I hope it's a beautiful day in Vancouver because Bif Naked is getting married. She can sing this at her dance:

I love my spouse today
not like yesterday
back then
he was
just my fiance
uh huh

So my best fanboy wishes to her and her new hubby, Vancouver Sun sportswriter Ian Walker.
Update- Here's a brief and non-intrusive article from the CBC about the ceremony.

At work, I have the option of listening to:

a) Classic rock from Edmonton
b) Classic rock from Vancouver
c) Hot country from Edmonton
d) Classic country from Calgary

I have lobbied repeatedly to get one of the stations changed to Sonic (since we pipe them in via satellite to our remote wilderness location), but I have been told this is "impossible". No one has been able to clarify whether this means:

a) It is physically impossible, due to obscure technical reasons pertaining to kilohertzes and megawatts.
b) It is legally impossible, due to the CRTC's draconian rules
c) It is simply impossible, where "impossible" is defined as "I don't really feel like changing it."

Last night I had occasion to make the following observations about country music:

a) Surely there are more than four classic country songs????
b) Convoy may be the strangest song ever written
c) Country covers of rock songs are, excepting Johnny Cash, generally very terrible. The slogan of the Discount Country Cover Warehouse is "We take tired old classic rock songs and render them even more limpid through the application of liberal amounts of twang, autoharp and group harmonies, and then removing the melody!"
d) Country music is still better than Howard Stern

The solution to this woeful musical situation is to come home to your wife and find that she has loaded the CD player with:

a) Bif Naked
b) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Soundtrack (lovely jazz from the gabrielle collection!)
c) Selkie's Non-Country Cover Mix
d) KoRn

Anyways, here is a fun, musical meme started by Rolling Stone- Terrible Songs on Great Albums. Mine are:

a) The Tragically Hip's Day For Night actually has three terrible songs (IMO), that ruin the beautiful diad of "Scared" and "Titanic Terrarium". Those songs are, um, tracks 11,12 and 14. But the rest of the CD is beyond exceptional.
b) Metallica, Reload- "Attitude". Ruining the amazingly atmospheric diad of "Low Man's Lyric" and "Fixxxer" by sticking a generic rocker in between.
c) KoRn, Follow the Leader, "All in the Family". It's a sorta funny battle song, but it gets a little too over the top for me, and again, disrupts the mood of the disc. And it has Fred Durst, so . . .
d) Beck, from Guero- "Missing". Not really terrible, but I tend to skip it to get to all the other fantastic tracks. It lacks the genius of the other tracks.

Top 5 CDs of 2005
1. Get Behind Me Satan, The White Stripes. Jack and Meg are the best, hands down! Michelle doesn't like them, but I like them enough for the two of us! Choice cut: Red Rain
2. Mesmerize/Hypnotize, System of a Down. SoaD's frenetic nonsense invective is the musical equivalent of one of those wild-eyed speed freaks that you meet downtown who constantly mumble and mutter and occasionally yell their delusional paranoid theories to whoever is in the vicinity. And not the harmless kind, either. Michelle likes them! Choice cut: Holy Mountains.
3. Guero, Beck. Beck at his best! He starts it all with a Beasties beat on E-Pro and ends it with some kind of Swedish yodelling girl, and in between nothing but great tunes. Choice Cut: Farewell Ride
4. Superbeautifulmonster, Bif Naked. Born in India, raised by missionaries, resides in Vancouver, but in reality the incarnation of some sort of Hindu goddess of rock and roll. Choice cut: That's Life (with me)
5. Demon Days, Gorillaz. This CD, as well as Bif and Beck, were the soundtrack to my honeymoon, as Michelle and I drove Seamus (our rented Chrysler 300) around the Maritime provinces dreaming of robots, puffins, whales and lighthouses. Choice cut: Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head

Honorable mention to KoRn's See You on the Other Side. Great album, just too new to have really wrapped itself into my 2005.

What are you listening to these days? I finally picked up the new White Stripes. Wow. You should really get it. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone Magazine was only exaggerating a little bit when he said, "If you happen to be a rock band, and you don't happen to be either of the White Stripes, it so sucks to be you right now." Every song is perfect- I especially like The Nurse which reminds me of that happy True Romance theme; and the bluegrassy and whimsical Little Ghost.
Bif Naked's Superbeautifulmonster is another disc never too far from my CD player these days. I'm not sure how much exposure she has in places other than Canada, but she kicks muchas ass, and you should check her out. The new album is probably her strongest one yet. Lots of her trademark sweetbadasssassiness,strong melodies and even a few quick little musical jokes (the bass does a double take when she says "I wanna be like Pamela Lee, you go get the camera and I'll say 'cheese'"). Plus she throws in a cover of Nothing Else Matters. What else could you ask for? My favorite song is That's Life With Me- "But if I french kiss you in the broad daylight you'll fall in love oh oh oh."
And speaking of Rolling Stone, I was browsing their movie reviews and saw the unfortunate poster for Everything is Illuminated which seems to be about Kevin from Sin City.