Ed Robertson is one of the two lead singers for the Barenaked Ladies. Occassionally Ed will write a song for someone else, and He Makes Me Want Her Again is one of those songs. If you dig around on the net, you’ll find an amateur recording of Ed singing this song as well — although he wrote it for an artist named John Berry.

Ed refers to this song as “obviously a country song”. I think when you read the sad lyrics, you’ll agree.

—————–

There is something in her smile
Everyone loves so much
No matter what she wears
She looks like a million bucks

Whatever he’s made of…
He makes her happy
He breaks my heart he makes me want her again

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve finally gotten around to posting a new episode of my Animal Stories Podcast. This is one of my favorite episodes that I’ve recorded because it has some great audio recordings of my dogs howling at the top of their lungs. It is hilarious since the breed of dogs I have are not really known for being howlers.

Do you have dogs that howl? Ever caught their howling in a recording? I’d love to hear it if you have it.

–Pete

Amy Grant’s Christmas album is fantastic — if you like Christmas music that is — and I LOVE Christmas Music. One of my favorite tunes on that album is a haunting song called “Grown Up Christmas List”. In these dark day of unrest in the world, this song strikes a chord that I wish the whole world could manage to hear.

————-

Do you remember me?
I sat upon your knee;
I wrote to you
With childhood fantasies.

This is my only life-long wish.
This is my grown-up Christmas list.

————-

What’s on your Grown Up Christmas List?

–Pete

I’ve been really busy lately. Work has been bustling — travel, trade shows, customer visits, etc. I’ve had concerts, church, and activities to go to in the evenings and on the weekends. I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time to do much of anything! In fact, I haven’t even hung my outside Christmas decorations yet, and it is looking a little pathetic. My neighbors have all created regular winter wonderlands in their yards, and I look like I live in Ba-Humbugville. Maybe tomorrow I can remedy that. I sure hope so! This is getting embarrassing.

–Pete

Over the last few months, I’ve really started turning into a Barenaked Ladies (BNL) fanboy. It’s a little sad really…..OK….I’m over it now. Being sad that is.

Here’s a collection of interesting BNL links that I’ve stumbled across over the last month or so.

Impromptu Concert by Ed Robertson
A solo, impromptu concert given by just Ed Robertson of BNL. What I like about this is that he sings Brian Wilson, which is normally sung by the other lead singer of BNL, Steven Page.

Photos from the BNL concert at the Xcel Energy Center
I don’t know the person who tooks these photos, but they are a nice representation of the concert. Obviously they were in the front row. There is another really nice set here.

Rolling Stone Interview
BNL did a video interview with Rolling Stone that is short and funny. In it, they talk about why the band went independent from a major record label. Don’t miss the links at the bottom of the article too. They lead you to streams of two versions of the video from the song Wind It Up, from their new album. There is the “official” version, and there is a montage of fan created videos. The fan one is absolutely hilarious.

Bluegrass version of One Week
BNL’s biggest hit is still probably One Week. This is a new version they’ve been singing lately. It has a much more country feel and is awesome. The harmonies are amazing as is the mandolin.

Enjoy!

–Pete

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I really enjoy the music of the Barenaked Ladies (BNL for short). They released a new album in September called Barenaked Ladies are Me (BLAM) and are currently doing a North American tour. I had the pleasure of attending their concert at the Xcel Energy Center on Sunday night. All I can say is WOW!!

I had heard that these guys were awesome in concert and I was NOT disappointed. Every tune they played was executed flawlessly. The vocal harmonies were right on. The sound system was crisp and clear. The stage was cool looking. It was also filled with typical BNL humor. For example, at one point in the show, it appeared that a fan (who was wearing an “I Love BNL” shirt) had snuck on stage to be with the band. The head of security came running on stage to quickly escort the fan and just as he started getting dragged off stage, one of the guys produced a birthday cake with lighted candles and the band began singing “Happy Birthday” to their security guy. The whole thing was just an act to get their security guy on stage so they could wish him a happy birthday. How cool is that?

There were other typical BNL antics as well. They did their classic tune Pinch Me, and one of the lines in the song is “You can hide out under there. I just made you say underwear.” Apparently, as they’ve toured, it has become tradition for people to throw underwear on stage when they get to that part of the song. For the concert, they changed the last lyric to “I just made you throw underwear.”

Last thing, and then I need to get some sleep: They did two encore sets. The first included their classic If I Had a Million Dollars. The second encore set included just one song, Ed’s excellent When I Fall.

I’ll try to write more about the concert tomorrow.

–Pete

I just ran across an interesting new utility for my MacBook Pro. You may know that Apple laptops run pretty warm. The fans turn only as fast as necessary to keep the machine within the “normal” temperature range for operation. The end result, you get a warm, but quiet machine. Enter smcFanControl. This nifty piece of software lets you override the automatic fan settings for your MacBook Pro (and MacBook), so you can force your fans to run at full blast. The end result — a louder machine that runs signficantly cooler.

