As some of my readers know, I’m a huge Barenaked Ladies fan. And that’s why I’m going on a BNL cruise in the new year!

I’m getting excited as the date approaches. Recently I got an email from the cruise company. There will be some events on board that will have limited capacity. So the company got us to list the events in order of preference. The attendees will be decided by lottery and the event they get chosen for will be determined by availability and preference. So here is the list of events, in order of my preference:

• Wine Tasting with Steven Page
• Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Trivia with Kevin Hearn
• Songwriters Panel
• Guitar Hero with Ed Robertson

Guitar Hero sounds like lots of fun, but I know I will just embarrass myself - hence it being last. Hopefully I get into one of them! If not, there’s always the naked photo!

I added a little widget that plays the song “Maybe You’re Right” by Barenaked Ladies. I really enjoy this song, as it captures the way you fight yourself over your opinions when other people do no accept them. Do yo just concede and tell yourself that you are right, or do you speak out? That’s my take on the song anyways.

If this is truly annoying, I will take it off. I know sometimes the web can be full of little trinkets, and I don’t want to overwhlem my readers. So let me know.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

Washington Post

Interesting. I know that even real “street musicians” that are great at their art, have trouble gathering crowds. I think that busking is an art of it’s own though, it’s much different than being on a traditional stage.

Although this isn’t news that the FBI was spying on John Lennon, his file got released just a few days after Tommy Douglas’s RCMP File. It’s interesting to see the paranoia of the western countries back then… and how it’s coming back in regards to islamic fundamentalists. (Have you watched Glen Beck lately?)

Anyways, here is the story:

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LOS ANGELES - The FBI has released its final surveillance documents on John Lennon to a university historian who has waged a 25-year legal battle to obtain the secret files.

The 10 pages contain new details about Lennon’s ties to leftist and anti-war groups in London in the early 1970s, but nothing indicating government officials considered the former Beatle a serious threat, historian Jon Wiener told the Los Angeles Times in Wednesday’s editions.

The FBI had unsuccessfully argued that an unnamed foreign government secretly provided the information, and releasing the documents could lead to diplomatic, political or economic retaliation against the United States.

The newly released documents include a surveillance report stating that two prominent British leftists had courted Lennon in hopes that he would finance “a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London” but that Lennon gave them no money. Another page states that there was “no certain proof” that Lennon had provided money “for subversive purposes.”

“I doubt that Tony Blair’s government will launch a military strike on the U.S. in retaliation for the release of these documents,” Wiener told the newspaper. “Today, we can see that the national security claims that the FBI has been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning.”

Wiener first requested the documents in 1981, several months after he decided to write a book about Lennon following the singer’s murder. He initially obtained some documents, but the FBI withheld numerous files, saying they contained national security information and were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

Wiener sued the government and received a number of files in 1997 as part of a settlement with the FBI. Justice Department lawyers continued to withhold the final 10 pages until a federal judge in 2004 ordered their release.

The previously released files showed that the FBI closely monitored Lennon from 1971 to 1972

I will be recording question period, if I can’t find any.  However it would be great if I could find some online specifically with the President of the Treasury Board (the loud guy… I don’t remember his name) and Jason Kenney. And actually some with David Emerson as well. I’m putting together a political music video to a song called “Angry People”, and I got a great idea in my head.

If you know where, add a comment to this thread. It will be greatly appreciated and I will add your name or alias to the credits.