but I’m open to it, at least until I get some Canadian qualifications and establish more general accounting credibility in this country.

Anyway, changes are interesting. I’m feeling pretty good about it really and excited about what might come up. In the meantime, I will be spending some time applying for jobs and fortunately the ski fields are starting to open up so……