Interested? Follow this link.

NOTE: I’m sure there is no way Apple would recommend messing with this software, so use at your own risk.

–Pete

As you can see from above, I’ve uploaded a photo of our new horse trailer to my Gallery. Isn’t it cute?? It’ll get its first use tomorrow when it is used to trailer Sheba the donkey to our house for Halloween. My wife is playing the part of Winnie the Pooh and Sheba will be Eeyore. If you are in the neighborhood, come see us. If I get a chance, I’ll also try to take some pictures. Last year these two were Shrek and Donkey.

–Pete

I have eclectic tastes in music. A guy I once worked with when I was in college introduced me to the Crash Test Dummies. I’ve only bought one of their albums, but I love almost every track on that album. This particular song, I love, because of the clever lyrics. Here’s a sample:

So he said: Once there was a boy
Who woke up with blue hair
To him it was a joy
Until he ran out into warm air –
He thought of how his friends would come to see;
And would they laugh, or had he got some strange disease?

The people sat waiting
Out on their blankets in the garden
But God said nothing
So someone asked him, “I beg your pardon:
I’m not quite clear about what you just spoke –
Was that a parable, or a very subtle joke?”

Couple those lyrics with their lead singer’s unusual bass voice and it makes for a very memorable song indeed.

–Pete

This past Sunday, my wife and I went and saw Triple Espresso, a play/variety show at the Music Box Theater in Minneapolis. We’d heard about this show several times and finally had an oportunity to see it. I was not disappointed.

We had the real pleasure of seeing the original cast (and authors) in this performance. (For more information on the history of this show, click here. The show was hilarious. The comedy was clean. They didn’t swear. It was not raunchy. It was good clean fun — laugh out loud until tears are streaming down your face fun. They even encouraged you to bring your cup of scalding hot Caribou coffee into the theater to sip on while watching the show. If you haven’t seen it yet and you like clean comedy, you won’t be disappointed.

–Pete

My wife is definitely not a geek. She cannot fathom what could possibly be so interesting about a machine. So far, I haven’t been able to bring her to the light, and I’m guessing I won’t ever be able to. Fortunately, we have other things in common!

My good pal Brian over at Braimee.com invited me to join him for a podcast titled “Strategies for peacefully coexisting with a non-geek wife.” We had a great time recording that episode. I have no idea if it will be of any value for anyone who is struggling with this important topic, but it sure was fun for Brian and I to blather on it about like we were experts or something. If you have a few spare minutes and need something to lull you to sleep, be sure to download it and have a listen. You can get it here.

–Pete

I always appreciate fine photography, especially photos of nature, wildlife, or landscapes. Recently, I began reading Shutterwi, a blog by a gentlemen I met through work. He lives up in the Ashland, WI area, where there is wildlife and scenery galore! His blog is focused (no pun intended) on his photographs, and he has some amazing ones there. Be sure to visit it if you like good photography. You can follow this link. If you want to subscribe to his Atom feed directly, try this link.

–Pete

I’m a big fan of cool software and the good people at Ambrosia Software have released a very helpful little widget (for Dashboard) called Easy Envelopes. In a nutshell, it allows you to quickly and easily print envelopes using a Dashboard widget. It is integrated into the Apple Address Book app, so it can generate an envelope for anyone who is already in your address book and it assumes that the return address should be you.

You should be able to download that widget by going here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/business/easyenvelopes.html

or here:

http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/utilities/easyenvelopes/

–Pete

This past weekend, we purchased our first load of hay for the winter season. Hay seems to be not as plentiful this year as it was last year due to the rather dry mid-summer months that we had. We typically feed our animals grass hay during the winter, but this year, we’re going to try a mixture of grass hay and alfalfa hay. I’ve never stacked alfalfa hay before, and I made a *HUGE* blunder when we went to pick it up.

I have allergies. They manifest themselves as hayfever and asthma, and I’m allergic to a great many things. Things like, dust, pollen, mold, etc. Alfalfa hay, because of the small leaves, seems to crush up into dust pretty easily, so moving around the bales can get quite dusty. Here’s the mistake: I didn’t bring a dust mask. I stupidly decided to go ahead and help stack it into the trailer anyway. I paid for that mistake all evening long after it set off my allergies. I was fortunate in that I didn’t end up in the hospital or anything, but I was miserable for the remainder of the evening. I’ve bought a new package of dust masks and will have them handy when we go pick up some grass hay next weekend.

Live and learn….

–Pete

I’ve not seen the musical Rent, but I’ve heard some of the music. I love the song Seasons of Love. The lyrics ask an age old question and give an uplifting answer.

