A Whale of a Gale
CD in Play: Mojo presents, Experienced!
Blowin' in the Wind
So I guess we had a big ol' gale here in the Lower Mainland. People seem so surprised by it, but I recall Novemeber being a stormy, windy month usually. As a kid in the eighties I seem to remember some huge wind and rain storms hitting the coast. We live in a temperate rainforest region, so this kind of weather is to be expected.
Right now around 200,000 people are stuck without power in the areas throughout the Lower Mainland and also on Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and on the Sunshine Coast. When the power went out at my place we had to start bailing water out of the area for the sump pump. My landlady was suppossed to have some work done to drain water away from the house over to the stormdrain. I think she was taken for a bit of a ride by the contractor.
With the power out the sump pump can't pump and her emergency generator wouldn't start. Anyhow, me one of the other guys renting in the place and a neighbour all started to bail water waiting for the guy to show up to get the generator going. Two hours we were bailing water, and loosing against the rising water levels.
I am at work now and the campus has been evacuated and closed. Amazing how students still want to come in and try to work, drop off papers, hand out, etc. It is calm outside now, but still...
Stuck in My Head
I have a few things stuck in my head these days. I picked up the latest issue of Mojo this week and it came with a free CD called Experienced! tying in with the Jimi Hendrix cover story. Some of disc features covers like Love covering "Little Wing" or the insipid cover of "The Wind Cries Mary" by Jamie Cullen. (The best cover of that song is still the version on Marc Ribot's Rootless Cosmopolitans) Some of it is stuff the bears the influence of Jimi - "Super Stupid" by Funkadelic - or contemporaries that Jimi respected like Johnny Winter and the Move. One track actually features Jimi himself playing with the Last Poets, but it's not that great. For great Lost Poets check out the track, "On a Subway".
Three songs have been rotating within my head - "A Message from the Country" by The Move, "Drifting" as covered by the now departed Chris Whitley and Rotary Connection's cover of "Burning of the Midnight Lamp". The Move have to be one of the most ignored bands ever, aside from in the native UK. Quite original and versatile, the Move deserve to be heard. Whitley's cover is spartan, but faithful and it sticks in my head. The Rotary Connection's cover of "BotML" does what so many people into Jimi's music have wondered - can the melotron vocals on the original be produced by real voices? The answer is yes, especially when you have a metzzo-soprano up your sleave.
I have also had portions of the Spiderman cartoon from the `60's in my head - specifically the "Spiderman Samba". (or rhumba, something Latin) Uses congos at any rate.
Blowin' in the Wind
So I guess we had a big ol' gale here in the Lower Mainland. People seem so surprised by it, but I recall Novemeber being a stormy, windy month usually. As a kid in the eighties I seem to remember some huge wind and rain storms hitting the coast. We live in a temperate rainforest region, so this kind of weather is to be expected.
Right now around 200,000 people are stuck without power in the areas throughout the Lower Mainland and also on Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and on the Sunshine Coast. When the power went out at my place we had to start bailing water out of the area for the sump pump. My landlady was suppossed to have some work done to drain water away from the house over to the stormdrain. I think she was taken for a bit of a ride by the contractor.
With the power out the sump pump can't pump and her emergency generator wouldn't start. Anyhow, me one of the other guys renting in the place and a neighbour all started to bail water waiting for the guy to show up to get the generator going. Two hours we were bailing water, and loosing against the rising water levels.
I am at work now and the campus has been evacuated and closed. Amazing how students still want to come in and try to work, drop off papers, hand out, etc. It is calm outside now, but still...
Stuck in My Head
I have a few things stuck in my head these days. I picked up the latest issue of Mojo this week and it came with a free CD called Experienced! tying in with the Jimi Hendrix cover story. Some of disc features covers like Love covering "Little Wing" or the insipid cover of "The Wind Cries Mary" by Jamie Cullen. (The best cover of that song is still the version on Marc Ribot's Rootless Cosmopolitans) Some of it is stuff the bears the influence of Jimi - "Super Stupid" by Funkadelic - or contemporaries that Jimi respected like Johnny Winter and the Move. One track actually features Jimi himself playing with the Last Poets, but it's not that great. For great Lost Poets check out the track, "On a Subway".
Three songs have been rotating within my head - "A Message from the Country" by The Move, "Drifting" as covered by the now departed Chris Whitley and Rotary Connection's cover of "Burning of the Midnight Lamp". The Move have to be one of the most ignored bands ever, aside from in the native UK. Quite original and versatile, the Move deserve to be heard. Whitley's cover is spartan, but faithful and it sticks in my head. The Rotary Connection's cover of "BotML" does what so many people into Jimi's music have wondered - can the melotron vocals on the original be produced by real voices? The answer is yes, especially when you have a metzzo-soprano up your sleave.
I have also had portions of the Spiderman cartoon from the `60's in my head - specifically the "Spiderman Samba". (or rhumba, something Latin) Uses congos at any rate.
posted by Magnus at 20:08
3 Comments:
Glad to know you're OK...although flooding and bailing is crappy. They've been bandying around words like "monsoon" and "**" on local news for the weather out your way in BC - it had me a bit concerned. here You have my sympathies. I've only recently escaped (knock on wood) such a situation in our house. Sometimes buildings just leak no matter what. J's aunt's who we bought the house from, claim they had work done to "fix" the flooding...if so they got hosed as well.
I find it od how people go about life in extreme weather as well. Out here it'll be so cold that the tires are square and it'd kill you to be out for more than a few minutes and we all go about life as thought it was spring...
oops...** is a technical term for a word I can't think of right now. I was gonna fill it in when I thought ot if. I jsut did.
It was tsunami.
Man I need a nap...
Yeah, didn't read about the tsunami warning until much later on, which is pretty discomfitting when you come to think about it.
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