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. I have gone to this for the past couple of years and it’s a blast! There’s a lot of international flavour and tons of cool people. There is music galore, weird chopper bikes, excellent food and so on and so on. I plan to hit it up after the cool old-school bike swap (also in East Van, see here). I’ll try to take some photos at both events, which might surface here. Unfortunately, a few of my friends are out of town for this one, but the great news is that this year there’s another one on July 22nd! There is a lot more info about the bands that are playing, the various events etc. here:

• Festival Website
• Festival Poster
• Facebook Event Page

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.

When: Sunday, June 17th 2007. 9AM – 3PM
Where: Cambrian Hall, 215 East 7th Avenue
How Much: $2
More Info: Event page on Facebook , Momentum listing.
[Photo courtesy of sgoralnick on Flickr]

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.

1) See this interview on YouTube – In a recent Meet the Press interview, Powell places the blame for that infamous UN presentation on CIA higher-ups (including George Tenet) that convinced him their sources were solid. He sets himself up as an unwilling decoy for their manipulations. This, to me, is a pretty weak defense for a man whose own instincts were clearly sounding alarms at the time.

2) See this clip on YouTube – CNN (of all places) aired a report in which Powell’s chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, expresses the doubts he and Powell had about presenting the world with a “Chinese menu” document, which he categorizes as being anything but an intelligence report. He wishes he hadn’t been involved at all and muses about Powell hypothesizing back then whether 500,000 troops would comb Iraq end to end only to fail in their search for WMDs. Once again, we get a portrait of Powell as a hesitant and unwilling accomplice, which does not cut it for me.

3) Read this article at The Guardian – UK’s The Guardian does some analysis of its own and suggests Powell broke his loyalty with Bush’s administration and weighed in on Gitmo at a strategically important moment, helping to turn the tide against the Republicans. They go on to suggest that Powell was the one quietly fixing Dubya’s mistakes, particularly during the 2000-2004 first term, all the while the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove cabal was plotting against him and working hard to make sure Bush didn’t listen to his advice (this is why, we’re told, he didn’t travel with the President much). The article also talks about the end of his support, tacit or otherwise, for the administration. In a linked speech, his aide (the above-mentioned Wilkerson) lambastes the Bush government for their mistakes and sets the stage for Powell’s own coming out of the anti-Bush closet.

This made me feel even worse about him as a man. As harsh an accusation as cowardice is, I am tempted to level it at him. Not only did this man wait until he was safely mothballed as a politician with responsibility and power, he also held on until Wilkerson blew his fuse. Only then did he shed himself of loyalty to the people he used to work with.

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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 …

I am cooking up some ribs today. It’s my first foray into rib cookery and I hope it turns out. As my guide, I’m using a highly-rated recipe called “Fall off the Bone Chinese Spareribs” from my favorite recipe site, RecipeZaar. This involves a long simmer or rather a sort of slow boil process and smells heavenly while cooking. Judging by the included photo, the end result should be yummy. UPDATE: This was a great recipe and an excellent meal. (Photo courtesy of “kiwidutch” on RecipeZaar).

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.Photos courtesy of: Flickr, MySpace, Petterpang’s blog and a friend of mine. None are mine, but I’ve tried to link all to the sources.

When I got in from the random back alley door (see photos) and got up a set of stairs, I found a little jazz club that looked a lot like someone’s living room and served only cans of beer from a mini-fridge. The acoustics in this large room are quite good and the music has definitely kept me coming back. 1067 has some of the best jazz in town, especially if you are into its more modern and experimental forms. You can listen to some samples and see if you like it (MySpace). Cover is always $5 and a beer costs $4. Lately, they’ve been getting more organized and have a little Yahoo! Groups page which they use to keep people updated about the upcoming shows. It also seems more consistently open than before: there used to be times when the door would be inexplicably locked on Fridays or Saturdays. They even have a MySpace page with fan comments, photos and tunes played the club.

I get a really peaceful vibe at 1067 and the music has a tendency to put me in a very contemplative state. This is a great spot to while away the evening and you can combine it with other weekend outings – they usually start at 10 or 10:30 PM and play until 2 AM or so. Now that I’ve moved downtown, I would like to come here much more often.

Directions: coming soon

If you enjoyed finding about this random Vancouver spot, get my free newsfeed to get the latest music updates.

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]
4) Google Blog Search – Definitely submit your blog(s) here. No registration required.
5) Blogflux – Add your blog to this directory as well.
6) Blo.gs – another one to add.
7) IceRocket – and one more.
8] BlogPulse – No registration required, but an email address is.
9) Best of the Web Blogs (BOTW.org) – This one works a lot like Yahoo: you will need to find the most appropriate category for your blog and then click its “Submit Blog” link. The editors approve all submissions manually and recommend that you have at least 6 months of posts and quality content.

