Quickies: A Two-fer

A moment of silence, if you will, for the passing of summer. Last night, I turned my heat on for the first time since March.

One of the nice things about writing in the winter is that there’s a wall heater under my desk and I can rest my toes on top for nice warm tootsies.

The air quality is back, thanks to the bog fire dwindling towards almost-out. I may have been a tad pissed in my last posting about the fire, and possibly a little dramatic about fires not getting undone in a bog. The reality is that fires are part of the bog’s lifecycle, but this bog’s one of the world’s biggest, and the fires have been increasing at an alarming, unhealthy rate, with just a few years spacing out each fire. Its urban location means it sees far too much use from the public, but it also means that the bog plays a fundamental role in the quality of air we breathe here in Vancouver. So, important, yes, but I may have overstated things in my heated moment.

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Canada continues to kick ass. JD Fortune has been selected as the new frontman for INXS. A while back, I thought it’d turn out this way, but each of the performers had weak patches, and during JD’s, I wrote him off. Clearly I underestimated his resilience.

Last night he kicked ass on both his songs, You Can’t Always Get What You Want and What You Need, and then proceeded to look absolutely natural singing the new INXS single, Easy Easy.

JD’s an interesting national phenomena for Canada. He’s part of The New Breed of Canadians. We’re nice, but we won’t take your shit, and we won’t wait for seconds. I’m now designating our New Breed spokespersons as JD Fortune and Avril Lavigne.

Fuck Celine. We’re so beyond that. It’s a pity all y’all throughout the world tend to pick our most cliche exports as our pinnacles of entertainment.

Fact is, the American entertainment industry would come to a goddamned standstill if it wasn’t for the Canadian exports.

Hell, even the great “American Sweetheart” from the early days of Hollywood, Mary Pickford, was Canadian. We got you covered, folks.

I don’t even know where to begin with a list of who’s been a famous Canuck, but suffice to say, there’s an awful lot of Canadians out there. It baffles me, with such a small country population-wise, how we can be such a large number on the international scene. But hey, we’ll take it.

And the newest player is JD Fortune. I don’t know where that kid gets his incredible charisma from (the maple syrup, I’m betting), but Jesus, I think he’ll be a major player in the rock’n’roll world, and INXS is back from beyond the grave. This will be interesting to see if the dividends pay better for the Rockstar grads than the Idol grads, but I’m wagering it’s not even a competition.