…but it’s not my fault. It’s Microsoft Word’s fault. When you use the grammar and spell check it often makes corrections that you question but ultimately believe to be true given that it’s a freaking word processing program.

For instance, if you go back far enough in the archives you’ll notice that I used to type That said (,). But after I got Office 2008 it started saying that that was wrong, that is should be That said (;), so I believed that it knew what it was talking about, even though it seemed strange to me.

As it turns out, I was right to be suspicious. A reader emailed me this evening and pointed out that there is a variety of punctuation that has been improperly used on a routine basis.

That’s all I need. To look like a bigger idiot than I already am.

Never attempt to edit a post right after you wake up. The save and delete buttons are too close together and if you happen to be staring blankly off into space you don’t realize that you’ve hit the wrong one until it’s all over. That admitted; Roy sent me a great article regarding possible Presidential pardons that inspired said entry, so maybe he’ll link it in the comments (as I forgot to save it). It presented far better information anyway.

Truth be told, I suffer from foggy head quite a bit, which makes most things a bit tricky. For example, it is not unheard of for me to wake up with my laptop sitting on my chest, or somewhere on the bed having slid off my chest. It is also not unheard of for me to completely forget that I own a car, leaving me occasionally wondering how I am going to get somewhere.

Throughout the day I have fielded numerous emails from readers regarding my last entry, which are what ultimately convinced me to remove it altogether. All of them made the same point, and it really is something that I should have thought through before I began typing this morning – I have nothing to prove, nor do I need to defend this website or my career. Adding fuel to useless fires is a pointless exercise. To be honest, in cases such as these, it’s a pleasure to realize that this site has such a well-rounded and intelligent readership – especially one that can point out that such rebuttals are a waste of time.

That said; there is a bit from the previous entry that I did want to keep, so I have included it below. Again, thanks to those of you that contacted me and talked some sense. We all need that now and again.

Archived

Arms proliferators feed off of conflict and the horrors that they produce. The big five have enjoyed that luxury for decades and yet we do not question it while, like lemmings, deride the inevitable backlash that it produces. The only difference between cutting the head off of a captured contractor and video taping it and helping to remove an unfriendly government and replace it with a friendly dictatorial regime is that one gets broadcast on the internet and the thousands of deaths produced by the other doesn’t. The point is; both are criminal and cowardly, but one cannot be viewed as such because to do so would require us to admit that even though we view ourselves as morally superior, we have been complicit in evils of considerable magnitude.

For a recent example of such culpability look no further than the Montréal International Conference on Haiti, what it produced, and our ultimate inclusion in the coup engineered to remove Aristide from power. Of course, here at home, Aristide was painted in a light necessary to maintain the illusion that freedom was being gifted the Haitian people. What wasn’t highlighted was that the ‘freedom fighters’ that entered the country from the Dominican to help depose him were drug lords and thugs – not some movement bent on bringing peace and stability to the country. In the end, it was Aristide’s refusal to privatize Haitian industries that led to his political demise and loss of control. And, like most Latin American leaders placed in that position, paranoia and a thin grasp on the maintenance of law and order pushed him into a corner in which acts that he might otherwise decry became undesirable options.

As Peter Hallward put it in March of 2004…

“Aristide was forced from office on Sunday by people who have little in common except their opposition to his progressive policies and their refusal of the democratic process. With the enthusiastic backing of Haiti’s former colonial master, a leader elected with overwhelming popular support has been driven from office by a loose association of convicted human rights abusers, seditious former army officers and pro-American business leaders.

It’s obvious that Aristide’s expulsion offered Jacques Chirac a long-awaited chance to restore relations with an American administration he dared to oppose over the attack on Iraq. It’s even more obvious that the characterisation of Aristide as yet another crazed idealist corrupted by absolute power sits perfectly with the political vision championed by George Bush, and that the Haitian leader’s downfall should open the door to a yet more ruthless exploitation of Latin American labour.

If you’ve been reading the mainstream press over the past few weeks, you’ll know that this peculiar version of events has been carefully prepared by repeated accusations that Aristide rigged fraudulent elections in 2000; unleashed violent militias against his political opponents; and brought Haiti’s economy to the point of collapse and its people to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.

But look a little harder at those elections. An exhaustive and convincing report by the International Coalition of Independent Observers concluded that “fair and peaceful elections were held” in 2000, and by the standard of the presidential elections held in the US that same year they were positively exemplary.”

And where were we? Well, JTF2 was holding the airport, waiting for US operatives that had secured Aristide to arrive and usher him into exile so that the so-called ‘liberators’ of Haiti could do the rest. Haitians were indeed liberated in the two weeks following the coup, hundreds of them in fact. All by death.