For the second part, you will need to know your blog’s RSS feed address. This is usually as simple as adding “/feed/” to the web address of your blog home page. For example, this blog’s feed is at http://dubesor.wordpress.com/feed/.
1) Blogdigger – submit your RSS feed address to this site.
2) DayPop – another RSS feed submission.
3) WeBlogALot – here’s one more.

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[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”. I personally love the Motown sound and was sadly ignorant of how big a contribution the musicians made to the music of Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson etc etc. It’s a no-brainer to wonder who provides the sound to go with those incredible vocals, but many have overlooked that aspect. Director Paul Justman is apt at guiding us through the group’s collective story and individual histories while splicing in some of the hits that made Motown such a juggernaut. Interestingly, this seems to have been his breakthrough as his previous docs were not noteworthy. There are musical cameos by Ben Harper and Chaka Khan (among others), who play some of the Funk Brothers’ biggest hits with the remaining members of the band.

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):

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.

[5/10] Blogsome – allows file edit and upload up to 1MB, has 27 themes and 10 plugins and an excellent stats view using Analog 5.32 from analog.cx. You can also edit the code using their online editor – very useful for customizing your CSS stylesheet. Blogsome doesn’t have the “Presentation” tab enabled in your blog admin site, which means you cannot play around with widgets. That’s a very big negative in my books.

[7/10] Blogetery – this is a quickly growing blog hosting site and the administrators will quickly adopt user feedback (eg. when you suggest new WordPress themes for them to enable). They already offer well over 100 different themes, which alone is a great benefit. They offer a few plugins, the best of which are Sociable and the Flickr Badge Widget. Unfortunately, they don’t yet have any sort of stats, but soon might. They also don’t have a tag cloud plugin. All in all, this is a great site and the only thing against it is the lack of stats and the fact that you won’t be getting any traffic from their front page, as this site is still a relative unkown (their rank on Alexa is 800,000 versus 2,000 for Blogsome and top 100 for WordPress.com). The only uploads they allow are directly through the post – it’s unclear what the maximum upload capacity is here. Read on for a review and rating of WordPress.com.

[8/10] WordPress.com – This is not to be confused with WordPress.org, the site for the standalone WordPress system you would install on an outside hosting account or your own web server. If you blog about popular topics, they can bring some traffic to your blog through their main page, which is listed in the top 100 most visited sites on Alexa. That’s a pretty big deal as far as I’m concerned. They allow 50 MB of uploads. You can attach a domain name you already own to your free hosting account, which is really cool. They also offer blog stats and feed stats (to see which feed readers your subscribed visitors use to read your posts) right from your admin dashboard. This service has the best plugins including a Tag Cloud for categorizing your posts and Akismet for blocking comment spam. There’s also a Snap Preview plugin for outgoing links and a number of widgets you can put on the sidebar (Box.net, Meebo, Palatial Map Kit, Sonific and Vod:pod). At the moment, they offer 56 themes to choose from for your blog. You can opt to pay them to a) be able to edit your CSS stylesheet and/or b) have more storage space (1GB or 5GB). I think the only complaints I have against them are : my blog wasn’t crawled properly by Google – maybe they are limiting GoogleBot in some way as only the main blog page got included in the index; they don’t have a random flickr plugin for the sidebar – only one that shows the newest photos; they don’t offer my favorite theme, Vistered Little .

Let’s also mention defunct blog hosting sites – as far as I can tell, blogthing.com and wpblogs.net are either inactive or no longer accept new blog registration. Another service I found, letsblogit.net, puts ads on their users’ pages. Yet another site, iblog365.com, does not allow plugins, which hinders your blogging options quite a bit, although they do have a nice choice of themes for your blog.

For now, I keep my Funcouver blog on both WordPress.com and Blogetery.com, but I’d like to soon move it entirely to WordPress.com and then to my own hosting, which I will post about soon. I hope this helped some people out there with their free WordPress hosting needs.

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[PHOTOS/VIDEOS to follow]

As promised, here is a breakdown of the recent festival roadtrip from Vancouver to The Gorge in Washington State. It was a great decision to head down to Sasquatch Music Festival. I love these kinds of things and who really needs an excuse to camp, tune in and have a few beers in an otherworldly setting?

Although my little carful was late getting there, we still caught Manu Chao, The Arcade Fire and Bjork at the main stage. The latter was yawn-tacular – my apologies if you’re into Bjork, but I just am not.

Already fueled by great vibes from his Vancouver show the night before [see posts below], we were a very receptive audience for Manu Chao’s brand of cool stoner fusion and upbeat pseudo-punk. The sun began to set and, when Manu asked Bobby Marley to ’sing something good to me’, it was a memorable moment.

The Arcade Fire totally stole the show. Apparently, one of their band members fell off the stage at one point, but I didn’t witness this. They sounded like a frickin’ record, but they were live. Unbelievable. There was even the tiniest dig at Jerry Falwell. I am now a gushing-schoolgirl-type fan of theirs and want their children. The pipe organ alone was worth the whole trip!