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

Measure in love…
Seasons of love…

If you’ve ever needed to take a screenshot when using Mac OS X, you’ve probably figured out the Command-Option-3 keystroke combination needed to do this. In 10.4 “Tiger”, the file that is created is a PNG file. I recently discovered that if you want it to be some other file type, say a JPG file or a PDF file you can do that. There are two ways.

Way #1: In the Terminal.app, type the following command, replacing the words “image_format” with the file type you want to use:

sudo defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format

It may be necessary to either restart your computer or to issue the following command as well:

sudo killall SystemUIServer

Way #2: Download the freeware utility savescreenie by clicking here.

Now you know. Don’t you feel better?

–Pete

I know what you thinking. Don’t worry. We didn’t buy another horse. We could have…..but we didn’t.

This past week my wife and I drove down to Waverly, IA with some friends to see the semi-annual Waverly Midwest Horse Sale. Despite the name, there are a lot more things sold at this auction than just horses. They also auction just about anything you can think of that is horse related, including wagons, buggies, sleighs, saddles, halters, lead ropes, blankets, decorations, etc. If it is horse related, you can probably buy it at the Waverly Auction.

We didn’t really attend the auction with the idea that we’d buy anything major. In fact, we didn’t even bring our new horse trailer. Oh wait — didn’t I tell you? We bought a horse trailer since I last wrote. I don’t have a picture of the actual trailer yet, but if you are really desparate to know, it is a CM Circuit Champ, two-horse bumper pulled trailer. The one we bought is black with white pin stripes. I’ll post a picture when I get a chance. As I was saying, we didn’t bring the trailer, so that limited what we could bring home with us. We did get one thing while we were there. We bid on, and won, a nice new horse blanket for Sioux to wear when it is really cold.

The really interesting part of the auction for me was all of the people watching. Waverly is right in the heart of Amish country in IA, and since horses are a part of the Amish culture, there were quite a few Amish families at the auction. I honestly don’t know a lot about the Amish, but it was interesting to observe them. The ones we saw at the auction were exceptionally gifted with managing horses and/or exceptional craftsman. Even the non-Amish folks were interesting to watch, as there were folks from all over the country bidding and selling their horses and/or horse related items. It never ceased to amaze me the weird things that people would bid on.

–Pete

I just recently had a chance to read a little bit about Steve Irwin’s Memorial Service. It is estimated that as many as 300 million people worldwide watched the service. That’s incredible. Even more incredible was the eulogy that was given by his eight year old daughter Bindi. Without a tear, she said this:

““My Daddy was my hero – he was always there for me when I needed him. He listened to me and taught me so many things but most of all he was fun. I know that Daddy had an important job. He was working to change the world so everyone would love wildlife like he did. He built a hospital to help animals and he bought lots of land to give animals a safe place to live. He took me and my brother and my mum with him all the time. We filmed together, caught crocodiles together and loved being in the bush together. I don’t want Daddy’s passion to ever end. I want to help endangered wildlife just like he did. I have the best Daddy in the whole world and I will miss him every day. When I see a crocodile I will always think of him and I know that Daddy made this zoo so everyone could come and learn to love all the animals. Daddy made this place his whole life and now it’s our turn to help Daddy.”

How’s that for a tribute from a daughter to her dad? Pretty amazing huh?

I also just recently ran across a really nice poem written as a tribute to Steve by a man named Rupert McCall. Check this out:

THE CROCODILES ARE CRYING

RUPERT McCALL 2006

Well said Rupert. Well said.

–Pete

The song for this week is one that has been sung by several groups, including the Blenders and the Barenaked Ladies. The song is titled McDonald’s Girl and was originally written, as near as I can tell, by a man named Dean Friedman.

I leave from softball practice every night
It’s getting dark, but the “Golden Arches” light up the way
I turn the corner at the traffic light
I count my money
Then I rehearse what I’m going to say

I am in love with a McDonald’s girl
She has a smile of innocence
Oh so tender and warm
I am in love with a McDonald’s girl
She is an angel in a polyester uniform

Have any of you fallen in love with a McDonald’s girl? My girl was a Dairy Queen girl — although I didn’t know her then. I bet she looked VERY cute in that polyester uniform…..

–Pete

I don’t know what I was waiting for, but I finally upgraded to WordPress 2 here at MinnesotaGeek.net. I wish I wouldn’t have waited because there are some really nice new tools in WordPress 2. If you hadn’t noticed, I also finally fixed the header graphic so it fits properly with the new theme. In case you’re interested, from left to right the images are: Emmet in the pasture at the farm, My brother Matt flying a PT-17 Stearman biplane, Jackie O’Donkey, and the Two Harbors Lighthouse in Two Harbors, MN.

–Pete