Tonight both Loreena McKennitt and KoRn are playing in Edmonton. Although normally the chance to see KoRn, even a KoRn with only three remaining kernels on the kob, is something I'd jump at, Loreena supersedes all others. In five hundred years they'll speak of her in the same breath as Beethoven. In fact, I'm pretty sure if Fieldy, Munky and Jonathan knew Loreena was here tonight they'd cancel their show to go see her. Ooh- can you imagine if they joined her onstage? That would be amazing! Jonathan could play bagpipes and Loreena would arrange Freak on a Leash all celtic-worldly, sort of how it was done on the Unplugged album. And then the guys would reciprocate by doing a super-heavy version of Marco Polo, which is already pretty heavy. I'm crossing my fingers for that!

First of all, do yourself a favour and immediately go get Loreena McKennit's Nights from the Alhambra concert DVD/CD. It's beautiful- I'm almost in tears from it. Seriously.
Michelle and I have tickets to her concert later this month- at the Jube, not exactly as pretty as the Palace of Charles V but that's okay. Anywhere she sings is automatically heaven.
Would you think you were in hell if you saw a bunch of chupacabras running around sucking blood from chickens and cows? That's what they're saying in Texas- and one woman even has a severed head to prove it. Though to me the head looks kind of like a pitbull/bullshit cross.
Also in Texas, you might have heard about the social spiders who cooperated to spin a massive web. I never knew some species of spiders exhibited social behaviour- in fact, I thought it was an invention of Vernor Vinge in his excellent book, Marooned in Realtime- he has massive colonies of social spiders who live atop jungle canopies, harvesting silkworms and pooing green mycotoxins. The spiders actually are just an interesting detail- the book itself is a sci-fi murder mystery. Vinge just won a Hugo or his latest book, Rainbow's End.

And check out what I found when I was over at Amazon- video of Loreena McKennit performing a song from her new CD, An Ancient Muse! Lovely. I assume you got her disc a couple weeks ago when it came out but if not it isn't too late to correct this grievous oversight. I've already pretty much worn out my copy.

Festival festivallus!
Have you been out to the Fringe yet? Michelle and I are going tomorrow. As always, the hard part is choosing just one or two plays out of the many that sound interesting. I think I'm due for a dud, since so far I have always been really lucky. We'll see.
A couple of weeks ago we went to the Folk Festival for a couple of the nights- the highlight was seeing Loreena McKennit. She sounds even better live than on her CDs, Selkie! Just amazing. Steve Earle the next night.
And Symphony Under the Sky is coming up in a couple of weeks. Beethoven's Overture to Egmont is on the itinerary so we are definitely going to try and get to that. Wanna come?
On a smaller scale, but just as exciting, is next Sunday's G-Arts festival at the Gathering. Third Annual, no less! I will be reading some poems and a story that first appeared right here in the Woods! Always a good time.