…is one of my favorite twitt’rs, writer/director/producer Ann Marie Lindbloom, AKA @annmarietv. For anyone unfamiliar with Ann Marie’s work, I’ve posted some of her latest press below.
That was the last #SethBuyMeLunch contest of 2011. I’ll pick things up on January 9, 2012.
When you’re still using a three-year-old iPhone 3G, the Maps app takes 35 minutes to start up. Which means that by the time you admit that you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to be at least 35 minutes more lost. And so after several U-turns on Venice Blvd. and captivating tours of the side streets of Culver City, I parked near a lot full of beatdown Alfa Romeo Spiders1 at the Omega Motorsports garage and arrived at Villa Tacos quite a bit late to find Brian Morrison deep into free chips and salsa.
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Photo © André Bergeron
On Sunday I wrote about French & Saunders, a great comedy team that’s phenomenally popular in the UK but relatively unknown in the US. Today I want to talk about a guy and his band that are equally popular in Canada and equally unknown down here. Sam Roberts has scored multiple number-one songs and albums in Canada, had his very first single nominated for a Juno,1 and has won six since then. He’s released four albums since 2003, but you won’t find anyone in America who knows him outside of the well-quinoaed cult of Adult Album Alternative radio listeners.
Even Pitchforkians are largely unfamiliar with Sam, possibly because his music tracks a few rarely traveled paths. For one, It’s very high quality, but without any distinctive innovation; listening to it is like eating a perfectly made pizza. For another, it’s rock and roll of a type that’s particularly out of fashion, because it’s really just plain ol’ really good rock and roll. So much so that it’s hard to put a name on it. It’s not indie rock, or roots rock, or folk rock, or horrible modern rock, and certainly not punk rock. It’s just melodic, guitar-forward, five-piece rock and roll, played without conceit, gimmick, or nostalgia.
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I’ve set a fundraising goal for my radio series Special Relativity of $100 a day, which means to be on track for the first week we needed to raise $700 by 1:30pm yesterday. Thanks to the extreme generosity of 11 people, we met that goal right at the wire. As a thank you, I’m giving you this portrait of the Emperor of the Basset Hounds, photographed by me in Stockholm, Sweden.
We still have 73 more $100 days to go in this project, so if you haven’t donated yet please give what you can. If you can’t/won’t/shan’t contribute, you can help almost as much by sharing the project via Facebook, Twitter, email, or your web site. Every time someone shares the campaign, it increases something horrifyingly called its “GoGoFactor.” A high GoGoFactor increases the chances of IndieGoGo featuring the project on its home page or in its newsletters, not to mention building the project’s confidence in the locker room.
Your support means a lot to me. Thanks.
Congratulations to Brian Morrison, AKA @MorriBri. I’m looking forward to having tacos with him in Culver City. I’m posting the photo above because Brian strikes me as the type of guy who’d have the flagons to walk into a Jack in the Box with a cup from three weeks ago and help himself to some Coke Zero, which I think we can agree is the type of person we all want to be.
Next week is your last chance to win a free lunch with me in 2011. Tweet #SethBuyMeLunch anytime on Monday to enter.
I should really just stop intending to take photographs of the #SethBuyMeLunch winners, because I forget every time. I’m just gonna uese Dave Shotwell’s Twitter photo, which I can verify is what he looks like. Conversely, he can confirm that this lunch actually happened and that I’m not just making this post up from information I learned during the 49 hours I spent hidden in his couch cushions.
It was a very poor fundraising weekend for Special Relativity, with only $5 raised, putting us two hundred dollars behind the target amount for today. That’s led me to take extreme measures. I’m now attempting to increase the pace of donations by harnessing the power of the very fabric of the Universe!
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Allow me to present a new campaign perk: the Special Relativity Fundamental Force Manipulator. For a ridiculously small donation of $15, you’ll receive this remarkable science-powered device which, though it sits comfortably in the palm of your hand, allows you to wield one of the four fundamental interactive forces of the Universe. Relish your dominance over the very sub-atomic particles that make up all matter in creation as you use the Special Relativity Fundamental Force Manipulator to control the electromagnetic force, allowing you to permanently attach it to the front of your refrigerator without the aid of adhesives or fasteners.
Donate $15 to get yours now. Please, use it wisely.
If you’re an ordinary American over the age of 30, you’d probably recognize Jennifer Saunders as Eddie Monsoon on Absolutely Fabulous.1 If you’re particularly well-versed in British TV comedy, you might even know Dawn French as the star of the long-running sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. But the curse of being an American, aside from the growing trend of going out in public wearing clothes with butt flaps, is that you probably don’t that know before, during, and after Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French were those wonderful things, they comprised the even more wonderful comedy team French & Saunders.
Dawn and Jennifer have generated comedy for the BBC for more than 25 years now, including six seasons of their show French & Saunders and over a dozen specials. But their work, like professional soccer and beer with flavor, is one of those phenomena that’s tremendously popular and famous in the UK but with nary an impact over here. That’s really too bad because, with the possible exception of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, French & Saunders created the best television sketch comedy ever.
----I’ve added two new PBS-pledge-drive-quality contribution perks to the Special Relativity IndieGoGo campaign:
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Universe’s Cutest Animal Pet Shirt
For the discerning pet lover, a contribution of $100 lets you label your pet as the Universe’s Cutest Animal with the Universe’s cutest pet shirt. 100% ribbed cotton, reading “Universe’s Cutest Animal” in Special Relativity style. Available in XS-3XL, because cuteness is not size-relative.
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For the not-so-discerning businessman, $150 will snag you this exclusive piece of fashionable neckwear with a pattern custom designed from the Special Relativity symbol. Made of 100% silky not-silk.
You might’ve noticed that this is an 80-day campaign with an $8000 goal. That’s because I, having once been an undergrad math major, was able to calculate that 8000÷80=100. So I’m looking at this campaign as raising $100 a day for 80 days.
I’m approaching the campaign one day at a time (as marketing experts call it, “going Schneider”). Every day I’ll try to bring in just enough donations to get to $100.
Day 1 got us off to a great start: $275, almost three times my daily target. So if you donate just $25 today you’ll not only buy yourself advanced listening of all the episodes, but also you’ll guarantee that we’ll reach the first campaign weekend right on track.
Along with being a former undergrad math major, I’m also a former amateur ethicist. The question of whether to make a donation of $25 to a comedy radio show is just the type of quandary that people often sought my advice about. And so I can say, in all honesty, that I can’t tell you what I would advise them because I charge $25 an hour.
