The Long Branch by the lake Garden Tour 2016 is a Garden Days official activity and is now listed on the website. Garden Days is Canada’s Coast to Coast to Coast, three-day celebration of our National Garden Day held each year the Friday before Father’s day. The Long Branch Garden Tour will take place rain or shine June 18, 10-4.
Check out the Garden Tour blog for updates including how to get early bird tickets. Tuffy P (AKA Sheila Gregory) and her pal, Nadia Stelmach are organizing the garden tour. There will be over a dozen fantastic Long Branch gardens to visit. It’s an opportunity to show the rest of the city just how beautiful Long Branch is! Tickets for the garden tour will be $10 with every penny going to support Lamp Community Health Centre. I’ll keep you all posted on details as I get them from Tuffy P.
One year ago this morning, I put on my boots and coat, grabbed my lunch bag and my laptop and headed out the door for work. I didn’t get very far though. I took on step onto the invisible “black ice” on our steps and went for a flight, badly breaking and dislocating my ankle.
It’s amazing what a single mis-step can do. I spent most of a year recovering, and only stopped physiotherapy last month. Fortunately, everything is working fine now. My surgeon told me I’ll likely get some arthritis in that ankle at some point down the road, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I suppose just about everyone in North America knows the John Henry story. In the annals of American folk tales in general and African-American folk tales more specifically it’s a big one. It’s a big one because it’s the story of the underdog. John Henry was a steel-driving man, that’s how the song goes. His job was to use a 9 pound hammer to whack a steel drill, held by his “shaker”, and this is how making a railway tunnel was done the old-school way. John Henry was flat-out the best there ever was. And then along came the steam drill. If you don’t know the story, listen to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee sing it for you…
John Henry went up against the steam drill, up against progress, up against the machine, and he was going to win, even if it killed him. He did, and it did.
Now I imagine many readers of 27th Street don’t know who Lee Sedol is. Mr. Sedol is not a folk hero, he’s a real person. He is a Korean professional player of the board game known in Korea as Baduk, in China as Wei Chi, and just about everywhere else as Go. Lee Sedol is considered to be one of the greatest Go players of the modern era. The question is, what is so significant about Lee Sedol that I’m comparing him to John Henry.
On March 9, Mr. Sedol will begin a 5 game match against a bot named AlphaGo. Back in the fall, AlphaGo beat up on European champ Fan Hui, 5 games to nothing. Fan Hui is a strong professional, but he is thought to be considerably weaker than Lee Sedol. Consider it a warm-up match.
Until AlphaGo, computers have not been able to beat strong Go players. This is a different situation than in the world of chess, where computers have been able to wipe the floor with Grandmasters for a couple decades now. Chess computers did this with brute force computing power, but brute force has not been successful in beating humans at Go. For details about how AlphaGo’s artificial intelligence has been successful at Go, I recommend you check out Nick Sibicky’s comments in a recent video shared on YouTube. Many Go players thought a computer strong enough to beat a strong pro Go player was a decade away or longer, if possible at all. After all there apparently are more possible positions in a game of Go than there are atoms in the universe.
There will be live streaming of the matches on YouTube and to be sure the games will be posted there after the fact with enough commentary for even the most ardent Go freak. As for Lee Sedol, he expects to win. Unlike John Henry of old, though, it is unlikely Mr. Sedol will die trying. The winner of the match gets $1Million. If AlphaGo wins, the money will go to charity.
I’ll be following the matches closely, and yes I’ll be cheering for Lee Sedol. I hope he kicks bot-butt!
I came across this performance Joe Newberry gave at the 2015 Midwest Banjo Camp. If I hadn’t broken my ankle, I would have been there to hear it live. I will be attending the 2016 camp. Mr. Newberry talks about a life changing moment and plays a tribute to Fred Cockerham.
I love this video. Occasionally I go back for another dose of it. That’s Bashful Brother Oswald singing and playing guitar. Cathy Barton Para is the clawhammer player (one of my fave players). I don’t know who the other guitar picker is. It’s backstage at the Opry in Nashville. There was a lot of joy going on at that particular place and time.
Going to Louisiana for to see my Suzianna Polly-Wally-Doodle add day.
Our friend Claude Breeze has an exhibition on at Yumart, here in Toronto. It opened yesterday. We’ve known Claude since the early 80s when he was our painting instructor at York University. I’ve actually been aware of Claude’s work since before I ever met him, back in my high school days, when I saw his Canadian Atlas paintings.
Claude Breeze at the opening of his current exhibition at Yumart
It was great to see Claude’s new work. He continues to be one of the most prolific artists I know. You can see images of his new pictures here. Much of Claude’s recent work is based on manipulated digital photos, printed on canvas and in some cases collaged. In some of the ones in the Yumart exhibition, Claude has added some sort of crayon and charcoal and in some cases acrylic paint to the printed image. There are also a couple works painted completely in acrylics. These are smallish works – the one in the photo with Claude might be the largest. There’s a remarkable variety of imagery at play, often with a dark or surreal edge about it. Check out the show. Yumart is at 401 Richmond.
The bathroom in our home is in serious need of a face-lift, something we’re finally getting around to. In preparation for this adventure, we trundled out this morning to look at bathroom tiles. We started by looking in a couple box stores. Based on what we say, all their customers buy taupe, beige, tan, brown, and white tiles. That’s it. We asked the box store guy, don’t people use colours? We sir, 80% of our customers like beige, so that’s what we stock. OK. Off to a tile specialty store. Make that 2 tile specialty stores.
We quickly found some really lovely tile, unique, way more interesting than the rest. It turns out this material was 10X more expensive than anything else in the store. Oh, and we would have to order it from New Jersy or from California and it could take some time. Right.
At least we got an idea of what is out there, learned what is and isn’t realistic, and narrowed down our choices some. Unfortunately, we’ll have to venture back into the tile store one more time.
The dizzying array of choices for a simple bathroom reno made me think that renovating an entire house must be a mind-boggling experience. Fortunately we don’t need to do that. The bathroom will be this year’s interior project.
If Doc Watson were still with us, he would have turned 93 today. Doc Watson played huge role in popularizing Old Time music, and he was both a fine singer and a remarkable guitarist. I’ve known Doc Watson’s music since my teens when I used to listen to the old Folk Music and Folkways radio program with host Joe Louis on CJRT here in Toronto. Mr. Louis played quite a number of cuts over the years featuring Doc, often with his son Merle.
27th Street 