From far and wide -- redundant

It's a Canada Day with an interesting vibe. 

The usual clichés, but with a slightly siege-like feeling. 

This year, I started seeing red teeshirts and maple leaves early, appearing on the streets around our home in the week leading up to our national holiday. 

The Resident Fan Boy, jet-lagged from several hours spent with Air Canada (long story), hung up our flag on what we laughingly call the patio, and tuned into the ceremonies from Ottawa, the usual sea of red-and-white, alarmingly resembling a MAGA rally -- except for the gentle smiles and effusive, but polite applause.

This short offering from the National Film Board of Canada is fourteen years old.

I don't care.

Made to mark the presentation of the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement to William Shatner in 2011, it features Shatner out-Shatnering himself.  It doesn't get old.  (Except for the tweeting bit.)

Stay for the credits.  It's worth it.

Should I also add "heartbreak?"

 

In my ever-dimming hopes of becoming a better person, I keep scores of qualities on slips of cardboard in my blessing bag, drawing them out three at a time.  I learned this practice during my years volunteering in the hospice.  I do have cards inscribed with "discipline", "honesty", "love", "patience", and "humility".

I'm seriously considering "not clapping on 1 and 3".

Putzing around Putney

Don't let the rather twee titles and descriptions of these videos put you off.

I can't quite recall how I stumbled across this extensive list of walking tours of London neighbourhoods and beyond, but I find them enormously cheering. 

On a down day, I pick an area of London associated with either my family history or that of the Resident Fan Boy, and usually it's just the ticket.  The guide is Julien McDonnell of Joolz Guides. He's from the Muswell Hill area originally, studied philosophy (of all things) in Manchester, and his video walks - usually chatting companionably with his videographer - are charmingly informal, and cover pretty well any area of London you can think of.  (He's a pretty snazzy dresser, too.)

Here's a recent one about Putney.

Fault lines

 

I've never sat down and counted the number of anniversaries the Resident Fan Boy has missed, but it's probably at least a quarter of the available ones.  It's not always his fault.

This one is; he's spending it in London, Ontario, of all places, under a heat dome.  He sent me a view from his hotel window; it looks exactly like the view from the St Laurent Transitway station in Hades. Here in Victoria, the June weather this year has been cool and temperate. -- his loss.

Anyway, I got a text from my Friend of the Right Hand, offering to drop over over with some ginger loaves.  It turned out the RFB had sneakily persuaded her to deliver some roses, seeing as this anniversary is one of those ending in 5.

The first house on the left

Too tired, again. Just three more nights and days. 

This song is by 30-year-old Katherine Priddy of Birmingham, West Midlands. 

 Maybe we've all known houses like this, but the house in this song is an English house, and probably a lot older than most houses in Canada. There is a house on a hill 

One little corner where time has stood still 

And as though caught in some pendulum swing 

I try to go, but home pulls me back in 

Centuries passed through this door 

The stories we write have been told here before 

All of their voices still breathe in these walls 

It’s as though things never change here at all 

Oh, is this the boat made of old bricks and mortar 

That’s kept us afloat as we sail through the years? 

Or is this the light that shines from the shoreline? 

The port where we know we can rest? 

Or is it just the first house on the left? 

The garden tells most of the tales 

With fragments of china, old horseshoes and nails 

Flower seeds planted by hands gone before 

Asleep through the winter, then blooming once more 

And is this where they slept on the way to the jail? 

Or the shop where the lady had sweeties for sale? 

Or is this just the nest that was emptied by war? 

Or the room where the next generation was born? 

Tone-deaf hockey

Social media may be a double-edged sword, but it has introduced me to some wonderful things.  Among them is Louisiana-born Josh Johnson, a 35-year-old comedian, who looks younger and sounds older.   

I was initiated into Johnson's prolific, articulate, and compassionate comedy a couple of months ago, with a story he told in Little Rock Arkansas on March 28th of this year.  This was in the middle of the "Signals" scandal - y'know, when an Atlantic Monthly journalist got included by accident in a supposedly top secret security group-chat in Washington.

Johnson writes and performs for The Daily Show, so his main topic in his ever-changing stand-up act is often on the news of the moment, which has a limited shelf-life. However, he almost always includes a personal anecdote of more universal appeal.  Here, he tells the story of a time when he got inadvertently included in a private group chat, and decided not to disabuse the others.  (I've set up this video to begin when the story begins.  It lasts about eleven minutes, and is worth every second.) Johnson has sold out shows everywhere on his latest tour, which includes pretty well every U.S. city, the UK and Europe, and a handful of Canadian locations. The following gem comes from a Calgary show from about a month ago, in which he details his initial reactions to hockey -- which pretty well mirror my own. (The Resident Fan Boy knows I did try...)

