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:

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:

The Newest in Runway Fashion: Winnipeg Jets Logo and Merchandise Unveiled

As has been the theme thus far with the hasty relocation of the former Atlanta Thrashers, the logo of the newly transplanted team has been considerably behind schedule. Not that True North Sports and Entertainment has had much of a choice when they acquired the franchise; the original snags and snafus in the relocation negotiations put the new owners behind the clock on everything, from hiring staff to negotiating with players and from establishing the team name (which only finally happened at the Draft, seemingly reluctantly, time essentially having ran out) to designing the logo and jerseys, iconic elements of any team that are sort of important to have before the start of a season.

The jersey design isn't expected any time soon, nor does it have the urgency of the other puzzle pieces, but the logo was considered an ASAP project; the other 29 teams need a logo so they can print tickets for the season, companies like Electronic Arts and Upper Deck need a logo to produce the League's merchandise, the League needs a logo for its own promotional material, and the team needs a logo because augh did the constant use of the generic NHL shield placeholder just get old really fast.

So there were no signals from the organization that the logo would be forthcoming any time soon -- but the early afternoon saw frantic scrambling amidst the Twitterverse and other pockets of the web today when the news broke that the Winnipeg Jets logo might potentially have been leaked.

Could it be true? Had the internet once again worked its information-gathering magic and flushed out the symbol that would guide our beloved hockey team into its new era? Would this be the first public peek at the iconography sure to launch a million jerseys?

It's coming! It's here! It's--

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"