I Wanted One Last Project to Give This Site a Proper Sendoff, So I Wrote an Original Soundtrack Concept Album for a Manitoba-Themed Nintendo Game That Doesn't Exist

Hello there, friends! I'd hate to bury the lede too far down under my characteristic exposition, and the post title gives you the gist of the idea, so let's get straight to the important part: I'd been secretly writing an album off-and-on over the past year or so, and now that album is out.

Manitoba Circuit OST / マニトバラリーレース大冒険!! こんなに平らでいいのか?! OST
Pay-What-You-Want | hopechip.bandcamp.com
So that's pretty great. That's a pretty good feeling! The album is free to stream, and also free to download, though you are welcome to pay money for it if you find you enjoy it.

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Unsurprisingly, Lots of Christ in the St. Mary's Academy Christmas Album (JUBILEE!)

Merry almost-Christmas, listeners, and welcome to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club!

Today's lost local Christmas album is vastly more traditional than our most recent installment; it's more in line with last year's Christmastime entry, though twenty years later and with the jump in recording equipment to match.

So get your stockings and your eggnog and your Christ-love if you're into that, because it's time for:

Manitoba Links Weekly: We Should Send Thunder Bay a Nice Card, Diabetes as Plot Resolution, More Fights Than Points, and Here is Burton Cummings Performing His "The 8 Days of Christmas" (ManLinkWeek S02E09)

The soulfulness in each and every delivery of "Five pounds of hash~!" makes my heart grow three sizes. And that camerawork! I'm so glad that we live in a world where this exists.

Hello and welcome to Manitoba Links Weekly! We've almost made it all the way through 2013; I'd say "let's enjoy it while it lasts", but this year turned vicious on me in every imaginable way, so honestly let's just kill it as quickly as we can.

This week on Winnipeg Internet Pundits we had some fun with that new Tourism Manitoba slogan -- and some fun flag-related follow-up discussion! -- as well as some looking back on top stories of 2013 and looking forward to top stories of 2014. Oh, and some music! That's a thing I've learned how to do on the soundboard now, swap on the fly from music to talk, it was pretty rad. Fine seasonal discussion, fine seasonal music -- a fine show all around, well worth your ear.

Anyway! No time to waste. ManLinkWeek!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Underwhelming Hockey at Discount Prices, I Think I Missed Dim Sum Day, Boot Scootin' Boogie for Keyboards and Drum Set, and I Don't Smoke But I Own a Cheeky Protest Contraband-Cigarettes Shirt Nonetheless (ManLinkWeek S02E08)

Hello and welcome to Manitoba Links Weekly! My word, time flies these days.

This week on Winnipeg Internet Pundits -- ha, that episode title, though -- this week we went into surprising depth on local store and product gift-shopping recommendations, discussed the merits and drawbacks of the hypothetical Unicity II, and expanded on some particular points of the preliminary civic budget. Including this very fine local blog post, which I heartily recommend you check out. Good times!

Oh! Also earlier this week, I added the 92 CITI-FM compilation "Winnipeg's Rock 'N Roll Christmas, Volume II" to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club; it's a two-decade-old rarity well worth your investigation, so give it a spin or two.

And if this post seems a little shorter than usual, it's because I've driven 2,200 kilometers across nine degrees of latitude in the past three days. Y'know, as one does. Release the ManLinkWeek!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Ladies and Gentlemen, Prepare Yourselves for 92 CITI-FM's "Winnipeg's Rock 'N Roll Christmas, Volume II"

Happy holidays, you infidel atheists! Welcome to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club; as we draw closer to Christmas Day, I think it's important that we all collectively take the time to appreciate the seasonally appropriate output of local musicians past and present.

In my last post I'd linked to some suitably seasonal material curated as a Manitoba Music playlist, but what I am about to present to you -- what you are about to hear -- has largely escaped detection until now, and really for the past twenty years or so. An oddity, a rarity, a treasure lost to time; it just so happened that I rescued a copy from a thrift store earlier this year, and it further just so happened that it played in exquisitely fine quality. (Believe me, with cassettes, you can't assume anything.)

