Tag: GBS

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Vertical Movement is ON

This just in, for those of you who aren’t members of greatbigsea.com and/or not on the band’s mailing list: they’re playing the Woodland Park Zoo again this summer! The show date is July 29th, and tickets go on pre-sale for members of greatbigsea.com this Friday the 23rd!

I am of course ALL OVER THIS. Any local people want me to snag tickets, please to sing out NOW. I’m pretty sure I’ll be limited to eight, and three of them will already be spoken for since I’ll be buying for myself, userinfosolarbird, and userinfospazzkat.

Anybody who doesn’t need me to buy tickets but will be at the show anyway, please also sing out because I’d love to know who to look out for. If you didn’t go to the zoo show they did in 2007, seriously, consider going to this, because it’ll be a kid-friendly setting AND outdoors and the zoo is an awesome place to see the B’ys perform. Do please note that July 29th is a Thursday, if you need to rearrange your work schedule–and according to the band’s site’s tour page, the doors (well, the concert area, in this case) will open at 5pm and the show will start at 6pm.

Looking forward to seeing you all there! :)

ETA: All of my ticket slots are claimed now! But don’t let that stop you from joining the greatbigsea.com site and jumping in on the presale yourself. Signup’s free, and sometimes being a site member means you can get advance goodies on album releases as well!

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Song prequel giggles

Those of you on Twitter may have seen the #songprequel trending topic, wherein the idea was to post titles of songs that came before actual songs. Much hilarity ensued!

With a hat tip to userinfotechnoshaman, userinfospazzkat, userinfosolarbird, and userinfofredpdx, here are the Great Big Sea ones we all came up with so far:

  • Young Brown’s Mother
  • Acting Third Lieutenant Taylor
  • The Day Pat Murphy Got Sick
  • Nagging Girlfriend
  • Showing Up At the Kitchen Party With Mrs. White

Dara and Paul and I also came up with these:

  • Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Bedtime” and “School is Just Starting”
  • Simon and Garfunkel’s “Construction Crew Arriving at Bank of Troubled Water”
  • Elvis Presley’s “(You Ain’t Nothin’ But a) OMG PUPPY” and “I’ll Do Anything to Get Into Some Blue Suede Shoes”
  • Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the Colonies, I Was”
  • The Day the Music Bought a Cheap Ticket on a Small Plane in Bad Weather
  • Slightly Darker than Usual Day of the Heart
  • Radio Killed the Vaudeville Star
  • From O Brother, Where Art Thou?, “Boy of Periodic Sadness”
  • Kenny Rogers’ “You Picked a Fine Time for Our First Date, Lucille”
  • Duran Duran’s “Peckish Like the Wolf Cub”
  • Kiss Him Hello (may be more obvious if you sing “na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, HELLO”)
  • And last but definitely not least, from Dr. Horrible, “Misbehaving Pony Solo”

Got more? Drop ’em in the comments!

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And now, a gratuitous icon post!

It occurred to me that if I was going to go around calling my LJ “Ordinary Day”, I should damn well have a default icon that reflects that. So for the benefit of those of you looking at this on my various LJ-flavored sites, check out the Alan and Sean loverliness. That shot is of course from the video for the song. The icon is by userinfoturple_purtle, who was the provider of just about all of the GBS icons I use.

And if you’re looking at this on annathepiper.org, here!

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Some end-of-year site housekeeping

So just because I can, I’ve been waking up old broken parts of this web site (annathepiper.org, for those of you reading this on LJ or DW), bits that were never properly integrated into WordPress. Since I’ve got a handy link-checking plugin installed, this has been a lot easier than I thought it would be; I’ve just had to go through and fix a lot of broken links, and in some cases, restore content that’s been absent for some time.

Right now, this primarily means reinstating my Great Big Sea page, and a couple of its child pages as well–most notably, the Pictures page, since I found a nifty plugin that lets WordPress easily talk to Flickr. And I do still have several lovely collections of pictures from various Great Big Sea shows which some kind folks had given me permission to post (userinfomamishka and userinfofredpdx, I’m lookin’ at you!). You can see a nice example of the plugin in action, not to mention some nice pics of Great Big Sea in Vancouver from 2003, here.

I’ve also reinstated the Sitemap, the Credits page (with proper updated references to nifty plugins and things I’m using these days), and the Journal section (although this is primarily a pointer off to my LJ and a place to link to posts I wrote before I ever had a proper blog).

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For those of you not on Twitter

Here are a couple of quick pics I snapped today!

Last night, like I am wont to do, I was whipping through my “Anna’s Set” playlist on my iPhone, which is the various songs I can play to one degree or another on the guitar. And while there’s even stuff that isn’t Great Big Sea on that list, it was somewhere just after “Lukey” when I looked at my pick and realized it suddenly had extra points on the end. Oops!

GBS Kills Another Pick

Meanwhile, the cats have gotten very fond of parking on the windowsill in the kitchen and staring out to the walkway just behind the house. I still don’t know what they think they see back there. And by “they” I mean “Fred”, because George is clearly a slacker when it comes to being a watchcat.

Kitties on Watch

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Songs about horses falling through ice!

userinfosolarbird asked me if I had the chords to two of the ditties off the mighty GBS album The Hard and the Easy: “Tickle Cove Pond” and “Concerning Charlie Horse”. I’d pulled “Tickle Cove Pond” off the OKP at one point but did not have chords for “Charlie Horse”, and so I’ve spent a chunk of my afternoon with my guitar, working those out!

