Take a Gander

Lovely weekend, it was. The weather made everything just so damn pleasant. I took a bike ride on the Capital Crescent Trail in DC on Saturday. Snapped a few pictures, including the one to the left, of what I thought were some ducks hanging out near the C&O Canal. Tim corrected my city-boy mistake by informing me that those are in fact Canadian geese. Whoops. Anyway, they were cool; there was a whole family of them waddling around. This old guy came up to me just as I was starting to shoot and asked if he could feed them, and I told him it was ok, of course. They were so preoccupied with eating that it allowed me to get that much closer to them. Thanks, old guy! I'll have to remember my own bread crumbs next time.

So I was considering going to see Antena tonight at my least favorite DC venue, Iota. They are a recently-reissued and quasi-reformed French band from the early 80s whose discography-spanning Camino Del Sol disc was released last year on reissues label Numero Group. It is essentially an expanded edition of an EP of the same name, originally released on Les Disques du Crepuscule in 1982. That label is perhaps better known for Factory Records tie-ins (as Factory Benelux) and releasing early material from bands like A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column, and Crispy Ambulance.

Antena's unique “electro samba” (blech) sound and enchanting, French/English female vocals made it my favorite reissue of 2004. I was excited to hear that they'd be touring and playing in my own neighborhood. That is, until I saw that they would be appearing at Iota and that it would actually only be the original singer, Isabelle, who was playing with some back-up band. So I was on the fence about it, until I heard today (thanks, Dominic) that Antena is not playing at Iota, or anywhere else for that matter. The Numero web site has the following to say about it, along with an apology: After only a handful of dates on their first US tour ever, Antena have decided to cancel the remaining dates and head home. Weird. There's nothing on
Isabelle's blog about it. In fact, she seems to indicate that the tour was going well. Well, decision made.

I'm considering getting one of these PocketDocks for my iPod. I never got a dock, since Apple stopped including them. And the regular docs won't work with the iSkin on, anyway. This looks like the perfect solution for giving me that lovely line-level signal I've been craving. You do realize that the headphone out of the iPod is inferior to the line-out of the dock, don't you? Huh, nerd?

And while I'm considering what iPod accessory to buy next, this is happening:

Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories: How The U.S. Press Has Sanitized The War in Iraq [DN!]
Images of thousands of dead U.S. soldiers helped to turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War, but now photo-journalists are even banned from military funerals at Arlington national cemetery. A report this weekend in the Los Angeles Times documented the extremely rare publication of photos of American casualties in six major newspapers during a sixth month period. Readers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post never saw a single picture of a dead serviceman or servicewoman in their morning papers.