Behold as I beheld, friends:



THE LEGENDS ARE TRUE, IT'S REAL

Manitoba Links Weekly: It's a Bit Easier Being Green Than it Used to Be, I Hope a Weekly Provencher Facepalm Doesn't Have to Be a Thing, COOKIES, and Here's Brian Pallister Wishing All You Infidel Atheists Out There a Merry Christmas (ManLinkWeek S02E06)

I, uh... appreciate the... effort? I appreciate that you tried. You, uh, hey, you have a good one too.

Hello and welcome to Manitoba Links Weekly!

This week on Winnipeg Internet Pundits was one-third-repeat and two-thirds-new, because it snowed on Wednesday and roads are impassable when y'all keep driving into each other. (I passed four -- four! -- accidents on my way to the University, including one that snarled Pembina southbound for the better part of forever. Manitoba has the nation's lowest rate of winter-tire use, just coincidentally.)

But! In the back two-thirds of said show we covered the fascinatingly close Brandon-Souris byelection and its wildly, historically inaccurate polling -- TWENTY-NINE POINTS LOL -- as well as the very, very exciting University of Winnipeg apartment-tower announcement. Hey, someone's gotta build them, and it's not like the U of W doesn't already have plenty of valuable experience building things around there.

Speaking of radio -- segue! -- remember the CKUW 95.9 mystery show that Scott Price and I had collaborated on earlier this month? We spent an hour on the airwaves gushing over some of our favourite bass performances, and I am pleased to report that the audio of that show is now mirrored here for your listening and downloading pleasure. (Also, I couldn't resist: to honour the death of Winamp, I've listed the ID3 genre as "Primus".)

This concludes our weekly radio preamble; commence the ManLinkWeek! Let's start with a quiet but noteworthy provincial exit:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: She Will Love You and Leave You High and Dry (or, 1987 Just Was Not a Year for Lookin' Good)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Slurpees and Murder Record Club! Are you all set for the long weekend? Not yet, you ain't!

Get ready to kick it like it's 1987:

Internet on the Radio: Slurpees and Murder Record Club, a Winnipeg Cat Segment on CJOB, and Winnipeg Internet Pundits (Briefly) Returns This Week

Well, hello there, everyone! My apologies for the unintended two-week absence; it seems like the busyness of summer starts earlier and earlier every year, whether it actually feels like summer yet or not. (It's expected to rain today and right through to the end of the week, because of course it is.) But there's well over an hour's worth of content for you to enjoy in this post, so let's get rolling!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Happy Earth Day 1992

Happy Earth Day, one and all, and welcome once again to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club!

After the worst major news week in recent memory -- filled with tax hikes and shootings and bombings and explosions and poisoned letters and attempted train attacks and gah -- it's a nice change of pace to unwind with the annual day of save-the-planet rhetoric, which each year closely follows the annual day of hey-brah-what-if-weed-were-legal rhetoric.

So, in celebration of Earth Day, let us gather around and enjoy a now-twenty-one-year-old local compilation album. One that was also in celebration of Earth Day. Uh... mostly.

Feast your eyes and ears upon:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Someone Please Help Me Figure Out This 1984 Commemorative Pope-Themed Cassette

The title says it all, really, but -- hello and welcome back to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club!

Remember how the last installment of SMRC had at least given us something, anything, to work with in determining its origins? Well, PREPARE YOURSELVES:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Mother Nature Went on a Rampage, Filled Many a Heart with Fear

This is a feature that I haven't busted out in a while, so pardon me a moment while I brush the cobwebs off the ol' Slurpees and Murder Record Club:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Leise Rieselt Der Schnee

The WIPs Year-End Special I'd previously mentioned didn't quite pan out, owing to some scheduling difficulties, but since it would have overlapped with the public hearing for the controversial Osborne Village Shoppers proposal I sort of doubt anybody noticed anyway. (Pundit-wrangler Tessa Vanderhart was embedded at the event and live-tweeted it on @internetpundits, if you'd wondered what the ambiance there was like.)