Anyone that had a heart

Amid the distractions of this week, I almost missed a news item on the BBC web site. Mick Ralphs has died. I suppose, on this side of the Atlantic, he's most famous for being part of the super-group Bad Company, which is scheduled to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. 

For me, though, he was the original lead guitar for Mott the Hoople. Mott had many splendid compositions of their own, but they also did amazing covers. Their cover of Lou Reed's Sweet Jane is a classic, ending with a meandering and wistful solo by Ralphs. 

The part I love starts at about the 3:15 mark.

La Chanson Démodée

Today is La Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a day many Québecois celebrate instead of Canada Day, for a bunch of historical, political, and complicated reasons.

So I'm offering this gem from Les Séguin, Richard Séguin and his twin sister Marie-Claire, singing, in 1975, a song written in 1966 by Gilles Vigneault, who, at age 96, is still on the planet.

J′ai trouvé ma mie en haute montagne 

La lune était ronde, le hibou, muet 

En haute montagne je l'y ai laissée 

À la nuit tombante j′irai la trouver 

Ma mie a les pieds comme biche vive 

Sa peau est plus blanche qu'aubier de sapin 

Si je l'emmenais courir par la plaine 

Comme biche vive s′en irait bien loin 

La maison que j′ai n'a pas de toiture 

De porte non plus, de fenêtre point 

J′entre par le haut comme en cheminée 

Rentre la fumée quand le temps est doux 

À qui j'ai loué, c′est à la chouette 

Qui radote un peu mais qui veille à tout 

Ma mie est logée, ma mie est à l'aise 

Demandez au lièvre, demandez au loup 

Ma mie a fleuri dedans une souche 

Coupée en hiver, vidée au printemps 

Une fois saison la lune s′y couche 

Ce qui donne à l'oeil couleur du beau temps

(I found my love high up in the mountains,

The moon was round, the owl was silent.

In the high mountains I left her,

At nightfall, I will go find her again.

 

My love has feet like a lively deer,

Her skin is whiter than pine sap

If I took her running through the city,

Like a lively deer she would go far.

 

The house that I own has no roof,

It has no door either, no window;

I come in from the top, as one would a chimney

The smoke enters when the weather is mild

I rented it out to the owl,

Who rambles a little but watches over all;

My love has a house, my love is at ease:

Ask the hare, ask the wolf.

 

My love has blossomed inside of a stump

Cut during winter, emptied during spring

Once in season, the moon lies down,

Which shows the eye the colour of good weather.)

Maybe it ain't over

Nope.  

One of those days. 

Here's a song I like. 

I once was a dancer, I was young once like you, though I know I don't look it

Jumped high as the sky, had fire in my eyes, had legs like a stallion

And I had a girl, and I loved her, oh, my best friend was her brother

We were on top of the mountain that summer

We thought we'd never be swallowed by the crack

Fallen so far down like the rest of those clowns begging bus fare back

Swallowed by the cracks

Our pride worn down talking times gone by, like everybody else

Swallowed by the cracks 

We would talk through the night about what we would do if we just could get started

I would choreograph, Eileen, she would act while Steve was a writer.

Then Stevie ran away and got bored

Eileen took a job in a store

While I became this drunken old whore

'Cause you see we'd be swallowed by the cracks.

Maybe it ain't over, I can see it's up to me,

You're only out when you stay out

You stay out when you don't believe

We could drive around in circles getting nowhere all night long

Getting drunk with strangers telling lies, and singing along with the jukebox, baby.

- David Baerwald

Some despondent evening

So I decided to watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tonight, because it's a current affairs show, and thus rather time-sensitive.

I knew I was in trouble when a notice in red appeared just before the opening credits:  "This show filmed the evening of June 21st, 2025".

Oh gawd.  This meant, of course, it was filmed before the news about the Creature joining in the bombing of Iran came out.  

The show was pretty damn depressing anyway.  John Oliver devotes about the first ten minutes of his rapid-fire satirical/cynical/ironic commentary to recent events, followed by roughly twenty minutes of a chosen topic.

Tonight the topic was "AI slop", a term I hadn't heard before, although, naturally, it's been around for more than a year.  

I never claimed to be swift.

Nevertheless,  I've noticed, particularly in the past few months, that my social media feeds are less about the people and institutions I have voluntarily followed, and more about accounts that I have not invited.  So far, a lot of them seem to be associated with arts groups, but tonight, after John Oliver's show - which I really shouldn't watch alone, but the RFB is winging his way to Ontario as we speak - and spurred on by the CNN article in the above link, I went through my Facebook feed for a bit and systematically blocked a lot of accounts, as innocuous as most of them seemed to be.

Then I'll wash the dishes and go to bed.

Reading an actual book seems to be a good idea.