“Charlie Horse” is a fun ditty in no small part because it changes keys, which is unusual for a Great Big Sea song. So in order to accommodate the key change and the key they recorded it in, I had to figure out what would work best for chord transcription. This led me to do two sets of chords, a set with the capo on 3 and modulating from D to E in the chords, and a set with the capo on 5 to modulate from C to D. Persons way more comfortable with the key of F than I am could go completely capo-free, since the ultimate goal here is to get from F to G.

Anyway, here are some chords! Enjoy!

Tickle Cove Pond

Charlie Horse Capo 3

Charlie Horse Capo 5

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Great Big Sea at Malkin Bowl, Vancouver BC, 9/12/09

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the highlight of userinfosolarbird, userinforavyngyngvar, and my trip to Vancouver: the Great Big Sea concert at Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park, Saturday night, September the 12th!

Fangirly squealing behind the fold, and this time, y’all, thanks to my beloved Dara, I am bringing pictures. There are links off to suitable tasty videos as well, and mad props to OKPers sticckler and katy for those!

Continue reading “Great Big Sea at Malkin Bowl, Vancouver BC, 9/12/09”

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Great Big Video Goodness

For those of you who didn’t see me tweet these yesterday and this morning, I must share with you two delightful videos from a young lady I met on the way out of the Great Big Sea concert on Saturday night. She had attended both shows in Vancouver and had the great fortune of being up near the stage, with a camera! I therefore bring you the work of fellow OKP denizen sticckler:

Here’s her catching Sean McCann doing the Extended Remix Edition of the Mermaid Dance! Watch for where he completely forgets the next verse.

And, from the show I attended, The Mighty Doyle nailing “River Driver”. To wit, YUM. <3 Also, Doyle fans, note the presence of the beard! My own Extended Remix post for the concert is on the way, y'all. ;)

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Vertical Movement Alert!

This just in off the GBS newsletter, folks: tickets are going on pre-sale TOMORROW for four November shows in WA! However, these ones are in some locales that the B’ys haven’t much hit before, as opposed to Seattle proper. To wit:

Nov 18 – Washington Center for the Performing Arts – Olympia, WA – Presale,
August 5, 9am PDT

Nov 20 – Edmonds Center for the Arts – Edmonds, WA – Presale, August 5, 9am
EDT

Nov 21 – The Admiral Theatre – Bremerton, WA – Presale, August 5, 9am EDT

Nov 22 – Mount Baker Theatre – Bellingham, WA – On Sale Now

I’m eying that November 21 date for Bremerton, as that’s a Saturday and is therefore the one that will not require me to do anything to my work schedule. Who’s with me? :)

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Quiet weekend

What with userinfosolarbird being out of town this weekend, I’ve taken it upon myself to have some quiet me time, which I really rather needed. Just getting caught up on my sleep is a win. But so is doing various and sundry small chores and errands that needed doing, such as getting the checkbook caught up, buying reflective red tape to go over the broken lens on our right rear taillight*, picking up some more long and therefore work-appropriate shorts to wear to work as well as some badly needed sports bras, and washing clothes and sheets and towels.

Friday night we had all the Bothell crowd as well as userinfojennygriffee come over for more tabletop gaming, and while that was quite hectic, it was also fun. I continue to be full of Win for little Moira and Lillian, and this time around I also got little William’s attention; the boy thought it was great fun to try to help me play my guitar. He’s shyer than the girls and doesn’t talk nearly as much, so it was pretty neat to see him perk up.

Lily and Moira love going up our stairs and peeking in my bedroom because I have a big bed they can bounce on, and also, we have a cache of stuffed animals in there. But they also love making me (as well as any other convenient grownups) chase them in circles around the main floor of the house. Lily in particular commanded me to “be a dinosaur!”, so I apparently need to get right to work on my T-rex impersonation. ;) Meanwhile, Moira wanted to further investigate our DVD collection, and when she spotted the pink boxes that contain our Cardcaptor Sakura anime episodes, I went ahead and let her watch that figuring that it wouldn’t be too scary for her or Lily. userinfokathrynt tells me that Lily in fact is experimenting with being scared, and likes to identify things as “scary”.

This led to one of the cutest things I’ve heard coming out of a two-year-old mouth lately: “scary toilet paper lady” to describe the antagonist character in the movie I showed them. Hee.

And, Moira insisted that I “protect” her while she was watching the movie, and sat in my lap. Aw. <3 It should also be noted that Lily furthermore kept asking me for "Donkey Riding", and when she spotted the background pic of Great Big Sea on my computer, pointed at it and said "that's a picture of Donkey Riding!" She's still a little shaky on which name goes with the band and which name goes with the song, but she clearly now knows the faces of Great Big Sea when she sees them. Mostly. She also thought Eddie Izzard on my T-shirt was Sean, I think. I put her straight! Yesterday morning Q then IMed me to tell me that Lily told her "we put on shoes and go over to my Anna's house!" I am apparently now Lillian's Anna! Who knew? Unrelatedly, last night while working on checkbook balancing, I re-watched TOS's "Doomsday Machine" episode (some awesome mileage of The Kirk), Master and Commander (which I think is now well and solidly my favorite Russell Crowe movie Ever), and another 4th season episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (which is still bringing the wacky).

* Why the hell can’t I buy just a replacement lens for that taillight, anyway? The light itself is intact, it’s just the outer lower bit of the lens that’s broken. But according to the guys at Schuck’s the assembly is all they have, and they wanted $130 for it. I bought a $5 roll of reflective red headlight repair tape instead and used that. Which should do me for now and hopefully satisfy the next cop that tries to pull me over for having a broken taillight.