This ain't something else.

It’s not the weekend yet, but I haven’t been posting on here lately because of many reasons. Also, this song has become a bit of an obsession since I first heard it on Monday and it won’t wait. It’s deep within my head and I’ve listened to it about three or four times a day. And it’s a gem.

Meaghan Smith is a Canadian singer songwriter of retro-vintage stylings. She’s been described as if Bjork worked with k.d. lang and Doris Day.

She’s more of a Pixar Nina Simone. This song has great lyrics and the meter is perfect. Just beautifully flawless. Every single syllable is perfect. Not that perfection is something I look for in music, and there’s plenty else here, but this is great. If we looked for perfect, there would be no genius, no creative flash or wonderful accidents. No Charlie Parker or Alistair Fleming – or pelicans.

Meaghan Smith says she suffers from stagefright and she took four years of open mics before she plucked up the courage to tour. Her record label is slowly getting her out there without pushing her and I’d like to do my bit.

Also, she sings so beautifully that it should hammer home the reminder that shyness sucks. It really does. The things I might have done had I not held myself back by being such a shytard. It’s just rubbish and I decided when I hit thirty to stop doing it. And it’s not condusive to the creative process. How many other Meaghan Smiths are there? Actually, I know that, and it’s not many.

And who else could turn Here Comes Your Man into such a thing?

Her album The Cricket’s Orchestra comes out this week, and while I downloaded this song, I didn’t want to embed a high quality version because you should buy it. I can’t even embed the video here because her label has disaballed that functionality.

I’ll never forget your kind brown eyes
Or the fingerprints you left all over my life

Watch: Drifted Apart

—-
Weekend Songs Archive

• Read this and change your life! | Hannah Gannagé-Stewart – "Work harder, take up yoga, charm everyone, aim for the top, be graceful, be one of the boys, eat five a day, look stunning, act like you don’t know it, play it cool, go for what you want, drink water, be on time, be fashionably late, be amazing in bed, sleep more."

  I like discovering good blogs out of the blue by people I don't know and sharing their work. Ladies and gentlemen, I have done it again. I am amazing.

Headphones jammed in, mind elsewhere, I walk up to uniformed gentleman at station this morning and ask for a ticket. He is a security guard.

There’s no comeback from that. I considered telling him what a great job they were doing, like how he’s out here every day in the shit and the folks back home have no idea what it’s really like. Just – thanks, man.

But no, I said “Single to Paddington”, followed by “Oh, sorry.” and shot a studied look at my iPod like it just swore before walking off in search of singles.

While I’m on the subject, a word in defense of my American cousins. London ticketing staff should probably know by now what tourists want when they ask for a “round trip”. But they still a lot of them give it the “innit” and act like idiots.

“Ere, Mugsy. This Yank came up the other day, asked for a round trip, ‘e bleedin’ did. I only told him to get on the Circle Line. You toilet.”

By the way, I literally have American cousins, so I’m speaking figuratively. You probably didn’t know that, so this recent confusion, despite being of all my own making, should now be clear. Nor am I offering to literally defend my actual American cousins or suggest that they need my help, as they have guns and can probably look after themselves. I apologise for bringing this to light.

• Wzzy's World » Blog Archive » Corkage – One of the many things I like about the web. Not just because it has a staggering variety of the content, but because it provides the platform from which your friends can comfortably share a breadth of knowledge way beyond the reaches of your (my) own. Cheers.

• Welcome to the New Buddhist Geeks Site! | Buddhist Geeks – Buddhist Geeks website has relaunched. Shut up and read it.

• Anne the Ikea assistant – part three « Ben's blog – Part Three of Ben's adventures with Anna, which are all hilarious, but this one's off the scazzle."
• Anna the Ikea assistant – the remarkable true story! « Ben's blog – Please read Ben's outstanding conversations with Anna, the Ikea (or is it IKEA?) assistant.

• All hail the (Copy) King|BCS Digital – How come it was so much for just a few lines of copy? Surely it can’t have taken you longer than an hour?
• "Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he –

The earthquake in Chile on 27 February illustrated the differences in how news organisations use Twitter.

The greatest strength of the microblogging site is that there are few rules beyond that of the 140 character limit, leaving editors to use Twitter however they choose.

Take National Public Radio as a recent example. The American public service radio news broadcaster, like many US news outlets, has several personality-led programmes. It’s one of the big differences between American and British current affairs programming. CNN has Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, while the BBC News has Click, Hard Talk, Fast Track, World News America.