We are not at war with a religion, only a fool would presume as much, only a fool who hasn’t the wherewithal to actually educate themselves would sit easy on the conclusion that we are currently engaged in a world wide struggle against several billion people that ‘hate us for our freedoms’. Generalizations and fear are terrorism’s most profound productions. That being the case, it would seem that we have been terrorized by voices amongst us as equally as by those zealots that adhere to an entirely warped and politicized religious ideology. There are examples aplenty stretching back through time that provide context with regards to how easy it is to scare the weak minded into the belief that what they fear is actually greater than what it is. That said; many have done a fantastic job of insuring that ignorance remains commonplace so that such distractions can continue to convolute reason. That is not to say that threats do not exist, only that we are just as much a threat to our own way of life than any exterior threat. And those that perpetuate that fear are, in the end, no better than those they condemn, even if violence isn’t their primary tool. Intolerance and ignorance have killed far more people through their complacency in our collective history than any single cabal of individuals. Because without that complacency their evils would never have succeeded in the first place.

What we stand for, in the end, cannot be defended by a staunch belief in insularity while at the same time promoting the violent deliverance of freedom to others. That is merely a hypocritical position preferred by those that often believe that arguments are won simply by the volume at which they profess their beliefs and not on their actual merits.

If ignorance is indeed bliss, then welcome to an age of perpetual contentment.

I have decided to stop posting demos. It seems that there are those that don’t view it as something special, rather as a right with regards to their ownership of them – such as complaints that they weren’t left up long enough and therefore couldn’t be ripped in time to be saved.

My initial reason for posting them was to allow people a look at the process, to see how something is initially created and then grows from that stage to its final stage in the studio. I get a lot of email from aspiring musicians about it, and therefore thought it would be a positive thing.

You know, it’s funny how quickly positive intentions on the web are taken advantage of. Given the facelessness of the medium, there’s no questioning the fact that it has fostered a mindset that rarely takes into consideration the fact that were such things to occur in any other form it would be seen as something very special. Imagine if I were to sit down with people in a room and offer them glimpses of the process. That would be seen as something very special indeed. But when it’s done on a computer, it is not seen as all that special. In fact, after a while, it is something that almost becomes expected.

I didn’t grow up with the internet. In fact, when I was young the thought of a household computer was rather otherworldly in a way. Hell, Atari blew the minds of my generation, and compared to what young people have at their fingertips today an Atari is laughable in comparison. The internet, to people my age, is a rather fascinating thing to be honest. Perhaps that’s why, at times, I am still naïve about it. I view it as something that offers connectivity, resource, and a medium with which to freely, and without censure, express and share ideas and opinions. But one thing that I have always found strange is that it also fosters a complete lack of respect in many instances for a great many things. While a milestone in human achievement, it sadly reflects a growing state of incivility, something that many have come to simply accept. Interestingly, prior to its widespread popularity, the sort of incivility prevalent on the web was not something that was nearly as apparent in the normal course of daily interactions.

Obviously, given that I post entries on this website on a daily basis, I am a fan of the web and its possibilities. Then again, I am also very aware of its negatives and, at times, seriously wonder if the freedom that it currently offers us will continue to be more and more regulated because it was something that could not be used without being tarnished by those unable to translate real world respectability to their online behaviour.

It’s game time. It’s 1976.

I was just updating a post from earlier today and accidentally deleted it. The new interface has the update and delete buttons pretty close together, and when you’re watching playoff hockey at the same time, hitting the wrong one can certainly become a problem. Anyway, it’s probably still out there in RSS land.

Updated

Now that was a comeback.

It’s almost noon, which means only four more hours until the puck drops in Montreal. How I am going to pass those four hours I don’t know.

After returning home some weeks ago I realized something about my apartment. The concrete floors, like hardwood floors, collect dust at an alarming rate. You could vacuum and dust this place on a daily basis only for it to end up in the exact same state the next afternoon. Meanwhile, you’re breathing all of it in, which, if you’re allergic to dust, makes your sinuses very unhappy.

For years I’ve had to sleep with a fan next to the bed for two reasons. One – the noise it produces drowns out the ringing in my ears. Two – I get hot really easily and can’t stand sleeping in a warm room. Unfortunately, because the fan is pointed at the bed, dust particles are probably being pumped through it, meaning that while I’m sleeping I’m getting a healthy dose of dust – fantastic.

My brain has felt like scrambled eggs for weeks. It’s been hard to concentrate, hard to work, hard to read. I find myself obsessively cleaning, folding laundry, opening recording sessions only to have the feeling of ‘I don’t feel like doing this right now’ pass over me. The same goes for writing for the site, actually.

In truth, that’s one of the reasons we tend to make so many graphic changes around here – because it gives me something to do that isn’t focused on my job or the weight of the world. I suppose that’s why I’ve come to envy blogs and sites that aren’t so serious, because writing them must be a ton of fun every day. After a while, writing about music and geopolitics can get to you, I’ll be the first to admit it. The latter of the two tends to cause a great deal of blog fatigue, even to the extent that I’ll read a great deal every day but fail to even bother posting links to those things that I have read to my del.icio.us page, which is something that I have done on a routine basis for some years now.

In a way I miss being on the road. Out there you know what’s going on, what you have to do, and what your day’s going to be like. Having no real connections at home, beyond the dogs and my immediate family, it’s become something that I miss. While I tend to be somewhat of a homebody while at home, there’s something about being constantly on the move that I miss when I’m not doing it.

Anyway, four hours to kill before game 5.

I’ll admit it; I’m hooked on flickr’s new video feature. I think it’s utterly brilliant, primarily because I can’t stand YouTube – for some reason everything Google touches looks like crap.

This morning alone I have posted four different video clips. Hopefully, as flickr develops the feature, they’ll increase the file size to allow for more than 90 seconds.

Given my new found love for it, I may add a permanent link somewhere in the menu to my Video set, so that readers can wander over and keep up to date on them if they’re at all interested.

Speaking of the site, and our never ending graphic psychosis, here’s a little preview of some of the changes we’re about to make…

The new backend admin features for Wordpress are pretty cool. Even cooler is the fact that Dale customized our layout. One of its downsides, unfortunately, is the fact that audio upload sizes are pretty restricted, making it basically impossible for me to throw up teasers on a whim.

Another cool development is the addition of video to Flickr. I know that a lot of Flickr purists are against it, but like anything, you just don’t have to use it. The clips are limited to 90 seconds, but can be embedded, so I’m probably going to use it primarily for quickly answering fan questions. If you’d like to ask a question, you can email me at matt@matthewgood.org or by using the Flickr mail service. If you chose to, please include your real name and where you’re from, because I won’t answer anonymous questions. Obviously, I won’t be able to get to everyone’s questions, so forgive me in advance if yours isn’t chosen.

Anyway, a few film reviews…

John From Cincinnati

I wasn’t sure what to make of this HBO series, but bought it anyway given that the creators of Deadwood are behind it. I must admit that I was refreshingly surprised – so much so that I watched the entire first season in one sitting.

There Will Be Blood

To say that this film wasn’t the best film made last year would be a profound understatement. While I have always been a massive fan of the work of the Cohen Brothers, there is simply no way that No Country For Old Men is even in the same league as this film. The acting, the dimension, the cinematography and depth – they are all representative of the sort of superlative filmmaking that is becoming increasingly rare.

The film opens with almost fifteen captivating, dialogue-free minutes; a powerful achievement and one that certainly speaks to not only the ability of Daniel Day-Lewis, but also the vision of Paul Thomas Anderson.

How this film did not win Best Picture is entirely beyond me.

A few random bits to start with today prior to delving into the Petreaus-Crocker debacle.

First, congrats to my friend Claire Folwer who wrote her first blog entry in a year yesterday – for The Guardian.

Second, a rather shocking occurrence in which a girl was assaulted while it was videotaped…

Regarding The Recently Announced Calgary Date

I realize that some fans in Calgary might be disappointed that I’m not playing my own show but rather the Virgin Festival. Then again, the bands on the bill that day are more than worth the ticket price. The headliner is the Tragically Hip, then there’s me, then City And Colour, Stars, The New Pornographers, and Constantines. Hell, I’d pay admission the first night for The Flaming Lips alone.

Also, the single day admission of $75 dollars is taxes in, and a dollar of each ticket goes to the Virgin Unite program.

First, my entry last night entitled ‘you see’, was actually a just a test post, so it shares no relevance to this entry.

I didn’t watch the Junos last night. In fact, I don’t own a television. But on this occasion I wish that I had watched, just for the diatribe of host Russell Peters.

If there’s one thing the Junos are known for it’s how utterly painful most of its hosts have been. Last night, from some of the excerpts that I have read, it seems that curse was broken.

Here are a select few…

“I can’t believe they have a post-apocalyptic theme up here. We’ll let a brown guy host, but the world has to end first.”

“South Asians, my people, are now the largest visible minority in Canada. Do you know what that means, Calgary? Pretty soon your cowboys are going to be Indians.”

“I never actually have seen the Junos before, which makes me Canadian.”

“The Junos people have been treating me really well. They actually got me a driver - Chad Kroeger.”

One wonders if that last remark will lead to Kroeger claiming in an interview that Peters is due for a good old fashion country ass kicking.

My Recent Canucks Entry

If you subscribe to the website using the RSS feed then you still have access to it, even though it’s been deleted. My reason for doing so is that I’ve been receiving a ton of email from Canucks fans lambasting me for everything from my lack of knowledge to the fact that ‘my music sucks’. Normally that wouldn’t bother me too much, but when you start to get emails that claim that Rolling Stone voted you the worst song writer in North America, which is a total fabrication, then you know you’re in for a shit storm that’s best avoided. If I’m going to be attacked for anything, let it be for commentary regarding something that’s actually relevant to the state of the world, not a bloody hockey team. At least Hockey Night In Canada analyst Jeff Marek said he liked it.