Grand Hotel was on TVO early this morning. Ever since the first time I saw the movie, every time I see Joan Crawford it reminds me of Corin Tucker.

Konfabulator is something of a dream come true for power users. Konfabulator is a miniature JavaScript engine for OS X that allows you to create all kinds of stat/macro widgets. Want to find out the weather? There’s a widget out there that’ll display the five-day forecast in a little window on your desktop. Want to keep track of your bandwidth? You can do that too. If you can cook up some images and write the JavaScript for it, you can do it with Konfabulator.Since I’m not blessed with a Mac, I’ve been playing around with a Windows substitute called Samurize that utilizes the Windows Script Host to do much of the same work. The WSH takes a bit of figuring out, but now I’ve got a little persistent window that tells me, among other things, when I have mail, how long the system’s been up, what’s playing in WinAmp, and what the most recent post on Metafilter is.Samurize is, unfortunately, only a statistics program at the moment; you can’t, for example, load the comments for the latest Metafilter post using Samurize, whereas it looks like you could with Konfabulator. Still, it’s a pretty handy little application, and lots of fun to tinker with.

Sleater-Kinney at the Opera House, February 18 2003. The pros: the band keeps coming back to Toronto, so that’s a plus. Corin’s talking more and dancing more, and overall just rocks more. The new songs sound great in concert, too.The cons? They talked to the audience less, and they didn’t seem so pleased with the reaction. Maybe it was a really bad idea to let the audience sing a verse to Words And Guitar instead of the chorus, which everyone remembers. Is that the band’s fault for not figuring out the audience, though, or our fault for not knowing the words? Plus there was nothing—absolutely nothing—from The Hot Rock. I’m convinced now that The Hot Rock is Sleater-Kinney’s Pinkerton—no one, outside of a core group of enthusiasts and/or cultists, seems to like the album. This is unfortunate.Also, not that the band should be blamed for this at all, but the last time I went to see Sleater-Kinney, it was like a revelation. Janet Weiss was holding down the fort at the merch booth when I walked in, as was Olivia from COCO and Meg from the White Stripes. Sleater-Kinney was the first show I’d ever seen in such a small venue (although I’ve seen plenty in even smaller venues since then) and it never occured to me that actual band members would be selling their own swag, let alone setting up their own equipment and talking to the audience beforehand. There was none of that this time around, and while you can’t fault the band for wanting someone else to tune their guitars, I missed being able to talk to Corin, even if I had nothing good to say.But. The ten-minute jam during the encore. Everyone who was paying attention knew it’d be Dig Me Out, and it seemed like none of us could wait for it. And yet the band took us for a rollercoaster ride before they finally gave us the goods. That, and Corin during Sympathy, is what I’ll remember from the night. Oh, and the girl who got the wrong coat after the concert. Hope you found it.

Lots of people tell stories to other people, but it’s the rare individual who’ll tell people a story that seems tailor-made to be told only to themselves. Sometimes it’s all too personal, and if you’re the unlucky recipient, you sit and cringe and wish it was all over. Even rarer, then, is the person who can reveal a portion of themselves with a certain grace.Budding creative writers, and even those who’ve made their hobby into a profession, often use their own experiences as subject matter. Sometimes there’s no pretense to fiction, but most of the time the line between reality and fiction is blurred. Did this really happen? Does the author really act this way? Does it matter? Most of the time, it doesn’t.There are people in your life, though, about whom you know only the vaguest of details. You know that her sisters think she’s a heathen, and that most of her friends probably think the opposite. She’s the bookish type, very intelligent, and not the condescending type you thought she’d be. She has a boyfriend, and a close relationship with her mother. She might be the girl you see in class on occasion, or the woman in the office two down from yours. Maybe she goes to the same bar you do on Wednesday nights, when you’re trying to see a way to the weekend that doesn’t involve bloodletting or hallucinogens.I knew she wrote stories, but I never took the time to read them. She never gave them to me to read, of course, but she gets published every now and then. When you write for a person, you hide details and change names, to make sure that no one knows what’s really you and what’s made up. When you write for a faceless and nameless audience, you forget those little tricks and obfuscations, because you know that no one will ever be able to figure out if it’s real or not, and most of them won’t care.Some of us, though, know the person behind the byline, and wonder how true it is. I wonder how much of it she remembers, and if she was really like that as a kid. I wonder if it affected her, distinctly changed her so that if you looked closely enough, you could see it in her somehow. Most of all, I wonder how I knew someone like her, even if only in passing, and how her writing has given me the briefest of glimpses into an undercurrent of thoughts and feelings and histories that I would’ve missed entirely given a different twist of fate.She brought her characters to life, and in turn the story brought her to life for me. Not bad for three pages of prose.

It’s been a while since regular updates, and it’ll probably be a little while until they return. There are a number of reasons why, but the biggest one is because we won.

On the one side, pretty much all of the next White Stripes album is on theinternet, although apparently John Peel’s been told not to play any of it on Radio 1. On the other, a release date (May 6th) for the next New Pornographers album, along with a new MP3 on Matador (strangely enough, no word from Mint about the release,probably because their entire website is stuck somewhere in early January).To sum up: New Pornographers 1, White Stripes 0. Not that the Elephant tracks aren’t good, but “The Laws Have Changed” is just so much better.

Easily the worst Kingston winter in the two and a half years I’ve been here.In some respects, this year’s winter is just more of the usual—more snow, more wind, more bitter cold—but there are some things that I’vejust never seen before. For example, panflute-like icicle formations hanging from electric wires. That’s always reassuring.The coolest thing I’ve seen, however, is the massive layer of ice that has formed over all of the sidewalks in Kingston. Not only have they widened the effective sidewalk area by encroaching onto the street, but they’re damned thick. You can’t tell how thick these layers are unless someone’s hacked away a portion of it, or a water main has broken and cut a channel through it. We’ve got a couple of inches, at least. Chalk up another wonder of the world to the City of Kingston for failing to adequately clean the sidewalks. Without their ineptitude, I’d have never seen this marvel of the natural world. Huzzah!
I’ve got a commercial for you, coming soon.

From the AP wire, January 29, 2003:CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Columbia’s astronauts briefly interrupted their science work on the 17th anniversary of the Challenger disaster to remember their fallen comrades.NASA’s work force, in orbit and on Earth, observed a moment of silence Tuesday at the exact time that Challenger exploded in the sky Jan. 28, 1986. They honored not only on the seven Challenger astronauts, but also the three who were killed by a fire in their Apollo spacecraft at the pad Jan. 27, 1967.At the launch site, flags flew at half staff for the second day in a row.The two tragedies, separated by 19 years and a single day, represent the space agency’s darkest hours.

Today is February 1st, and with the confirmation of Columbia’s breakup in the skies of Texas, NASA finds yet another reason to mourn this week. Hopefully, this will be the last reason for quite some time.