Vancouver: Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival 2007 – I’m There!

I’m very excited about the huge Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival happening in East Van today. In case you don’t already know, this is a street festival, for which Commercial is closed off to traffic from 1st Avenue to Venables, from 10am to 8pm.

Vancouver Vintage Bike Swap – I’m There!

On Sunday, I’m headed to the Vancouver Vintage Bicycle Show and Swap Meet (6th annual, no less). It’s happening at the Cambrian Hall, right by Main Street. This is right in my old ‘hood of Mount Pleasant and I’m excited to go there before the Commercial Drive Car-Free festival. That latter one was one of the best events of the summer last year. Anyway, I’m desperately in need of a cool and inexpensive set of pedal-powered wheels. Finding something like the one pictured or a less out-there roadie or hybrid would make my week. I’d also like to snap some cool pictures there.

Colin Powell: A Tragic Superhero

I had an interesting revelation when hearing that Colin Powell has opined that Guantanamo should be closed right away, “this afternoon”. To most of us, this is probably tinged with more than a little irony given his record at the White House. After all, this is the man that, back in 2003, delivered a PowerPoint full of faulty and invented intelligence to the UN ahead of an attack that had already been decided. He also tacitly supported Guantanamo simply by being largely silent about it while in office.
I once had a humorous conversation about the best lame superpowers a sort of anti-action-hero might have: stacking needles and perfect hindsight came out on top. I’m not sure if Powell can do the former, but he’s mastered the 20/20 hindsight bit perfectly. But … If you begin to dig around, some interesting information surfaces.

Writing Ideas

Some things I would like to write about this week: Colin Powell as tragic superhero, advice to Nicholas Sarkozy, upcoming Vancouver events (Jazz Festival, Portuguese Heritage), film reviews (‘Touch of Evil’, ‘Waitress’, ‘Tokyo Drifter’, ‘Unforgiven’ etc), more links to sites for blog and RSS submission, a detailed review of free WordPress MU hosting sites, guide to ‘borrowing’ MySpace media …

Yummy Spare Ribs … Recipe Put to the Test

I am cooking up some ribs today. It’s my first foray into rib cookery

1067: Vancouver Underground Jazz Spot (on Granville)

It’s been a while since a culture-related or Vancouver-related post so I thought I’d muse a little about “1067″. 1067, prosaically named after its address on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, is an ultra-cool underground jazz venue that few know about even here in town. I personally got introduced to it rather randomly. When I was still quite new to Vancouver and largely ignorant of the music scene I found myself at Calhoun’s (another good local live jazz spot). I was talking to their house band’s drummer during a break between sets and he suggested I check out 1067 when I asked him to recommend other places around town for good music. After following his cryptic directions (see info on how to find it at the end of this post) a few days later, I made it to this mysterious little space.

Where to Submit Your Blog or RSS Feed for Free (SEO & Promotion)

Here is a short list of some of the easiest (and of course free) places to submit your blog quickly to get a little more exposure. This first post lists sites that do not require registration for submission. I will post another list with those that do shortly.

1) Technorati – Registration not required, but I would recommend that you claim your blog by registering after you submit it.
2) Pingoat – Just pick the services you want to ping and hit the button. Voila!
3) Pingomatic – Works like Pingoat. WordPress pings Pingomatic whenever your blog is updated, but you can do it manually too. [9 more free services to follow]

Film Review: ‘Standing in the Shadows of Motown’ (2002) [8/10]

[8 out of 10] [ For my other movie reviews, see the Film category of this blog or my IMDB vote history ] This is my mini-review of “Standing in the Shadows of Motown”, which I recently got from the library and thought I’d share with whoever is interested. I gave this movie an eight because it does a great job chronicling The Funk Brothers, a forgotten group of Detroit musicians that put together a hard-to-believe string of chart-topping hits from a small basement studio. In fact, the movie mentions that they created “more number-one records than The Beatles, Elvis, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys combined”.

Arcade Fire Live Video from Sasquatch Music Festival 2007, Gorge Amphitheatre

As promised, I will slowly leak videos and photos that my friends and I took at Sasquatch a week ago (May 26-27, 2007). Here’s the first installment – my video of The Arcade Fire, now up on YouTube. They played a great set at Sasquatch – their sound was so polished that I was overheard saying that it was a lot like listening to a studio record. This is a video of them playing “The Well and the Lighthouse” from their new album, Neon Bible. You can also see it on Facebook by clicking HERE. There are also some cool videos of Arcade Fire at this festival uploaded by others to YouTube. Have a look at “No Cars Go”, “Rebellion” and “Intervention” (click on the thumbnails to view on YouTube):

Review: Best Free WordPress Hosting Sites – WordPress.com, Blogetery.com, Blogsome.com and others

I went looking for places to start experimenting with the WordPress platform for free before shelling out for full-on paid WordPress hosting [that still remains my preferred option and I'm looking into a Canadian host for this - details in an upcoming post]. Here are the results of my research into free WordPress hosting services out there on the interweb.
The only hosts that remained after ruling out defunct and ad-driven sites (see note at the end of post): Blogsome.com, WordPress.com and Blogetery.com. Read on to find out how they fare in my rating on a scale of 10.