Our lives are littered with habits, some of them get us in trouble, most of them do us quite well, nearly all of them are brazenly invisible and that's what makes it so inviting to get into the habit for the changes we want to make. The thing is, we habitually avoid changing our habits, we have a great deal of aversion reaction to anyone trying to rock the even-keel boat of our same old used-to-be behaviours. But right there, there's the trick to this species of brain-hack: It's all in building on what is already ingrained, and it's that secret that both lets P&G sell gallons of de-scenting spray to conscientious homecleaners, and let's public health workers sell the use of simple life-saving bars of soap to third-world mothers:  read more »

Some astute observations from Mickey Hart and Frederic Lieberman on the topic of our survival:
No human society, present or past, has lacked music. Music is therefore one of the very few human universals, which puts it on the same level as food and sex.


It follows that any tendency to consider music as a "luxury" is dangerous. This patently false idea leads to devaluing music in general education, often to the point of eliminating it entirely when budgets are tight. That Plato, Confucius and many other great thinkers have held music to be the indispensable cornerstone of education should help strengthen the resolve of parents and educators to make music part of every home and to maintain and strengthen music programs in our schools.
[ Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music ]

Are you mathematical?

Let me put that another way: Do you like music? Because, inescapably, they are the same question, and the 'why' of that riddle has perplexed natural philosophers and musicians for at least 3 millenia. Of course our mathematics cannot really describe nature, but it is tantalizingly curious that nature should be even approximately describable by our humble equations, and for those curious about that "unknowing exercise of our mathematical faculties" we call 'music', Seed offers an intro article by Dmitri Tymoczko, discoverer of the bold new math of music, a short article one might call A Young Person's Guide to the Orbifold Quotient Space Theory of Music.

Read carefully, there will be an exam later ...  read more »

I had a long talk with a festival promoter today. He really wants us on his bill, but, y'see, there's a basic problem here: he offers that we "make our money" off "exposure to a tourist audience" which is fine and cool but we ain't got nuthin' t' sell! -- after probably an hour trying to explain the anthropological imperative of the community dynamics of a grounded music divest of status strata and legality ornamentation, I'm not certain I was any closer. "ok, ok" he says, and we agree because its a charitable cause but in the next breath he asks if we'd like to play a dinner club.

What I should have said was "Only if they stop eating, paint their faces and dance a dervish around the burning buffet tables. But I didn't.  read more »

Mark Harris had this crazy idea. Mark went ahead and did it. This is the story so far as Day 37, just past Wiarton ...

I got the usual questions from the waitstaff:
"You're not from around here?"
"No, I'm from Vancouver."
"You didn't bike here, did you?"
"Yeah."
"Holy --"
[ Day 37: "It Was a Beautiful Day!" ]

Last weekend the press reports told of a young man our local long-weekend police gates arrested and subsequently probationed for carrying a chest-pocket amount of this fungi. I'm sleeping so much better now. Absolutely, we don't mind you kids swarming off on bleary-eyed havoc sprees or getting into piss-drunk mass-brawl public knife fights or even stress tensored adults wound tight like the coil of a rifle, them sort is just fine by our local mores and stuff we understand and expect, but dag-blast it, the last thing we need around here is folks like his sort:

"... more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a 'full mystical experience' as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant."
[ Spiritual Psilocybin ]  read more »

wait, there's more ...  read more »

So many years later, and y'know, the jury is still scratching their heads over the man who called himself Guinea Pig B and guided his transformation through a simple self-query, "If the fate of humanity depended on what I did, what would I do?"

Some still call him an expert midway barker and a master of self-promotion, they call him 'amateur', 'naive', 'dreamer', 'hoaxster' and 'charlatan' even, but there's one thing about the man Time called "America's Friendly Genius": For a nearly-blind man, he saw the world with incredible clarity, not only for what it was, but for what it could, for what could be done, starting now, and given only the small efforts of nearly-blind, nearly peniless, nearly alone and unknown personal failures such as himself.  read more »

From Friday evening, a short video of the ceremony, just after the offerings of a drink to the faeries, sweetgrass for the cardinal spirits, tea for the parents of the bride and the beautiful song from Mike and Valierie. Set in the idyllic gardens at Rural Roots under the clear blue arc of the solstice sky accompanied by the birdsongs and rustling breeze. Best wedding I ever went to ...

May is attended by Rieko Sudo (also in kimono), and Paul Stewart and Rhoadie by me, with Karen Holgate, Sue Montgomery and Maureen Schmidt as May's bridesmaids and Nolan, Kaelin and Riordain are our attendents, Donna Andrew is our officiant, and with Mother Nature Dee Ashman holding it all together with her own very special magic.  read more »

Sun is shining, the birds are singing, the boys are down in the studio jammin', Carmen and Billy are out in the cookhouse kickin' up grub, and Paul an' me, we're a-sittin' out on the veranda, just waitin'.

Gonna be a weddin' soon.  read more »

Sent today, although it is reminiscent of casting bodily effluents windward, but if we don't try, nothing could happen. And yes, I did respond to that completely ignored Call for Comment before the bill too, but I'll trust Larry to at least make sure this one gets read. Can't promise the same for the other 10 million they'll receive ...

As a constituent who has been following recent developments in Canadian copyright law, I'm concerned that the Copyright bill presented by the government on June 12th goes too far in outlawing the lawful use of copyrighted material, and does not take into account the needs of consumers and of Canada's creative community who are positively exploiting the potential of digital technology. I'm disappointed that this bill adopts an American approach to digital copyright laws, instead of crafting a Canadian approach.

