The Stypod has an excellent essay this morning about why indie kids are starting to warm up to that genre of frosty nordic guitar-wankery, heavy metal:

"Why now? Why these particular bands? I suspect on this one the purists are right. A lot of these bands aren’t really “metal” at all. I mean, Isis and Mastodon have big riffs and cookie-monster vocals, but they draw from some pretty un-metal sources in concocting their particular brands of loud rock music.

I like to think of them as the musical equivalent of gateway drugs—the kind that give you a taste of what you’ve been missing out on all this time and make you want to try something new. So you want to get into metal in a few easy steps? Try a band that sounds a lot like one you already like and then move on from there."

Hipsters are now trying to legitimize rosé wine, according to the Old Gray Lady:

"...At least a dozen revelers were chugging light pink wine from a bottle. It was Domaines Ott, a French rosé that retails for about $30. Thanks to Mr. MacPherson, who always packs several cases for the weekend, it has become the unofficial drink of the Ditch Plains scene, so common that attendees were referring to it as 'D.O.' and 'the Ott.'

'To me this wine tastes like the South of France and summer, and you should have an endless supply of it,' said Mr. MacPherson."

We think it's time to relaunch Baby Duck. Now. And quickly, before the hipster appetite for low-culture hooch fades or turns its attentions elsewhere.

(hat tip)

Countdown, pretties!  Just one more week and it's the Wolfe Island Music Festival!

The lineup includes Great Lake Swimmers, Holy Fuck, Jon-Rae and the River, the Hidden Cameras, Wintersleep, and The Constantines.

Tickets for Saturday are $25 (proceeds go to charity).  But children under twelve are free, which means that the festival has an awesome family flavour (frisbee in the park, anyone?).  Your kids will be radder and better-developed for seeing the Constantines, and we promise to refer to Brian Borcherdt's band as "Holy Fork" all weekend long for the benefit of the young'ns.

To get y'all in the mood, we point you to former Kingstoner Chumptastic, who's got the new Constantines video in its YouTubetistic glory:

"... picture the White Stripes' 'Fell in Love With a Girl' (but with rocks instead of Lego) combined with a peek through the Polka Dot Door." 

Naked & Angry makes beautiful neckties in small editions, based on a community-driven submission-and-ranking system. They're owned by SkinnyCorp, explaining the Threadless-esque mechanics of the voting process. We're not crazy about the five currently in production, but we've got huge hopes that Lara Cameron's Treehouses (shown above) is turned into a piece of neckwear.

Holy tapdancing Moses, pretties. Have you ever heard 14 Iced Bears? We hadn't either. In fact, we're not precisely sure who to thank for the introduction, as we happened to stumble across them in our admittedly sprawling iTunes library, and have no recollection of how the songs got there.

How we didn't notice them earlier, we've no idea: Inside, for instance, sounds like an Echo and the Bunnymen track, but with less fuzz, more jangle, a pinch of psychedelia and an opening salvo of feedback, guitar and rapidfire drumming that could have been pinched from a Buzzcocks song.

Our good pal Sofi describes them thusly:

"It sounds a little like the Ramones getting their hands on a 1950s doo-wop song, but with that guy from the Wedding Present singing!"

That's high praise, from our perspective.

14 Iced Bears -- Inside

"On Monday, Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington (KFL&A) Public Health issued a Level 1 Heat Alert to residents with the forecast of hot, humid weather continuing for the next few days. A Level 1 Heat Alert is issued when temperatures or humidex are forecast to be 36 degrees Celsius for two or more consecutive days.

And earlier today the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) asked citizens to reduce their use of electricity throughout the day in order to alleviate the increased strain on Ontario's electricity system.

The City of Kingston is making public skating sessions at the Cataraqui Community Centre available free of charge (beginning August 2), as well as some regularly scheduled swims at the Leo Lafleur Memorial Pool and the Artillery Park Aquatic & Fitness Centre."

It's tough to stay cool while avoiding the selfish impulse to hasten rolling blackouts by keeping the AC frosty. This sounds like a great idea from the city for those who don't have air-conditioning (like us at home), or those who have chosen to turn it off to lessen the load on our grid (like our employer).

If skating and swimming aren't your thing, all we can suggest is ghetto air conditioning, the method we proposed in a post during the peak of last summer's heatwave: Ghetto air-conditioning. Mist water from a squirt bottle into the breeze of a fan. The resulting evaporation of the mist off your skin is the greatest thing imaginable when it's scorching hot.

Those with iron rings can go even further. UW civil engineer Geoff Milburn built a jerry-rigged homemade air conditioner that runs on cold tap water:

"I have limited funds and a cheap house without air conditioning. To avoid dying in the summer of 2005, I built a primitive air conditioner. It's a basic heat exchanger, using water as the medium. You'll probably need to fiddle a bit with the dimensions of the supplies based on your resources and preferences."

At 1L/min, his homebrew AC isn't much on water conservation (it would fill about 6 standard-sized rain barrels per day if run continually), but it's still an interesting experiment in terms of low-energy-use cooling.

And, energy misers: Mind your lights! Keep non-essential lights off, and use compact fluorescant for essential lights. As Treehugger noted a couple months ago, lighting accounts for nearly a fifth of global energy consumption:

"According to Paul Waide, a senior policy analyst with the IEA and one of the report's authors, '19% of global electricity generation is taken for lighting -- that's more than is produced by hydro or nuclear stations, and about the same that's produced from natural gas.'"

Lights out, pretties. And stay cool.

Left:  Poster by Yo Rodeo for Les Savy Fav, 2003
Right:  T-shirt design by Unborn Media for PureVolume, 2006

Today's addition to the summer jukebox is best played in the muggy twilight of an August evening.

It's Sam Cooke's moody interpretation of George Gershwin's Summertime. Previously, we had heard this song arranged by Booker T and the MGs. Theirs is slow, sultry and soulful, but has none of the darkness or smoky blues of Cooke's version.

What makes Cooke's cover so perfect is how it closes: Cooke, humming the barebones tune over a thick choral wail that sounds like it was transplanted from an Ennio Morricone score. It's eerie and beautiful.

Sam Cooke - Summertime

Edit: We're not the only ones with this song on our playlist; James at Moistworks also posted an arrangement of this same song today.  His is a rock steady cover by BB Seaton of the Gaylads, and it's well worth the download.

So we liked the idea of Flor, a flexible and modular carpeting solution.

But we loved this even more: DIY, cheap as water, and charmingly ragtag:

Okay, so truth be told we'd probably hunt for bolder colours and try to square it off (call us conventional), but Faux Flor is still pretty durn'd cool.

We would argue that, aside from certain items on the tinned meat shelf at your grocer's, there is practically no food product so inherently vile as marshmallow fluff.  It's like a marshmallow peep, whipped and frothed into spreadable form.  It's barely categorizable as food.
But amazingly, the stuff has a following.  Diary of a Reluctant Housewife attributes the product's appeal to a deeply-entrenched sense of nostalgia for those who pair it with peanut butter to make a 'fluffernutter' sandwich:

"The sandwich, while not technically 'food', was delicious.  It brought back memories of a childhood spent sneaking into Fenway Park and drinking hot chocolate in front of the fire after shoveling February snow.  Which makes the sandwich even more impressive because I grew up in the Caribbean and didn't see snow until I was in graduate school.  That's some powerful Fluff." 

We just giggle at the name 'fluffernutters'.  When we worked at Queen's Walkhome, where a ban on profanity was strictly enforced, this was a word that we came up with through brainstorming as a perfect substitute curse.  "Wait, we've got a patron six blocks North of Princess?  And it's hailing outside?  Aw, fluffernutters."