erics head

Like everyone else, I assume, I go through musical phases: listening to a lot of alt.country (Ryan Adams, Wilco, the Jayhawks) for awhile … then listening to mainly classic rock (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen) for weeks … then I pull out all my old 90s grunge stuff (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Nirvana) … before going all indie (The Dears, Stars, Death Cab for Cutie, Joel Plaskett) for some time. Sure, I can’t ever seem to stick exclusively to one genre, but I do seem to play favourites for the most part.

Beyond entire genres of music, there are some artists that I’m particularly fond of who have enough of a back catalogue that I can just listen to them for an entire day or two: Ryan Adams, Counting Crows, Pink Floyd, John Mayer, radiohead, etc. and it’s sometimes quite awesome to hear them change over the years … and not just in a ‘listening to the Greatest Hits collection’ sort of way. All those wonderful non-single tracks that you, as a music lover, secretly believe have been heard only by your dedicated ears, willing to listen all the way through every album the band has released.

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Happy Canada Day, Nation!

Although I hadn’t done it in many years, tonight, with My Girlfriend, I headed out to my local community park, grabbed a square metre-or-so of grass and watched the fireworks display. For a locally run show, it was quite impressive.

Canada, here’s to another great year!

This past weekend, My Girlfriend and I trekked down the Niagara wine region to take advantage of the “Discovery Pass”. This was a $30 ticket that allowed you tastings at six (of a possible twenty-eight) wineries in the region on Friday and/or Saturday. Each of these tastings was accompanied by some sort of carefully selected food that complimented the wine. We’re not big wine drinkers, or experienced wine drinkers, but we’re enjoying the experience of wine together. For example, last year when we were in the region we fell in love with ice wines from one of Canada’s best known wineries: Inniskillin.

Our first stop of the day was at a smaller winery, the Fielding Estate Winery. We tasted two wines - a 2007 Pinot Gris and a 2007 Gewurztraminer - and while we preferred the Pinot, both were quite good. (Being the rookie wine drinker that I am, I’m not going to embarrass myself by trying to describe the taste of any of these wines … sorry!)

Although you go to Niagara for the wines, you can’t ignore the beauty of some of the buildings. Fielding is a nice little building, with a beautiful interior, a simple set-up and very friendly, knowledgeable staff. This was a wonderful start to our day and I strongly recommend it as a stop to anyone heading down.

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I’ve gotta say … this Spore thing is pretty fun. I mean, sure, I had to update my DirectX drivers to run the program, and it’s a 200+ mb install, but otherwise it was very easy to get up- and- running. Creating life is pretty straightforward, although the demo version shows you just how much more you can get with the full, $10 version of the Creature Creator. But, without further ado, I present to you my first four creations:

The Findepid: an orange, bipedal creature with a wicked mace-tail

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I think I Twittered about this game awhile back and I know I’ve been seeing references to it around the net with increasing frequency these last few weeks, but given what tomorrow is, that’s no surprise. Don’t waste time marking your calendars ’cause by the time you read this you can probably jump right to the site and download the Spore Creature Creator … just be sure to have a few playful hours set aside to explore!

For those of you not familiar with the game, Spore comes to us from EA/Maxis who are best known for the Sim City and The Sims franchises. From the official website:

• CREATE Your Universe from Microscopic to Macrocosmic - From tide pool amoebas to thriving civilizations to intergalactic starships, everything is in your hands.
• EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages - It’s survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization.
• EXPLORE your world and beyond - Will you rule, or will your beloved planet be blasted to smithereens by a superior alien race?
• SHARE with the World - Everything you make is shared with other players and vice versa, providing tons of cool creatures to meet and new places to visit.

In short, you get to create your own species, watch it grow from a tiny single-cell organism to the point where it’s whole civilization is colonizing other planets! It’s being marketed as a single-player game, however, there is a very strong community component to everything. It also looks like they’re developing complimentary mobile (e.g., iPhone, HTC, Palm) versions of the game so you can take your species with you wherever you go.

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The Canadian Polaris Music Prize, similar to the UK Nationwide Mercury Prize or lesser known US Shortlist Music Prize, now enters its third year. New this year, the Polaris Jury has decided to publish the ‘long list’ of nominees (40 in total) to the public in the hopes of further promoting Canadian music.

The Long List consists of the top 40 full-length Canadian records released from June 1, 2007 to May 31, 2008, selected by the 180 members of the Polaris Music Prize jury.

Looking over the list (included below the jump), it makes for quite an impressive collection of artists and a strong reminder of how great this past year has been for the Canadian music scene. Unless you’ve been listening to CBC Radio3 this past year, as I have been, you may not recognize a number of these artists although a few should still jump out at you as they’ve edged their way into more mainstream music channels: City and Colour, Kathleen Edwards, Hayden, the New Pornographers, Tegan and Sara, Wintersleep.

If you’re looking for something new to listen to this summer, perhaps you can use this list as something of a checklist of bands and artists to consider. Radio3 has a number of free podcasts where you can hear most (if not all) of these artists and I’d assume that each one of them has a MySpace page or other web portal where they’re streaming tracks.

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The tour books are correct: walking out of the train station in Edinburgh gives you a view of the Castle almost immediately. It’s a welcoming entrance to the city.

We arrived in town, grabbed a taxi to the hotel, got settled, etc., however we didn’t end up going back downtown that night. In the morning, we got up and hopped on a bus — the wrong bus — towards the city core. Arriving some distance from the castle, our original destination for the day, we changed everything up and climbed Calton Hill. It provided us with a nice warm-up hike for the following day’s task as well as nice views of the city and the Firth of Fourth, a fjord north of Edinburgh’s downtown.

Down from the Hill, we wandered about the southern part of the Old Town, viewing the (new and somewhat controversial) Scottish Parliament Building, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s official residence in Scotland as well as the Canongate Kirk before we started up the famed Royal Mile towards the castle.

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