Bjork was largely boring (to me) and I headed with my crew back to our campsite … it was a little like bring Jim Morrison: we walked for (literally) two hours and people were strange and acid-laden strangers + pleaded us to take them home, but we little knew where our own was. At least one of them did and it was sad and funny in equal measure. The car/tent conglomerate was finally located, no thanks to the Gorge people and we slept.

I found another video clip from the Manu Chao concert I went to [my earlier video and clip can be found right here]. This one is from someone on YouTube. Unfortunately, they were a little further back – I was right up at the stage, but only caught the tail end of ‘Mala Vida’. Oh well … Enjoy!

Manu Chao recently played a great live show at the Commodore Ballroom here in Vancouver before heading down to The Gorge in Washington State for the Sasquatch Music Festival. I was practically front-row and was on hand for the Sasquatch craziness too … For now, here’s a little video from the Commodore concert (link on the right of this post). You can see a better version on Facebook if you have an account there.
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In the spirit of savouring what might be the last week of being unencumbered by work, I headed to Commercial Drive (that’s a cool neighborhood here in Vancouver) recently to watch some football, or soccer if you will.

The match was the big final of this Champions League season, with Liverpool FC again taking on AC Milan, as they had done only two years prior in Istanbul. This year, the game was played in Athens’ cool new Olympic Stadium and Milan was hoping to regain some cool points by making up for losing that last game despite being up 3-0. I was wearing my Milan jerseys one over top of the other, hoping for some of the same.

I chose Abruzzo Cappuccino Bar (1321 Commercial Drive) since it has the best atmosphere and always gets packed for big events in the football world. It did not disappoint – pretty much standing room only by the time the whistle blew for the start of the match. Other Rossoneri (Milan) fans were clearly on hand + a handful of Scousers. After nervously gobbling down some espresso and chinotto, I finally scored a seat at halftime as Milan went up 1-0 thanks to a lucky deflected free kick. Fillipo Inzaghi’s second goal for Milan was more skillful and seemed set to seal Liverpool’s fate. Of course, the game got its necessary dose of theatrics when Liverpool’s Kuyt pulled off a late header to bring the score within one. It was a nail-biter, but Milan thankfully came out on top.

Here are some thoughts I’d had during the game:

• I thought it very strange that Rafael Benitez (Liverpool’s manager) chose to field Jermaine Pennant and keep some of his offensive firepower safely mothballed on the bench. None of Peter Crouch, Craig Bellamy, or Robbie Fowler were brought on until only 15 minutes remained. By then, Crouch had little chance to contribute to any sort of meaningful comeback.
• Even stranger were Milan’s defensive tactics. The above-mentioned Jermaine Pennant had the run of what seemed like half the field, with nobody bothering to defend him. Milan’s Czech defender Jankulovski probably should have stayed on the bench or at least replaced by more experienced Kaladze or Cafu earlier than he was.
• Milan did not seem to want the trophy until quite late in the game and were lucky to come out on top. They were clearly outshot and outrun by Liverpool, who were unfortunate not to get many bounces their way.
• The game was played fairly cleanly and professionall, with very little overt diving and dirty physical tricks.

And some hypothetical “what-if”s:

• I have to wonder whether, if Milan still had the services of Jon Dahl Tomasson, Rui Costa, Hernan Crespo and Andriy Shevchenko (all gone since these teams last met in 2005), Liverpool would not have been buried much earlier on. Of course, the English club also no longer have Milan Baros and Djibril Cisse. Looking forward to next year, having the Brazilian Ronaldo back from injuries and [just maybe] Sheva back might put Milan clearly back on top as the odds-on Champions League favourite. Shevchenko is currently being speculated about as contemplating a return from Chelsea to AC Milan, where he had been far more successful. Interestingly, Milan stand to gain GBP 18 million on such a transaction – the rumoured price for him is 12 million, whereas Chelsea paid an amazing 30 million to secure him.
• If Jerzy Dudek was still Liverpool’s starting goalkeeper, he might have made the same astounding Oliver Kahn -like saves that gave them the trophy two years ago. He has been playing high-level football for over 10 years, whereas the younger Reina has far less experience in such important matches.

One of the coolest moments of the afternoon was the presence of a photographer on assignment from The Province (a big daily newspaper in Vancouver). He tried to capture the important moments of the game and the fans’ reactions. [UPDATE: I ended up in the sports section of The Province newspaper the next day - see my scan of the page above; you can also click through to a larger version].

There was also a fan there who was blind – he was intently listening to the game and asked me something to clarify the second goal. It’s only too bad that the TSN/ESPN commentary he got here in these Northern climes is quite weak. We could really use Sky Sports or ITV here.

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[Newspaper photo credit: Vancouver Province, taken by Jason Payne]
[Headline photo credit: Courtesy of marc_l'esperance on flickr]