From Beijing's independent music scene comes Lonely China Day, a superbly good band that mixes elements of atmospheric rock with electronic loops and smaller samples. Have a listen to One from the Tag Team Records site. While you're there, listen to Sorrow as well, the song that also lends the album its title.

Ubuntu Canada/Toronto reports that their counter-marketing campaign in front of the Microsoft Ice House was an absolute success, despite initial discouragement and words from Toronto Police. Link to pics included.

David gives an excellent post-mortem of the Friday/Saturday happenings at Ubuntu Toronto's visit to Microsoft's Ice House downtown Toronto.

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Posted over at linuxcaffe.ca, the various Davids and their respective teams have been organizing Operation Cold Comfort, an event ocurring today, Feb. 2, at the Microsoft Ice House/Castle, Yonge and Dundas Square from 4pm to 7pm.

There will be a very large and very cuddly 10 foot tall inflatable penguin. Photos will be taken :)

The event is "a promotional effort by Ubuntu Canada, designed to co-incide with the launch of Microsoft Vista (tm) and to tell as many people as possible about this great free alternative."

I hear whisperings that there may be a media outlet or two present, perhaps reminiscent of Network News week Feb. 2006 at the linuxcaffe. Who knows... my money's on CTV as the place to watch tonight or tomorrow night. Have to wait and see.

This time it was the Forbidden City, which is stupendously large and beautiful. Then it was the Great Wall, which is mind-bogglingly long, tall (in places), well built, and old. Then some neat bars, and today (Sunday), Pangaiyuan market.

Thursday: Forbidden City. The various courtyards, walkways, buildings, even full gallerys that carged admission (over and above the entrance fee) are so numerous and unique that a full day is not enough to realy explore and see everything. I spent about 7 hours walking (an hour travel there and back on foot) and probably managed to cram in about a 2/3 of the whole place. About 1/3 of the city is under renovation at the moment in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. It's going to be absolute pandemonium.

Hotpot is the dish of choice for any social gathering in China from what I can tell, and it is a superb dish to be sure. Essentially a large pot filled with hot water and some spices, a few onions and such, along with individual bowls of customizable sauce. Garlic with soy sauce and peanut oil is typical. Place any 1 ingredient at a time of the 5-10 ordered into the pot for a few minutes, meat, vegetable, mushroom etc., remove with chopsticks and dip in sauce. Eat.

One ingredient popular in the south is fish head, of which I was given the dubious honour of eating the most choicest of part, the brain. Difficult to pick up a gelatinous mass with chopsticks, yes. Easy to swallow a mass of brainmatter with the consistency of something between jello and silicone, doubly so. That was before the live skewered shrimp went into the pot...

By the time the average Canadian grudgingly drags his or her still-hungover body into work Tuesday, swaps holiday tales with the stiff in the next cubicle, and hunkers down to work, the country's highest-paid CEOs will have already earned the worker's annual salary.
...
A study released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says the 100 highest-paid private-sector executives will have earned an average Canadian's salary of $38,010 by 9:46 a.m. Tuesday.

Just a little bit more, please, sir? From The Canadian Press.

From The Toronto Sun, via largeheartedboy:

The Toronto Sun finds out what's on hockey star Sidney Crosby's iPod.

Q. What's playing on your ipod right now? Rock music. Foo Fighters. Three Days Grace. Pretty much everything.

iPod == ubiquitous... or maybe I meant Foo Fighters, or Three Days Grace. Pretty much all three actually. I suppose the apparent ubiquity of such bands owes much to the ubiquity of the iPod and Steve Jobs' seeming omnipotent presence in the market He created.

Stumbled across a documentary called God on the Brain from BBC that aired in April 2003. From that page:

"Rudi Affolter and Gwen Tighe have both experienced strong religious visions. He is an atheist; she a Christian. He thought he had died; she thought she had given birth to Jesus. Both have temporal lobe epilepsy.

Like other forms of epilepsy, the condition causes fitting but it is also associated with religious hallucinations. Research into why people like Rudi and Gwen saw what they did has opened up a whole field of brain science: neurotheology."

Watched Syriana last night and I must say I was mighty disappointed. Not because the film was badly done or anything. What bothered me about it was how well it was done. A cast of some considerable note, though almost all were men, a little offputting, but by no means a problem for me. People like to watch attractive people they've seen before in a film, myself included, can't fault anyone for that.

No, what got me was how masterfully the film gives you, the viewer, insight into some hidden world of Oilmen of the year, or into the inner workings of large multinational companies, CIA espionage, illegal? weapons trade, and international politics. Yeah, those pseudo insights. Sure some of the film might well represent reality and just how corrupt things are. But at the same time, if things are as bad as they are made out to be, there isn't a damn thing any one of us common folk can do.

So the linuxcaffe had 2 music acts tonight, orangutan and ory no'man.

Not sure if Orangutan was selling cds, but I grabbed one from ory no'man and wanted to post this track, Love Comes Too Soon. The recording is from a live set played at The Renaissance Cafe earlier in the year, but the song is the same as was played tonight (without tonight's stand up bass accompaniment), and its great to see live. I was (and am) particularly impressed with the lyrics of this song, so give them a close listen.