Nope, my digital camera didn’t arrive. Today I rode down to Vancouver (with Marpho, who was making his first on-pavement motorcycle ride in 20 years) and we wandered around the pawn shop district in east hastings. While there, I bought a ukulele.

While poking around the internewt for tips on tuning and chords and whatnot, I’ve come across a bunch of references to a current upsurge of popularity in ukes. Who knew? Once again I’m on the cutting edge.

I’m in instantly in love with this stupid little thing, especially after finding this hilarious and cute page of engrishee instructions for learning the ukulele (see this summary of the page by some people who thought it was as funny as I did, and this discussion of anti-Japanese racism), and especially especially after trying some of these fabulous ukulele tabs. So far Bird on a Wire and the Spider Man theme are giving me the biggest high, although it’s weirdly fun to try and play ‘tiptoe through the tulips’.

In an odd moment of co-incidence with my last post, it turns out that Ukulelia, “the world’s greatest ukulele blog” is maintained by Mark Frauenfelder, who was the guy largely responsible for the BoingBoing zine back when it was, as I mentioned, a physical zine made in a wearhouse in San Francisco. Weird.

I already want to buy all the good ukuleles in the world, but mostly because mine sounds utterly terrible. Frankly I expected more for $32 (including case).