Warren Ellis is one of my favourite writers; his Transmetropolitan was one reason I found myself steeped in comics as an adult.

I took dibs on reviewing his debut novel, Crooked Little Vein, for the Georgia Straight.

Get my take on how Ellis fared in moving from comics to the novel form, over here.

An extra “Trigger Happy” this month, courtesy of the Georgia Straight’s annual education issue.

A new project by Toronto’s Bitcasters has modified the Civilization III engine to enable gamers to replay Canadian history, from 1525 and through the development of Canada as a nation.

It’s a great initiative that will allow players to learn history by rewriting it. Or at least trying to.

The entire column is over here.

In my last “Trigger Happy,” I wrote about how E3 changed for this year’s incarnation. The most dramatic difference from recent E3 events is how the games were more important than any hardware announcements.

In last week’s Georgia Straight, part two of my look at Santa Monica’s E3, with a round-up of some of the games that really got me going.

Get an eyeful over here.

I’ve had this song pounding through my skull for more than a couple of days, but the curious thing is that each morning when I wake up, it’s a different part of the song that is in refrain.

On the first day it was the whistling section that comes right after the drum (machine) solo that opens the song. The whistling sets the melody which is then followed by the vocalists.

The second day the portion of the song that was in my mind was the chorus: “We don’t care about the young folks, talkin’ ‘bout the young style. And we don’t care about the old folks, talkin’ ‘bout the old style, too.”

This morning, the third day that the Peter Bjorn and John song was in my head, it was to the lines sung by Victoria Bergsman: “Usually when things has [sic] gone this far, people tend to disappear. No one would surprise me unless you do.”

Her mumbled accent and lack of ennunciation gives the song a haunting feel, like it belongs on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.

The more I listen to Writer’s Block, the album on which “Young Folks” lives, the more I like it. One of the best of last year.

This Split Enz single, from 1982’s Time and Tide, has been threatening to break into the internal soundtrack ever since I realized that Crowded House, which formed out of Split Enz back in the ’90s, had come back together to release a new album.

Yesterday, while getting everything ready for our first airplane travel with a three-month-old child, it was there.

It was still there this morning when I woke up in Calgary. Our travel on the airplane was blissfully stress-free and served as a good first run for what we hope will only be the first of many trips.

Every time I return to Calgary it’s a different city. On this trip I’m caught off-guard by not only the heat, but the humidity. Stepping out from the terminal, we were struck with a wall of humid warmth that – for a second – made me think we had flown to Bangkok, not Calgary.