Yes, Christmas music. Not “seasonal” music, not “holiday” music, it’s fucking Christmas music.

Anyway – it’s that time of year, and the fine folks at Soma FM are once again streaming the two best channels of Christmas music on the whole damn planet. For your chilled out and laid back times, there is “Christmas Lounge” (fireplace defintiely recommended) and for the rest of your day there is the insanely awesome “Xmas in Frisko” which I could not praise highly enough even if I sat here and typed non-stop until my fingers were bloody stumps and I passed out from lack of egg nog.

The desktop channels are old hat, and will probably talk to your box no matter what OS or software you have. And new this year is streaming in an alternative format specifically for mobile iTunes-based devices – if you have an iPod Touch or an iPhone, you seriously need to check this bit out. It’s way cool.

Two words: Custom Muppets.

This is, to put it mildly, just about the most awesome thing you could get anyone. And, even if you don’t plan on buying one, playing around with the online Muppet design tool is a hoot. Also, you can gift one so that your recipient can go on, build their own, and have the whole thing prepaid.

Fun all around – lotsa thumbs up here.

Submitted for your approval: A snicker-inducing reference to “earworms” in the always-awesome Pearls Before Swine comic strip:

Normally this would be pretty funny stuff – especially the “Good luck” at the end. I do love Rat so. But … after a bit of a traumatic experience, this toon is more vexing that hilarious. I have recently been down this road and, while the average earworm ends up being little more than an amusing episode, I was subject to one of the worst things that can happen to any being that lays claim to any form of sentience.

For a week I had McArthur Park stuck in my head.

No just any McArthur Park, either. The full fucking 8 minutes of the Richard Harris version, word for word, note for note, angst-ridden wail for angst-ridden wail. I could even hear him botching the words “McArthur Park”, for chrissakes. For seven full days I walked around singing the damn thing. I tried other songs, I tried vile other songs, at one point I even spent my 99 cents on iTunes and bought the damn thing, thinking that if I heard the real version I would somehow undergo some sort of catharsis and get the faux version out of my head.

That was a big waste of 99 cents.

Finally, in some sort of desperate “know thine enemy” sort of move I went as far as researching the damn thing. And amongst all of the other dreck about the song and the recording and the fucking cake left out in the rain, I found out that Dave Barry’s readers voted this song the worst song of all time. Which, finally and in a very anti-climatic way, brings us to the book of the month: Dave Barry’s Book Of Bad Songs.

Beyond that, I don’t have much to say about it. “It” being the book, not the song, since I could go on about the fucking song for ever. The book is slim, complete fluff, and you will spend a very enjoyable 2 hours giggling madly at it. You will also be stuck singing at least one of the songs contained therein, so be warned. However, that is probably balanced by the new-found disdain you will have for Mac Davis … in the end, it’s a wash.

Enjoy.

This is all the buzz on UseNet right now. I can see why. I cant take my eyes off it.

Fascinating.

I wrote this for Remembrance Day in 2006, and while the numbers have changed – there is only one living Canadian vet from The Great War now – the thought is still the same. I can’t think of anything better that I could write, so I’m just going to paste it verbatim.

Poppies

I broke a personal rule on the weekend. A long time ago I had promised myself that I would only buy my Remembrance Day poppy from an actual World War One veteran. This, of course, was when I was young and stupid and didn’t factor the actual ages of the WW1 vets into the equation. Older and wiser, I eventually amended this to be “any veteran” … although it was still a bit of a jarring day when I first put my coins into the box of a WW2 serviceman – a fellow who told me that he wasn’t even born when the armistice was signed in the bombed-out forest of Compiegne.

Now the modified rule has also gone by the wayside. I got my poppy from a pair of air cadets outside the grocery store. This time, I didn’t mind so much.

I remember the last poppy I bought from someone who came home from the horrors of 1918. It was eleven years ago, and he stood alone in front of Union Station in Toronto, looking almost impossibly old. There was snow and he was obviously cold, and he apologized for not being able to take his gloves off to pin my poppy to my coat. I don’t know if it was the weather or the quiet pride and dignity of the man, but he had drawn an actual line-up of people waiting to buy their plastic red flowers … normally oblivious and self-centred commuters taking the time to wait in the snow to pop their coins into his little legion box. I wanted to linger, and ask him so many things … how old he was when he enlisted (he could not have possibly been of age), what it was like in the hell that was the Somme (he had the blue and yellow service ribbon, which basically announced that he took a face full of chlorine gas and lived) … but the line was long and I didn’t want to spoil the moment.