I had dragged out, dusted off and digitized a seasonally appropriate local album from the ol' record collection to use for musical interludes, and since the whole Christmas season will be over in three days I figure I should share it with you folks while it still makes sense:







The Winnipeg Mennonite Children's Choir (1973)
[website | history | founder bio | I couldn't find anywhere that sells this album, so you'll just have to make do with this ]

I hope you don't mind a few clicks and pops here and there; I did what I could to clean the audio quality up, but the age of the item and the condition I found it in only allow for so many miracles to be worked. (There's one particularly unsettling warble in "Il Est Ne Le Divin Enfant" that I couldn't shake -- but, hey, maybe you like your Christmas music a little creepy.)

The tri-lingual fourty-voice choir was founded in 1957, this particular album recorded inside the Westminster United Church in 1973. I dig the song selection variety on this record; there are a some songs on here that you really don't hear very often any more, and many of the songs that tend to be overplayed this time of year are freshened up here by a switch into German.

(I'll be honest; I straight-up despise most of the standard Christmas repertoire, and it's not like it ever changes.)

I know I tend to overexplain when I post these, so I'll keep the highlights brief. "Alleluia, Sing FOR Joy" -- that's exactly how it's written on the album label, I don't know why -- is badass in its own curious way for a Christmas piece. "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy" gets a surprisingly funky rendition, although a lot of that stems from the organ's effort. "The Sleigh" is less than a minute long, but dang if I don't enjoy every bit of it; I'd probably like all Christmas music a lot more if it involved this kind of urgency. I never quite know what to make of "Huron Indian Carol", but it's done as well here as it's done anywhere. And I really wish the audio quality were better on "Kling Gloekchen", because the two-part harmony in the first half of the song is really quite nice.

I rather doubt I'll be posting again before Christmas, so, Merry Christmas! And Happy Holidays, and everything else that applies this time of year. Only three more sleeps until Boxing Day, Winnipeg!

Manitoba Links Weekly: Popcorn, Publishing, Portage la Prairie Punk, and Pilfered Parrots (ManLinkWeek 10)

Tomorrow's edition of Winnipeg Internet Pundits will be a two-hour Christmas special, airing from 4:30 to 6:30 PM on UMFM 101.5. There will be retrospectives, musical interludes, the year's best segments, reflection on the past and future of our city, and even -- I'm not sure why I'm presenting this like it'll be a selling point -- brand new poetry. So tune in!

Ah, but first things first. ManLinkWeek hits double digits! Let's see what seasonal items are floating around out there in the big wide worl--

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:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Just Go to a Pavilion for a Dream That You Can Share

I wrote this Uptown column, about how awesome hidden talents are (spoiler alert: they're pretty awesome), and I mention it to start this post because I'm dedicated to shameless plugs but also because this is the time of year when you are most likely to find out that people you know around town are secretly really good at things.

That's right: it's Folklorama time! Kicking off with a free Saturday show and then running until the middle of the month, Winnipeg's annual multiculturalism festival -- or, as one of my former professors proclaimed it (and indelibly branded it in my mind), "ethnic zoo" -- will be filling community clubs, curling rinks and high school gymnasiums all across town.

Two weeks of good times! Squabbling amongst your travel group over which pavilion to drive to, buying a wacky imported soda pop because the MLCC never allows any beer more exotic than Corona into the festival, eating whatever the spiciest and/or scariest food is on the menu, and clapping along as strangers do exotic and potentially injurious dances for your entertainment. That, my friends, is an evening well spent, and I look forward to this year's extravaganzas (now with less E. Coli!) with glee.

Are you all ready to get into the Folklorama spirit? You'd better be! Because tonight's installment of the Slurpees and Murder Record Club is a sampling of years past -- way, way past -- with something for everyone and a finale that you won't want to listen to. Er--did I say "listen to"? I meant "miss". A finale you won't want to miss.

I bring you:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: My Favourite Song That I Can't Identify

I happen to be on Google+ now, if you're into that sort of thing; part of the whole Information Science rigamarole means paying attention to emerging trends in social media, in case a prospective employer considers it the kind of stuff that may be lumped into one's hypothetical job description. So I am now, if nothing else, aware of it -- but the platform is popularly seen as a response to Facebook and Facebook never really ended up being my bag, so I'll have to wait and see how well Google+ grabs me.

