I Get to Be Part of the Red River College Creative Communications Blogging Roundtable 2011

That's right! Today allows me the opportunity for a very special one-day-guest-appearance return to the Princess Street Campus Roblin Centre of Red River College; I've been invited to participate in the Kenton Larsen-moderated CreComm Blogging Roundtable, held annually to provide first-year Creative Communications students with valuable advice and wisdom as they set forth to create and maintain their own blogs throughout the year.

The roundtable discussion from 11:00 to noon in the Great-West Lecture Theatre will feature accomplished local notables Erica Glasier, Liz Hover and Alyson Shane, so all of the lucky students in attendance today will be treated to indispensable insights from three talented, professional, dedicated, successful local bloggers. And then I'll be there, too, presumably for balance, Schmucky McCatpicture over here explaining why you should think carefully before including a word like "Murder" in the title of anything you could conceivably otherwise list on a resume one day.

So it should be fun! I expect this'll be the highlight of my week, even above yesterday's star-powered episode of Winnipeg Internet Pundits and above my Uptown Magazine column that somebody will probably be mad at me for once it hits newsstands later today. I have nothing but fond memories of the Princess Str i gotta stop typing that Roblin Centre from my time there, so it'll be a fun trip down memory lane to poke around; heck, if I'm really well-behaved, maybe the fine staff in the Library will even let me do the Word of the Day board again for old time's sake. (But, then, maybe they won't.)

As for you, gentle reader, stay tuned; I should hope I'll have some points to add or follow up on after the fact.

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: 50 Years and 800 Pounds

Well, hey, long time no see! August was kind of a bust for this site -- perhaps you had noticed -- but hey, if I was going to accidentally take a month off, it made sense that it would be that one. And it was a very nice month, indeed, but all good things must come to an end; the end of the summer has since ambushed our fair province, its sudden comparative cold chasing us all inside whenever we aren't waving sandbags around and hoping the water won't make off with all our stuff.

Yes, the transition into autumn has begun in earnest, and nothing heralds the arrival of dead leaves and early sunsets quite like the observance of Labour Day. The holiday is of course highlighted by its annual Labour Day Classic, the first of two consecutive football games between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and their hated Saskatchewan Roughrider rivals, and we here at the Slurpees and Murder Record Club are nothing if not dedicated to the journalistic concept of equal time. So! Today's super-special super-sized Labour Day installment will feature two timeworn vinyl selections -- one representing our beloved-until-hockey-arrives Blue Bombers, and one representing the fearsome (if backwards) scourge of the Roughriders.

We begin with a piece of Blue Bomber history, or rather a half-century chunk of it: