Within Earshot

The Curse is Broken

Classical composers were evidently a superstitious bunch, since many believed in the so-called Curse of the Ninth, which dictates that any composer will kick the bucket shortly after composing their Ninth Symphony. Sure, it happened to Beethoven. And Schubert. And Dvorak.  Gustav Mahler was terrified his Ninth would kill him, and was relieved when he miraculously survived. His relief subsided when he croaked while writing his Tenth.

If there is indeed a curse that haunts Ninth Symphonies, it certainly didn't wreak any havoc on tonight's performance of Beethoven's Ninth by the K-W Symphony.  For the first time in ages, the concert completely sold out, resulting in would-be concertgoers being turned away at the door of Centre in the Square. This is good news, considering it wasn't long ago that the symphony nearly went belly-up due to low ticket sales and public indifference.

The success of tonight's concert (and the anticipated repeat of such success tomorrow night, since it's nearly sold out too) can be partly attributed to the $18 ticket price for many seats. But it seems there's more to it than bargain pricing. Symphony music director Edwin Outwater has insisted since his first day on the job that he wants to overturn the image of the symphony as a snooty, elitist club for old rich people. Judging by the varied crowd at Beethoven's Ninth (including uncultured nincompoops like, well, me), Outwater's message is getting out there.

If you can manage to snag one of the few remaining tickets for tomorrow night's concert (or Sunday's family-oriented matinee), I recommend you do. It's an epic show, with five whole choirs joining the symphony onstage -- that about 200 musicians total -- for the rousing and iconic Ode to Joy section. It's powerful stuff, and it's almost certainly not cursed.

I thought you weren't supposed to use your hands in soccer...

A bench-clearing brawl erupted at a high school soccer game in Waterloo last night, with more than 30 players from Sir John A. Macdonald and Eastwood Collegiate swinging fists in the melee. Read all about it. The local high school sports community is abuzz about it, with much poorly reasoned and misspelled name-calling and mudslinging coming from both sides.

The soccer brawl is particularly newsworthy for one reason: it is the first time in history that something exciting has happened during a soccer game.

Waterloo's Wii Wizardry

Meet Flip. He's an apprentice wizard. His favourite colour is evidently blue, he likes gold coins, his hat is wayyy too large for his head and he's got a wicked roundhouse punch. He can bend the laws of physics to manipulate the peculiar universe he inhabits. Oh, and he's from Waterloo, in a sense.

Flip is the brainchild of the creative minds at Frozen North Productions, a video game design company based in Waterloo.  For many moons now, the artists and programmers at Frozen North have been working feverishly to create their debut game for the Nintendo Wii, Flip's Twisted World. The game is scheduled for release next January, so the Frozen North team is working on overdrive to cram as much fun into the title as possible.  And by the looks of things, they're succeeding.

Frozen North unveiled this week a trailer for Flip's Twisted World, which they'll undoubtedly use to generate advance hype at trade shows and online. By the looks of things, the game will nostalgically evoke many good-timey conventions of the old-school Nintendo era (an adorable hero collecting coins while on a treacherous quest) with the 3D visuals and intuitive, motion-based controls of the Wii. 

In other words, it looks fun to me! Check it out:

Johnny off the spot...

Criminals around here just keep getting weirder.  The most recent incidence of a mind-bogglingly peculiar crime is the theft of a portable toilet from a construction site in Listowel last week. For reasons unknowable, a used port-a-potty -- contents and all -- was whisked away under the cover of night. It's described as green, with a white decal on the door that reads C&P Portable Toilets.

Anyone with information on the missing loo is asked to call 1-888-310-1122 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS. Workers on the construction site, who have been without their john for nearly a week now, reportedly want their toilet back "really, really, realllllly bad."


Hopefully the pilfered potty has been put to good use, like this:

Let's get a party goin'!

For decades, Kitchener has hosted an annual festival of heavy drinking and live music, which sounds great in theory until you realize the music is polka and the drunkest boozehounds are your parents.

Thankfully, a different multi-day music festival has emerged that will be beery, loud as hell and almost entirely parent-free. The Cutting Edge Music Festival will roll into Bingemans the weekend of August 1 for two days of non-stop performances by more than two-dozen bands. Oktoberfest it ain't.

Among the biggest names on the festival are The Roots, illScarlet, Moneen, Rebel Emergency, Andrew W.K., Mix Master Mike, Protest the Hero and a soon-to-be-anounced co-headliner. The line-up will also feature a slew of great bands from closer to home, such as Kingdoms, Baptized in Blood and Candy Coated Killahz.

It's one of those two-day camp-out festivals, so there will likely be plenty of people passed out on the grass, lots of smelly portapotties and really pricey bottled water.  On the plus side, though, a VIP pass grants you access to the nearby water park, so hopefully many campers will rinse off the stankiness between bands.

I'll be writing a longer article for the paper about the festival, ideally after interviewing Andrew W.K.  I could have requested an interview with The Roots, illScarlet or Mix Master Mike (I may still try to get him), but I figured Andrew W.K. would likely prove the most interesting and quotable of the bunch.

His music is a quite cro-magnon-frat-boy dumb, with its endlessly recurring theme of partying hard, but there is something distressingly catchy about it.

I hate myself for loving this song:

Andrew WK - Party Hard
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Get smashed.

As a reporter, I ask people a lot of questions. Some questions I ask over and over again: "Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing? Can I borrow 20 bucks?" And so on.

The other day, I asked a young woman a question that, under normal circumstances, would warrant a slap to my face. The question: "So, you look like a tramp -- are you a tramp?"

Thankfully, the question was perfectly appropriate (if a tad carelessly worded) given the situation. The situation was a practice session of the Tri-City Roller Girls, who are set to launch their second season this Saturday at the Wilmot Recreation Complex with a bout dubbed Super Smash. I was interviewing Cellblock Betty, a feisty rollergirl who joined the league late last year. I was curious to know which intra-league team she skated for, The Vicious Dishes or The Venus Fly Tramps (the teams that will collide this Saturday night).

Judging by her metallic-green short-shorts and her black fishnet stockings -- the official colours of the Venus Fly Tramps -- I assumed she was a Tramp. Hence the question. Her answer: "Yes, I'm a tramp."  Phew. Then I asked a bunch more questions and wrote a story all about it.

Having watched the progression of the Tri-City Roller Girls since their very first blooper-filled practices, I was tres impressed by how far they've come. They skate hard, they hit harder and their wipeouts are totally gnarly. Tickets for Saturday night's bout are only 10 bucks in advance (or $12 at the door), so if you want to see a bunch of Tramps and Dishes skate and hit and crash, I suggest you check it out.

Dispatches from the final frontier...

A riddle: what's black, the size of a toaster oven, built in Cambridge and currently hurtling through space at 40 kilometres per second?

Answer: This thing.

I concede that wasn't a very good riddle.

If, however, you correctly answered the riddle (precise answer: It's the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared, or HIFI), you are either a nerd, an astrophysicist, or likely both. Good on ya.

Last Thursday, that HIFI doohicky was rocketed into outer space from a launchpad in French Guyana. The HIFI is a small but crucial component in the Herschel Space Observatory, the largest orbiting telescope ever created, which looks like this (only bigger):

Thanks to the HIFI doodad, which separates infrared light into its component frequences, the Hershel Space Observatory will peer deeper into the universe than any telescope in history. It will search specifically for water molecules in forming galaxies, which may reveal the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

The HIFI whatsit was invented by this guy:

That's Mike Fich, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He spent the past decade of his career working on the HIFI thingamajig, which means his brain is roughly the size of a Humvee.  He's literally doing rocket science -- the benchmark against which the difficulty of all other endeavors are measured.

Last Thursday morning, Fich was joined by about 100 colleagues and spectators (and me) at the University of Waterloo to watch a live webcast of the rocket launch that would send his whatchamacallit into outer space. He was really, really hoping it wouldn't blow up, as rockets sometimes do.  It didn't. You can read all about it in this story I wrote, if you wanna.

I'm a sucker for this stuff. I'm continually amazed every time I microwave a bag of popcorn, so I'm awestruck by people who invent stuff like infrared telescopes and shoot them into space. When the HIFI gizmo reaches its orbit about a million kilometres from home, it might just find the building blocks for life in faraway places. Too cool.

Until it begins transmitting such data, however, I shall rely on the next-most-reliable evidence for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe:

Theatre without the theatre.

William Shakespeare wrote: "All the world's a stage."

He also wrote "a weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with," which is a pretty wicked insult but completely irrelevant at the moment.

That first quote is, however, very relevant when considering Asphalt Jungle Shorts, a series of site-specific plays being staged around town starting this Thursday. If you live anywhere in or around Kitch-a-Camber-Loo, I strongly suggest you grab your walkin' shoes and watchin' hat and check out Asphalt Jungle Shorts.

Here's how it works: the audience meets at the Kava Bean Commons, the coffee shop kitty-corner to the Kitchener bus depot.  From there, they are led to a series of secret sites around downtown Kitchener to watch a short play that will be staged at each spot. A play could suddenly begin on a fire escape or down a manhole or in a public restroom or up a tree. Meanwhile, the city bustles all around with its "normal" activity (as normal as downtown Kitchener gets, which is to say not very normal at all).

"Not only does the city become a set, but it becomes a character," says Paddy Gillard-Bentley, who founded Asphalt Jungle Shorts nearly four years ago. "The lines of reality and imagination are blurred." Read all about it here. For only 15 bucks, you're not going to find a more surprising and off-beat theatre experience anywhere. As Shakespeare wrote: "Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens."  Irrelevant, but another great dis.

Real or fake? You be the judge.

This photo, taken in front of the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, began to circulate the Interwebs a couple of years ago. I checked in with the curator of the gallery to see if it was legit or a Photoshop phony.  But before I reveal the answer, though, have a good look, make up your own mind and leave your thoughts in a comment below.

Whether real or bogus, it's wicked funny.

 

The swashbuckler of the cake shop.

As if to outdo the weirdness of Rob Zombie's local girl-punching, a man was arrested in Elora last week for stealing swords from a cake shop. First the guy pilfered one decorative sword from the wall of the shop, then he returned a few days later and nabbed another sword. He returned again the following day, presumably to steal a third sword, but was recognized by staff, who called the cops. 

A foot chase ensued, during which he ditched one of the swords. Yes, he was still carrying one of the swords. He struggled a bit during his arrest but no one was hurt, presumably because his swashbuckling arsenal was flimsy replica swords. The debacle does beg the question: why does a cake shop have so many swords within grabbing distance of customers? The only explanation I can come up with is that the shop specializes in a very specific kind of of cake: