“Breeze blows leaves of a musty-coloured yellow…”
Author: Tom Barrett
It’s National Acadian Day
Bonne fête nationale de l’Acadie!
Lennie Gallant, Ouvrez les aboiteaux
From Lennie and Patricia Richard’s YouTube channel:
This is a song Lennie wrote for the third World Acadian Congress held in Nova Scotia in 2004. The aboiteaux were series of dikes and drains that the first Acadians built using the powerful tides to claim many thousands of acres of land in order to survive. The aboiteaux design would allow the moon to pull the water out of the fields on low tide but not allow it to return on the high. Ironic that Acadians themselves were later also pulled from the land with the devastating deportations and not allowed to return. The Acadian Congress gatherings were the first in 250 years to assemble over 200,000 Acadians and their Cajun cousins of Louisiana since that infamous event. The French chorus says: “Open up the Aboiteaux…Let my heart return with the waters.”
Sirène et Matelot, Acadian Girl
It’s Canada Day
… up Canada way.
I think that it was just as they were singing like this: “O–Can-a-da”, that word went round that the boat was sinking.
Stephen Leacock
The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias
Happy Canada Day, everyone.
A third-rate burglary
Fifty years ago, in the early hours of 17 June 1972, security guard Frank Wills noticed something was wrong at the Watergate office complex. He called the cops and changed history.
Thank you, Frank Wills. If only things had turned out better for you.
While we’re at it, we should remember legendary police reporter Alfred E. Lewis, who called in the story to the Washington Post, including the detail that the accused men dined on lobster at the Watergate Hotel restaurant before the break-in.
June
It’s Accordion Awareness Month in the U.S. Celebrate the stomach Steinway.
Big brass
It’s International Tuba Day. How low can you go?
May
Welcome in the May O. (And celebrate International Workers’ Day.)
April in Paris (and elsewhere)
“One more once!”
Spring
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.… Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.
Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows
Political science
If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.
Nikita Khrushchev to Richard Nixon
quoted by Rick Perlstein in
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Rannygazoo 