[ Tell MPs What's Wrong with the Prentice Bill ]

You can click through there to fill out your own template letter to be emailed to your MP; I highly recommend you customize your letter just so we don't bore the secretaries to tears. The full text of my letter follows:  read more »

And now a few words of wisdom from Michael Leunig:

On the bus, the smell of doom hung heavily in the air. At the office, the smell of doom! In the coffee shop, everywhere he went, the unmistakable smell of doom.

Even at home, at the dinner table, the all-pervasive inescapable smell of doom. And in his bedroom too, the appalling, repulsive smell of doom and gloom.

Then he noticed it was stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
He had trodden in it!

[ Michael Leunig ]

It's not just about cross-selling blades to refill the free handles, nor is it about cheap dolls with stacks of pricy accessories. This is about recognizing how the modern ubiquitously connected markets actually work, about recognizing the meaning of terms like one million members and facing the inevitabilities of the Zeno's Paradox of diminishing pricing on increasing returns. I do wonder sometimes if I will live long enough to see any of my compatriots click to this, whether that's cell companies, or musicians ...

Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns it plans to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That's OK, because selling discs isn't Calypso's main source of income. The band is really in the performance business — and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet.
[ Wired: Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business ]

Dig how everybody wins? And it's that local need to make a few extra quid that fuels the demand for the impending show, that's so dead obvious yet so rare.  read more »

Here, in a single link, is why the Internet as it is cannot work, why this open network can never be the unbiased universal source for informing humanity, at least, not in the long run.

Why? Because we are right back to our old friend the Trust Thread, and because it is only a matter of time before shill-squads like Canada Blog Friends (sic) have invaded Wikipedia and the rest.

Canada Blog Friends hopes to attract new members to help promote our culture online. This is a paying opportunity for bloggers with established blogs.
[ Craigslist: Toronto Jobs ]

Seeing as Canada tends half a decade behind the trendlines in online innovations, it's my guess a lot of what may be being read about elections and such south of the border may not be precisely what it pretends to be. True, any online material does demand a certain BS-detection Turing Test sense by the consumer, but in this case, we've got leagues of seemingly unaffiliated cash motivated personalities playing the spambot role, and thereby that much more difficult to spot.  read more »

I first met Utah Phillips at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, must have been '77, there was him, Jack Elliot and I think it was Gamble Rogers and while I'd gone to the fest thinking I wanted to tap the brains of Bruce Cockburn, it was these three that inextricably captured my young mind and set me on my rightful course. I was mesmerized. I stuck to those three like glue and y'know, not one of them said a thing about it, instead I got a few invaluable post-show guitar tips and a lot of backstage c'mon along, son invites.

S'long, Utah. Its been swell. See ya.

I could name you a long list of ordinary amazing heroic things Utah Phillips did with his life, ordinary not in the sense that everyone else does anything close to it, but ordinary in the sense that, when you'd met him, it was perfectly natural to imagine him at the front of all those many frontlines, just being sensible
"the last TV set I had, I shot. I don't know what commercial importunement drove me off of the pier, but I hauled it into the backyard. It was up in Spokane, Washington, and I got a -- had an old Stevens shotgun. I tied a scarf around it for a blindfold and scotch-taped a cigarette to the front and lit it and let it burn an appropriate amount of time, and then I blew a hole through it with the shotgun. It was out there in the lilac hedge, which grew through it eventually. It was kind of pretty after a while. But I have not -- you know, I haven't owned one of those foolish things since."
[ Legendary Folk Musician, Activist Utah Phillips, 1935-2008 ]  read more »

Couldn't have gone smoother if they'd planned it -- that's a direct quote:


NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars today to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander's robotic arm.
[ NASA - Phoenix ]

The two images here were clipped directly from NASA-TV just moments ago, the first showing the solar panels as fully extended and the second a composite shot from the display wall at JPL, but showing the other images that followed in rapid succession.

Residential Schools investigator and author Rev. Kevin Annett is trying to get a message out, a message he wants us to hear before PM Stevie Harper stands up straight faced before the world's cameras and 'explains' that it was all just cultural misunderstanding and unfortunate accident.

Residential schools indeed: The mind-bogglingly cruel systemic and institutionally ritualized torture of children barely out of diapers, and a 50% extermination rate over forty years worth of conscriptedabducted school-children.

These were not schools. They were Death Camps. Death Camps for Children. Canadian Death Camps for 50,000 Children, sponsored still endorsed by you and I. Needless to say, the Reverend Kev is having some trouble getting his letter published, so here's hoping the blog'sphere can do something with it:

For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, an "Indian problem" in Canada. Rather, the problem is a "white" one. The problem is with us.
[ Why an Apology is Wrong, and Deceptive ]  read more »

What is Arrival Day? You may not know much about this annual celebration of May 22nd, but you will. You will hear of it as the children of those who know, and their children and grandchildren spread out into the world. You can see that happening now in the profiles of young nu-jazz on MySpace, "I am a force of nature," he said, "The Brother of the Wind" That is how a myth works. It works because it works and this one, it's working.

Arrival Day - The annual celebration of an alien visitation, the day when an angel being came to Earth to speak to us, sent here with an important message from our Creator, a gift from our ancestors with a message about Space, about The Future, about The End of Sorrow, about The Sound of Joy. About Music.  read more »

Some years ago I had this notion to test Frankincense. It was at Christmas time, and I just wondered if there may be something to it, some reason for including it so prominently in the pageants, and mostly after learning how the biblical kingdom known for producing the resin had never once been at war with anyone. In part I wondered if the strong and distinctive scent might become Pavlovianly linked to the Christmas season, but I also wondered if maybe the conditioning was also the other way around. I wondered if the psychotropic qualities of their chief export might have had an impact on their treaty negotiations.
In the science results today, it seems I was not the only one asking such questions:  read more »

on a cue from the IJG, Alan Watts speaks on Life and Music, brought to you by Parker and Stone: