Birds or the Bees, and more MOJO

I've got Fellini's La Dolce Vita and two Penn And Teller Bullshit! DVDs on loan due back Thursday, so I'll try to view a video tonight. Speaking of Italian, I was at Starbucks last week when I overheard a lady asking an employee whether dolce was pronounced dol'-chay or dol'-say. Amateur! Tyro! Tsk, tsk, all in due time. Now where's my tall skinny unleaded latte?

Shaula claims she has identified a new type of leaf-eating dinosuar, Barfalottosaurus.

My next read was going to be Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees. But I went with William Wharton's Birdy instead because a co-worker was currently reading it, so we can compare notes. I am simultaneously dipping into Beth Kimmerle's Chocolate: The Sweet History, and thinking about skimming Krishnamurti's Think On These Things. I've read some Krishnamurti before, The Significance of Life, if I recall. Think On These Things does not have to be a linear read as it's a collection of talks. I'll post some of my favourite Krishnamurti sayings some time.
I had a chance to glance at The MOJO Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion yesterday during my daughter's weekly half-hour piano lesson. The piano is in the boardroom. I won't get into it, but suffice it to say that there was a meeting scheduled immediately after the lesson, so people were bringing in boxes of papers and plastic cups and the like, and walking in or otherwise interrupting the session that was clearly in progress. This better not happen again, or some chairs will go missing.

I heartily recommend MOJO as a good place to start exploring good contemporary music. I found quite a few of my favourites in the collection, and the following should give you an idea of my musical tastes:

• Bill Evans Trio Sunday at the Village Vanguard
• John Coltrane A Love Supreme
• Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited and Blood On The Tracks
• Van Morrison, Astral Weeks* and Moondance
• Steely Dan Can't Buy A Thrill and Aja
• Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells
• Elton John Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
• Eno Another Green World
• Queen A Night At The Opera
• Keith Jarrett The Køln Concert*
• Kiss Destroyer
• Boston Boston
• Fleetwood Mac Rumours
• Kate Bush The Dreaming and The Hounds Of Love
• Dire Straits Brothers In Arms
• The Waterboys This Is The Sea
• Jane Siberry The Walking
• The Blue Nile Hats
• The Sundays Reading Writing And Arithmetic
  

Each entry gets a full-page writeup, with personnel and track listings. There's quite the cross section of genres. Notice how I peter out in the 90s (Radiohead?, Oasis?, Wu-Tang Clan?, P.J. Harvey?, Offspring?) and after 2000. I've marked two albums with an asterisk, *, to indicate that the music here is not of this world, most likely gifts that slipped into this universe through some freak rent in space and time. FYI, The Waterboys' This Is The Sea is incredibly pagan.

MOJO, $6.99 at your local Chapters' clearance table (regularly $40).

Oh yeah, Sathwick replied to my email and was IM'ing with two co-workers yesterday, good to see that he's alive.