Your Daily Dose today features the late Wade Hemsworth, a great Canadian songwriter.
Never mind that he also wrote The Blackfly Song, The Logdriver’s Waltz and The Shining Birch Tree.
Here’s Adam Miller performing The Shining Birch Tree. Let me say that if I had a list of top 10 songs, this one would be on it for sure.
What the hell, let’s go out with the big one. If you’re Canadian, this song is part of your genetic code. Here’s Mr. Hemsworth and the most delightful NFB animation…
We know that temperature doesn’t matter any more. It’s all about the humidex in the summer and the wind chill in the winter. Today it may be 30 degrees but the radio promises it will feel like the fires of Hell with the humidex. Convection Roast. The same station reminds us that while the power grid is in much better shape than it was a year ago, we should turn down our AC. Of course, it’s days like today that air conditioning such an attractive option.
This mini heat wave has come just in time to remind us that summer is starting. The good news is that with some decent rainfall, we’ll start to see chanterelles and maybe some ornate boletes and a few lobsters up in the Enchanted Mushroom Forest. Oh, where exactly is that, you ask. Ya, ya, it’s you know, that forest up by um, you know the place. Ya, ya, where the roads you know and there’s that spot where you can pull over and the big hill with the thingy and that old barn. Well, past the old barn. You know. Sure, it’s a good hike in, yes that’s true.
Tonight’s Daily Dose takes you down to Louisiana to listen to the great Aldus Roger and the Lafayette Playboys performing The Bosco Stomp.
Yeah!
I had an opportunity to see Yves Lambert et le Bébert Orchestra play in San Antonio at the accordion festival a few years ago where they were among the highlights of the weekend. Your Daily Dose today features Quebec button accordionist Yves Lambert.
Here he is with Tommy Gauthier and Olivier Rondeau
In a couple weeks, we’re putting a path across the yard. Strangely, our house does not have a path from the driveway to the front walk. Neither does the house to the south of us. When we arrive home in a vehicle, we have two choices…walk across the lawn or walk down the driveway, across the sidewalk, and up the front path. We walk across the lawn. We’re going to put in a flagstone path from the front walk to the driveway, and extend the front garden down to the new path.
Tuffy P came up with the idea of adding a canoe garden at the same time. Her idea was to find a very inexpensive canoe, put holes in the bottom, integrate it with the path as if the path were a rapids, fill it with soil, and plant a garden. We’ve never had a canoe garden before. However, a google search on canoe garden images shows us it has been done. To fit our garden path, a canoe no longer than 12 feet is the ticket. Now there are lots of old canoes advertised sites like kijiji, but most of them are either too expensive or too long. We’ve found a couple possibilities but for one reason or another we haven’t been able to nail down the transaction.
The canoe doesn’t even have to be sea worthy. It just has to look sharp (we don’t mind painting it up….or maybe even adding mosaics) and be able to hold soil….and be 12 feet max. I know that canoe is out there. It’s sitting out behind the shed or taking up room in the garage. I know there is someone out there thinking, “I wish I could get rid of this old canoe, but who would want it?” We do. We’re running out of time to get the canoe before the path goes in, and ideally the canoe garden will be integrated with the path. The only thing left to do is turn to you, gentle readers. Please email me if can help.
Sometimes, when I witness the world and it’s most bizarre, I shake my head and say, “There are worlds they have not told you of.” I never really thought about where that phrase came from or where I first heard it. And then one day I remembered it was the title of one of the cuts on Lanquidity, the 1978 record by the Sun Ra Arkestra. For a while, a number of years ago, I was listening to Lanquidity a good deal. I found it on YouTube today and gave it a listen. Yes, just as I remembered it. Here’s today’s Daily Dose, There are Worlds they have not told you of by Sun Ra and the Arkestra.
What will they think of next?
It’s Friday night and I could use a polka about now. How about you?
Here’s a video I’ve posted before but it’s so good I just can’t resist posting it again. It features Li’l Wally live on the Lawrence Welk show, playing concertina and singing in Polish. When I was a boy, my mom had a little stash of Li’l Wally records, including one in which he sang “blue” tunes in Polish. Whatever he was singing, it made my mom’s face turn beet red and it made her laugh like I’ve never seen her laugh.
Walt Solek, the Clown Prince of Polka, recorded a song I knew as a kid, called Who Stole the Kishka. Here’s a different take on it by the Polkaholix
OK, not to everyone’s taste…here’s Papa Crow with another version…
Finally, here’s the mighty Flaco Jimenez with Max Baca, performing In Heaven there is no Beer, a song that must have come from either the Czech or Dutch sections of San Antonio.
Nik Wallenda Walks Across Pittsburgh (Photo credit: jstrak)
Tomorrow night, Nik Wallenda of the famous Wallenda daredevil family, will attempt to walk a tightrope across Niagara Falls. What do you all think about that? It seems this daredevil business is something from a distant carny past. Who knew people still did this?
I remember when I was a kid, Evil Knievel was smashing himself up, doing crazy motorcycle jumps, but after that, I’ve hardly heard of anyone not named Wallenda in the daredevil business. Wallenda comes from a big family of tightrope walkers, many of whom either died or were seriously hurt, all in a day’s work.
So, what’s the attraction? Is it the question? Can Wallenda complete the walk? Or is it the doubt? Maybe he’ll fall and die? The TV network behind this has insisted on Wallenda using some kind of safety harness. Does that take some of the excitement out of it? In other words, is the excitement in the possibility of a fall or in the possibility of a deadly fall? After all, only two things can happen. Either he doesn’t fall or he does fall. Would you watch this? Would you go to Niagara Falls to watch it?
I suppose I have a certain morbid curiosity about the spectacle, and if a 10 second clip came on the news I suppose I’d watch it, but walking on a wire across a falls, even a really really big falls, just doesn’t do it for me. That said, I wish Mr. Wallenda well. I hope he fulfills his dream walk and all of that.
I’d love to hear your opinions on daredevils and circuses and all that jazz.
Come with me. Let’s hop aboard the Wabash Cannonball and pay a little visit to the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Here’s Yodeling Slim Clark…
It was first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928. If you were part of the traveling nation, the mountain was paradise. The hens lay soft-boiled eggs, man.
Here’s Harry McClintock now…
I first heard this song as a small boy. My dad had bought me a record player, one of those units where you had to balance a penny on the needle. I know some of you are thinking, penny, needle, what the hell is this guy talking about? Anyway the first record he bought me was Walkin’ the Floor over You, on 78, by Ernest Tubb. For those of you who are not dinosaurs, 78 refers to the number of times the record revolves in a minute. The second record he bought me was on a 33 rpm record. It was by Burl Ives. Man I loved his voice. Anyway, that’s where I first heard Big Rock Candy Mountain. I thought it was a kid’s song (never mind the line about the buzzin of the bees and the cigarette trees, references to burly bums, and cops with wooden legs). I didn’t get the hobo paradise bit. I don’t think, growing up in Etobicoke, I even knew what a hobo was.
Pour me a little cup from the lemonade springs over there, will you? The mountain would be a perfect place on a day like today. You know, sometimes when I listen to those old Utah Phillips stories about the traveling nation, I kind of admire those guys out trampin around. Talk about hunter-gatherers. It must have been a tough life, but each day was an adventure.
Before we go back to the real world, let’s visit with Lew Dite and his ukulele…
27th Street 