Who knew it would be so hard to make sense of the numbers in a counting song? Not I, or I never would have started, Seth be damned.
After all, we have almost innumerable instances of anything we have to celebrate: northern places, explorers, singers, and so on. Assigning a number just to maintain the form of the original song seems sort of forced.
On the first day of Christmas
Canada gave to me
A nation, sea to sea to sea.
Drat. That’s accurate, but doesn’t scan real well. Continue reading
The choir is on an endless loop. The two altos carry the tune and the main body of the lyrics; the lone bass contributes what I guess we might charitably call the contrapuntal line, although to see it as melodic seems a bit much.
Shy dee doze
And there is, of course, the percussion contribution: off-tempo thigh slapping. Off every tempo relevant here: that of the original song, the other singers, and of his own self. Continue reading
In Hamilton, Roger Boyd launched an unregistered charity, feeding and clothing the homeless. He started by giving away the surplus clothes in his closet.
Read the CBC article here.
Check out his Facebook page here, and his GoFundMe campaign here.
Thanks to Mary Gibson for posting the CBC article on Facebook.
When it wasn’t raining at the Left Coast, it looked like this out the back door of our rental. Tough, eh?
Spitting, winding, and darkling: not ideal conditions for another foray into night photography, but at least I had a subject ready to hand, just by walking for a few blocks from our AirBnB in Comox to the dock. One of the (many) tricks, I am beginning to appreciate, is to learn what looks good with an extended shutter time; that is, what sort of movement creates an interesting effect, and what just makes for blurriness. I have not yet mastered this trick, but at least now I know there’s something there to be mastered.
This next one combines night photography with reflections, one of my favourite photographic themes.
You remember The Box. That’s not a question.
Artist Brandi Jasmine does not have The Box, but she does hide some of her creations for people to find, sparking a little brightness in an ordinary day. That seems similar to the I Have Lots initiative.
Read more about her project, here.
Check out her Facebook page, here.
In one smooth motion, I somehow squeeze through the 2 inches of clearance between the arc of the opening door — an arc fatally abbreviated by the front edge of the toilet — and the industrial-size toilet-paper dispenser. It’s a clearance graciously provided by the building designers, presumably the better to meet regulations by squeezing one more stall into the space squeezed out of the space that has revenue-generating potential.
Am I at a sports arena? A highway rest stop? An airport? An arts or community complex? I can’t remember. Continue reading
I have pretty much given up on learning to identify gull species. There is, after all, only so much time left to me. They vary by gender, of course, but also by their age, with birds of different species looking alike at different ages: That is, a year-two bird of one species might look like a year-three bird of another. Yikes. Frankly, I’m just not that interested. But I haven’t given up on trying to catch them in candid poses.
Given my recent experience with identifying birds from obvious characteristics, I assume this one is a Yawning Gull (cousin to the Laughing Gull).
And this one I like because of the pattern of light and shadow.
Posted: 2025 Jun 13
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
