My Blue Heaven

On 29 April 2008 at 0515 CEST, our son was born. He weighs 3.160 kg and was 52 cm long (that’s 7 lbs and 20.5 inches).

My dear wife was so amazing. She claims she’s a klutz and physically unaware, but she she had a problem-free pregnancy and delivered our child beautifully.

The doctors and hospital staff that attended us are all wonderful. They made the language barrier disappear.

Now, about our son. He has my feet and his mother’s legs. He has his great-grandma’s chin, his grandfather’s ears, and his other grandfather’s forehead.

Like his father and his mother, he shares a birthday with another jazz giant. He will no doubt be the “Duc du Lac” when we stroll the pond around with his “big sister”, la Reine du Lac.

Looking Back

I’ve been gone a long time. I’m not sure how to get back into the swing of things.

I suppose I just start again.

It’s been a very exciting time at Officemonkey Central. Living in Brussels has been very life changing. Full details (and pictures) will come once the good news happens.

The other biggest bloggable news is I watched the “Up Series”. Probably the most engrossing documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I’m roughly 7 years behind the “Uppers”. It was interesting to see where they are, and where I was at that age.

Well, that’s all for now. Hope to see you soon.

Oddest Brussels Landmark

No, it’s not the 18-inch statue of a naked toddler peeing.

No, it’s not the giant silver tinkertoy.

These are the famous Brussels landmarks. I’m talking the oddest landmark.

Americans who have visited Brussels for any length of time will know what I mean.

You take the metro to De Brouckère and you go up the stairs and it stands before you in all its glory.

One of the few remaining Chi-Chi’s restaurants.

Apparently, the Chi-Chi’s chain fell on hard times in 2004: a Hepatitis A outbreak in one of their restaurants caused them to sell their operations to Outback Steakhouse which shuttered the American restaurants.

The Chi-Chi’s is located in a 70s era, butt-ugly office building. The plaza in front of the building is walled off with high, ugly, iron fencing. Three flag poles, flying Chi-Chi’s flags, stand in the center of the plaza. Put a couple of armed guards in front and the whole thing would look like an Embassy.

The Chi-Chi’s Embassy. That’s the oddest Brussels landmark.

A Short List of Things that Must Exist, Yet are Never Seen:

1. Baby pigeons.

Coca-cola

I live in Belgium, which I’ve read has the highest consumption of Diet Coke per capita than any other country. They call it “Coca Light” here, which I think is a pretty good name.

I was driving with my family the other day and we pulled over to get gas. I went inside the station to get snacks. While I was in this tiny station I saw the regular array of Coke Products: Coke, Coca Light, Coke Zero, Diet Coke with Lemon, and…

Coca Light Sango: with the flavor of blood oranges.

The concept made my mind reel. Not just orange-flavor but blood orange-flavor. I had to try one! Worst case scenario, it would be awful and I would have a good laugh. I bought the bottle and saw at the orange-tinged, slightly-murky Coke inside. This could be really, really bad.

It was awful. Everybody in the car tried it and I had two-thirds of a half-liter bottle left. Only my desire not to have that toxic waste rolling around the back of my car made me strong enough to finish the bottle. That, and my masochism.

I recently read that there’s a Coke with vitamins. That’s wild: Coke is simultaneously trying to make vices good for you, and to turn you off vices completely. It’s like some kind of Clockwork (Blood) Orange conditioning.

The New Music Showcase

I’ve been in Brussels for four months now. I’m getting used to being away from “American Culture”. For instance, I know that Anna Nichole Smith is dead, but I only have a vague indication of how predominant the story is.

I’ve seen “Dreamgirls”, but I haven’t seen “Last King of Scotland” or “The Good German” or “The Good Shepherd” which apparently were big hits three months ago.

So I’m becoming pitifully unaware of TV and Movies. So what? Even when I lived in the US, I might be the only American whose never seen an episode of Lost or Desperate Housewives or Gray’s Anatomy.

One realm I feel I haven’t lost a step is music. I don’t have normal music tastes anyway: iTunes tells me I have 417 Jazz CDs and 40 Rock CDs (and I’m not even done with ripping my collection).

Since I’ve been in Brussels, I’ve discovered some really nice music:

• Scatman John Larkin: a completely unknown to me vocalist with a normal voice but great jazz/scat chops. I found him on Pandora.com.
• Billy Stewart: a heard his version of Summertime in a bar in Brussels. I also heard him on Pandora.com.
• Les Humphries Singers: Who?? WTF? Believe it or not, it’s a German-based choral group led by an English hippie back in the 1970s. Their song “In My Father’s House” is a nice poppy gospel song which I heard one day on a Flemish-language radio station.
• John Proulx: I saw him play piano years ago at a jazz recital in Chicago. I thought he was great and I remembered his name. About 5 years later I hear the same guy on Pandora.com. It’s the same dude. He’s got a nice singing voice. Think Michael Buble, but without the obvious ripoffs of other singer’s songs.
• Amy Winehouse: I predict that this chick will be the new Gnarles Barkley. I heard her two songs Back to Black and Rehab on a Francophone radio station. Sandy bought the CD for me the last time she was in Paris. It’s great: she’s soulful and crazy and a great big mess. All wrapped up in a Phil Spector/Motown sound.
• Donny Hathaway: Yes, I might be the last person who has ever heard of Donny Hathaway. I guess I’ve heard of his duets with Roberta Flack, but I had never listened to his singing until recently. In my opinion, his signature songs are Jealous Guy, For All We Know, and A Song for You. (I plan on dissecting my love/hate relationship with A Song for You eventually. In a nutshell, I don’t really like the song, but I love it when Donny Hathaway sings it.
• Badfinger: I fell in love with Badfinger back in the 1980s because they sounded a lot like the Beatles. I had forgotten about them until I heard them on an Armed Forces Radio station the other day.

So what is the common thread to finding new music?

1. Good music can be anywhere. European radio formats are a lot less restrictive than the US. You could hear anything!
2. Pandora.com might be the greatest thing on the internet. You tell them what kind of music you like and it will try to find music that ‘matches’. The more you rate the music they play, the better their recommendations. I would have never heard of Larkin, Stewart, or Proulx without Pandora.
3. Keep your ears open and write down what you like. Many bars play interesting music. Ask the bartender what they’re playing and you might get turned onto something new. I asked a bar tender about a group that sounded like Stevie Wonder and now I’m listening to Jamiroquoi.

Who's Yahoodi!?!

I’m not much of a post-in-response-to-a-blog blogger.

Hell, I’m not much of a blogger.

But a recent entry on BoingBoing on Houdini got me thinking.

Seems like Houdini’s heirs may exhume his body in order to test if he died of appendicitis (as long believed) or was murdured by some phony psychics (as if there are any other kind).

You know what I’m betting? The coffin is empty. It would be his greatest trick.

Ok, back to sleep for me.

[NB: the title of this entry is a great Cab Calloway song. The best line in the lyrics is G-Man Hoover’s getting moody/Got his men on double-duty/Trying to find out who’s Yahoodi/Who’s Yahoodi??]

Turning Ankles

It’s been three months since I moved to Brussels. When I first got here, I turned my ankle about once a week. One day, I turned it quite badly and I stayed home one day until I could walk without serious limping.

I was walking home the other night and I noticed how awful the sidewalk was: broken pavers, uneven curbs, and missing cobbles.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t turned my ankle in at least six weeks. Apparently I’ve learned (from painful experience) how to be light on my feet.

I’m going to have to alert visitors to keep one eye on the sidewalk. Either that, or keep a supply of icepacks handy.

And the hits just keep on coming!

I was wondering why I haven’t blogged recently. Plenty has happened in the past few weeks, but I haven’t been moved to write.

Brussels is officially a bilingual city. However, it’s not much like Montreal, the other bilingual city I’m familiar with. In Montreal, all the signs are in French; in Brussels, all signs (even ads in the subways) are in French and Flemish. In Montreal, you can speak in French or English. I call it “French with training wheels”, because if you can’t get through a conversation in French, you can switch to English and nobody blinks an eye.

Language is much more of a contentious issue in Belgium. If you’re in Flanders, you can’t get by with just French. If you’re in Wallonia, you can’t get by with just Flemish. In both cases, you’re much better off trying English. In Brussels, they’ve created this uneasy truce where all signs are bilingual.

Here’s an example of that uneasy truce. They pipe music into the metro stations, so there’s something to listen to while waiting for the subway.

Rather than playing alternating French and Flemish tunes, they either play instrumental music, or they play songs sung in English. Generally these are 20-25 year-old pop songs. Not classic tunes, like the Police and Michael Jackson: More like second-tier tunes like The Thompson Twins and Swing Out Sister and A-Ha (probably because they’re cheaper).

Ever since we moved to our apartment, I’ve just been taking a bus to work, instead of the metro-bus combo. So, I’ve been missing out on a major source of inspiration.

So, it’s official, I’m no longer limiting my blog entries to song titles. Let’s see if I can find some new inspiration.

On The Cover of The Rolling Stone

About a month ago, I was reading an article about Snoop Dogg in Rolling Stone (how I got a subscription of Rolling Stone, is another story).

After reading the article, it struck me that Snoop Dogg is the modern-day equivalent of Dean Martin. Snoop’s drug use and gangsta ways are mostly part of an act (the article says he coaches pee-wee football), and he’s appartly a loving husband and father. From what I read about Dean Martin, his ‘drunken playboy’ was a carefully-constructed act, an exaggeration of his personality, not his actual personality.

Snoop’s popularity as an actor, rapper, and personality are analogous to Dean Martin’s celebrity of the late 50s and early 60s.

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything more to say. I just couldn’t resist using the song title.