Author Archives: Rob MacD

I’ve recently removed a few blogs from my daily reading list. One of them in particular because I thought it to be a miasma of pomposity.

I may have reported here before of my love of The Beatles. It’s boring to say, but they are my favourite band.
One of the problems with being such a huge fan of a musical group or artist, I think, is what I’ll call the ‘Trees for the Forest’ syndrome. By that, I mean that because I know so well every aspect of the songs, sometimes I can be listening to a song but not really hear it. Because it’s so familiar to me, sometimes I take the song for granted, I think, and don’t hear the drums, bass, guitars and vocals for what they are. I hear it from rote, without really paying attention to it.

That’s why it’s great, lately, to be hearing some previously unrelesed or hard-to-come-by Beatles music. Because I know the familiar recordings too well, the differences in these alternate takes, outtakes, etc. can startle me and cause me to hear the songs anew.

A couple of great sources for alternate Beatles songs, and history are found at the NPR site, from a program called All Songs Considered. I watched (although mostly it’s just a couple of guys sitting in chairs, and occasional still photos) one this afternoon called The Birth Of Beatlemania (high speed recommended). It focused on the year 1963 and the path of events that took the Beatles to America. Very interesting to me. The second, which I am going to watch now, has to do with The Lost Beatles and recordings from Let It Be that were stolen 30 years ago and only recently recovered.

If you’re deep into The Beatles like I am, I’ll bet you’ll enjoy them quite a bit.

A new, periodic-to-daily, until-I-get-tired-of-it feature of The Annekenstein Monster will be the Dictionary.com word of the day, used in a paragraph of my creation that somehow relates to something that’s going on in my life.

Today’s word: Hector

This week, there has been quite a bit of talk, on a couple of blogs I frequent, about the word “vagina”. Fortunately, the debates remained civil and nobody attempted to hector another.

My wife’s grandmother, Helen, in her 10th decade, suffered a large heart attack about a week ago. She’d been in the hospital ever since, at times seeming like she’d pull through, at other times seeming pretty frail and showing her age and condition. Upon her being admitted to the hospital, the nurses told the family to expect Helen to not leave the hospital, and so, over the past week, we were expecting death to come. Today at noon It did.
I wasn’t really close to Helen. I liked her and she was friendly enough to me over our 20 years of knowing each other, but in the past few years, I’d only seen her a couple of times. Karyn and Cameron, the church-goers in our family of three, would see her much more often at church.
One of my last memories of her was when she, still living on her own in her own home, invited us to stay for lunch during one of our visits to see her. We didn’t really want to stay but we did. She made us Kraft Dinner. From what I remember, she didn’t have any milk for the cheese mix, so she used a bit of water instead. Unfortunately, she used too much water, and the resulting cheese sauce was pretty weak. Actually, the word ‘weak’ implies much more flavour than what was contained in that dinner. It was, by far, the worst macaroni and cheese I’ve ever eaten.
Still, it was a nice visit, and she was remarkably smart and clear and spright for a lady of her age. And in my 20 years of knowing her, I’ve never seen her angry or unpleasant, and she was always quick to laugh.

She was a pretty religious lady. And even though I am not religious at all… Helen, I hope everything works out for you.

Well, it was bound to happen. Obviously, a few months ago, all the pipes and plumbing in our bathroom got together and planned this. First it’ll be the toilet that goes. The bathroom sink and its pipes, having been replaced a mere year or two ago, decided it’d be obvious if they went again. Now, the final bit of bathroom plumbing has decided to malfunction and depart. So, today, we have new taps and shower, plus new pipes leading to the taps and shower.
To get to the pipes, our interim plumber (the much appreciated Cecil has put his back out and was unable to attend to our needs) had to go in from the bathroom closet. That means the wall in the closet had to be, um, removed. That means that everything in the closet had to be removed.
The closet in question has probably seven shelves, and is as deep as a standard tub is wide. Pretty deep, for a closet, I think. Over the 10+ years of living here, we’ve begun using less and less of the back areas of those shelves. Lately, in fact, I’d guess we only use the front 6 inches of those shelves. That’s not to say the rest of the area is empty. Quite the opposite, in fact. All the shelves are piled deep with all sorts and manner of bathroom and non-bathroom items. Many of which have not been seen for years.
One of those objects was a pill bottle that contained some of Cameron’s baby hair. Much lighter than it is now. I found it interesting how my wife was quite struck by the memories that this bottle of hair elicited, yet my reaction was (perhaps typical of the male of the species) more along the lines of “Erp.”
The difference must have something to do with the fact that she has a vagina

For those, like me, who are a fan of both, Johnny Depp will be on The Actor’s Studio tonight on Bravo.

Film actors must just salivate at the opportunity to act in a Coen brothers movie. Tom Hanks looks wonderfully funny. The movie looks very promising.

Film actors must just salivate at the opportunity to act in a Coen brothers movie. Tom Hanks looks wonderfully funny. The movie looks very promising.

Here’s a link to the MoveOn dot org Voter Fund 30 second television commercial that CBS won’t allow to be aired during the Super Bowl.

Be careful, though. You might see something that makes you think just a bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s Oscar time in Blogland, and everyone’s got a post or two about the nominations.

But here’s one that I bet is different. See, I’m very much looking forward to seeing (I’m assuming they’ll perform) Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara perform “A Kiss At the End of the Rainbow” as Mickey and Mitch.

That got me thinking:

What five artists would you really like to see perform at next year’s Oscars?

Here’s mine, off the top of my head (artists are real, songs and movie titles, obviously made up):

Rufus Wainwright singing “Babelfish” from the movie “Fountain Lake”
Dwight Yoakam singing “Texas-Size Hole” from the movie “The Appellate”
Liz Phair singing “Guy Homme” from the movie “Augmented” or singing “Augmented” from the movie “Guy Homme”
XTC singing “Beat Up” (from their new album) from the movie “Stone-Dead Churchill”
Tom Waits singing “Hambourg Whore in the Land of Gin and Tonic” from the movie “Uncle Auntie”

I’m sure if I gave it more thought, I’d come up with a better list, but I think the above five performers would make a kick-ass Oscar telecast.

I’d also love to see the movie Stone-Dead Churchill, especially if XTC was involved It’d be the hit smash, hot new movie import from Britain’s newly discovered Tarantino. Also, I expect Uncle Auntie would be good. Maybe it’s a Robert Altman comedy. Guy Homme must be some sort of period piece, maybe Guy is a french foreign legionairre? Renee Zellwegger would star as the squinting Monsieur Homme. The Appellate sounds like some southern legal drams bullshit starring Cruise and Paltrow. Fountain Lake would be a psychological thriller starring Harrison Ford and Nicole Kidman as husband and wife. Yes, husband and wife.