In the same way, NPR has many personal Twitter accounts, and in the wake of the earthquake and amidst tsunami warnings, its journalists put out the following alerts via their own user names:

NPR Twitter list to monitor tweets of possible interest re: Chile quake & tsunami: http://bit.ly/cweJfw
RT @acarvin: Got around 50 people on the NPR #chile #quake #pacific #tsunami Twitter list, more to come: http://bit.ly/cweJfw
RT @acarvin: Volunteers needed to find+add emergency resources to CrisisWiki for Chile, HI, NZ, etc. Instructions: http://crisiswiki.org

These are fine examples of solid, public service tweeting in the form of action-oriented updates which don’t cross over into its core coverage. In addition, however, the following updates from NPR appeared over a two hour period:

Rescuers Struggle To Save Lives After Chile Quake http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Chile Struck By One Of Strongest Earthquakes Ever http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Huge Quake Hits Chile; Tsunami Threatens Pacific http://su.pr/1d5YhB
Hawaii, Pacific Under Alert For Post-Quake Tsunami http://su.pr/2jUoS9
Chile Struck By 8.8-Magnitude Earthquake http://su.pr/9c3CO3
8.8-Magnitude Earthquake Hits Central Chile http://su.pr/1d5YhB

Four of these links go to the same story, one is about the rescue operation and four are about the earthquake itself.

NPR used Twitter as a kind of rolling news ticker, pounding out the same story to the same audience different URLs, sometimes with a similar headline, sometimes completely different headlines but to the same URL.

If users wanted to find out which was the main story, they would have to click the link on each update. Alternatively, they could wait half hour for the next tweet with the expectation that it might be the latest version of the story, or it could turn out to be a background piece and the updated article would be at the original URL which was sent when the story first broke.

Would the main story be the original one or the latest one? Maybe the user should just visit their NPR homepage and find the main story that way, which would involve visiting its Twitter profile page and clicking on the link in the biography.

It’s a confusing way of presenting the news, a bad user experience and one at odds with how ordinary people (and it’s still a social network) use Twitter.

If this was a deliberate strategy on the day of the earthquake, it could be due to NPR’s editors hearing the increasing number of audience members who say: “I don’t visit news websites. If it’s important, the news will find me.”

This comes up increasingly in user research and it means: “I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook and my friends will let me know if something happens.”

Despite many people heard about Michael Jackson’s death and the Hudson river crash from friends on the web, news organisations don’t act like our friends.

For a start, your friend wouldn’t say every fifteen minutes: “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.” “There’s been an earthquake here’s the story.”

In contrast, here’s how Reuters covered the story (in reverse chronological order)

Hawaii prepares evacuations ahead of tsunami http://bit.ly/dxZdxN 5:09 PM Feb 27th
Factbox: Chile has history of big earthquakes http://bit.ly/b2zzn3 5:07 PM Feb 27th
Massive earthquake strikes Chile, 122 dead http://bit.ly/9WkWL0 5:07 PM Feb 27th

And that’s it. One main story, one fact box (presumably a box with which to fact me up) and a sidebar. Three stories in quick succession. There were tsunami angles a couple of hours later, but the main story went out once.

Note to editors: don’t repeat yourself on Twitter. Leave the retweeting to the audience – your followers already know what you’re saying.

News organisations have a great opportunity shape how companies use Twitter, but if they want be in the spaces where people are, they need to join them not beat them.

• Things That Are Great Day Continues: Hey, Watch This OK Go Video –

I can sum up twelve years of marriage in a simple conversation about hockey.

Last night me and Mrs. This were sitting down on the couch. I’d said all week I was going to watch the hockey final, because it would contain awesome.

At sometime Pacific Time

Me: Do you mind if I watch the hockey?

Wife: No, do you mind if I read my new Twilight book?

Me: Yes, it might disturb my hockey game.

I was joking, reader. It’s just my way.

Wife: It might be really bloody and gruesome, though.

Me: No, see, this is Olympic hockey. It’s goes against the whole um, ethos, of the games. It would be frowned upon. There would be repercussions. Besides, it’s just not sporting. It’s like – it’s like, ok, Olympic boxing. There they wear padding and their objective is to sc-

Wife: I meant my book.

Me: Oh.

—

There’s me trying to hold court, if not interest. Perhaps not presiding but grant me diverting, if nothing else. And we’re having a conversation about two different things, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe it matters more than if we were talking about the same thing, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this.

I get the vampire thing by the way. Vampire fiction, yes, very good. Well get this: vampire pugs.

Yeah? See, always thinking.

Vampire pugs, reader.