Twitter, as you're aware, I dig; it's built around the rapid-fire short-form delivery of information, a helpful skill not otherwise often taught, so I check it fairly frequently to see how people work within its disciplines. But Facebook? Man, my Facebook use is entirely sporadic, as anyone who's tried to contact me through Facebook has long since figured out by now. Facebook only exists in my mind as a way to remind me of folks' birthdays and to keep me updated on adorable baby photos of tiny relatives, which, I mean, I guess that's still pretty good for a website. But its continually rotating air-quotes "Privacy" settings and its gradual, Myspaceian advertising creep are bad enough before you realize that there isn't much to it or on it at this point; most of its clientele only seem to use it now for personality tests, web quizzes, Flash games and copy-paste exercises.

"A LOST COW HAS WANDERED ONTO CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE'S FARM!"
"HOW MANY OF THE AFI TOP 100 MOVIES HAVE YOU SEEN?? CLICK HERE"
"70% OF PEOPLE WHO READ THIS ARE IN THE MAJORITY, REPOST THIS IF YOU'RE IN THE MINORITY 30%"
"DON'T YOU HATE WHEN YOU WANT A SANDWICH AND THE BREAD ALL GONE, PUT THIS AS YOUR STATUS IF YOU OUT OF BREAD"

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Summer Recline Mixtape

my feelings for you are complex and confusing so i put a mixtape in your locker

I ended up being kind of busy yesterday, thus missing my post for the day; I'll make a point of sneaking an extra one in somewhere before the month is out, for the sake of retroactively pretending that I said "Daily Post Month" but actually meant "Average Pace of One Post Per Day Month".

But, on to business! So far we've had mixtapes for day and night highway driving, which are all well and good if you've still got about a hundred and twenty kilometers left between where you are and where you need to be. But what if you've got nowhere in particular to be, have no inclination to get out of the city, or just really like lounging around? Well, I do believe I'm about to have you covered.

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Nighttime Highway Mixtape

i like you but i am shy so i made you a mixtape are you going to the dance this weekend y/n

As promised last week, this is the counterpart to the previous podcast mixtape whatchamacallit; where last week's compilation was for the daylight drive out of the city to start the weekend, this week's compliation is for the (usually reluctant) night drive back in.

You'll recall that last week I gave the file about twenty minutes of pre-highway warmup to let you get out of the city, but that's obviously not the case when you're driving back from far-flung lakes or woods or wherever you end up. So this mix gives you about ninety seconds to get driving, pretty well all you need to get yourself onto the road, and if you aren't on your way by then it's not my fault that you backed into the ditch again. SMOOTH MOVE EX-LAX HAW HAWWWWWWall right i'll go get the truck

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Daytime Highway Mixtape

i like you but i am shy so i made you a mixtape :x

I had intended for a fine mixtape... podcast... thing? Ahem. I had intended for a big ol' audio file to be ready for download just as people would be heading out to their out-of-town weekend hideaways of choice today, but then it turns out that my old and slow computer ain't the audio-rendering speedster I remember it being. (It doesn't help that there's a couple dozen files floating around in it.) I am staring at it, and it is still attempting to render, and I am starting to believe that I could have done this faster with actual cassette tape and scissors.

So I'll cut you all a deal: I have important matters to attend to outside, weekendy matters, so I will be back later tonight and -- better late than never! -- drop you this neat file and the details on it. All good? All right! I will meet you folks here in a few hours or so.

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: When I Dance, You Move and I Can't Get Enough

Day two of Daily Post Month? Day two of Daily Post Month. I think we can all agree it's as good a time as any to bust out a new installment of the Slurpees and Murder Record Club, so I've got a special treat for you folks tonight: everybody's favourite long-defunct Winnipeg-based Prairie-Music-Award-in-the-completely-wrong-category-winning rock-band-turned-funk-band!

That's right, you guessed it: