You’ll find tonight’s Daily Dose deep down in the mine.
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Bye Bye Cable
I canceled our cable tv today. For years we were good with rabbit ears, but when we moved to Long Branch we decided to try out cable. We get loads and loads of channels but very little programming that really interests us. I suggested to the guy at the cable office that if he could offer us HBO + the movie channel only and charge us $10 each month, we would seriously consider it. He told me a sad tale. He said the government forces the cable companies to force many different channels on their customers. If it weren’t for that darned government always getting in the way, his company could be much more reasonable. Right. Left to their own devices the cable giants will always do the right thing.
And so, we have 30 days of cable left. I feel free.
Let’s Go Ridin’ in my Car
Hayseed Dixie
This is for all the folk music freaks out there who secretly wish they were rocker dudes.
Donald Duck Dunn RIP
Photo of musician Donald “Duck” Dunn (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Soul fans know Donald “Duck” Dunn as the bassist for the Stax rhythm section and Booker T and the MGs. Later music lovers may have been introduced to him in The Blues Brothers film. Mr. Dunn was just 70. He died in his sleep in Japan after a performance.
Related articles
- Bass player Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn dies in Tokyo (todayonline.com)
- Steve Cropper Announces Death Of Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn (noise11.com)
Garden Updates
I thought the lean-to needed more substance, and so I fortified it some today. I also planted a flowering currant shrub. That’s the plant with the yellow flowers on the right side of the photo.
The veggie garden is coming along fine. We’ll be eating spinach and mesclun and scallions soon. We haven’t made any progress yet on the mosaic on the veggie bed but hopefully we’ll get to it soon.
I created a new garden – to the right in the photo – for tomatoes and herbs. A few days ago I decided there would be no more frost in Long Branch for the season, meaning it was safe to plant tomatoes. My friend Spicecat gave me some “seedlings” that were threatening to take over the house they were getting so big. Now they’re in the ground. The area to the left used to have two trees – you can see the stumps where a spruce and a cedar once grew. This area is going to become a shrubbery, and I’ve planted two dogwoods, a verbenum, an elderberry and a Japanese Kerria. Eventually, these plants will grow up and create a large shrub anchor for the north side of the garden. By the way, Mr. and Mrs Sparrow have moved into the birdhouse you can see at the top right of the photo. We’ve had this birdhouse for years, first on Blackthorn and now on Twenty-Seventh, and this is the first year birds have moved in.
Breeze
We ventured out to Bloor St W this afternoon for the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Claude Breeze. Of course we brought Memphis and Ellie Mae along. The show is at Robert Kananaj Gallery on Bloor near Landsdowne.
I’ve known Claude and his partner Ardis since about 1981 or maybe even 1980, when Claude was my painting professor at York University. For this exhibition Claude is exhibiting work from a few different streams in his current painting. The show even has some objects, wall-pieces made from broken dolls. There’s plenty to look at and plenty to think about too, as well as a wide range of emotional content. I enjoy the playfulness in Claude’s paintings but at the same time, some of them have a very dark edge about them.
Shelf
There is, or at least there was, a shelf above the desk in my studio. I had it piled with stuff I need to have handy but I don’t use all that often. All that material is now on the floor since the shelf spontaneously collapsed several days ago. I’ve been ignoring it since, but the gig is up. No more stalling. Time to clean up the mess….
Joe Cooley
I post quite a lot of music on this blog but it isn’t so often I point to the same performance of the same tune twice. However, I stumbled across this one on YouTube, and I was delighted all over again. Let’s listen to “the box” and Joe Cooley
Swarm
My next door neighbour has a swarm of honey bees on his property. I think this happens when the colony wants to establish a new hive. I have never seen so many bees together in my life. Most of them are huddled together in the swarm, but there were quite a number of them flying around this afternoon as well. They took no notice of us watching and did not seem to be at all aggressive.
27th Street 