I went back at lunch, hoping he was still there, but he was gone, and the next day a much younger gentleman was taking his turn.

There are none left now, the ones who squatted in the mud and bore the brunt of the fire and the gas – the last four living Canadians who served in World War One did not see any combat action, either coming to the theatre too late or serving in support and administrative roles. There is no one left to remember the things that happened – now we can only remember those who are gone and who have taken those memories with them forever.

So now it’s a different kind of remembrance – but an important one nonetheless. Wear your poppy. Don’t forget.

4: The number of Canadians who have appeared in U.S. postage stamps.

If you have an iPhone you may have noticed that making your own ringtones from audio files you already own is a complete and total pain. While ringtones you purchase and download from the iTunes store are super easy, your own tunes and sounds are a complete and utter exercise in frustration. There are two reasons for this:

One: There is a different set of copyrights involved between a song you download for listening to versus a song you are downloading as a ringtone, and this leads to a digital divide between the two, and

Two: Ringtone sales a a massive cash cow for both Apple and the record labels that own the rights to the songs, and they are not going to give that up by making it easy for you to brew your own.

This is not just an iPhone/ Apple phenomenon, either. Most cellular carriers and handset manufacturers are are also in on this … if they do not outright deny you any way to get homebrew ringtones on a device, they manage to put up enough roadblocks that most people give up and hand over their coin for the “official” method.

Well, enough.

Welcome to “I Want Free Ringtones“, a website that acts as a filter, processor, and host for converting your own audio files into delicious and free (as in free beer) ringtones. It is dead simple, too: You upload your file, use the site’s tools to crop it for time (if you didn’t or couldn’t do that at your end beforehand) and adjust the volume, preview the thing with the on-line audio player, and then either save the result back to your hard drive or leave it hosted on the site so you can surf to it later. It’s fast, super easy, and works exactly as advertised. You can save the files as QCP (lo-fi tones, for the Motorola crowd), M4A or MP3 (hi-fi tones for the rest of the world), or M4R (the special Apple hi-fi format that the iPhone is looking for).

The hosting function, by the way, is perfect for Blackberry users – one of the slickest parts of the BB package is that you can use the web browser to surf to an MP3 file you create with this tool and use a single click to convert the target file into a ringtone that you install over the air. Better, you can share your creations with your friends just by passing around the URL.

The whole thing is a total hoot no matter what phone you carry. But – for Blackberry users who want to stretch their legs and for iPhone users tired of trying to navigate the gordian knot of M4R files – this is the greatest thing since sliced pizza.

Enjoy.

27: The percentage of the world’s climate destroying greenhouse gasses that are produced in the United States of America.

In the emails that darted around following my link to “Google Earth For iPhone” it became clear that some – nay, a lot of – people are using the mainline web browser on their iPhone to access Google for searching. They spark up Safari, hit google.com, and type in a search just like they would at their desktop or laptop workstations.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

What you want to do is go to the app store and get “Google Mobile” as realized for the iPhone. It is smaller, faster, and better because it knows enough to search your local data along with whatever it can get from the web. It is a combination of a super-thin, super-fast web search engine and a metafinder for your own on-board info. It rocks large, and if you aren’t using it you need to start. Right now.

Things that spring to mind at the break of dawn on a day that will be a watershed one way or the other:

No matter what the reason, a shitload of people are going to vote today. This is a good thing.

Despite what the nutbars on talk radio say, Barack Obama is not “left wing”. His politics are actually slightly right of centre.

A “republic” is not actually a “democracy”.

When you get right down to it, John McCain is okay. But the part where he is surrounded by morons and his running-mate is a first-class idiot? That’s not okay.

After seeing what the White House has done to basic freedoms over the past 7 years, I cant shake the feeling that a vote for anyone republican is akin to signing a document that says you agree with the way the Bushies have wiped their collective asses on the constitution. I mean, really.

CNN may have the flashy coverage, but for real meat you should tune your radio to NPR.

Oh – and if you are reading this in the great forty-eight … get out and vote, dammit.

4.5: The percentage of the world’s population that lives in the United States of America.